Blog Surfing Networks and Adsense

In general it is a no no (against the Adsense TOS) to utilize a Blog surfing network to generate traffic to your website that also happens to run adsense advertising on it.

Its not against the rules however to pay Google Adwords to sport advertising that will bring traffic to your website running Adsense advertising.

So while it may be be cheap and easy to start generating traffic to your site through one of the many Blog Surfing Exchanges, if that traffic in number is significantly higher than traffic to your site from all other sources the Adsense team will probably send you an email warning and maybe threaten to close or even close your Adsense account.

So if you receive a decent Adsense pay out on pages about your vacation to Disney world, you might consider running Adwords ads paying other sites a lower amount per click than what you earn on relative keywords like Orlando vacations.

So make sure your traffic levels are high, don't fear advertising with Google Adwords (just make sure you pay less than you earn) and consider dropping adsense advertising if you are running a traffic promotion to your sites.  When the promotion is over, then turn off the advertising on the surf exchanges (or turn it way down) and turn Adsense back on.

Those Deceiving Little Link Units from Adsense

Adsense offers up one product that really seems to have very few applications on a website other than possibly deceiving a web site viewer when Link Units are put in place.

Link units are a type of ad units that use contextual targeting to display a list of topics that are relevant to your page. Each topic, when clicked, brings the user to a page of related advertisements. You'll earn revenue for each valid user click on the ads on this resulting page. Link units come in a variety of unusual ad formats
Google Adsense

I have attempted to utilize these links from time to time acting in good faith that Google would not offer up a deceptive advertising product, but I have seen no situations where these particular products offer up a useful function.

The product at best lists several words in quasi menu form contextually related to the page they appear on.

As they are advertisements and not menus, this seems to be the first deception and results in their general lack of utility.

So if you have a site selling Nautica watches and you offer up one of these link units, someone clicking on the link might presumably find useful information but to throw up contextual words really rarely serves a purpose. 

This is likely why Adsense pushes their text and image ad units (the box looking ads) which have the option of including short phrases to explain why the contextual word should be clicked upon by a visitor.

So whenever you are considering putting link units in place, you are probably better off skipping this practice and either going instead with either other adsense ad units, nothing at all, or possibly some other advertising device.

Blogging for Gas Money!

Today I am on the road blogging my way through three states and using my blogging revenues to pay for my gas money as I go.  So far, I have spent about $56 in gas, and have earned close to $40 in the last hour blogging.

I have about 80 miles and another 90 minutes to go.  The big questions are whether or not my air card cellular connection will hold out when I need it, and whether or not I will have to unplug the kids portable DVD player from the cigarette lighter so that I can recharge my laptop.

When I arrive at my destination, I will shut down the computer for a couple days, while I pack up my old house, load it into a moving truck and move it back across state lines.  During that trip, I'm not going to blog as much while I drive, but I will be able to bank some articles using my digital recorder and Dragon Naturally Speaking.

The real question will be, how tired will I be?

We have to pack up everything, load it up and do some repairs on the house to prep it for sale including installing carpet, vessel sinks, and maybe residing the house or getting it painted.

That's not going to leave me feeling terribly energized about writing, and so that's just one more good reason to get the writing done now!

Adsense – A Revenue Option for Small Clubs and Charitable Organizations

This week I have been doing some volunteer work for the Parent Teacher Organization that represents the school my children attend. I am setting up a website for the PTA, and I have been counseling them on their options of the setup including new revenue and fundraising options that will be available with their website.

This includes running adsense advertising on their site. As the website will likely generate a focused group of parents and possibly students looking for information, it is definitely possible that Adsense revenue could help them meet some of their budget and fundraising goals.

The trick is to balance out the types of advertising that might appear. Maintaining a tight filter for competitive advertising to screen out advertisements that are not appropriate for a PTA website would be very important for example. While ads for school supplies could be great, other ads for Orovo detox or diet pills may not be at all.

EmailCashPro - Getting Paid to Read Emails

Here is a new service I learned about this week.  It seems to be designed so that users from Asia (as opposed to only Americans or English speaking countries) can engage in being paid to read emails that include advertisements in them.

• EmailCashPro - This particular program is open to Asian bloggers and writers as well as those in the US!
  • 

This type of service is not necessarily one of my preferred ways of earning money, I prefer blogging, but it can be useful to study the method a bit and learn how marketers are using email these days. 

If nothing else this can help improve your own copywriting skills also by studying the good and the bad.

This is not the first such service, there are others here if you are interested.

If you are a student or have lots of spare time, this could give you some extra money for textbooks or gas, but even then I still recommend blogging for earning a second or first income.

Search Google as if You are Located Somewhere Else

Here's a tool that could be useful from time to time.  Say you live in Canada, but you want to see what search results for the keyword 'ipods' would look like for a person that lives in the United States in Atlanta or in Australia or in Thailand for that matter.

The Google Global Firefox Extension, enables you to quickly set up locations so that you can see the Google Search Engine result listings for many different areas based on the following items:

View paid and organic search results as they appear in different cities.

View paid and organic search results as they appear in different regions.

Open all results from countries, cities and regions in multiple tabs for easy comparison.

View paid and organic search results from a specific IP address.

View paid and organic search results from any US ZIP code.

View paid and organic search results from different language results pages.

Custom advanced saved searches.

Adsense Referrals Ending through Adsense - Will they be back under Double Click?

This week most Adsense and Adwords users received an email indicating that Google would no longer run product referrals through their own systems.

The question now becomes one of 'Will Google start a new product referral program through their newly acquired DoubleClick advertising company or will they just give up on referring people into their own advertising platform?'

I've got a feeling that this may be the temporary end of this program for Google, but it might be something that pops back up with their competition from Microsoft.  In the meantime, I suspect there are going to be a lot of people trashing their pages and sites dedicated to educating new users to Adsense and Adwords like cheesy company logo shirts getting tossed out after you leave a company for a better job.

Hello,

Thank you for participating in the AdSense Referrals program.
We’re writing to let you know that we will be retiring the AdSense Referrals program during the last week of August. We appreciate your patience during this transition and here are some alternative options to consider:

    * Google Affiliate Network: As part of the integration of DoubleClick, the DoubleClick Performics Affiliate Network will now operate as the Google Affiliate Network for advertisers targeting users located in the United States. Similar to the AdSense Referrals program, the Google Affiliate Network enables publishers to apply for advertiser programs and get paid based on advertiser-defined actions instead of clicks or impressions. For further details, please visit:
www.google.com/ads/affiliatenetwork.
    * AdSense for content ads: If you have less than three AdSense for content ad units on a page, you may wish to replace the referral ad units with standard AFC ad units.

If you currently use referral ads, either to promote Google products or offerings from AdWords advertisers, AdSense Referrals code will no longer display ads beginning the last week of August.
We encourage you to take the following steps before the product is
retired:

    * Remove the referral code from your site(s): Please take a moment to remove all referral code from your sites before the last week of August, so you can continue to effectively monetize your ad space.
    * Run and save all referrals reports on your desktop: Create and save all reports related to the referrals program on your desktop, so you continue to have access to your valuable campaign information

Why is this happening?
We're constantly looking for ways to improve AdSense by developing and supporting features which drive the best monetization results for our publishers. Sometimes, this requires retiring existing features so we can focus our efforts on the ones that will be most effective in the long term.  For this reason, we will be retiring the AdSense Referrals program. If you have any additional questions, please visit our Help Center:
http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?topic=14882

Sincerely.

The Google AdSense Team