Well, ok, not quite a conspiracy, just common business actions – but these actions aren’t often covered by most news outlets/influential blogs.

All businesses do “bad” things. But everyone seems to, or at least until the last few months, see Google as “good”. In recent months there has been quite a lot of people pointing to their “do no evil” motto, and questioning it.

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Just saw a “new” “Ads by Google” logo on an adsense block on a new site I am working on:

No longer an “Ads by Goooooogle” or whatever!

Click image below to see full image.

Not seen this before (and sorry for quick post…)

I would say that almost all “serious” amateur webmasters use adsense (or something very similar). And of course, you want to bring in as much revenue as possible. Over the years I’ve made a fair amount thanks to Google, and have worked out what works and what doesn’t. (Tips after the jump)

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I know that some people go and sign up for adwords, sign up for adsense, make their own ad appear, click it, see how much they were charged. They then believe that Google is ripping them off (as for example they may recieve $x via adsense, but had to pay $x+y on adwords). Of course Google takes a cut. But the important thought I am trying to tell you is that remember that on the actual search results advertisers pay a lot more to display ads (or pay for the clicks anyway) than they do for the content network (Adsense).

Hope that made sense. More small posts coming soon

There is a site called Ads Black List. Basically the idea behind it is that it provides you with a list of low paying advertisers that you can put into Google Adsense’s competitive ad filter.

So for example if site xxxx.com only bids as high as 2 cents, then chances are (this is how their theory works anyway) if you add xxxx.com to the competitive ad filter on adsense you should start earning more money.
A small selection from one of their lists are as follows:

best4sites.net
infoscouts.com
finditonline.ws
searchguide.biz
truelocal.com
info.com
cohit.com
expert-expert.com
tunu.com
getbestinfo.com

…

But what I don’t get is how it would actually improve your earnings. Firstly, there is a maximum of 200 filters you can put on your adsense competitive adsense filter, so that chance that one of the domains in the generated lists would actually appear on your adsense block is quite low (in my opinion) (apart from maybe ebay.com which seems to get in every list…). Also, as far as I am aware (and I am sure this is 100% true, other wise “bidding” higher on adwords wouldn’t make sense…) only the highest paying ads are shown. If you have room for 12 ads (3 x block of four ads), only the 12 higest paying ads will be shown.

So if you ban site xxxx.com, another one will be shown, chances are that you will earn even less with that ad that replaced the xxxx.com advert.

Maybe I am not seeing this site as I should be, but it doesn’t make much sense to me (hey, its early in the morning [and I appologise for this post if it doesn't make sense...]) although to be fair I havn’t tried it out. Maybe if someone who has tried it out could comment about it?

I started on the Internet a few years ago. Well, more than a few now. About 6 or 7 years ago. And within a couple of months I had my own site. However it took me a couple of years to realise that the Internet has a lot of potential. Potential to earn money, that is. Only within the last six months though have I started to concentrate on making money seriously. Before that I had made about $400 in total, including selling on ebay (which made up about half of that). But then earlier this year I though, hold on a minute, if other people are making $400 a MONTH just with adsense (and related programs), why can’t I?

Now I am on at least $30 a day, pretty much for doing absolutely sweet **** all. Seriously, it is almost guaranteed $30. And when I work on promoting a site, it can really go up (sometimes over $150 / day!). I just lack effort really. But I’ve decided to be nice, and let you guys into a few secrets on how to make money on the Internet with little effort. You could be brining in enough to buy you a free lunch every day within 7 days. And i’m not selling anything here – so I’m not talking bullshit to make you buy my product. Infact apart from eBay, i’ve never sold a single item.

Find a Niche – First you will need to find something that interests you. My first site was about paintball. I knew loads about it, and could easily write and write and write and write all day long about paintball. Find something that interests you. Ignore high paying keywords, find a niche that interests you. That is the most important thing from this post that you must learn really. Some people think that if they target loan ads (by writing about loans) they can bring in 10 times the profits – but you won’t get the hits. Loans (and other high paying keyword themed sites) are too over saturated. There are too many sites trying to tell you about loans.

Get some hosting – you *will* need a host. Don’t bother with free hosts, they’re crap, and as soon as you start to get any sort of traffic you iwll get a “This user has run out of bandwidth” message – not good. And if you start on a free host and then change to another host, chances are you will change urls, so any search engine results will be fubared…

When I first started I used a free host called Tripod. They were good for what I wanted, as I was amazed (remember this is 6 years ago…) that I could center some text. But when I started seriously thinking about making money on the Internet (6 months ago) I realised I needed a real host. I read literally hundreds of reviews, to find out what was the best host for me. I wanted a cheap host, but didn’t wanna be limited by small bandwidth or space, incase (like it has) my site(s) became incrediably popular. In the end I went with Dreamhost (note: affiliated link. See dreamhost promo code though to save upto $95). They let me add as many domains as I wanted, with so much bandwidth and space I never have to worry about it. I actually host all my friends sites as well, and it makes no difference on the performance of it all!

Get some content – Remember I said to pick a subject you are interested in? This is why. When I first started I wrote loads (just in Microsoft Word) about paintball. Guns, matches, rules, tips, anything and everything. The more content, the more handy it is for your users, and the more content you have for the search engines to spider (And thus by default more chance you will get hits from search engine searchers!).

Another key tip I learnt when I was writing content was to include as many key words as I could. I would make sure every paragraph would contain a main keyword I was targeting (in this case, generally it was paintball. Sometimes it would have been paintball tips, etc). Remember to also use different forms of words, for example if your subject was search engine optimisation (its just an easier example to use than paintball), include:

• SEO
• Search Engine Optimisation
• Optimised pages for search engines

etc – ie, different stems of words. It helps a lot for, well, search engine optimisation ;)

Get your content on the web - there are lots of methods. The easiest by far is to set up a blog. Don’t worry, you don’t have to write about your life and how bad everything is. Software such as WordPress (which is very easy to install with Dreamhost – infact its just a “one click install” as they even say themselves) lets you log in, write content, publish it and the whole world can see it. Once you have published a lot of content (lot is arbitary here. As it’ll be a new site, a lot can mean anything from 10 pages to 100.) you will want to start getting traffic, but first you wanna make sure you earn money from your traffic.

Sign up for Google Adsense – Google adsense is the best money making “scheme” on the Internet really. And it is done by Google, and they aren’t the type to rip you off. As you will see for yourself when you get your first cheque (check) for $100 in the post! (They send cheques worldwide as well, so don’t worry if you’re not in US. I am from UK and I got my first cheque easily enough. They also do direct bank transfers now, which is a lot easier. If you aren’t from US, it also means you get more money – no bank cheque exchange negoiation fees!).

You will then wanna put the adsense code into your pages. This is easy enough, Google give you instructions.

Get your traffic – There are several ways. You could buy traffic (for example, get $100 free traffic from Text Link Ads), but that kinda defeats the point of this. You would need to make sure that you make more than you spend on advertising. It can be done (quite easily if you know what you’re doing, but as you are just starting I wouldn’t really wanna tell you to do this as its quite a risk and you need quite a bit of money to start off with (over $1k really to see a nice return on investment).

The main way that you will get traffic is from search engines. Blogs are very handy things. Set up your WordPress blog so that the “permalinks” are in the format of “/%postname%/%post_id%/” or even just “/%postname%/”. Go and download the Google sitemap wordpress plugin. Add the list from here to your update services (this will mean posting posts takes ages when you hit publish, but its worth it!). And lastly sign up for Autopinger, it is a very good service. You can literally get over 600 hits in your first day, with just two blog posts if you follow the above instructions. I’ve done it time and time again.

You will also want to use Short Stat, to give you an idea where you are getting hits from.

Set up 3 sites, post about 50-100 posts to each, and you will be rolling it in. It isn’t really a big secret on how to make money on the Internet. It is just most people keep it to themselves. But telling people won’t affect my earnings, the Internet is so large, it just can’t happen. (just don’t target paintball, yeh!)

There are lots of aspects to maximising adsense profits. This post deals only with the amount of ads you display.

Think about it, if you display 3 blocks of 4 or 5 ads, that is three times the amount of ads than one. The higher paying advertisers (for this example lets say they spend $1 on an ad) will still get shown, but more lower paying advertisers (lets say $0.30) will be shown.

Therefore the chance that a user clicks on a high paying advert is considerably less.

So you might think, ah, i’ll put just one block of adverts. Well, then you’ve got less adverts for them to click on. Its is catch 22 situation.

Our thoughts? Remove any ad blocks that never get any / only get very few clicks, for example an ad block at the very end of a page that has no content at the bottom (say for example if a menu on the side was longer than the content).