The move was not easy at the beginning as we strive to have long term relationships with Internet advertising providers even if it means to miss opportunities. We did ran into some invoicing issues with Vibrant Media which definitely fueled the decision to move. We were contacted by one of Kontera’s business development managers who convinced us that Kontera would be able to monetize the website better which essentially meant more revenue for us.

We did not run blindly into this though as we have been burned quite a few times in the past by Internet advertising agencies who claimed to up the revenue but failed to deliver. Kontera was easy to setup on the blog as they provided access to a WordPress plugin. Took a couple of minutes to install and configure the plugin and everything was set to go. One of the differences between Kontera and Intellitxt is that the former allows to change the color of the links while the latter does not. Kontera managed to reach the same level of revenue that Intellitxt provided but managed to surpass that after the first week. We are now at about 150% of the Intellitxt revenue.

Every website on the other hand is different and performance can therefor vary quite a bit depending on your site’s niche, language and other factors.

One of them was the non-existing option to pick site categories and provide information to potential advertisers. Google now has introduced the Google Ad Planner which changes this slightly. The service seems to be in a testing phase with webmasters being invited by email. Every website that has been added to Google Webmaster Tools can be added to Google Ad Planner which then offers a basic interface to add information about the website.

This includes a small 250 character description, the selection of an advertising url directly on the website, up to five categories that describe the website’s contents (Computer & Electronics category alone has dozens of subcategories to choose from, the accepted advertising forms and the option to share Google Analytics data with Google Ad Planner (only unique visitors and pageviews which are estimated by Ad Planner).

It is obviously to early to tell if these information will make any difference at all as they only seem to affect so called placement ads on a website. Placement ads are ads that are placed by Adwords customers directly on the website. This stands in contrast to contextual ads that are placed globally on websites. Contextual ads usually make up the bulk of ad placements on a website whereas placement ads pay better.

Interested webmasters can take a look at how their website is displayed by visiting the Google Publisher Center.

I am not taking credit for this, so if you did this before me feel free to let us know, but I did arrive at it on my own. The methods you could try is the “defer” attribute, which defers loading to the end of the page load, however, this had no effect at all. You can also try a “window.onload”, but this didn’t help either. With any other function combinations the ad either loaded as usual or did some weird stuff.

In the end, I decided to load the ad at the bottom of the page, right before the “” tag, and then use javascript to “transfer” the contents to where I need it do be, while keeping the source hidden. This is achieved using the “document.getElementById” method, read on to take a look at a specific example.

So what we need to do is create a div at the bottom of our page, load the advertisement there, and transfer it to the place we want it to be. I will be using inline CSS and inline javascript, which should not be done in real “life”, the best practice is to have all your CSS in external stylsheets and you javascript called from files in the header (where possible). The bottom of our page would look like this:

<div id=”top_ad_loader” style=”display:none;”>
Ad code in here
</div>

<script type=”text/javascript”>
document.getElementById(“top_ad”).innerHTML = document.getElementById(“top_ad_loader”).innerHTML
</script>

</body>

So what is going on here? We have two divs, the first is “top_ad_loader”, which you can see right here. This div is hidden, but contains the ad code. When the code is being read, the javascript might take a while to load, but we’re right at the bottom, so all our content is displayed already. There is also another div, “top_ad”, which can not be seen here, it is somewhere way above this part of our code, somewhere near the “<body>” tag.

There is javascript code right beneath the ad loader, the purpose of which is to transfer the loaded contents of the ad loader to te place where we want it to be. We “grab” the contents inside the ad loader using “document.getElementById(“top_ad_loader”).innerHTML“, and we want the contents of the actual ad block to equal this.

Once the page load gets to the ad it will slowly load it, when finished, parsing will continue, and our javascript will transfer the contents to the top.

If you have a page that loads a bit slowly, perhaps this method would be worth a try? Contents usually load faster than javascript, so if you place the javascript load last your content will load in 1-2 seconds (maybe much less), making the javascript load 1-2 seconds later. However, if a javascript at the beginning loads in 5 seconds, you need to wait that out just to start loading the content.

If you’d like to read some similar articles, take a look at Scriptastique, a blog all about web development and coding, with great tips on CSS, HTML, PHP, MySQL and Javascript and tutorials and screencasts coming soon! You can follow us on our RSS feed, or Twitter where we’re posting 3-4 short tips daily now!

Many people own lots of domains which they keep around to sell at a higher price, or they simply haven’t gotten around to developing it, and as such, the “weight” of these webpages are lost, even if someone gets to the page they’ll just see an empty canvas, or some sort of “pricing inquiry notice”.

In this case Google Adsense for domains is a great resource for grabbing that extra buck, since it’s set and forget you won’t really need to do anything, and in the end if you only get a few dollars daily from it, it’s still better than nothing, and lets you use your domains to their full extent.

The interesting thing about Google’s system here is that it differs from the usual select an ad and show method because of the specialized nature of parked domains. In fact, you will have to create CNAME records and configure some stuff at your registrar, only then can you customize and choose keywords. Following all that, your domain will have a sleek Google-like look, with keyword relevant ads served, so ideally this should be a page worth something, even if all it has is ads (it will also have a search box).

I am interested to try this out in practice, I have a couple of domains standing still, although I am not totally convinced about the money making capabilities here, I think you can make more by actually developing a site. Obviously I don’t have as much time as I’d like, so this will be a fun project. If you have some experience advertising on parked domains please share with us!

The Inside Adsense blog made an announcement today that changes this restriction. Adsense users can now switch from the default Google Adsense font selection to either Arial, Verdana or Times. This makes it easier to use the same font for the display of Adsense units that is being used on the rest of the website. It is most likely that using the same font to display the Adsense unit and the content on the website will yield higher revenue.

It is probably a good idea to test all three new font combinations on the website to find the one with the best results. Fonts can be changed for single ad units or globally in the Adsense account. A click on the My Account link in the top menu and a selection of Ad Display Preference will open the menu where the font setting can be edited globally. Individual ad units can be changed by clicking on Adsense Setup > Manage Ads > Edit Ad Settings.

Being able to change the default font face is definitely a step in the right direction. Premium publishers have still an advantage as they can change the font size and other settings as well which are still locked for non-premium users.

Until I realized that they were all fake, at least when it comes to making money. I learned most of the stuff that I’m doing alone or by communicating with friends. It was mostly trial and error but I discovered, only recently, some websites that would have been invaluable for me if they would have existed back then and if I had known them. I want to introduce four blogs that make a difference, that are true money making blogs and I promise that you will learn more in one post at those blogs than you will in your lifetime at all those other blogs that I mentioned before.

The first huge difference that you will notice is that those blogs don’t sell you crap, don’t have an ebook that is full of affiliate links, don’t post pay per post articles and don’t do all the other fancy tricks that earns them money without teaching you anything that’s worth your money.

Blogger Unleashed is run by Vic. He is a helpful, honest guy with a big heart. He usually posts videos and not articles which is very entertaining. He swears a lot and his language might be inappropriate to minors but he is telling the truth. Some might complain about the language he uses but no one will ever complain about the message. He basically talks about Bans (Build a Niche Site) which is an automated script that creates eBay shops and ways to drive traffic to those websites. He is only talking about tools that he is using and that led to his success, nothing else.

His Challenge to get mad video was a first for me, someone talking about his inner feelings, about his past and how he was able to overcome that hard ship. I never before felt with someone on the Internet before. After watching that video you will know why he is getting mad at all those scammers on the Internet.

Challenge To Get Mad
Build a Niche Store BANS Review and Tutorial

Make Money Blogging is a relative new website which is somewhat connected to Vic’s Blogger Unleashed website. If I recall it correctly Vic did help Justin in the beginning and Justin decided to give back by creating his own blog. He talks about new aspects and is a great addition to Vic’s blog.

How to Make Money Online for Beginners is run by Griz, another honest blogger that is probably best known for his Make Money Using Blogs Lessons which is a series of articles that he updated over time that contain everything that you need to know. He loves to write long, very long articles that are great to read and contain tips that you won’t find at those A-Blogger websites.

Make Money Using Blogs – Lesson 1

Court’s Internet Marketing School is run by Courtney Tuttle. He is writing about nearly everything in the Make Money Online niche, about blog creating, keyword selection and SEO for instance.

Introduction to Keyword Sniping

If you read those four blogs you are set to become successful on the Internet. Since I’m experienced enough I can really say that. I’d like to thank those four guys for being honest, for posting great articles that really make a difference to the crap that you are reading elsewhere in this niche.

There are however several differences between the Rubicon Project and Pubmatic which are worth noting. When I first joined Pubmatic I was turned off by the fact that I had to add my username and password for all the advertising companies that I did work with and that I had to sign up for all that I was not a member of yet.

This required a huge portion of trust on my side which I was not able to give at that time. I did not want to give away my login details which basically could be used to change account details like payment address. I therefor never tried out Pubmatic.

The Rubicon Project does not have this requirement. They use existing accounts for sites that generate less than 300000 impressions per day. This has several advantages. First, I do not have to give them my existing login information which is great. Second I do get paid by Paypal or Check from one company and not from several. I also see all the stats and performance in one place instead of having to log into several websites to check the performance of my ads.

Third, I do not have to join networks that I’m no member of yet and finally I can use advertisers that are not available yet in my country. This means that it is for instance possible to have YPN (Yahoo Ads) displayed on your website even if you do not have a US-American SSID. That’s the theory at least because I can currently select only a handful of networks from the list of advertising networks listed on their website.

A quick chat with the excellent support revealed that the Network Directory contained most known advertising networks and that users could comment and rate them even if they have not been added yet to the Rubicon Project. Plans are to add as many advertisers from that list before the commercial release in 2008.

I’m currently using ads from their website to fill as second tier for certain ad spots on my website and will report back when I have some data that I can share. Here is a short list of changes that I would like to see:

• Create Ad Zones and disable certain networks on those zones. Currently a network can only be disabled for all ad spots.
• Faster reporting times. They are updated once a day only but they will most likely fix this before they leave Beta
• More Advertisers. Some heavyweight advertisers are missing currently. Those are YPN, Tribalfusion, Burst Media and others that I use on my website currently
• Make it clearer that users have to select ad colors themselves and make it possible to use different colors for different ad zones.

I heard about the Rubicon Project at Connected Internet. Make sure you check this awesome blog out and add it to your RSS Reader.

]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2007/12/28/the-rubicon-project/feed/ 0 http://www.ghacks.net/2007/12/16/breakdown-of-blog-earnings/ http://www.ghacks.net/2007/12/16/breakdown-of-blog-earnings/#comments Sun, 16 Dec 2007 00:34:16 +0000 Martin Brinkmann http://www.ghacks.net/2007/12/16/breakdown-of-blog-earnings/ Once in a while I do post about my blog earnings on this blog. I still do not like to post exact figures although it would give me some credibility with the blog community who seem to put those into higher regard that earn a lot of money with their blogs. Still, you would not tell someone you hardly knew how much you’d earn in your job either, would not you ?

This post describes the progress of monetizing Ghacks and will hopefully encourage others and probably give at least some readers new ideas on what they could do to monetize their blog or website.

I’m basically using three monetization concepts here at Ghacks. The first is Pay Per Click which makes up the majority of my earnings, then there is Pay Per Impression and last but not least we have Affiliate Sales.

Pay Per Click

I’m using Google Adsense which has been my major source of income for a very long time side by side with Vibrant Medias Intellitxt service. Google Adsense was on a decline ever since Google changed the clickable area of their ads while Intellitxt is on a huge rise. It gets even better, Vibrant Media pays in Euro, one of the few advertising companies that do. This is very helpful and a good counterweight to the decreasing value of the Dollar in the world. Both make up roughly 80% of my blogs earnings.

Pay Per Impression

This is something that I’m exploring lately and I had good results with Tribalfusion. They make up roughly 10% of my blogs earnings which is ok for impression based services. I read about chaining just lately and signed up for Burst Media and Vizi as well to chain advertisements.

Let me explain what that means. The companies are not able to fill out all of your inventory with ads. Good companies fill 50%+ of the inventory with ads and display default ads (or none) if they can’t fill the ad spot with an ad.

Instead of displaying none paying default ads or no ads webmasters began to chain services and put them into tiers. So, if Tribalfusion can’t serve the ad they send the request to Burst who fill the ad or, if they cannot, send it to Vizi to fill the ad.

This makes it possible to create a higher fill rate for your ad inventory and earn money in the process.

Direct Advertisement is normally impression based as well and this is an area where I really have to do more. I made a contact with the nice guys of Ciao who ordered an ad placement for six months but this is just a tiny deal, nothing big. The deal was made after I contacted them asking if they wanted to advertise on my website.

My plans are to create a list of possible advertisers first and write 2-3 emails each day. I don’t have that much experience in writing sales letters but I will learn that as well I think.

Affiliate Earnings

This is not really working for my blog. Earnings are neglectable except for the earnings of the Giganews affiliate program which is earning a good amount of money if you consider that I mention it only in a few posts on my site.

To Do:

Direct Advertisement is the key to go. I’m at a cap with all advertisements on my site and only new traffic sources would raise the amount of money that I earn from this website. (I’m currently testing something that will drive more traffic to my blog, I will probably write about it if it is indeed successful).

The big advantage of Direct Advertisement is that the webmaster keeps all the money. There is no third party that gets a piece of the cake. It’s more work though and pretty hard to convince companies to advertise on a website directly.

Looking For:

I’m looking for someone who has experience in making direct advertisement deals with companies. A few friends of mine would join the party with their successful blogs as well and you would earn a percentage of every direct advertisement deal that you make.

]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2007/12/16/breakdown-of-blog-earnings/feed/ 6 http://www.ghacks.net/2007/12/05/analyze-google-adsense-statistics/ http://www.ghacks.net/2007/12/05/analyze-google-adsense-statistics/#comments Wed, 05 Dec 2007 13:47:02 +0000 Martin Brinkmann http://www.ghacks.net/2007/12/05/analyze-google-adsense-statistics/ Google Adsense offers webmasters a quick way to monetize their website without really thinking about niches and affiliates that work for your website. While the Adsense website offers a quick way of analyzing your revenue and some filters it does not really shine when it comes to generating reports that webmasters can use to analyze the revenue.

There are for example no graphs, no hourly statistics or comparisons with past revenues. CSV Adstats aids webmasters tremendously. The tool can be configured to automatically download Adsense CSV files which are then analyzed by the tool.

Once that is done webmasters can access all sorts of statistics and graphs that give in depth information about Adsense performance including Adsense for Search and Referrals. Webmasters can analyze global stats or channel stats and receive information about revenue progression, revenue average, click through rate, cpm, clicks, views, compare charts with the last years and much more.



It would take a long time to describe all the different functions and options that CSV Adstats offers. What I really like is that it automatically updates your Adsense earnings throughout the day similar to the Adsense Notifier extension for Firefox. No browser is needed though to view the updates though.

I enjoyed the best of category as well which displayed the best revenue, cpc, ctr days since running Adsense. Webmasters who want to use CSV Adstats will have to add their adsense login details to the software to make it work which might be enough reason for some cautious site owners to not use the software.

]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2007/12/05/analyze-google-adsense-statistics/feed/ 7 http://www.ghacks.net/2007/11/17/new-adsense-clickzone-consequences/ http://www.ghacks.net/2007/11/17/new-adsense-clickzone-consequences/#comments Sat, 17 Nov 2007 21:09:42 +0000 Martin Brinkmann http://www.ghacks.net/2007/11/17/new-adsense-clickzone-consequences/ Google changed the clickzones of their Adsense ad units and most webmasters are reporting decreases in their ad unit click through rate and revenue. Many have seen a decrease between 1-2% in click through rate which reduced the earnings by a figure between 30-70%.

It is to early to really say if this will turn out to be a lasting effect of if advertisers in turn will spend more money which results in higher earnings per click. I’m a bit skeptic that advertisers will really increase their bids on keywords and have the feeling that this drop will remain as it is for a very long time.

Several webmasters already decided to move away from Adsense and use other ways of monetizing their website. This is unfortunately not an option for many.

I compiled a list of tips that might help in this situation:

• Don’t panic ! This is probably the most important tip. We need more time to analyze the impact on the webmaster community and discover strategies on how to cope with this situation.
• Blending might not be the best option anymore. Most webmasters did blend their ads to fit into the site design. They were able to do this because it did not really matter where the user clicked on the ad. Even the whitespace was clickable. This is different now with only the title and url clickable
• Be patient when you try different ad units and color schemes. Try those for at least 1-2 days before you draw a conclusion. We all know that Adsense earnings rise and fall on a daily basis and it is essential to test ad units for a certain time. My suggestion would be to test them on at least two weekdays.
• Take the time and look for Adsense alternatives. It is always a good idea to look around and have alternatives if Adsense earnings remain on these low levels. A good starting point is Darrens Problogger blog and webmaster forums like Webmaster World and Digitalpoint
• Making Ads stick out. I’m currently testing different color schemes and a early conclusion that I can draw is that the color red seems to be excellent for a higher click through rate. I would suggest to change colors and ad units and test those as well. Title and URL have different sizes in many ad units which means that the clickable area is different as well. Some ad units do not display the URL at all which means that the only clickable area is the title.

Feel free to add additional tips and alternatives to Adsense. I would also be interested in your observations.

]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2007/11/17/new-adsense-clickzone-consequences/feed/ 1 http://www.ghacks.net/2007/11/14/google-adsense-tips-and-change-announcement/ http://www.ghacks.net/2007/11/14/google-adsense-tips-and-change-announcement/#comments Tue, 13 Nov 2007 23:34:44 +0000 Martin Brinkmann http://www.ghacks.net/2007/11/14/google-adsense-tips-and-change-announcement/ A list of tips was published at the official Google Adsense blog Inside Adsense which should help maximize revenue potential. The tips are to turn custom channels into ad placements which will highlight parts of your website to advertisers, to enable text and image ads on your website and to use the 300×250 medium rectangle because many advertisers use this specifically when creating rich media ads.

I’m using ad placements for a while with no obvious result whatsoever but it could be rather site specific. If I recall correctly those ads can then be booked directly at the website. It is not working at all for me but it does not cost anything and it could work for your website.

The second tip is a no brainer as well and I’m using this setting for a very long time. Image ads are mainly paid on a CPM basis while text ads on a CPC basis. Remember that the best paying unit is shown which could be either, so activate both.

Last but not least we have the medium rectangle which received their recommendation. I know that some webmasters are using this medium rectangle successfully on their websites while others have more success with the large rectangle. I’d say to test both and see which performs better on your website.

Besides this emails from Adsense representatives are floating around the web stating that there will be a major change in the design of the ad units. This has lead to some confusion among webmasters.

They say that descriptions and the background will no longer count as clicks that are paid in the future. Some webmasters understood it the way that they remain clickable but will not produce any revenue while others understood that they will not be clickable at all.

I think the latter will be the case because of this sentence:

Previously, users could click on the background and full text of an ad, but now users can click only on the title and URL of a text ad

Webmasters will nevertheless see a reduction in clicks and it remains to be seen if the drop in CTR will affect many webmasters. Googles hope is to make Adwords attractive to advertisers and that the reduction in accidental clicks will lead to better conversions and higher advertising budgets.

I don’t think it will make much of a difference for solid websites if the background and description will not be clickable anymore. What bothers me a little bit is that some Ad formats do not display a URL which would mean that the clickable area on those units would be reduced to the title.

]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2007/11/14/google-adsense-tips-and-change-announcement/feed/ 3 http://www.ghacks.net/2007/10/26/google-adsense-revenue-and-traffic-comparision/ http://www.ghacks.net/2007/10/26/google-adsense-revenue-and-traffic-comparision/#comments Fri, 26 Oct 2007 13:14:59 +0000 Martin Brinkmann http://www.ghacks.net/2007/10/26/google-adsense-revenue-and-traffic-comparision/ I’m using Google Adsense for more than two years to monetize Ghacks and experienced some ups and downs. I thought it would be nice to create a graph that would put Adsense revenue in relation to the traffic that my website received. This could give courage to those webmasters who are currently struggling with their Adsense revenue especially when it dropped suddenly while the traffic remained more or less on the same level.

The red bar is showing my Adsense earnings (excluding Adsense for search and Adsense Referrals) from October 2005 to October 2007, the blue bar showing the traffic that my blog received in that time (the impressions counted by Google to be precise). For the sake of getting those values on the same chart I decided to divide my traffic by 10, just imagine it would be somewhere outside that graph..



The interesting part is of course what we can learn from that graph. Here are my conclusions after looking at that graph.

• I did not start optimizing Adsense (position and layout) until May 06, that explains the first huge upswing in earnings.
• The rise in December 05 was due to several of my articles making it on the Digg frontpage.
• The big drops in revenue can not be explained with decreasing traffic. I’m not sure what caused the drops, I did change to my new theme in August which might have something to do with the drop. Not sure about the cause in April though.
• The traffic increase can be mainly attributed to increasing the post frequency from three to four / five posts per day.

Did you experience similar increases and drops since monetizing your blog with Google Adsense ? I used to panic a lot when I recognized huge drops in earnings but looking at this graph once again shows me that it does not make sense to panic. If traffic remains steady the revenue drop can more likely be attributed to holidays and advertisers stopping campaigns.

]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2007/10/26/google-adsense-revenue-and-traffic-comparision/feed/ 5 http://www.ghacks.net/2007/10/24/have-you-been-hit-with-a-pagerank-drop/ http://www.ghacks.net/2007/10/24/have-you-been-hit-with-a-pagerank-drop/#comments Wed, 24 Oct 2007 17:14:36 +0000 Martin Brinkmann http://www.ghacks.net/2007/10/24/have-you-been-hit-with-a-pagerank-drop/ Many popular websites and blogs have been hit with Pagerank decreases in the last days. Most went down two points (some even three) from one day to the other. The Pagerank drop does not seem to have an influence on other factors like website traffic or Adsense. It does seem pretty random though, some websites get hit, others that do the same do not get hit at all.

It was noted that this is currently a manual process which could explain why it seems to be so random. My site has been hit as well dropping 2 points from PR5 to PR3. I would not care that much if someone would assure me that there would not be any future ill-effects but I do not want to take any risks here.

I decided to remove all paid links from my website which was not that hard because I did not make much money anyway. I can see that this could be a huge problem for guys like John Chow who make thousands of Dollars selling links.

The Webmaster Tools that are accessible if you have a Google Account offer a link on the main page that is entitled Request reconsideration. Webmasters who were punished by Google may ask for an reconsideration if they got rid of the factor that penalized them in first place.

While I’m not sure that this is about selling links and not some general PR drop across the board I don’t want to take chances here. I did ask for a reconsideration and hope that I will receive a positive answer from Google once they checked that my site is no longer selling links.

I’m wondering what those webmasters will be doing who did not get hit until now. It currently really does not matter that much but it could hurt a lot of people if the websites would get penalized further in the Google search engine.

]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2007/10/24/have-you-been-hit-with-a-pagerank-drop/feed/ 11 http://www.ghacks.net/2007/10/14/a-second-look-at-tnx/ http://www.ghacks.net/2007/10/14/a-second-look-at-tnx/#comments Sun, 14 Oct 2007 09:03:45 +0000 Martin Brinkmann http://www.ghacks.net/2007/10/14/a-second-look-at-tnx/ I recently discovered TNX which is a web service similar to Text Link Ads. TNX is a link broker selling links on every single page of your website or blog if their script is installed on those sites. Users get paid in points for links which can be anywhere from 1 point to a several thousand depending on the Pagerank and the backlinks of the website the links are placed on.

Points can be in turn used to buy links for your websites or cashed out. The current exchange rate is $0.63 for 1000 points. PR4 pages at Ghacks generate 3750 points which equals roughly $2.36 per month for that page. A PR5 page would earn double that amount per month.

If you compare the prices to Text Link Ads you see that you could earn more money from TNX especially if you take into consideration that up to 4 links can be played on every page of your website.

I have currently earned 75000 points with Ghacks which is about $50. It takes some time until links have been placed on all pages. I currently have links on about 40 pages which is not much. I do delete all links on PR0 pages because this earns me just 7.5 points which is next to nothing in my opinion. 1000 Links on PR0 pages would earn me $5 which is ridiculous. So, all PR0 links get deleted.

My estimation is that I could earn about $300 per month from playing one link on every page that has a Pagerank greater than 0 or $1200 if I go for the overkill and place four links on each page.

Points can also be sold in webmaster forums and in the forum at TNX which unfortunately has no activity at all at the moment. I suppose you could try and sell points at forums like Digitalpoint or Namepros instead for a better conversion rate than $0.63 because webmasters buying links do pay $1.2 for 1000 points at the moment.

Read More:

TNX

]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2007/10/14/a-second-look-at-tnx/feed/ 0 http://www.ghacks.net/2007/10/08/are-you-selling-links-watch-your-pagerank/ http://www.ghacks.net/2007/10/08/are-you-selling-links-watch-your-pagerank/#comments Mon, 08 Oct 2007 15:22:16 +0000 Martin Brinkmann http://www.ghacks.net/2007/10/08/are-you-selling-links-watch-your-pagerank/ What has been a rumor for some months seems to have become reality in the last weeks. Google is starting to punish websites that are selling links by dropping the sites Pagerank. Danny Sullivan noticed a huge Pagerank drop from 9 to 7 on the Stanford Daily website which happened to sell links since 2005.

After reading about other incidents he asked Google directly and got the confirmation that this was indeed a drop because of the link selling. While a Pagerank drop might be troublesome for some webmasters who make a good chunk of their monthly earnings from selling text links it might even lead to an exclusion of the website from the Google Search Engine.

This would be catastrophic for many webmasters who decided to live from the revenue that their websites generate. Another Pagerank drop that came to my mind instantly was the drop of JohnChow.com from Pagerank 6 to 5. John is very open minded about his earnings posting a monthy income report on his website.

He made more than $2000 from selling text links in September. If this drop was a penalty for the link selling is not know as of yet but it could be very likely the reason.

Apparently websites hit by a Pagerank decrease may request a review. How and where is not yet know but it could become available as an option in Google’s Webmaster Central.

Google stressed, by the way, that the current set of PageRank decreases is not assigned completely automatically; the majority of these decreases happened after a human review. That should help prevent false matches from happening so easily.

A way to report sites that sell links was introduced earlier on as well and it could become common to report the competition if they are indeed selling links.

Will you keep on selling links on your website even with the chance that your site will be penalized by Google ?

Read More:

Official: Selling Paid Links Can Hurt Your PageRank Or Rankings On Google
via Google Reducing PageRank of Websites That Sell Paid Text Links


]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2007/10/08/are-you-selling-links-watch-your-pagerank/feed/ 4 http://www.ghacks.net/2007/09/29/monetize-your-website-with-tnx-ads/ http://www.ghacks.net/2007/09/29/monetize-your-website-with-tnx-ads/#comments Sat, 29 Sep 2007 16:17:10 +0000 Martin Brinkmann http://www.ghacks.net/2007/09/29/monetize-your-website-with-tnx-ads/ I heavily rely on Everton from Connected Internet who sends me new interesting ways to monetize my sites from time to time. Today he was sending me a link and a short description of TNX which basically sells links on your website. Unlike other sites that sell links the links from TNX are sold on a per page basis. Every sold page earns the user points which can be either exchanged into cash or used to buy links as well.

The value of a link depends on the pagerank of the site, the total amount of incoming links, the category of the website and the number of outgoing links. A calculator on the TNX website gives webmasters a rough idea on how much they could make from TNX with their site.

The amount of backlinks is fetched automatically. Webmasters need to edit the website category and amount of pages that have a certain pagerank. Ghacks for instance has a link popularity of 99862 and 2290 pages. At the beginning all those pages were assigned a pagerank of 0 which resulted in a monthly income of $10.91.

While this does not seem very impressive it becomes so when adding pages with a higher pagerank to the calculation. I was not able to find out the pagerank of all of my internal pages. If my site would have 100 PR5 links it would earn more than $450 per month if all links were sold and one link would be displayed on each page. The maximum amount of four links would lead to $1839.

This means the average webmaster will be able to earn more from TNX than from Text Link Ads or other advertisers.The links can be placed as php code which should be suitable for most webmasters and have to be visible and not be placed at the bottom of the site. Placing them below your articles for instance should be fine.

A great feature are the payment methods, paypal, check and wire for instance are supported.

Adding Sites to TNX:

Adding sites to TNX’s network is pretty easy. Add the php code to your website first. WordPress users can add the code for instance to their single.php file which means that every article page will contain the code automatically.

After adding the code you have to add the site to the system itself. Just add url and several other parameters like site language and you are ready to go. It takes between 1-3 days to get a site accepted – or rejected. When the site is accepted you are ready to earn money with TNX.

The main advantage for webmasters is that advertisers only select a category, the amount of sites and the pageranks that they want to buy. Everything else is done automatically by the TNX script. This means that it does not matter if you are John Chow or John Doe, no one will have advantages in this system.

Pages cost a certain amount of points to order which can be exchanged into cash, here is how much each page costs and brings.

Minimum Link Prices:

PR 0: 0001 point ($0,00114)
PR 1: 0050 points ($0.057)
PR 2: 0100 points ($0,114)
PR 3: 0200 points ($0,228)
PR 4: 0500 points ($0,57)
PR 5: 1000 points ($1,14)
PR 6: 2500 points ($2,85)
PR 7: 5000 points ($5,7)

This means that advertisers can buy 20000 PR0 pages for a little bit more than $11.

Minimum Earnings:

TNX’s commission is 12.5% which means that you earn 0,85 points per PR0 link and 875 points for every PR5 link.

Referring other webmasters:

If you refer other webmasters you do earn 13,5% of the points that they earn (lifetime earnings) which can sum up quite nicely over time. You will also receive 5% of all payments made by those referred webmasters.

Read More:

TNX

]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2007/09/29/monetize-your-website-with-tnx-ads/feed/ 13 http://www.ghacks.net/2007/09/04/group-project-the-ultimate-tech-blog-listing/ http://www.ghacks.net/2007/09/04/group-project-the-ultimate-tech-blog-listing/#comments Tue, 04 Sep 2007 18:17:56 +0000 Martin Brinkmann http://www.ghacks.net/2007/09/04/group-project-the-ultimate-tech-blog-listing/ How many good tech blogs are out there ? What would you guess ? I’m always astonished to discover a new blog that I never heard before only to realize that I must have living behind the moon to not know it. This happens quite frequently and I add new blogs daily to my ever expanding list of feeds in Netvibes.

I’m however never satisfied until I know them all which is why I decided to make this post. I add five blogs to the list that I read on a daily basis and would like to receive hundreds of comments with tech blogs that you do read on a daily basis. This way we could create the ultimate collection of worthy tech blogs – would not that be fun..

Here we go, my top five technology blogs that I read: (in no particular order)

Connected Internet – one of my favorite blogs run by my friend Everton. He concentrates on Gadgets and Monetization but writes about other techy stuff as well.
Donation Coder – the blog is awesome with great topics mostly taken right from their well frequented forum. They do create applications as well.
Cybernet News – awesome blog with lots of great articles. Writes about the same stuff that I write about.
Download Squad – another great blog that concentrates on software, web services and general tips.
Digital Alchemy – a blog that is a little bit more on the dark side if you know what I mean. I love the dark side, hehe.
]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2007/09/04/group-project-the-ultimate-tech-blog-listing/feed/ 5 http://www.ghacks.net/2007/09/04/allowed-sites-now-available-for-adsense-webmasters/ http://www.ghacks.net/2007/09/04/allowed-sites-now-available-for-adsense-webmasters/#comments Tue, 04 Sep 2007 17:45:53 +0000 Martin Brinkmann http://www.ghacks.net/2007/09/04/allowed-sites-now-available-for-adsense-webmasters/ Until now it was possible to use the public id of any Adsense webmaster and place it on bogus sites to get the account of that webmaster banned. The public id is visible when someone views the source code of a website that uses Google Adsense ads for monetization. It is a simple copy and paste process to embed another webmaster’s Adsense ads on unrelated websites.

Webmasters who investigate their account ban may stumble upon sites that display advertisement with their Adsense ID embedded. Bad neighborhood sites, or sites in breach with the Adsense TOS could have led to the ban of the account. It was highly difficulty to prove to Google that particular websites were not related to the Adsense account.

Webmasters asked Google to implement the feature for a long time and finally Google decided to add it. The Adsense Setup tab of the Adsense account has a new tab called Allowed Sites. You have the option to add all of the sites that are your own and have the Google Adsense code implemented.

Ads will still show if they are implemented on a site that is not in the list but will not generate revenue. The problem that I see here is that it is not possible to get a list of sites that you probably missed when adding them. You could accidentally block one of your own sites if you are not careful with the feature. This should not be a problem for webmasters with one or two sites that use Adsense, but webmasters with dozens or hundreds of sites could easily forget to add one to the allowed sites listing.

I’m also not sure about cached pages and proxies which could turn out to be problematic if many of your visitors use proxies to connect to your sites.

Will you be using the new feature ?

]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2007/09/04/allowed-sites-now-available-for-adsense-webmasters/feed/ 5 http://www.ghacks.net/2007/08/17/which-adsense-ads-and-locations-work-best-on-my-blog/ http://www.ghacks.net/2007/08/17/which-adsense-ads-and-locations-work-best-on-my-blog/#comments Fri, 17 Aug 2007 16:22:18 +0000 Martin Brinkmann http://www.ghacks.net/2007/08/17/which-adsense-ads-and-locations-work-best-on-my-blog/ If you ask ten webmasters about the best Adsense unit that is offered at the moment, the best color scheme for that unit and best location you would get ten different answers. There is no absolute truth, no way to setup Adsense that will earn you the most. It depends on so many factors that it is difficulty to give general tips.

There are some and they can be applied to most websites and those websites will earn good money from those tips but they are probably not the ultimate way either. Most tips will tell you the following:

• Use the large or medium rectangle and / or the wide skyscraper for best results.
• Blend the ads
• Add them as close as possible to your content

If you apply the ads this way you will get good results. A click through rate between 2-5% for instance but you never know for sure if this is indeed the best ad unit for your website.

It is also important to note that the best paying ad unit might not be one that you want to put up on your blog because it might turn visitors away from your site. Back to the topic, how would you find out which Adsense ads work best for your blog ?

The obvious answer is of course to try them all out and come to a conclusion afterwards. The not so obvious way is what I’m going to explain now. I would suggest that you try this out if your blog reaches at least 1000 page impressions per day, the more the better of course. It does not make much sense to try out different ad units and positions if your blog gets 50 visitors per day because this does not lead to data that you can rely on.

WordPress Plugin:

A great way to test out different ad units, location and appearance is to use the excellent WordPress plugin Adsense Paster if you happen to use WordPress.

Adsense paster rotates ad units that you create in text files randomly which means that you can test several units without having to alter the code by hand.

General Method:

The following method has been found at the digital alchemy blog and can be used to test several ad units.






Factors:

Some factors that you should consider are:

• Ad unit size. Test out different sizes such as large and medium rectangle, half banner, full banner, the squares and so on
• Ad appearance. Blend units, make them stick out, use borders, don't use borders, alter link color, ad text, url color..
• Ad location. Let it float on the top left spot of your articles, on the top right spot, alone on top and the article below, at the bottom..
• Ad a second ad unit and see if it impacts revenue

Channels:

You have to setup channels to be able to track earnings. Every ad unit should get an own channel. Make sure you track the performance for several days - workdays are best for most sites - and remove ads that do not perform that well from your site.

Section Targeting:

Make sure you use Section Targeting which emphasizes certain parts of your website. You need to edit the source code of your blog and add the following code from google to it. You can add that code in single.php, index.php and page.php before and after the function that displays your blog post. It would look like the following in single.php


...
...
...
..
..
..




You can also deemphasize parts of your blog by using google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) instead of google_ad_section_start which is useful to deemphasize the sidebar for instance.

]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2007/08/17/which-adsense-ads-and-locations-work-best-on-my-blog/feed/ 8 http://www.ghacks.net/2007/08/11/make-money-online-with-cashcrate/ http://www.ghacks.net/2007/08/11/make-money-online-with-cashcrate/#comments Sat, 11 Aug 2007 10:51:23 +0000 Martin Brinkmann http://www.ghacks.net/2007/08/11/make-money-online-with-cashcrate/ CashCrate offers a free and easy way to earn money regularly by simply filling out some surveys every day. I’m really cautious when I hear of websites that offers something in the line of “Take Surveys – Earn Money” because most of them seem to really rip of the users with ultra-high payout restrictions or just a few surveys which means that it takes ages to make some decent money.

CashCrate seems to be different, at least for users from the United States, Canada and the UK. Everyone may join but the availability of surveys and offers depends on your location. If you live in Germany or India for instance you see two surveys and two offers to join a service to receive some money from it.

If you join as a American you get to literally chose from hundreds of surveys and two guaranteed daily surveys that bring in $1.60 per day if you complete both each day.

This means that you can earn $584 per year from just taking the daily surveys which is about $49 extra cash per month in your pockets. Minimum payout is $10 which means that you do get paid monthly if you take just the daily surveys.

You do have two options to earn more money. The first is to take surveys that are offered by other companies which bring in between $0.40 to $1.50 in average with dozens of surveys available currently. I would estimate that you could at least make $50 by taking those surveys as well in the month.

This would raise the monthly income to nearly $100 for just taking a few surveys. Now imagine that your girlfriend, friends or relatives sign up for the service as well.

There is a second way to earn money and that is by signing up to various services. Some require just a signup and some personal data such as your email or mobile phone number to reward you with money while others offer free trial versions or purchases.

Those bring in some serious cash. Want some examples ?

• If you signup at eBay for free and make a bid you receive $8
• A free trial at Vonage brings in $45
• A free trial membership at Netflix brings in $13.50

I can’t calculate all the possible earnings but I would think that you could earn at least $100 from CashCrate every month and even more if you take your time and evaluate all options.

Last but not least some offers award points instead of cash. This means that you do get a certain amount of points after completing a survey or other offer and can use those points to buy items in the prize shop. 300 points can be traded into a $15 iTunes gift card for instance and 6000 points into a Xbox 360.

Some surveys and free trials bring in around 300 points which is another great opportunity to gain something for free.

CashCrate is free to join, there are no hidden fees, a minimum payout of $10 and a monthly payout. What are you waiting for ?

CashCrate is also interesting for webmasters because it offers a two-tiered referral structure. You earn 20% / 10% by referring users to the site and an additional $3 whenever someone makes his first $10.

Take a look at several checks that a user received while using CashCrate, the last check shows more than $480 !

CashCrate Tips

• Visit the CashCrate Forum for a wealth of information and new monthly competitions
• Create a new email address at a webmailer and use it exclusively for offers. This way your main email remains unknown.
• Get a new free phone number from a company like Private Phone and use this one exclusively on CashCrate.
• Get a Visa Gift or Prepaid Card and use it in those cases where you have to enter credit card information.
• The best offers are the free ones that you do for free (most of the time surveys), you can sort all offers to see those at the beginning
• Make sure you cancel the trial offers during the trial period or you will get charged afterwards.
• Cookies: Cookies, being the number one cause of offers not confirming, simply must be cleared in between each offer. Why? Because companies track you through cookies, and for more than one offer from the same company, you need to clear them so you can be tracked again correctly, and so your offer will confirm.
• Email Recycling: Again, companies with more than one offer on the list track you with your email address as well, and if they already have that email in their database, then your offer will not confirm. Simply create 10 or more email addresses from any email provider, (The ones listed above are recommended) and change them up among offers. The more email addresses you have, the less of a chance you’ll submit the same email to the same company twice.

Filling out Offers at CashCrate

• Offers with the following descriptions have easier requirements than you think!
• “Participate in the Survey”, Without Questionare (Usually 60 cent or less payout): These offers only require you to provide your information, (usually on the first or second page of the “Survey”) once it seems like the offer has taken you into an infinite loop of “Yes”, “No”, or “Skip” offer pages, then you can exit that window, and submit the offer, and it should confirm. Even though you only have to submit your information, I always do the first 5 pages of these types of offers to be on the safe side.
• “Participate in the Survey”, With Questionnare (Usually 65 cent or higher payout): These offers will ask you to fill out your information, and then require you to do a 3 to 5 minute Questionnare. You actually do have to complete this, but you only have to go until it says “Done!” or “Congratulations, you’ve been entered!”, even though there may still be questions below the “Done!” or Congratulations!..”.
• “Complete at least the first two pages”: Obviously, you only have to fill out the first two pages. Most offers will tell you things like “your almost done!” or “last page”, you do NOT have to keep going after you complete the first two pages.
• “Fill Out the Form”: These offers are usually from $0.75 to $2.00, and you actually have to fill out the pages, and like the Questionare offers, you only have to go until it says “Done!” or “Congratulations, you’ve been entered!” even though there may still be questions below.
• IMPORTANT NOTE: On all of the free offers above, in the forms, questionares, and providing information, you only have to respond to the sections that have an ASTERISK ” * ” next to them, all other questions/sections are optional and do not need to be filled out.

The last tips were found at the CashCrate forum

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