Google Adsense: How to Explain the Google Adsense Program to Others

We are not talking about strangers here. For the strangers that visit your site, your content will have to do all the talking for you. But for the people in your daily life, the ones you want to click on your referral button, the ones you want to read and comment on your blog; these are the ones you want to be able to enlighten about the Google Adsense program.

First, excitement breeds excitement. Get excited about your new venture and others will too. Learn everything you can about the Google Adsense program, not only will this increase your earnings, but you will be better equipped to explain the mechanics of the program to others.

Show them the money. There’s nothing like a little proof to make a believer out of someone. You do not have to wait until you’re making thousands per month, although that’s a healthy goal. But even a small deposit in your piggy bank is enough to intrigue most people. Can’t you just count those referrals now?

Google Adsense: Dos for Using the Google Adsense Program

Google Adsense is a fun and easy way to make extra money. It’s important to follow the rules though as Google is serious about the integrity of this program. Not following the rules could result in your Google Adsense account being terminated. Here are a few Dos for using the program:

DO

Read the Terms and Conditions and Program Policies thoroughly.

Read everything you can about Google Adsense. Learn from other’s experiences and mistakes.

Learn how to optimize your site for the most enjoyable and profitable Google Adsense experience. Realize it does take some time and hard work. That’s why it is so important that you write about something you care about. Hard work is even harder if you do not like what you are doing.

Visit other sites that are benefiting from Google Adsense. Click on the ads only if you are truly interested in the product or service being advertised. Read other people’s blogs and comment on them. Only offer a comment though if it is truly sincere.

Hopefully, these helpful tips will ease you into using the program and help you avoid mistakes that could possibly cost you a lot of time or money.

Making Money with Articles: Letting Others Use Your Articles

Let others use your articles, along with your byline which will tell visitors who wrote it and how they can contact you, on their website. This will help to promote your own website and bring you in traffic through the search engine optimization and promotional efforts of others. For you this means absolutely free marketing just for writing a quick article about a subject that you are already familiar with. The more people who use your article as content as their website, the more potential traffic you will receive. These webmasters will probably be using SEO techniques, banner exchanges, and possibly even a Pay-Per-Click campaign to get visitors to their affiliate site. These are advertising methods that either take a lot of time or a lot of money and they will be absolutely free for you just because you placed your articles where others could use them. There are many places on the Internet that offer to post your article so that others may view and/or use it. My advice is to place your articles on every single one of these sites so that you can reach as many webmasters as possible.

Google AdSense Account Terminated - What Should You Do?

Once you have decided to take your marketing campaign to Google’s AdSense pay per click program, you agree to a number of rules including:

• No hidden pages. You must have a clear hierarchy and each page needs at least one link to get there.
• No broken links. If you link outside of your site, make sure you check your links often. No more than 100 links per page.
• When designing your site, create one that is helpful to a user; don’t design a page for search engines. Make sure you clearly define what your site is about.
• Your TITLE and ALT tags should be precise and descriptive.
• You need a site map to help users find what they are looking for if your menu doesn’t.
• No hidden text.
• No redirection of your site

Even if you follow all these design rules, you may still be at risk of losing your AdSense advertiser account or have temporarily been fined a penalty in the form of your ads being removed from rotation on other sites. The penalty may go away with time, but it’s best to double and triple check your site then file a re-inclusion request (instructions below.) Include in your request which changes you’ve made and that it won’t happen again.

Your competitors might have a plan that could get you banned. It’s called “click bombing” and it’s against Google’s policy.

Click bombing happens when someone, be it a competitor or not, repeatedly clicks the pay per click ad for a business in order to raise flags with Google. Google rates their ads based on relevance, so the more an ad is clicked, the more relevant it becomes, and the higher up the list it moves. This has made it very easy for business owners to move themselves up the relevance list, so Google countered this practice by red flagging any business that has a significant spike in AdSense hits. If the hits all trace back to the same IP address or addresses, the advertiser is removed for “invalid clicks”.

Finding out about this strength in Google’s search engine, sneaky competitors have started to exploit it by purposely clicking the competitions ad again and again, in order to ban the ad.

If this has happened to you, or if you’ve been banned for violation of any of the design or technological terms of your contract, you can sometimes have it overturned by contacting customer support. You can contact Google support by visiting http://www.google.com/support/bin/request.py. Make sure you type “Re-inclusion Request” in the subject of the email. Keep your request simple, short and to the point. No need to threaten Google that you’ll stop advertising with them or list how long you’ve been a customer.

It is imperative, though, that you run reports frequently and store the data outside of your Google account. This will help prove to Google that a click bombing happened should you be removed. You are not guaranteed a reversal, however. In fact, most pleas to Google to have a banned account go unheard.

If you don’t get a positive response from Google, you may want to check out some of the other pay per click programs, like Yahoo! Publisher Network or the many affiliate programs online.

A Smart Trick for Attracting Higher Paying AdSense Ads

There are no guarantees in life, so I don’t guarantee that following these tips will bring you more money every time. However, I do guarantee that they will greatly increase your chances of pulling more of the top-paying AdSense ads to your site than if you don’t follow these suggestions.

Enough with the disclaimers, let’s get down to the business of making money. Google lets advertisers bid anywhere from a minimum of .05 per click right up to a whopping $100. It should be pretty obvious that you’re not going to get rich running .05 cent ads on your site, but getting a few $100 ads, or even some $10, $20, or $30 ads can’t be a bad thing, right?

Now the problem is, Google is pretty closed-mouthed about who is paying what for their ads, and there is no real way to determine which words pay the most per AdSense click.

But ah, far away in a parallel universe we find another Pay-Per-Click provider called Overture. It seems that Overture is less sensitive about releasing their top-priced words and anyone who cares to find out what web sites are paying for words and phrases can do so by simply using Overtures tattle-tale special pricing tool (http://www.pixelfast.com/overture/). And it couldn’t be easier to use. You simply type in a key word or phrase and the tool returns a list of advertisers using that word and how much they are paying. It even shows you the actual ad.

Oh what a treasure trove of wealth-grabbing results this can be if you know what can be done with that priceless information.

Consider this possibility

Any key word or phrase that’s worth big bucks on Overture is probably worth big bucks on Google as well, maybe even more, right? So try this experiment:

Enter the phrase “SEO Services” without the quotes in the Overture tool (http://www.pixelfast.com/overture/). When I entered that phrase on the day I wrote this article, I was found a company called SEO Inc. that was willing to pay $8.01 per click, followed by SEO Advantage at $8.00, and Online Web Consultants at $6.50. Other bidders appeared below them in the $3.00 range straight on down to some who wouldn’t pay more than a dime per click.

Now, if a company is willing to pay that much money for a click on Overture, it is probably willing to pay that or more on Google. Even if that particular company isn’t advertising on Google, you can be pretty sure that the same key phrase is drawing near the same bid price from other companies who do advertise on Google. So what that means is there is no way that you can possibly afford NOT to have some web pages posted somewhere that are targeted to those sweet-paying words.

All you have to do is use Overture’s pricing tool to find the highest-paying key words that are related to your site and then optimize those words to start pulling similar ads. If all goes to plan, you can perhaps double, triple, or even quadruple your AdSense revenue without needing any increase in traffic or click-through rate.

Where’s the best place to put Google Adsense Ads?

Why, on your web pages of course. Ok, just kidding. The real question should be: “Is there really any truth to the rumors that where you place those Google AdSense ads can actually improve response?” According to my best information, the answer to that question is: Yes.

Google’s own AdSense experts say that that there is a direct correlation between the placement of the AdSense ads and the resulting clickthrough.

When ads are placed in “content zones”, rather than in “advertising zones”, response rates on Google AdWords goes up. There are also indications showing that ads appearing on the right side of the page get clicked more than ads appearing on the left side.

Advertising analysts with degrees in human behavior and psychology have spent thousands of man-years (people-years?) studying how people read printed and Internet content and what it takes to get them to respond to ads. While some of these studies are proprietary, or are only available to anyone with $10,000 or more to spend on a copy, other studies have been made public and can be read by anyone who is interested.

Google themselves has released some relevant information which is focused directly on increasing your Google AdSense response. You can read their findings here (https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/static.py?page=tips.html).

Of course, all of the studies in the world aren’t worth a hill of beans if the findings don’t work on your web site. That’s why it is important to test, test and test again. Experiment with your Google AdSense placement and track the results over a period of time. Google provides response tracking tools in your AdSense control panel. Learn how to use them. As you begin to see what may be only subtle differences in response, you’ll be able to determine what works best for your particular site. But don’t get complacent. What’s working for you now might not work next month if you change your site design or content.

One of the most important factors in determining placement of your ads is the type of content that your site delivers. If you are primarily an e-commerce site, and you have a lot of pictures and ad copy for your own products competing for attention against AdSense ads, then it is going to be a particularly tough challenge getting any kind of decent Google AdSense clickthrough. It is situations like this that require very thorough testing and a lot of trial and error.

Blogs seem to have a lot of success generating high response rates to Google AdSense listings. Perhaps it’s because blog readers realize that ad revenue is the only way that their favorite blogmaster can keep the lights on, so the readers think of clicking on ads as a way to make a donation.

Regardless of what the experts say, your best bet is to tailor your Google AdSense ad placement to what your own experience shows works best for you. In the end, you’re the only expert who matters.

How to Make Money From Google Adsense

It not uncommon to hear less than stellar reviews of Google’s Adsense program. Truth be told, making money with Google Adsense is not as easy or straightforward as most people think. There is a misconception that all we have to do to laugh all the way to the bank is to publish a bunch of articles, slap some Adsense code here and there and sit down to wait for our visitors to click away.

There is much more to Adsense than that. Adsense success depends on a multitude of factors which must come together to create a “perfect storm”, among them:

1. Blog topic: A product blog about car accessories or electronic gadgets will produce ads with better revenue per click than a blog about Greek mythology or medieval hunting habits.

2. Kind of traffic: If your visitors come from highly relevant search engine queries, your Adsense click through rates will likely be higher than if your traffic is mostly repeat visitors who are already trained to avoid your ads.

3. Position of the ads: Ads placed within the content area work better than ads buried at the bottom of a navigation column. Google even goes as far as sharing with everybody this heat map that shows the areas of the page that are likely to produce the best results.

4. Color of the ads: Some people advocate blending the colors of the Adsense ads with the colors of the site, under the pretense that by making it hard to determine if something is an ad or just a regular link you will generate more clicks. Others believe that using contrast is better, since it makes the ad stand out. You can determine what works best for you after some good old fashioned trial and error.

5. Size of your blog: Obviously, the more posts you write, the more Adsense impressions you will generate. If you post once a month and your blog has only twenty entries don’t expect great results. Hard work and consistency is key to build up content to the point that it generates enough traffic.

Before you rush to start blogging and filling up your pages with Adsense ads, I recommend that you first do some reading.

Probably the best place to start is these Google Adsense Optimization Tips from Google itself.

You should also read this extremely helpful and well thought eight step tutorial by Problogger.

I also recommend these Adsense tips, tricks and secrets by Graywolf, and this forum entry by a guy in Australia who writes about how he increased his Adsense revenue from $10 to $800 per week (and even shares with us the highly optimized template he uses to generate Adsense revenue from articles).

When you’re ready to read some eBooks, you can start with Joel Comm’s What Google Never Told You About Making Money with Adsense or The Definitive Guide to Google AdSense, by William Charlwood. Both are excellent and offer detailed, how-to advice.

As a footnote, in a significant new development, Blogger.com, the free blogging platform from Google, now lets you place Adsense ads without having to apply for a separate Adsense account.

How Google Detects Invalid Clicks - A Must Know For AdSense Publisher

A lot of Google AdSense publishers are banned from the Google AdSense program for invalid clicks. Some of these Google AdSense publishers manage to get their AdSense account reinstated. However, majority of them failed to do so. As a result, they are banned from the Google AdSense program.
Google does not reveal any specific details about invalid clicks in order to protect their proprietary clicks fraud detection technology. Hence, you would not know who is generating these clicks on your site or where these clicks come from.
If you are not getting any details of the invalid clicks from the termination letter, it may be a good idea to learn how Google defines these clicks and ways to detect them.
Google defines invalid clicks as:
• Manual clicks intended to increase publisher’s advertising

• Clicks by automated tools, robots, or other deceptive software.
So how does Google detect these clicks and how would they know which clicks are invalid? Google AdSense team uses three powerful tools to detect invalid clicks:
• Detection and Filtering Tool: Each click on an AdSense ad is monitored by Google system. Google will record the IP of each click, the time of the click, duplicate clicks and various click patterns. Google will use these factors and filter out potential invalid clicks.
• Advanced Monitoring Tool: Google uses its proprietary software to monitor clicks fraud activity. They are constantly working to improve their technology.
• The Google Team: In addition, Google has a team that uses specialized tools and techniques to examine individual case of clicks fraud. When Google system detects potentially invalid clicks, a member of this team will examines the affected account.
Despite the effort that Google put in to improve their clicks fraud detection technology, there are few innocent publishers whose AdSense account has been suspended or banned temporarily for different reasons. For example, a sudden spike in your AdSense earnings would probably raise the red flag in their system and cause your AdSense account to be suspended. If your AdSense account is suspended for invalid clicks which you did not commit, Google provides you a way to make your appeal:
http://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/request.py?contact=invalid_clicks_appeal
A Piece of Advice
When you are making your appeal via email, you should stay calm and plan the right strategy. You should be patient when dealing with Google and most importantly you should be polite when communicating with them. You may take initiative to provide them with all the documents they need.