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.
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I think I might actually put this back on my website.. For a while, I used another script called Explorer Destroyer. It did basically the same thing, but I decided it was too annoying and agressive to users using IE and took it off completely..
You can see it here : http://explorerdestroyer.com/
Instead of using fancy scripts, I have a fake alert bar at the top of my website using conditional comments for IE only. The bar is small and doesn’t have Google referral though. I think google’s image is too large and I never got any referrals. I wish Google just had a text link referral, then I’d opt in.
Nice article …
I will try it in my site ….
There are text links for referrals as well.
While I understand that most websites are about making money I think that there are better ways to do it. I used to enjoy reading the articles on your site but now with all of the adsense words it is difficult to scroll down the page without a lot of annoying popups. I hate sites which have an abundance of these and try not to visit them. I also do like what you are saying about forcing your users to use Firefox (which I have been using since it was Phoenix) and the google tool bar. I hate toolbars and the amount of space that they consume. This all is beginning to sound a lot like some MS drivel. Use my browser/software if you want to see the web correctly. That is why I went to Firefox and switched to Linux. And also the reason that I am looking for an alternative to Firefox. It is getting too much like MS.
I guess what I am getting at here is that because of this article I am deleting your site from my bookmarks and will not be visiting it anymore.
john
I’m not forcing anyone to use Firefox. Everyone is able to view my site the way they like. I’m just reminding visitors that use the Internet Explorer that there is a better browser which they could be using instead..
I’m sorry to hear that you are deleting the bookmark, good luck anyway..
eej martin thanks for the script. But do you also have a script that includes an option to let firefox users see another ad. Because the explorer users see now 2 ads.
you can see it on www.invloed.net