Make Money Online
Learn to Maximize AdSense Income with AdSense Secrets
The internet is filled with people that are self proclaimed experts of one thing or another, whether we are talking about making money online, internet marketing, blogging, domaining, etc. But it is rare that you run across someone that is widely accepted by the internet as an expert as the authority on a particular subject.
Joel Comm, the Google AdSense expert, is the only person that I know of that meets this criteria. Joel is the author of AdSense Secrets, which is a close to 250 page eBook designed to teach you everything he knows about Google AdSense. That is right, I said almost 250 pages!
Chances are if you’ve read AdSense tips by the many pro bloggers and other “experts” on this subject, they got their information from this Google AdSense bible. I’ve been reading about 5 pages a day and working my way through this document for a few weeks now and finally finished it.
I have to say that this book was the best $9.95 I spent over the past few months and has really opened my eyes to some additional opportunities that AdSense users have. I am hoping to discuss some of these strategies over the coming months after I’ve put them to good use, but in the meantime I wanted to make sure you guys knew that AdSense Secrets was out there at an incredible price. Oh, and don’t forget this could be considered a business expense. 
Make Money Online with TNX.net
If you are like me, you probably spend a lot of time each week looking for ways to make money online. One company I recently checked out TNX.net. TNX is a fairly new text link advertising platform designed to bring together both advertisers and publishers by offering an easy way for advertisers to get links and for publishers to make money selling links. Depending on your situation, you can actually advertise your site/blog and generate additional income at the same time, which we’ll talk about a little later. First, lets look a little bit at TNX.net from both the advertisers and publishers perspective.
Advertising with TNX
Setting up an advertising campaign is not very difficult with TNX. They provide an easy to use Ad Campaign Wizard, which is designed to make it easy for advertisers to set up their advertising campaign. With this wizard you can control where you advertise, including location, website category, Google PageRank, and Yahoo Backlinks. Once you’ve established a budget to work with, you can then figure out how many points you can purchase within your budget using their advertising calculator.
Once you’re ready, you can easily load your advertisement on to the TNX registry in one of two ways. If you have a large campaign, you can upload a text file containing your advertisements. For advertisers wanting to launch a smaller campaign (wanting under 2000 links), you can use the provided form.
Publishers earn TNX points simply by placing the provided code to display TNX text link ads on their webpages (usually in the sidebar). As text links are displayed, the publisher acquires TNX points. Each month you can take the acquired points and turn them into money in one of two ways. You can either sell them directly to TNX for a fixed price, or you can negotiate with other publishers to sell the points directly to them at your price. There is a minimum payout of $5.00 and all payments are made each month via Paypal.
The cool thing about earning points is that you can turn in part of your earned points for cash, while still reinvesting some points into advertising your website with TNX.
Other cool features:
- Find Relevant Links - TNX allows you to control who advertises with you so that you can make sure you only display relevant links.
- Earning Calculator - Get help estimating how much you can make with their earnings calculator. This calculator takes into account your Google PageRank and link popularity.
- Code Choices - TNX.net gives you the choice of using Perl or PHP code, with a variant PHP code available for caching advertisments (to reduce bandwidth and server loads).
TNX Affiliate Program
If you are interested in making money online, but aren’t interested in buying/selling links, you may want to look into the TNX affiliate program. While many similar companies have a set payout per referral, TNX gives a higher percentage back (13.3%) by allowing you to earn TNX points based upon the earnings of the people you refer.
Sound good? Ready to sign up? You can register for your free TNX account on their registration page, or check out a current promotion for 5,000 free points (to be used for advertising).
Other useful resources:
How To: Converting Kontera to Single Lines
In the past we’ve talked a bit about Kontera, which is a company that sells in-text advertising. I’ve used Kontera in the past and had some luck with them, but I found over time that it wasn’t enough income to warrant how much it annoyed some of my readers. Therefore, I ended up removing it.
With that said, I know a lot of people still continue to use Kontera as a way to make money online. If this sounds like you, you may consider making a small adjustment to your Kontera code to only display a single line, instead of the double lines people use by default. This should help your ads to blend better with your website.
In order to do this, all you need to do is make a small adjustment to the code:
var dc_single_line = 'yes';
Disclaimer: As with anything like this, you’ll want to contact Kontera before trying this to confirm it can be used for your account. This way you are not at risk of having your account banned. If your links are not underlined, there is a good chance you will get approved.
A Couple of Ideas to Improve Your AdSense Income
A couple of months ago Google made some significant changes to their AdSense program when they re-did the clickable area, which caused a lot of people to lose money. I know personally that my AdSense income dropped by at least $70.00 a month as a result of this change, and I’ve heard from several others that are have had the same problem.
Anytime there is a change, it is only natural we take the time to step back and look over the situation in the hope of finding a way to improve it. One post I ran across recently was written by Josh titled 10 Ways to Increase Your AdSense Income. In his post, Josh covers a bunch of methods people should consider when trying to maximize their clicks.
Two important tips:
2. Target competitive niches! I don’t care what anyone says about MFA sites, they work! I’m not talking about spam sites, I’m talking about high-quality, informative sites that are in a high paying market! Some of these niche sites can bring in $5-$10/day after only a couple days. When you’re making over a $1 per click you don’t need much traffic to make money.
3. If a site has a CTR of 1% or less, remove it from your site. Although there is some controversy as to whether or not CTR causes “smart pricing” to kick in, it’s just not worth risking. At least remove Adsense for a few weeks and see if your overall adsense income rises. If so, you were probably hit with Google’s Smart Pricing. If that site in particular was causing smart-pricing to kick in, consider a different monetization model.
And one tip I’m not so sure about:
8. Do not go by Google’s heat map. It’s a good visual aid for some layouts, but there are just too many variables. The effectiveness of any layout will be determined by color, style, niche etc. so testing is always your best bet!
Click over to check out the rest of the list!
What is Keyword Sniping?
About a month ago I reviewed a tool called Micro Niche Finder, which is an SEO tool designed to help bloggers find out how much traffic and competition there are for smaller keywords. The idea is that you can easily rank highly in these keywords with only a minimal amount of work. So, once you’ve found your niche, how do you go about actually attacking that keyword?
Well, keyword sniping of course. This is a method I’ve used, and I know several others that have also found a great deal of success by taking over low traffic keywords. There are a few different ways to go about, but most people in the know keep fairly quiet about their techniques. For people interested, I was able to dig up a post written a little while ago by Courtney Tuttle giving a very well written introduction to keyword sniping. His post covers the general idea behind keyword sniping and explains how anyone can make money online doing this.
The nice thing about this method is that it requires very minimal maintenance. Set up your blog and a few posts, then sit back and let your site mature with age. One thing I would recommend that Courtney didn’t cover is to make a very AdSense friendly WordPress theme and use it as a template. That way each time you launch a new site, you can use that same theme and just plug in the specific information for the niche you are attacking.
Have any good keyword sniping stories to share?
Google AdSense Smart Pricing…Re-Evaluating My AdSense Strategy
If you’ve ever attempted to make money online, you know that it can be very complicated, requires a lot of research, and is always evolving and changing. Last week I posted my December 2007 review and talked about how my overall income dipped for that month, particularly with Google AdSense. I noticed a similar trend on most of the blogs I read, so I originally told myself that it was probably due to the change to the clickable AdSense area.
Last week I ran across a post over at Courtney Tuttle’s blog titled how to get worthless AdSense clicks, which caused me to re-evaluate how I approach trying to make money with Google AdSense. In this post, Court explains Google’s smart pricing, which basically is a system that Google uses to penalize bloggers who get a lot of worthless AdSense clicks. This idea was not a new concept to me, as I’ve heard in the past the theory that having less advertisements per page can result in higher payouts per click. I also remember David of CyberCoder talking a bit about smart pricing in one of his video blogs (though I can’t find the link now).
After reading Court’s post, I decided it was finally time to look into this a little more. It just seemed to be to much of a coincidence that my AdSense income was at an all time high, then I launched a bunch of new blogs that currently aren’t receiving a lot of traffic and my AdSense income dipped from $10.00 a day to $3.00 or less.
The first thing I did was go into my Manage Ads page in the Google AdSense panel (managing all my AdSense code from here saved me a TON of time) and set up some new channels for my various ad blocks, including in-post squares, rectangles ads, link menus, and other places where I had AdSense on my sites. This way I could determine which advertisement blocks were performing the best. After a couple of days doing this, I studied the results and completely removed the under performing advertisements from my sites (anything with less than a 2% CTR). I also removed AdSense completely from some of my newer sites that haven’t received much traffic yet (if you feel your under performing websites need advertisements, you can easily replace your AdSense ads with Yahoo! Publisher Network ads or BidVertiser).
It is unclear how long it takes for AdSense to remove the penalty, but I’ve already seen some progress here over the past day. Unfortunately, it is to early to tell if this is a coincidence or not. If you have more questions about Google’s Smart Pricing penalty, I recommend you click over and read the post. It provides a detailed explanation, tips on fixing it, and also includes a bit about keyword sniping.
Are you a victim of Google’s smart pricing penalty?
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