Category Archives: Monetization

The Secret to Making Money With AdSense

Do you know how Google AdSense picks the ads that show on your site? It’s done through an automated auction process.

AdSense’s robot scans your page for keywords, then it queries it’s database for advertisers that match the keywords. Next, the auction begins. The advertisers one-up each other until one of them wins the auction. Obviously, you’ll have better results if there are more advertisers, as you’ll end up with a higher payout as the advertisers try to outbid each other. If there’s only one advertiser interested in the keywords Google finds, then they’ll put-out their minimum bid (like one cent) and win. Thus, you’ll make pretty much nothing.

Content is the secret. Write well, and write often. Also, the topics you write about will be a major factor in your earnings. Your site’s topic directly affects the keywords Google will find in your articles. So, AdSense isn’t for every site.

Also note that your site’s audience must be the sort of people who click ads. That’s partly why I haven’t had great success with AdSense.

A/B Testing: Optimize Your Ads

The problem with AdSense is people tend to ignore them. As a webmaster, you have to continually update your ad placement to prevent this “banner blindness.” How can you tell what the best placement and ad format is? You use A/B Testing. When you…

Make Money By Selling T-Shirts

How would you like to sell T-Shirts through your website without having to do any of the hard work yourself? With CafePress you simply upload an image, and you’re selling shirts (or other products) in no time at all. I’ve experimented with CafePress a…

AdSense Placement (and Styling) for Bloggers

Google AdSense is the biggest and most-used ad network among bloggers. As you’ll know already, it’s based off a Pay-Per-Click (PPC) model where the placement of the ad units drastically affects earnings. Want to make more money off your ads? Keep reading. So how…

Dropping Your Text-Link-Ads? Read This First!

Are you killing your Text-Link-Ads after reading about how Google has been penalizing websites that sell text links? First, consider these two points: With all of these sites panicking and removing their TLAs, the value of text ads is going up. If you continue…

Google Doesn’t Like Text-Link-Ads

There has been talk for the past few months that Google seems to be penalizing sites, rank-wise, that use Text-Link-Ads to sell paid links on their site. TLA is a great service, offering reasonable rates for paid links on your website, though Google doesn’t…

Is AdBlock “Evil”?

Last month, some idiot decided that commercial websites should block the Firefox web browser because some Firefox users (read: 87% of Digg users) utilize the Adblock extension to block advertisements from being displayed. The arguements continue. Though most people (most sane people, anyway) agree…

How does John Chow make $12,000 a month?

The infamous John Chow makes over $12,000 a month off his blog. His “evil plans” (to quote him) frequently involve link-baiting contests, and had landed him a PageRank of 6. Google got tired of his plots to take over the web (or at least…

All Those Links: The Amazon Empire

Run a search on nearly anything (especially related to books) and Amazon is likely to be in the top three results. How did they do that? They’re SEO (Search Engine Optimization) experts. It all has to do with links. First of all, people naturally…

Adbrite

Adbrite.com offers a great ad service. It boils down to the following: Your site gets added to their database You put some ad-code on your site You choose how much money you want to charge every day/week/month/etc Advertisers can rent your ad space. Adbrite…