Money Makers: Firefox Referrals

This is already the fourth article in the Money Makers series which are hopefully a great read for webmasters who try to earn some money from their websites. This time I’m going to introduce a method of earning money by making users download and install Firefox with the Google Toolbar. I have picked this one from all the referrals that Google Adsense offers because I firmly believe in Firefox and use the Google Toolbar myself to check pageranks for instance. Whenever a user downloads and installs Firefox with the Google Toolbar you earn up to $1 depending on the location of that user.

The only prerequisite is that you do have an Google Adsense account. If you do not have one simply go to Google and signup for one. They take almost any site and do not look at visitors or other stats of your site. My first try at earning money from this referral did not work out well. I tried to add a banner in a sidebar at the beginning which did not work out that well. Mainly because it was out of context there and I removed it soon after placing it there.

I visited one of my partner sites (Webby’s World) by chance at work using the Internet Explorer and saw a message that caught my attention. The first paragraph after the header did not show his site content but a notice that I was not using Mozilla Firefox with a small text explaining why I should use Firefox. The link was of course a link to Google Referrals and I thought that this was indeed a great way of reaching a target audience. This text was not showing when I opened the site with Firefox which meant that he had to use some sort of script to determine the browser of the visitor. I decided to give this a try.

I did find a php script that was checking the browser of the visitor pretty fast and added it to my site with the Google Adsense Referral link and a short text inside. The results were amazing. I was able to earn five times the amount that I was earning before from referrals by targeting only Internet Explorer users and explaining to them why I made the suggestion to switch to Firefox with Google Toolbar. Let me show you the script first:


function ae_detect_ie()
{
if (isset($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']) &&
(strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], 'MSIE') !== false))
return true;
else
return false;
}
?>

Place Code and Text in here


I added the script to my single.php file of Wordpress below the articles. I first thought about placing it on top like I saw it at Webby’s World but I did not want to remove the attention of my visitors from my articles. It surely performs better if placed at the top of the site.

I may not disclose how much I’m earning with those referrals but I can give you a percentage. I’m currently earning about 5% of my monthly Adsense earnings from those referrals which is a nice addition.

If you want to test how it looks on my blog visit my blog once with Firefox or Opera and then with Internet Explorer.