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.

Google are massive. They’re to the point now where you could say they controll a very large share of the internet. And not just through their organic search results. You have to remember that Google provide a lot of services. Here is a list of what I regually use -

• Google search
• Their adsense / adwords ads (as in, I click some adsense ads on other sites if they look like what I am after)
• Google News
• Gmail
• Google Reader
• Google documents and spreadsheets
• Froogle
• Google webmaster tools
• Google Video
• Youtube
• Google Maps

That is quiet a lot of varied services from one company that I use. And don’t forget that there are many more services they offer (I just don’t use them). I can’t think of any other company (online or offline) that provides such a diverse range of services that I use (excluding the fact that many companies are owned by one large company).

Google is here to make a profit – nothing wrong with that. In fact I don’t really see much wrong with anything that Google does – I am not a Google fanboy (!) but they don’t do anything I wouldn’t expect almost any company to do.

Google have always “spoken” to their users in many ways. Of course they’ve got their official Google blog – http://googleblog.blogspot.com/ – and countless other blogs on blogspot.com, they have Google groups within “Google Groups”, and key people at Google have blogs (yes, I am looking at Mr Cutts…).

Now we’re onto Matt Cutts (if you don’t know, Cutts is the head of Google’s Webspam team, and note that his blog isn’t directly linked to Google), have a read over some of his recent posts about buying links – http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/how-to-report-paid-links/.

Google (via Matt Cutts (and also their webmaster guidelines)) are trying to give out rules as if they’re the Internet police – policing in terms of spam, black hat methods – (and note this post isn’t a dig at Google for what they do. Just my views on what is happening). And all the SEO blogs (if you don’t read them you probably don’t realise just how much everyone links to everyone, and how everyone seems to know everyone (at least – the main players, Cutts, Aaron Wall, the guys at Seomoz etc etc)). Apart from black hatters, everyone just accepts that they must listen to Google, and everyone (generally) agrees with what they say.

Everyone is basically agreeing to themselves that Google is almost acting like the internet police. So saying “don’t buy links” seems like a good, moral rule. After all, we wouldn’t want people manipulating search engine results, would we.

But, what about the fact that Google’s main earner is effectivly selling links (through their adwords/adsense ads). Of course, these links have no effect on search engine results (unlike the bought links that Cutts mentioned), but they get traffic to peoples sites, and that is the #1 (assuming it is targetted traffic etc) thing that site owners and companies want – people to visit your site.

So, think about it … if Google starts preaching that buying (and therefore selling) links is bad, where are people going to go when they want to buy links? Go straight to Google. Buying links from Google won’t have any negative effect!

And just a note here – when i say links and talk about the adsense links, i know they’re not really links. But you get what i mean? Yeh? If not leave a comment and i’ll rewrite this bit up…

So Google, using its chosen methods tells webmasters that buying links is bad. And that will result in more profits…

Now onto my next point and this again resolves around adsense (remember, it is their main earner…). Black hat methods are bad, mmmkay!??!

But why? Ignoring the really spam filled terms like viagra, ringtones etc, people use black hat methods to get their pages to users, and in most cases this page is usefull to the user – otherwise the black hatter can’t really profit. Even ads are useful for users if they point them in the right direction that they want to go.

But rather than hire a SEO firm to get your page to the top of Google, Google much prefer you to use adwords and pay for clicks. Why would google want to give you free organic links!?!??

I believe that Google could also do a far better job at stopping spam. Just take a look at a search for viagra, ringtones etc. It wouldn’t take much for someone at Google to take all those paracite pages off the first few pages, but they don’t… (ok, they do every now and again…)

And also – Google is funding most spam. Almost all spammy crap sites (aka adsense mini sites) are, you guessed it, filled with adsense ads. So it makes sense for them to let the spammy pages at the top -

Firstly, the actual companies want to get higher than the spammy pages that show their ads (on the adsense ads on the spammy pages), so would hopefully (in Googles eyes) use adwords.

Secondly, even if they don’t use adwords, there is always (98% of the time) some other company they can display an ad for on the spammy pages if a user clicks it.

Part 2 coming soon.

No longer an “Ads by Goooooogle” or whatever!

Click image below to see full image.

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

• Blend your Adsense ads – don’t put bright red ads on a white, minimalistic page. Like many advertisers say, the best ads are those that people do not realise are ads
• Minimize other links - if your site is only of those small mini sites set up just for adsense (aka “Adsense sites”), don’t give the user too many options. If you list 20, 30 or more site links as well as your adsense ad you are going to get a lot less clicks on your ad than if you only have 1 or 2 links. This can hurt your search engine rankings a little, but it does help increase CTR
• Read Google’s own tips – they want you to make as much as you can, as it obviously makes them money as well. Their page about best ad placement on pages is very handy
• Track individual ad units – use the channel feature to track individual ad units. The more ad units you show, the more chance of low paying ads that are shown. So get rid of any that don’t get a decent amount of clicks (compared to other ads on the same page)
• People don’t think before clicking - this sort of follows on from my first point (blend it). People know that blue (and also underlined) text means links. Making the ads text blue can help (it depends on the target market – I found it didn’t make much difference for tech savvy users).
• Use the wide skyscrapers – these always seem to convert the best. And take a look at any large site that uses Adsense and you will see they use them.
• Use inline ads – these are ad units that are placed so they look like more of the content, than part of the layout. They have a higher (on average) CTR.
• About to make an Adsense site? - aim it at kids, or at least not geeks! It is true… Geeks hardly ever click ads.
• Try making your site hard to navigate – similar to another point above (minimise links). If your site is hard to navigate there is a higher chance people will click your ads (if they are clear). Of course, this is more for those spammy adsense sites rather than any quality site.
• Don’t ignore the search feature – put in the Google search box, and make a bit of extra money if people can’t find what they’re looking for on your site

Use tips at your own risk :)

Hope that made sense. More small posts coming soon

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?

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!)

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).