Google Adsense, is more of a Art then a Science, and so although there are no right ways to set up the Adsense units to your page, there definitely are some ways that are better than others. So although this page has many different pieces of advice to help you figure out the ideal setup for your Adsense units, it will still take a lot of testing and rearranging your ads to see what works best for you.
Websites are great ways to earn a little bit of extra passive income, or potentially a lot of passive income. If you have a website or weblog, there are many ways you can earn a little extra revenue just by adding a few well placed ads on your page.
In my opinion, it is best to develop your site or blog, “SEO” it, and start to get a healthy flow of traffic before you start to add ads onto it, but it definitely doesn’t hurt to add them right away as well.
Adsense
If you dont know what Google’s Adsense is, then you need to get out more (maybe that saying is the opposite in this situation). Adsense is definitely a must have for most websites and blogs. Basically Adsense is a PPC program through Google, where you put text or simple image ads onto your site, and you get paid depending on how many clicks those ads get, along with eCPM.
LinkWorth
Linkworth is a great advertising program, that allows you to use a wide variety of advertising mediums. Through LinkWorth you can set up “Linkads” (text link ads) “LinkPosts” (paid blog reviews similar to PayPerPost), “linkwords” (in content PPC ads), “Linkintext” (in text link ads, similar to Kontera), as well several other Rotating ad units, etc, and a ton of tools and programs to help you out as well. This, along with Google Adsense is my favorite ad program.
PayPerPost
This one is one of my personal favorites. Basically advertisers will pay you a set amount to write a post of certain length about their product. Once approved you go to the PPP marketplace and go through all different listings and pick a topic to post about and they will pay you for it. The advertiser will decide the amount you will get paid, as well as their desired format, and tone (if the review will be positive or negative towards their product).
Text Link Ads
Text link ads are nice, because they aren’t necessarily advertisements like Adsense, but a list of links you can put on your page that don’t bother readers, and are nice for advertisers because the links provide them with traffic and search engine benefits. Your link price is set based on Alexia, Google Pagerank, number of RSS subscribers, and other factors.
Deal Dot Com
Deal dot Com is a site that sells marketing/online business products and software, but what is really cool about it, is you make a 35% commission off whatever anybody buys, who you refer to their site, as well as a 15% commission off anybody THEY refer as well. Unlike other similar affiliate programs such as AuctionAds, who only pays 5% commission and for 6 months, Deal dot com commission is forever. So if you refer somebody today, and they buy something 10 years from now, you still get paid.
Kontera Contentlink
Kontera Contentlinks allow you to advertise on your page without having to give up any space for advertisements. Basically, Kontera will crawl your pages, and turn certain words into a link to an advertisement related to that word. You have probably seen them around on several popular websites, when you hover your mouse over the link a small box will pop up in the form of an advertisement.
Review Me
Review Me can be a very huge money maker for a prestigious website. Simply put, companies will pay you to write reviews and/or articles about their product on your site for a somewhat negotiable price set by you.
Shopping Ads
ShoppingAds allows you to make money by displaying merchant ads on your website relevant to the content on your page. When your visitors click on the ads you can make money on a CPC (cost per click) or CPA (cost per acquisition) basis. Basically, you tell them the relevant keywords of merchant ads you want displayed and they will display a matching ad. These ads are especially good for product review blogs or an online store.
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. .Once your page is found, and indexed with the “Big 3″ search engines, the next major step in search engine optimization is to work on your Title, Description, and Meta Tags. For those of you who don’t know, tags are information inserted into the “head” area of your web pages, not seen by those viewing your pages in browsers, but by the search engines themselves, to give the search engine an idea of the content on your page, so they can better match your page with relevant searches
The Title Tag, is information not seen on the page itself, but shows up at the very top of the Internet window, for example, this pages title is “SEO The Basics - Adding Meta Tags“. When a person makes a search on an engine such as Google, the search engine will first search the titles of the page, because the title is what the page will most likely be about. Your can be as short as you want, but its best to fit as much info into it as possible, but try to keep it under 60 characters. Search engines don’t like people to spam things like this and will often rank you poorly for a title that is too long.
Description Tags are just like title tags, only they are longer, and give you a more detailed description of what is in the page. When you make a search, the content that shows up underneath the link to the website is the description tag.
Meta Tags are basically key words in your content that give a search engine a good example of what your page is about. There is no perfect amount of keywords that you should put in, but I would say that you should try to keep it around 10 words or so, and keep each keyword/key phrase under 3 or 4 words.
Adding tags
Many web developing programs will allow you to enter your tags and it will automatically enter it into your HTML, but if you are making your page from scratch and doing all of your own HTML then this is how/where you enter the tag codes.
<HEAD>
<TITLE>Enter your pages Title here</TITLE>
<META name=”Description” content=”add your page’s description here”>
<META name=”Keywords” content=”add keywords here, separating each one with a comma”>
</HEAD>
Tips:
-Keywords that are bold in your content, or linked will rank better than just plain text.
-The goal is to pick keywords that are most frequently searched for, but have the least competition. There are many different programs you can use to decipher a keywords success, I like to use one called WEB CEO. It has many other tools as well but I most frequently use the keyword analysis tool.
-When a search engine crawls a page for a search, it looks through the webpage URL first, then the title, then the description, then the keywords, then the content to make a match for the search query, so that is the order of importance to a search engine.
-Try to make sure that your keywords also show up as much as possible in your content without spamming them. A search engine will see a keyword used a lot as a sign that the page it is indexing has a lot of info on that topic, so it will usually rank it high, but remember not to spam words.
- Don’t spam keywords! Lots of people will try to hide keywords out of sight from a page viewer and just write those keywords a hundred times, and search engines are smart and know whats going on, and will rank you poorly for this.
Search Engine Submission
The first thing that any web developer needs to do is submit their website to search engines. The first thing that an average developer will do is submit their site to millions of different search engines, believing that the more search engines they are submitted to the more traffic they will receive. This is definitely an a huge misconception and here’s why…
Here is a breakdown of the market share of the top 10 search engines (courtesy of wikipedia)
| Most popular search engines worldwide, Dec. 2007[5][not in citation given] | ||
|---|---|---|
| Company | Millions of searches | Relative market share |
| 28,454 | 46.47% | |
| Yahoo! | 10,505 | 17.16% |
| Baidu | 8,428 | 13.76% |
| Microsoft | 7,880 | 12.87% |
| NHN | 2,882 | 4.71% |
| eBay | 2,428 | 3.9% |
| Time Warner (includes AOL) | 1,062 | 1.6% |
| Ask.com and related | 728 | 1.1% |
| Yandex | 566 | 0.9% |
| Alibaba.com | 531 | 0.8% |
| Total | 61,221 | 100.0% |
As you can see, of everybody searching on the Internet, 46.47% search on Google.com, 17.16% search on yahoo, and 12.87% search on MSN (well just forget all the foreign search engines such as Baidu which is a chinese search engine). Out of all the searching done in the Internet, 76.5% all come from yahoo!, Google, and MSN.com, or as I like to call them “The Big 3″. Now every other search engine besides those “Big 3″ either have a very small amount of searches (aol, ask.com etc.) or is powered by the “Big 3″. If you’ll notice, on many of the smaller search engines you see, they all are “powered by google” or “powered bay YAHOO!” etc, so in reality, you don’t need to submit yourself to hundreds of search engines, only 3.
Often times, search engines will just pick up your page automatically and start to index it, especially if you have other websites linking to yours, but it is still a good idea to submit your URL to them anyway.
Google: www.google.com/addurl.html
Yahoo!: http://search.yahoo.com/info/submit.html
MSN: http://search.msn.com/docs/submit.aspx
Submitting a sitemap
Submitting a sitemap is very important, because the way search engines work is they “crawl” around the Internet indexing pages they find by going from link to link. What a sitemap is, is a map of all of the pages on your website, and by submitting this to a search engine it gives them all of your pages to ensure you get your entire site mapped.
Google:
To submit a sitemap to google first you need to create your sitemap. The simplest and best (and free) program I have found so far to do this is the Auditmypc sitemap Generator. You use their program to create an XML file which you will then save to your computer, and add it to the root directory of your site (example: save the file as sitemap and add it to your root directory so your sitemap’s URL would be www.yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml.)
Once you have your sitemap file, go to www.google.com/webmasters/tools ,setup an account and log in.
After you are logged in, enter the URL to your homepage into the box and click “add site”, and then click on the link on the box to the left that says “add sitemap”, chose “add general we sitemap” from the dropdown menu, then type in the url to your sitemap in the box, and then wait for your page to begin being indexed. This happens on a routine basis and wont happen immediately. Check back here every day or so to check on the progress.
YAHOO!:
Submitting with yahoo, is in my opinion less effective, but it still does’nt hurt. To submit to yahoo!
1) First create a text file with a list of all the urls to the pages on your site and save the text file as urllist.txt.
2) Save this file into your websites root directory and then go to http://submit.search.yahoo.com/free/request (you will need a yahoo account to get this far so make one if you don’t have one).
3) Lastly submit the URL to that file
Note: I am unsure, but I believe the URL to your google sitmeap may also work instead having to make urllist.txt, but it doesnt hurt to submit both.
. .Just about everybody on this planet knows what its like to live in the Rat Race and very few people will ever know the feeling of getting out of the rat race. For those of you unfamiliar with The Rat Race, it is a term often used to describe the life of the average “working man” (or woman).
The way I see it, if your in the Rat Race, you wake up early and work 9-5, go to bed and wake up and do it all over again the next day. You receive a paycheck weekly/monthly etc. and live your life according to that paycheck. Your bills start to stack up and things look like there’s no end in sight. Then one day you get a promotion…you are now making an additional $20,000/year and make a $5,000 bonus and what is the first thing you do? You of course look into buying that new home you always wanted, you buy a second car so that your wife can drive the kids to their piano class/soccer practice etc. and you use that bonus to take your family to Hawaii for the week. But then when all is said and done, you start to get bills for that new house and that new car, and at the end of the month you owe just as much money, if not more then you did before that promotion. Now you are wondering to yourself “Life was supposed to get better! I was supposed to get ahead now that I was promoted” but in reality you are in the same debt if not more.
This is the rat race, and although it seems impossible to get out, it actually isn’t. In-fact, the concept of escaping the Rat Race is easy to understand and fairly easy to do. All you need to do is change the way you use money.
Step 1 - STOP SPENDING!
Don’t spend another dime on any thing that isn’t a need! Until you are out of the Rat Race, you need to lower your spending. As I pointed out before, when we get an increase in our paycheck, we increase our spending and therefore our payments. Before buying ANYTHING or spending ANY money, decide if its a “Need” or a “Want”. Do you NEEDthat new 50″ Plasma TV, or is your 25″ flat-screen good enough for now?
Step 2 - Study your Debts
Write it all down on a sheet of paper, everything from credit card debt, to outstanding loans on your house/car etc., to medical bills. Now that you have a list of all your debts and how much you owe you might feel overwhelmed and realize you owe people alot of money, but worry not, because the next step is to make all this go away.
Step 3 - Pay your DEBTS!
Use that extra money you saved by not buying that new TV, and use any extra money you have after your expenses, and pay off those debts! Start with your credit card debt. Pay it all off or as much as possible. Once that monthly payment is eliminated you will be able to keep a little bit of more of your paycheck each month, resulting in more money for you. Use this extra money to pay off your car payments, or your mortgage or home loans. Keep doing this, always put money away each month to eliminate your debts, and you will start to see that you have more money in the back each month! This is almost like getting a pay raise (but make sure not to be like before and go and buy all of those new things, because that would just put you back inside the Rat Race).
Step 4 - Build your Assets
This is probably the most difficult step for the average person, but is the final step and is necessary to fully escape the Rat Race. For those of you who aren’t sure what an asset is, an asset is something that puts money into your pocket. Assets include, but are not limited to:
The way I like to think of an asset, is a way to generate passive income, or, income that is generated without me having to work for it. The main goal here is to build up your assets, to provide you with monthly passive income, that will ultimately lead to enough income to support your fixed expenses.
In the book Rich Dad, Poor Dad, the author explains that if it your assets, are as much as your expenses, you have you have become Financially Independent and have left the rat race. An example of this would be if it costs you $100 a month to live, and your assets generate $100 a month in profit*. Basically when you reach this point, any money you are earning through your job, is going directly to you, and can be spent on whatever you want! Just make sure not to raise expenses, and if you do, make sure to raise your assets right along with it.
*Tip: Once you reach this point, why stop there? Now you can continue to build your assets, and generate more and more passive income, and by doing this, you are putting more money into your pocket that you don’t even need to work for! Now you can sleep in, spend time with your family and friends, go fishing, etc. But remember to keep building the assets!
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The problem with the majority of people these days is that they only see what they have in front of them. They are taught and trained to look at the small picture and it often will discourage and drive you away from opportunities that will potentially make you money. For example:
The other day I was working on launching a new website. About 5 hours after launching it, I was visiting with some friends and decided to check up on my Google Ad sense report to see if anything had happened. To my amazement, only 5 hours after launching, I had made $.75 from my advertisements! Now even today, a week or so later, my friend still gives me a hard time about that, making fun of my “$.75/day website” and all I can do is sit back and have pity for him, because all he is looking at is the little picture.
If you step back and look at the big picture, you can realize that without ever having to even look at the website again, I can now make about $23/month…basically for no reason. Now mind you that this was in the first 5 hours, so it is very likely that as I build upon that website of mine, instead of letting it sit, I can bring in more readers, and potentially more advertisements will be clicked on. Now imagine a month down the road, when that website has 10x the amount of pages and content along with age and traffic building strategies, could increase that $.75/day to $1/day, then $5/day, then $10/day, which in the big picture comes out to $300/month, in which case I could sit back and enjoy that $300/month of passive income, but will I stop there? Of course not! Because at this point, seeing the website grow is getting so exciting and so profitable that I will of course want to build on it more and more. So by not looking at the small picture and saying “this website sucks I only made $.75 for hours worth of work” I look at the big picture and say “I worked on this website for x amount of hours, but from now on I can make $23.25/month, or $279/year of passive, un-worked-for, money.
So from now on don’t look at the seemingly small result of an action you can take, but look further down the road, and try to see its full potential of what that opportunity could become. Look at the Big Picture.
This poem by Robert Frost goes along well with the point I have tried to make…I try to apply it to my life daily.
. .Two Roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel Both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;Then took the other, just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads onto way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence;
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
-Robert Frost [1916]
