Showing posts with label advertising. Show all posts
Showing posts with label advertising. Show all posts

Wednesday, 19 December 2007

6 Ways to Make Money Blogging

1) Cost-Per-Click (CPC) Advertising Programs
CPC advertising programs are the best money making programs for most of the bloggers. They are suitable to all kind of blogs with family-friendly content regardless of their traffic level and age. CPC programs work well on blog because they display contextual ads that are highly relevant to blogs content and bloggers will earn anywhere between 10 cents to 50 cents for each contextual ads click by their visitors. With proper CPC ads optimization and consistent amount of traffic, a blogger can earn a steady amount of money displaying CPC ads on his/her blog.
is no doubt, the undisputed king of CPC advertising programs and Yahoo Publisher Network is the closest alternative of AdSense.

2) Cost-Per-Action (CPA) Advertising Programs
CPA programs is quite similar to CPC programs except CPA programs don't pay bloggers for each click on the CPA ads hosted by bloggers. The blogger only makes money when the visitor takes an action on the CPA advertiser website. The action can be a sign up, making a purchase, generating a lead, downloading a product and more. CPA networks pay a lot more than CPC programs, for a visitor sent by the blogger from his/her blog to a CPA advertiser website and the visitor taken an action on the advertiser site, the blogger can earn few dollar to fifty dollar depend on the niche. But CPA ads tend to work well on large traffic blogs only. AzoogleAds.com, Commission Junction and Advertising.com are some of the largest CPA networks. They are good payer currently. Good way to make extra money together with CPC.

3) Promote Affiliate Programs
Marketing affiliate programs is very common nowadays. You sign up with affiliate program of an online company, then decide whether to use the company's text link or banner ads on your blog to promote the company's products or services and earn affiliate commission when a visitor make a purchase through your affiliate link. Affiliate programs can be promoted without a website and blog too.

4) Pay Per Post Programs
Pay per post programs started last year. The programs pay bloggers to write a blog post about a sponsor's website. The paid blog post can be a review or an introduction on the advertiser's website, products or services. The blogger will be paid a least $5 for each sponsor post. Blogs that have massive traffic, high Google PR and large number of subscribers can charge a few hundred dollar for just writing one sponsor post.

The downside of pay per post is that writing too many sponsor posts that are not relevant to your blog content can seriously affect your traffic.

5) Sell Text Link Ads
Selling text links on your blog can be a great source of additional online revenue. It is not difficult to get started, just go to to sign up an account (and get $100 free), then decide which part of your pages you want to display paid text links, set your price and you are ready to take order. Text-link-ads.com will handle all the promotional works. Another company that offers the similar services as Text-link-ads.com is Reverselinks.com

6) Hosting Web Poll
Vizu Answer offers a pretty new way to monetize your blog's and website's traffic. The pays the publishers on a cost-per-thousand impression (CPM) basis for hosting targeted web poll. The money a blogger can earn from hosting poll is depending on the page views. The more page views, the higher the earning

Tuesday, 11 December 2007

Successful Internet Marketing

Interenet marketing, to most, it's just what stand behind some "make money at home" program. No, it's more than that.

If you are a business owner you will probably be looking for viable ways to increase the traffic to your website and are probably trying to do this through different internet marketing techniques.

Most new business owners may find the concept of internet marketing a little overwhelming however a little time reading and understanding internet marketing can quickly erase these fears.

Internet marketing is not based on luck, it involves a lot of hard work and effort. Although when searching the internet you will find programs that will promise to give you success instantly or in a few days,what you need to realise is that any scam or scheme that says things like that will never amount to anything. The simple fact is if you want to make money on the internet through your business you have to work hard and be patient.

Internet Marketing is a form of advertising. It is done via the internet by various ways including

Affiliate Programs, E-mail advertising, directory submission, linking, writing articles and submitting to article sites etc

Internet marketing is also commonly known as online marketing, it is a way of communicating with the market place to advertise and sell your product.

Although internet marketing has continued to grow and has had a huge impact on internet businesses a lot of people will give up after a shot time if they do not see results. Internet marketing is an important aspect of a business and one you have put the work it will continue to advertise your product for you while you continue with other aspects of your work.

It is important to plan ahead, if you decide to add you website details in the form of directory submission, this task can be long and rather boring but can benefit your site in many ways. Make sure you have a file saved with you website details so you can simply cut and paste it into the relevant places to save time.

Most directory submissions will need the following information:-

Your website URL

Your Name

A description of your website

A resource box (always remember to add a link to your site).

Articles are another excellent way of bringing traffic to you site as well as establishing links to your site. There are many sites on the internet that you can send your article to, most of which do not require a link back which is always an added bonus. This is a great way to talk about your product and once added to your website will add quality content also.

The main thing to remember about Internet marketing is that you only get out what you put in. some of it will take a long time to establish its self but any promotion of your site is of great benefit to you. If you do not have time your self to do this employ someone who will or ask a family member.

Internet marketing is an important part of any online business.

Sunday, 9 December 2007

Google AdSense Review: Strengths, Problems And Weaknesses

Google's AdSense program allows third-party sites (like mine) to run Google's famously successful text ads, which also get tailored to each of site's pages' content. Already, there have been a few examples of the money this could bring to small sites.
Source: Potential Effects of Google AdSense.

Google AdSense has recently lifted a ban prohibiting independent publishers like me to report about the use and effectiveness of their unique advertising program for independent publishers, bloggers and Web site owners.

Google AdSense is a virtual advertising agency, which automatically places ads on your Web pages and selects which ads to publish according to the specific type of content available on each.

All of this process is automatic.

"Simply put, we provide you with AdSense HTML ad code to place on the web pages on which you want to display AdWords ads. Then, we take care of the rest by leveraging award-winning and proprietary Google search and page-ranking technologies to deliver relevant AdWords ads to those content pages.

"We go beyond simple keyword matching to understand the context and content of web pages. Based on a sophisticated algorithm that includes such factors as keyword analysis, word frequency, font size, and the overall link structure of the web, we know what a page is about, and can precisely match Google ads to each page."

Source: Google AdSense FAQ

After signing up, you need only to place one short script inside your Web site page template so that it will be used on all the pages where you want your ads to appear.

After the Google ads start appearing on your pages your AdSense counter starts ticking the number of clickthroughs generated by your site visitors on those ads. Though as a Web site owner participating in AdSense, you are fully prevented from knowing which ads were clicked and how much each click brings to you, the overall result is that, without doing anything more than what many Web site owners would normally do, one can end up making a tangible amount of streaming income built upon the interaction between quality content and ethical ads.

Google uses their search engine ranking technology to decide what ads to show on your site, and on specific pages on your site. For instance on a webmaster site an article about Flash might show ads for Macromedia products and an article about web hosting might show ads from different web hosting companies. This type of targeting is very effective and results in good click-through rates in most circumstances.

This targeting isn't perfect though. One issue is that Google seems to be doing very little in the way of ad rotation. If a certain ad is highly targeted to your content it might be shown every time. This means that if you have a lot of return visitors or a high number of page views per visitor you may experience declining click-through rates.

Another issue is that Google targets ads based on your site's content, not based on your visitor's desires. The difference between the two might not be readily apparently, but it can be very significant.

Source: Google AdSense Review

Google pays Web site owners with a monthly check that is sent directly to your specified address (for now some limitations apply if you live outside of north America).

So far it sounds and looks as an ideal marriage between ethical and contextual advertising and the growing number of niche writers, reviewers and reporters adding themselves successfully to the universe of online news, educational and reference sites and more.

But let's look a bit under the surface.

Thanks to Mihai Bocsaru I finally scouted an excellent article about some of the features and characteristics of Google AdSense that any Web site owner should be aware of:

1) Pages with single theme topics are highly effective.
2) Targeting effectiveness increases over time.
3) Hosting AdSense ads has no effect on the level of spidering from the "normal" Googlebot.

Having been fiddling and playing with AdSense myself, in the effort of optimizing my Web site pages to trigger the most relevant ads I have also made a few discoveries:

4) Critical factors that determine Google ad selection are clearly related to off-page factors. These may be variables, link relevancy or other categorization mechanism that Google uses to determine the type of content displayed on any Web page.

5) Highly descriptive file names with dashes between the words work extremely well.

6) Domain names that clearly specify what you are all about about do have a tangible effect on Google AdSense selection of ads.

7) It is true that Google AdSense fills in the adstrip with public service announcements when:

a) it does not have sufficient ads to run for a they keyphrase it has identified

b) it has not yet "cached" the page on its own servers.

That means that if you take any page from the Web, and report the content on an empty page of your site, you will see public service ads appear on it, until that page is effectively "public" and becomes cached by Google.

Unless your Web page is very simple (design-wise) and your content is very focussed optimizing any Web site page for Google AdSense can appear to be quite difficult, if not altogether impossible.

But there are a lot of simple logical steps one can take to make things work for the better than the worst. And it all comes down to publishing high quality content that is focused on one or more very specific topics.

On the other hand, it is also likely that Google AdSense will gradually refine and improve its invisible keyword-matching engine, but it is also possible that we are asking Google something we could maybe doing ourselves.

Now let me express some very personal ideas:

a) What I would want from Google AdSense:

If I were to decide and design my ideal Google AdSense this is what I would do.

Make these considerations:

a) Who would be most interested in placing the very best ads on a site?

b) Why does this process have to be ONLY automatic?

c) Can Google ever be as good as the advertiser or Web site owner in establishing whether an ad best fits a page or another one?

It seems to me that as much as the talent, skill, experience and ability of advertisers and web site owners is fully leveraged, much of the extra potential of this approach remain untapped.

I know that there are tens of thousands of good reasons that you are already thinking up for why this is not so, but please, let me play my role and let's try to stretch a bit our view of how things could really be.

Picture this:

What if I had inside my Google AdSense control panel the option to access and see all of the ads available through Google AdSense searchable and sortable by category and type of products.

What if I could select which ads to run on my site and which ones to run on different types of pages. Would I be a more apt gardener than Google automatic keyword technology?

What if I could also set Google to operate in automatic mode for all those pages where I see it doing great keyword matching, while having the option to go on manual on those, maybe very important and trafficked pages where AdSense keep stumbling on itself?

Who do you think would benefit the most?

What if advertisers could themselves target and control with a finer degree of accuracy the sites and minimum requirements they would want to consider any site a viable advertising channel? Advertisers could well use criteria as category of content, Pagerank, number of inbound links, keyword relevancy, categorization and presence, inside DMOZ and much more.

b) What I don't like at all about Google AdSense

I frankly feel very uneasy to be in a business relationship where my business partner, Google acts like God and I have to maintain blind faith and full trust in whatever it does.

Fact is that I have no way to check or verify whether is Google effectively providing me with what I deserve for my marketing communication effort.

The issue is particularly thorny because Google claims the right to nullify any clickthroughs that it will identify as unethical efforts to boost the AdSense traffic. (I have already heard in person horror stories of very serious and credible independent publishers being cancelled their AdSense payment on the basis of such rules. Having talked to some of these people I have had the net impression that they had not acted unethically and that they were themselves very surprised of Google decisions.)

I, for one, have been surprised at how wide the percentage of "valid" clickthroughs may vary from one day to the next, and have been perplexed at some of the reported clickthrough data. But can I verify? Can I see if I have been penalized because someone has been clicking too much on these ads?
No. I have no way to check, verify or even test the effectiveness of my work.

Would it be so outrageous then to ask Google to play its "private" testing game on my sites for a few months, and then, having seen my reliability, relevance and content, grant me a forfeit advertising budget for the aggregated worth of my online property (reach, Pagerank, clickthrough, relevance, etc.)?



Conclusions

Overall I like Google AdSense very much because it DOES offer a tangible opportunity to support many independent Web site owners, small businesses and thousands of good writers and reporters who would have otherwise no easy to way to maintain an information-based online business.

This is certainly much better and more effective than considering the much touted micropayments solution for example.

If advertising can be made to be as non-intrusive, contextual, relevant and targeted as AdSense intends to be, the positive results can be seen not only in the wonderful opportunity to stretch the potential for effective marketing in new directions, but also in the fact that this approach opens the advertising marketplace to many small players, while, for the first time, incentivating the creative publishing work of those who are least commercially oriented.

Friday, 7 December 2007

List: Advertising services

So, you have read and throughly understand the basics of advertising? Still fell like digging in? So here is the list of advertisers I currently know and working on.

The first when talking about advertising is the owners of the ads you see all around this post ;). Guess who? GOOGLE, that's it.

Google

Google AdSense is a fast and easy way for website publishers of all sizes to display relevant Google ads on their website's content pages and earn money. Because the ads are related to what your visitors are looking for on your site — or matched to the characteristics and interests of the visitors your content attracts — you'll finally have a fast and easy way to both monetize and enhance the content pages of your website.

Google AdSense is also a way for website publishers to provide Google web search and Google site search to their visitors, and to earn money by displaying Google ads on the search results pages. Every time one of your site´s visitors click on one of the Google Ads displayed on your Webiste, Google Ad Sense generates money right into your pocket...!

If you are a publisher, Join adsense

Unfortunately, Adsense has strict value for a website to be accepted (this blog took 2 submission to get accepted, I know people who tried 15 times...). Tips to get accepted are described in this article

Adwords is Adsense's counterpart, for advertiser to choose keywords to promote their site to the public. Google gives $50 free credits to first time users. Join:


There's a lot of people use these two, so even if you are a novice, don't worry because there are always tools to help.

Adbrite
Quite a large advertiser, used by many as an alternative to Google Adsense whenever it's impossible to have Adsense (improper language/landing page only etc.). To me their server is quite slow and sometimes they spit PHP downloads instead of the code I want, but they pay quite good by check and have quite some type of ad to choose from. Say, banner like Google, full page ads or take random keywords from your site and turn them to ads.

If you fell interested, click below to find out more about them


Obeus
Nothing much to say, not really contextual, it's just the outside appearence. I've never seen their ads comes with the content unless I explicity indicates what words to use. The convenience is, they accept being paid and pay in e-gold. So they are good for countries without Paypal or people who have no credit cards. They pay not much but their approval citaeria is not that strict, they even list your site in their directory! So if you are looking for a quick advertising and instant money, join Obeus today

Definitions for PPC businesses

Quite some time ago, I have posted a definitions article for beginners, which includes definition for basic MMO activities. Overtime, as my reader gradually get mature in the business, I saw them gain more and more interest in PPC and promoting business. So here it is, definitions for PPC and promoting.

First, PPCs are
Programs pay you on the basis of the number of clicks you earn through your ads. They are only concerned about the clicks and the number of times you show the ads doesn't matter. Also, any purchases or Actions generating through those ads will not be counted to you. Instead, the one who bought you to display the ads will have the larger piece of the pie. So PPC is good for people who have to refer some customers to another people who have goods to sell. This "man-in-the-middle" is called an Advertiser and you are a Publisher

CPC : Cost per Click
A term to indicate how much money will you get for
1) Show the ad
2) Have to user click on it
Here's the formula: How much money you earn = clicks x CPC. More clicks, more money.

Advertiser
A bit expensive for Advertisers compared to Pay Per impression but its more reliable as they are paying only for clicks generated.

Publisher
CPC ads pay more per click than other advertising methods. However, publishers have to take extra care that their ads work well with their campaign. The Advertiser's Ads may harm you promoting website(s). Else, it will turn out to be a loss for them. However, When targetted properly, PPC/CPC ads are the best form of advertising which is profitable for both advertisers and publishers.

Basically, when you sign up for any PPC or promoting, you will see two options whether to become an publisher or an advertiser.

The most popular form of ad for PPC is banner

What is a web banner?
A web banner can be a single image (.gif, .jpg, etc.), a flash movie or a composite of different elements such as graphics, flash and or HTML code.

What is a banner impression?
Banner impression measures the number of times the banner is displayed, either on a web page or in a separate browser window as a pop-up or pop-under advertisement. Thus, 1000 impressions mean that the banner has been displayed 1000 times.

What is CPM?
Cost Per thousand iMpressions is an effective method of pricing web banner ads. It is the cost for displaying a banner 1000 times. Thus, if a banner ad space has a CPM of $10, it means that the cost of displaying a banner space one thousand times on that space is $10. Advertising program that uses this method almost only count traffic from the western world. This is the root for PPM

Pay per impression programs pay you on the basis of the number of ads you show rather than any other criteria required from the users side, like clicks, signups etx. Pay per impression are the safest mode of advertisement. Which is :-

1. Cheaper for the Advertiser (since the rates are low but are less reliable)
2. Quite reliable for Publisher but low paying. Publishers dont have to worry about clicks or signups.


What is CTR?
Click Through Ratio determines the effectiveness of a banner ad in terms of click-thrus. It is a ratio of the number of times the banner was clicked on by the viewer and the number of times the banner was displayed. Thus, if a banner has been displayed 1000 times and has been clicked 50 times, its CTR is 50:1000 or 1:20. Changing this CTR into a percentage value yields 5% (1/20 * 100); thus, 5% of the impressions have lead to clicks on the banner.

Coining CPM and CPC together, the term eCPM was born, it indicates how much clicks you generated per thousand impression. e stands for "effective", how many percent of your traffic is "effective" for PPC.

PPC and PPM can be considered a "bridge" between real advertising services and the basic MMO counterparts (PTP). Just to see how much life has been getting complicated ;)
Showing posts with label advertising. Show all posts
Showing posts with label advertising. Show all posts

Wednesday, 19 December 2007

6 Ways to Make Money Blogging

1) Cost-Per-Click (CPC) Advertising Programs
CPC advertising programs are the best money making programs for most of the bloggers. They are suitable to all kind of blogs with family-friendly content regardless of their traffic level and age. CPC programs work well on blog because they display contextual ads that are highly relevant to blogs content and bloggers will earn anywhere between 10 cents to 50 cents for each contextual ads click by their visitors. With proper CPC ads optimization and consistent amount of traffic, a blogger can earn a steady amount of money displaying CPC ads on his/her blog.
is no doubt, the undisputed king of CPC advertising programs and Yahoo Publisher Network is the closest alternative of AdSense.

2) Cost-Per-Action (CPA) Advertising Programs
CPA programs is quite similar to CPC programs except CPA programs don't pay bloggers for each click on the CPA ads hosted by bloggers. The blogger only makes money when the visitor takes an action on the CPA advertiser website. The action can be a sign up, making a purchase, generating a lead, downloading a product and more. CPA networks pay a lot more than CPC programs, for a visitor sent by the blogger from his/her blog to a CPA advertiser website and the visitor taken an action on the advertiser site, the blogger can earn few dollar to fifty dollar depend on the niche. But CPA ads tend to work well on large traffic blogs only. AzoogleAds.com, Commission Junction and Advertising.com are some of the largest CPA networks. They are good payer currently. Good way to make extra money together with CPC.

3) Promote Affiliate Programs
Marketing affiliate programs is very common nowadays. You sign up with affiliate program of an online company, then decide whether to use the company's text link or banner ads on your blog to promote the company's products or services and earn affiliate commission when a visitor make a purchase through your affiliate link. Affiliate programs can be promoted without a website and blog too.

4) Pay Per Post Programs
Pay per post programs started last year. The programs pay bloggers to write a blog post about a sponsor's website. The paid blog post can be a review or an introduction on the advertiser's website, products or services. The blogger will be paid a least $5 for each sponsor post. Blogs that have massive traffic, high Google PR and large number of subscribers can charge a few hundred dollar for just writing one sponsor post.

The downside of pay per post is that writing too many sponsor posts that are not relevant to your blog content can seriously affect your traffic.

5) Sell Text Link Ads
Selling text links on your blog can be a great source of additional online revenue. It is not difficult to get started, just go to to sign up an account (and get $100 free), then decide which part of your pages you want to display paid text links, set your price and you are ready to take order. Text-link-ads.com will handle all the promotional works. Another company that offers the similar services as Text-link-ads.com is Reverselinks.com

6) Hosting Web Poll
Vizu Answer offers a pretty new way to monetize your blog's and website's traffic. The pays the publishers on a cost-per-thousand impression (CPM) basis for hosting targeted web poll. The money a blogger can earn from hosting poll is depending on the page views. The more page views, the higher the earning

Tuesday, 11 December 2007

Successful Internet Marketing

Interenet marketing, to most, it's just what stand behind some "make money at home" program. No, it's more than that.

If you are a business owner you will probably be looking for viable ways to increase the traffic to your website and are probably trying to do this through different internet marketing techniques.

Most new business owners may find the concept of internet marketing a little overwhelming however a little time reading and understanding internet marketing can quickly erase these fears.

Internet marketing is not based on luck, it involves a lot of hard work and effort. Although when searching the internet you will find programs that will promise to give you success instantly or in a few days,what you need to realise is that any scam or scheme that says things like that will never amount to anything. The simple fact is if you want to make money on the internet through your business you have to work hard and be patient.

Internet Marketing is a form of advertising. It is done via the internet by various ways including

Affiliate Programs, E-mail advertising, directory submission, linking, writing articles and submitting to article sites etc

Internet marketing is also commonly known as online marketing, it is a way of communicating with the market place to advertise and sell your product.

Although internet marketing has continued to grow and has had a huge impact on internet businesses a lot of people will give up after a shot time if they do not see results. Internet marketing is an important aspect of a business and one you have put the work it will continue to advertise your product for you while you continue with other aspects of your work.

It is important to plan ahead, if you decide to add you website details in the form of directory submission, this task can be long and rather boring but can benefit your site in many ways. Make sure you have a file saved with you website details so you can simply cut and paste it into the relevant places to save time.

Most directory submissions will need the following information:-

Your website URL

Your Name

A description of your website

A resource box (always remember to add a link to your site).

Articles are another excellent way of bringing traffic to you site as well as establishing links to your site. There are many sites on the internet that you can send your article to, most of which do not require a link back which is always an added bonus. This is a great way to talk about your product and once added to your website will add quality content also.

The main thing to remember about Internet marketing is that you only get out what you put in. some of it will take a long time to establish its self but any promotion of your site is of great benefit to you. If you do not have time your self to do this employ someone who will or ask a family member.

Internet marketing is an important part of any online business.

Sunday, 9 December 2007

Google AdSense Review: Strengths, Problems And Weaknesses

Google's AdSense program allows third-party sites (like mine) to run Google's famously successful text ads, which also get tailored to each of site's pages' content. Already, there have been a few examples of the money this could bring to small sites.
Source: Potential Effects of Google AdSense.

Google AdSense has recently lifted a ban prohibiting independent publishers like me to report about the use and effectiveness of their unique advertising program for independent publishers, bloggers and Web site owners.

Google AdSense is a virtual advertising agency, which automatically places ads on your Web pages and selects which ads to publish according to the specific type of content available on each.

All of this process is automatic.

"Simply put, we provide you with AdSense HTML ad code to place on the web pages on which you want to display AdWords ads. Then, we take care of the rest by leveraging award-winning and proprietary Google search and page-ranking technologies to deliver relevant AdWords ads to those content pages.

"We go beyond simple keyword matching to understand the context and content of web pages. Based on a sophisticated algorithm that includes such factors as keyword analysis, word frequency, font size, and the overall link structure of the web, we know what a page is about, and can precisely match Google ads to each page."

Source: Google AdSense FAQ

After signing up, you need only to place one short script inside your Web site page template so that it will be used on all the pages where you want your ads to appear.

After the Google ads start appearing on your pages your AdSense counter starts ticking the number of clickthroughs generated by your site visitors on those ads. Though as a Web site owner participating in AdSense, you are fully prevented from knowing which ads were clicked and how much each click brings to you, the overall result is that, without doing anything more than what many Web site owners would normally do, one can end up making a tangible amount of streaming income built upon the interaction between quality content and ethical ads.

Google uses their search engine ranking technology to decide what ads to show on your site, and on specific pages on your site. For instance on a webmaster site an article about Flash might show ads for Macromedia products and an article about web hosting might show ads from different web hosting companies. This type of targeting is very effective and results in good click-through rates in most circumstances.

This targeting isn't perfect though. One issue is that Google seems to be doing very little in the way of ad rotation. If a certain ad is highly targeted to your content it might be shown every time. This means that if you have a lot of return visitors or a high number of page views per visitor you may experience declining click-through rates.

Another issue is that Google targets ads based on your site's content, not based on your visitor's desires. The difference between the two might not be readily apparently, but it can be very significant.

Source: Google AdSense Review

Google pays Web site owners with a monthly check that is sent directly to your specified address (for now some limitations apply if you live outside of north America).

So far it sounds and looks as an ideal marriage between ethical and contextual advertising and the growing number of niche writers, reviewers and reporters adding themselves successfully to the universe of online news, educational and reference sites and more.

But let's look a bit under the surface.

Thanks to Mihai Bocsaru I finally scouted an excellent article about some of the features and characteristics of Google AdSense that any Web site owner should be aware of:

1) Pages with single theme topics are highly effective.
2) Targeting effectiveness increases over time.
3) Hosting AdSense ads has no effect on the level of spidering from the "normal" Googlebot.

Having been fiddling and playing with AdSense myself, in the effort of optimizing my Web site pages to trigger the most relevant ads I have also made a few discoveries:

4) Critical factors that determine Google ad selection are clearly related to off-page factors. These may be variables, link relevancy or other categorization mechanism that Google uses to determine the type of content displayed on any Web page.

5) Highly descriptive file names with dashes between the words work extremely well.

6) Domain names that clearly specify what you are all about about do have a tangible effect on Google AdSense selection of ads.

7) It is true that Google AdSense fills in the adstrip with public service announcements when:

a) it does not have sufficient ads to run for a they keyphrase it has identified

b) it has not yet "cached" the page on its own servers.

That means that if you take any page from the Web, and report the content on an empty page of your site, you will see public service ads appear on it, until that page is effectively "public" and becomes cached by Google.

Unless your Web page is very simple (design-wise) and your content is very focussed optimizing any Web site page for Google AdSense can appear to be quite difficult, if not altogether impossible.

But there are a lot of simple logical steps one can take to make things work for the better than the worst. And it all comes down to publishing high quality content that is focused on one or more very specific topics.

On the other hand, it is also likely that Google AdSense will gradually refine and improve its invisible keyword-matching engine, but it is also possible that we are asking Google something we could maybe doing ourselves.

Now let me express some very personal ideas:

a) What I would want from Google AdSense:

If I were to decide and design my ideal Google AdSense this is what I would do.

Make these considerations:

a) Who would be most interested in placing the very best ads on a site?

b) Why does this process have to be ONLY automatic?

c) Can Google ever be as good as the advertiser or Web site owner in establishing whether an ad best fits a page or another one?

It seems to me that as much as the talent, skill, experience and ability of advertisers and web site owners is fully leveraged, much of the extra potential of this approach remain untapped.

I know that there are tens of thousands of good reasons that you are already thinking up for why this is not so, but please, let me play my role and let's try to stretch a bit our view of how things could really be.

Picture this:

What if I had inside my Google AdSense control panel the option to access and see all of the ads available through Google AdSense searchable and sortable by category and type of products.

What if I could select which ads to run on my site and which ones to run on different types of pages. Would I be a more apt gardener than Google automatic keyword technology?

What if I could also set Google to operate in automatic mode for all those pages where I see it doing great keyword matching, while having the option to go on manual on those, maybe very important and trafficked pages where AdSense keep stumbling on itself?

Who do you think would benefit the most?

What if advertisers could themselves target and control with a finer degree of accuracy the sites and minimum requirements they would want to consider any site a viable advertising channel? Advertisers could well use criteria as category of content, Pagerank, number of inbound links, keyword relevancy, categorization and presence, inside DMOZ and much more.

b) What I don't like at all about Google AdSense

I frankly feel very uneasy to be in a business relationship where my business partner, Google acts like God and I have to maintain blind faith and full trust in whatever it does.

Fact is that I have no way to check or verify whether is Google effectively providing me with what I deserve for my marketing communication effort.

The issue is particularly thorny because Google claims the right to nullify any clickthroughs that it will identify as unethical efforts to boost the AdSense traffic. (I have already heard in person horror stories of very serious and credible independent publishers being cancelled their AdSense payment on the basis of such rules. Having talked to some of these people I have had the net impression that they had not acted unethically and that they were themselves very surprised of Google decisions.)

I, for one, have been surprised at how wide the percentage of "valid" clickthroughs may vary from one day to the next, and have been perplexed at some of the reported clickthrough data. But can I verify? Can I see if I have been penalized because someone has been clicking too much on these ads?
No. I have no way to check, verify or even test the effectiveness of my work.

Would it be so outrageous then to ask Google to play its "private" testing game on my sites for a few months, and then, having seen my reliability, relevance and content, grant me a forfeit advertising budget for the aggregated worth of my online property (reach, Pagerank, clickthrough, relevance, etc.)?



Conclusions

Overall I like Google AdSense very much because it DOES offer a tangible opportunity to support many independent Web site owners, small businesses and thousands of good writers and reporters who would have otherwise no easy to way to maintain an information-based online business.

This is certainly much better and more effective than considering the much touted micropayments solution for example.

If advertising can be made to be as non-intrusive, contextual, relevant and targeted as AdSense intends to be, the positive results can be seen not only in the wonderful opportunity to stretch the potential for effective marketing in new directions, but also in the fact that this approach opens the advertising marketplace to many small players, while, for the first time, incentivating the creative publishing work of those who are least commercially oriented.

Friday, 7 December 2007

List: Advertising services

So, you have read and throughly understand the basics of advertising? Still fell like digging in? So here is the list of advertisers I currently know and working on.

The first when talking about advertising is the owners of the ads you see all around this post ;). Guess who? GOOGLE, that's it.

Google

Google AdSense is a fast and easy way for website publishers of all sizes to display relevant Google ads on their website's content pages and earn money. Because the ads are related to what your visitors are looking for on your site — or matched to the characteristics and interests of the visitors your content attracts — you'll finally have a fast and easy way to both monetize and enhance the content pages of your website.

Google AdSense is also a way for website publishers to provide Google web search and Google site search to their visitors, and to earn money by displaying Google ads on the search results pages. Every time one of your site´s visitors click on one of the Google Ads displayed on your Webiste, Google Ad Sense generates money right into your pocket...!

If you are a publisher, Join adsense

Unfortunately, Adsense has strict value for a website to be accepted (this blog took 2 submission to get accepted, I know people who tried 15 times...). Tips to get accepted are described in this article

Adwords is Adsense's counterpart, for advertiser to choose keywords to promote their site to the public. Google gives $50 free credits to first time users. Join:


There's a lot of people use these two, so even if you are a novice, don't worry because there are always tools to help.

Adbrite
Quite a large advertiser, used by many as an alternative to Google Adsense whenever it's impossible to have Adsense (improper language/landing page only etc.). To me their server is quite slow and sometimes they spit PHP downloads instead of the code I want, but they pay quite good by check and have quite some type of ad to choose from. Say, banner like Google, full page ads or take random keywords from your site and turn them to ads.

If you fell interested, click below to find out more about them


Obeus
Nothing much to say, not really contextual, it's just the outside appearence. I've never seen their ads comes with the content unless I explicity indicates what words to use. The convenience is, they accept being paid and pay in e-gold. So they are good for countries without Paypal or people who have no credit cards. They pay not much but their approval citaeria is not that strict, they even list your site in their directory! So if you are looking for a quick advertising and instant money, join Obeus today

Definitions for PPC businesses

Quite some time ago, I have posted a definitions article for beginners, which includes definition for basic MMO activities. Overtime, as my reader gradually get mature in the business, I saw them gain more and more interest in PPC and promoting business. So here it is, definitions for PPC and promoting.

First, PPCs are
Programs pay you on the basis of the number of clicks you earn through your ads. They are only concerned about the clicks and the number of times you show the ads doesn't matter. Also, any purchases or Actions generating through those ads will not be counted to you. Instead, the one who bought you to display the ads will have the larger piece of the pie. So PPC is good for people who have to refer some customers to another people who have goods to sell. This "man-in-the-middle" is called an Advertiser and you are a Publisher

CPC : Cost per Click
A term to indicate how much money will you get for
1) Show the ad
2) Have to user click on it
Here's the formula: How much money you earn = clicks x CPC. More clicks, more money.

Advertiser
A bit expensive for Advertisers compared to Pay Per impression but its more reliable as they are paying only for clicks generated.

Publisher
CPC ads pay more per click than other advertising methods. However, publishers have to take extra care that their ads work well with their campaign. The Advertiser's Ads may harm you promoting website(s). Else, it will turn out to be a loss for them. However, When targetted properly, PPC/CPC ads are the best form of advertising which is profitable for both advertisers and publishers.

Basically, when you sign up for any PPC or promoting, you will see two options whether to become an publisher or an advertiser.

The most popular form of ad for PPC is banner

What is a web banner?
A web banner can be a single image (.gif, .jpg, etc.), a flash movie or a composite of different elements such as graphics, flash and or HTML code.

What is a banner impression?
Banner impression measures the number of times the banner is displayed, either on a web page or in a separate browser window as a pop-up or pop-under advertisement. Thus, 1000 impressions mean that the banner has been displayed 1000 times.

What is CPM?
Cost Per thousand iMpressions is an effective method of pricing web banner ads. It is the cost for displaying a banner 1000 times. Thus, if a banner ad space has a CPM of $10, it means that the cost of displaying a banner space one thousand times on that space is $10. Advertising program that uses this method almost only count traffic from the western world. This is the root for PPM

Pay per impression programs pay you on the basis of the number of ads you show rather than any other criteria required from the users side, like clicks, signups etx. Pay per impression are the safest mode of advertisement. Which is :-

1. Cheaper for the Advertiser (since the rates are low but are less reliable)
2. Quite reliable for Publisher but low paying. Publishers dont have to worry about clicks or signups.


What is CTR?
Click Through Ratio determines the effectiveness of a banner ad in terms of click-thrus. It is a ratio of the number of times the banner was clicked on by the viewer and the number of times the banner was displayed. Thus, if a banner has been displayed 1000 times and has been clicked 50 times, its CTR is 50:1000 or 1:20. Changing this CTR into a percentage value yields 5% (1/20 * 100); thus, 5% of the impressions have lead to clicks on the banner.

Coining CPM and CPC together, the term eCPM was born, it indicates how much clicks you generated per thousand impression. e stands for "effective", how many percent of your traffic is "effective" for PPC.

PPC and PPM can be considered a "bridge" between real advertising services and the basic MMO counterparts (PTP). Just to see how much life has been getting complicated ;)

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