Oh, those silly, silly people at Google! Updating their policies on a Wednesday rather than a Thursday! What is this world coming to?

Hey, they started it.

The policy changes are pretty simple, although it sounds like bad news for poor quality MFA sites. Google now requires AdSense pages to conform to the same quality guidelines as AdWords landing pages do. They pretty much want substantial and relevant content, things that will improve the user experience.

But they’ve also now decided that you can place up to 3 link units on a page. Honestly, I’ve never been sure why they limited those to 1 before. The link units are great when you need something smaller than any of the ad blocks.

Technorati Tags: google adsense policy changes

Mastering pay per click searches is tough, but well worth the money when you can manage it. It’s one of the most certain ways to get traffic to your site – all you need is a great offer and relevant visitors. Pay per click is one of the few things that gives you a good shot at that online.

You can find it quite profitable to hire a company such as Apogee to manage your pay per click efforts for you. This takes away much of the learning curve – professionals already know how to tweak campaigns until they work, and they have a generally better feel for what should work.

Now the one negative is of course that it costs money to have someone do this for you. It’s not a choice you can make lightly, and you have to account for it in your marketing budget. On the other hand, having professionals handle this for you can give you a much better return on your investment, paying for itself and then some.

As I see it, you have two options if you want to get serious about pay per click searches. You can learn it yourself, through trial and error and/or buying ebooks on the topic, or you can hire someone to manage it for you. There are advantages for each, so you have to decide which matters most to you: time, how fast you can maximize your returns, the value of your own time, etc. Your own preferences will determine what is right for you.

I’m seeing all kinds of posts about for the new look of AdSense. Google has freshened up the look of AdSense ads, an effect you can see best if your ads have a border. Without the border, the change is not as apparent.

The new look is much smoother, and no longer has lines between each ad. It looks much, much cleaner. Much more Web 2.0, if one must use the terminology. Read the rest of this entry »

I posted a few days ago about Google’s new pay per action program. Today I read a great post over on Shoemoney analyzing some of the potential issues Google may face. It’s very much worth the read, as are some of the comments.

CPA as a model has some issues, and Shoemoney points some of them out, such as fraud. Google has gotten pretty good at detecting click fraud – I wonder how well they’ll do on CPA fraud. Then there’s handling chargebacks, as well as other issues.

Perhaps the biggest issue may turn out to be how easy it is to get a site into Google AdSense, versus how hard it is to get a site into many CPA programs. If Google isn’t pickier about these things there could be some major issues. Read the rest of this entry »

I saw this over on Search Engine Land, and thought it was pretty interesting. I don’t plan on being an early adopter of pay per action ads as either an advertiser or a publisher, but I do like that they’re having the option now available.

You can read all about this on Google’s AdWords blog. It’s in beta at the moment, but that is of course the Google routine. You have to be in the United States to participate, and advertisers must have conversion tracking in place, so that Google knows when to pay on conversions.

Payments are flat fees, not percentage based at this time. That’s certainly easier to handle for right now.

On the publisher side of things, you also have to sign up to be a part of the beta. You get to choose the pay per action ads you show, so you may have more luck finding relevant products or services to advertise on your site.

So why am I not interested? Read the rest of this entry »

The rules of AdSense use have been changing lately. Make sure you’re up to date.

The changes mostly make a lot of sense. No more lining up pictures with the ads, for example. Yes, I know many publishers loved doing that, but the advertisers definitely weren’t so fond of the practice. Remember, AdSense is nothing without willing publishers. Losing the pictures means losing a major tactic for improving your clickthrough rate, but it’s not too bad a thing.

One to be very careful about is the use of competitive ads. You aren’t allowed to use the same colors on competitive ads and your AdSense ads if they appear on the same website. This appears to be a per site policy, not by the page, a very important difference.

A tough one to enforce but one that should really make things interesting for scraper sites is that ads are not to be published on sites with copyrighted information that you don’t have the right to publish. I like this rule, since scraper sites are a major problem, but the enforcement should get interesting. Don’t quite know how it will all work. Read the rest of this entry »

Pay per click is a great way to get quick attention to your website. There’s no waiting for the search engines to discover and rank your websites for the keywords you’re after. You decide what you’re willing to bid and spend each day, and in a short time your website is out there waiting for searchers to discover it.

However, pay per click can also get expensive quickly, especially if you aren’t tracking your ROI. It takes time to develop a campaign that pays what you spend on it in many cases.

With this in mind, I’d like to go over some of the basics you need to know about running a successful pay per click marketing campaign:

1. Research your keywords.
I like Wordtracker for this. The free version does a fair job, but when you’re serious about it, pay for at least a day’s use of the paid version. You’ll get so many more keywords it really is worth the money. Failing to research your keywords can really limit your campaign’s effectiveness and you will miss some great keywords. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the most amazing things about the internet is how many different ways you can earn money from it. Some are pretty well known, while others may be options you haven’t even thought of yet.

No matter how you earn money online you need to do your research first. You want a market you will enjoy, targeted enough that you can get good traffic, something that has enough people interested in the topic. You want some competition, as that is an indication that there are people interested in the product. Too much competition can make for a difficult start.

Affiliate Marketing
My personal favorite, although not as easy as some would like you to believe. You can find great products to represent from Clickbank, Shareasale, Linkshare, Commission Junction and similar companies.

Blogging
More or less a subset of affiliate marketing, many people earn good money by blogging. It takes a lot of work but can be quite profitable. Money is earned most often through affiliate marketing or contextual ads. Read the rest of this entry »