AdSense is not a get-rich-quick program.You have to build a site with lots of traffic to make it worthwhile.This free guide will give you a realistic overview of what you can expect from the program. Don't pay a cent for these "Get Rich Quick" books on AdSense. Many of them are all hype or they're trying to get you to purchase one of their products: Google.
If уоu hаvе thought аbоut starting уоur оwn website оr аlrеаdу hаvе one, аnd hаvе dоnе аnу research аt all, уоu hаvе read аbоut thе importance оf keywords. Evеrуthіng оn thе web іѕ driven bу keywords. It’s thе fuel thе Internet runs on.Onе оf thе ways tо gеt great traffic tо уоur website іѕ thrоugh thе Google Adwords program. Yоu select thе keywords уоu wаnt tо bid оn аnd set uр thе budget уоu wаnt tо uѕе tо gеt traffic based оn thоѕе keywords frоm websites thаt utilize thе Google Adsense program аnd оthеr sources.
Google offers the widest range of professional tools for marketing, business and media. At the same time has an enviable platform with the full arsenal of hardware and software for optimizing your work:(Adsense,AdWork,Blogger,Email,Marketing Place,and Much more...How to make money on the Internet? This interesting flowchart from Fast Company offers some ideas other than Google AdSense.
How to Implement Google Instant Pages on your Website? »Create Temporary Email Addresses inside Hotmail
Wednesday, June 26, 2013
Service Tax is a form of tax which is levied on any service and is to be paid by the “provider” of the service to the Central Govt. at the rates in force. The provider of the service can in turn collect the tax form the recipient of his service.
Starting July 1, 2012, India has shifted to the Negative List System which states that Service Tax would be levied on all services except the ones mentioned in the Negative List. Earlier, all services were exempt from Service Tax except those mentioned in the act.
The sale of advertising space or time slots is included under (G) Section 66D of Finance Act, 2012.
As the new service tax regime has specifically stated that Service Tax is not chargeable on the sale of space for advertisements on the Internet, website owners and bloggers are exempted from paying Service Tax in India.
In case you have already paid Service Tax on online income from Google AdSense and other direct ad Sales, you can always claim refund of Service Tax.
Moreover, service tax is levied on the Gross Amount Received rather than on the Net Income (i.e. Gross Amount – Expenses).
You can however claim Small Scale Service Provider exemption if the gross value of such services is less than Rs. 10 Lakhs. In other words, you are not required to pay any tax if the gross value of services provided by you is less than Rs. 10 Lakhs.
Karan Batra is a visiting faculty member at Institute of Chartered Accountants of India and blogs at charteredclub.com.
Starting July 1, 2012, India has shifted to the Negative List System which states that Service Tax would be levied on all services except the ones mentioned in the Negative List. Earlier, all services were exempt from Service Tax except those mentioned in the act.
Service Tax on Income from Advertisements
The educational guide on Service Tax, released by the Indian Ministry of Finance on June 20, 2012, mentions (page 35) that Service Tax is to be levied on the sale of space or time for advertisement to be broadcasted on radio or television. However, the notification also states that service tax is not to be levied on sale of space in print media, bill boards, buildings, cell phones, ATM Machines & Internet.As the new service tax regime has specifically stated that Service Tax is not chargeable on the sale of space for advertisements on the Internet, website owners and bloggers are exempted from paying Service Tax in India.
In case you have already paid Service Tax on online income from Google AdSense and other direct ad Sales, you can always claim refund of Service Tax.
Service Tax on Affiliate Income of Bloggers
The service tax is only exempted for advertising income but if you who are earning revenue though affiliate commissions (like Amazon Associates) or by providing other related services on the Internet, service Tax would be levied on all such services.Moreover, service tax is levied on the Gross Amount Received rather than on the Net Income (i.e. Gross Amount – Expenses).
You can however claim Small Scale Service Provider exemption if the gross value of such services is less than Rs. 10 Lakhs. In other words, you are not required to pay any tax if the gross value of services provided by you is less than Rs. 10 Lakhs.
Karan Batra is a visiting faculty member at Institute of Chartered Accountants of India and blogs at charteredclub.com.
Responsive web design is a simple technique that makes your website look good across all screen sizes – be it the mobile phone, tablets, desktop computer or even the large-screen TV.
Google DFP, or DoubleClick for Publishers, is a perfect solution in either of the above scenarios. DFP is a free ad server from Google that lets you sell ad space on your website more effectively and also helps maximize your advertising revenue.
Tuesday, June 25, 2013
Monetizing Your Blog Can Make YOU A Mega-Star!
You’ve taken the leap into “blogdom”…Hoooraay! Keep in mind the phrase spoken by Bette Davis’ character, Margo Channing, in All About Eve — “Fasten your seatbelts, it’s going to be a bumpy night!”
Please don’t misunderstand. My intention is not to dissuade you from your goal to monetize your blog. In fact, my desire is quite the opposite. I’m delighted to be able to share 3 tips that can make your ride a little less bumpy!
If you’re a blogger or a site owner, you probably have thought about making money online with Google Adsense. But that might not be the case if you’re an online business owner selling services or products since you want the total attention of the visitor on your products.
Assuming that you’re already aware about the basics of Google Adsense, let’s discuss how to bring the word ‘success’ into action.
Following are some real ways, which Google prefers and encourages bloggers to make money online with Google Adsense.
Teliad: Another Great Place to Generate Blog Income
There are lots of sites that allow you to generate an income from your blog or outsource SEO services to help you save time, but not all of them actually pay you what your blog is worth or live up to their promise of providing lucrative offers.Teliad.com is one of those sites that I almost overlooked.
I signed up a couple of weeks ago and totally forgot I had even set up my account when I got my first offer. I had to go and dig out my log in information and figure out where the offer was coming from – I know it was a serious “duh” moment on my part. I almost missed out because the email was buried in my inbox over the holiday – I guess I’m just not used to getting worthy offers that quickly.
Make Money Online With Freelance
One of the advantages with certain types of freelancing is the ability to be able to do so without being tied to any particular location.
By taking up one of these vocations one can choose to work from locations where the living costs are cheaper and the climates warmer.
Here is a list of several lines of work that one could explore if they are attracted to this idea.
Are you a blogger who has some decent traffic visiting your site regularly? Then you absolutely need to consider how to monetize that traffic! Your following not only respects what you have to say, but will likely also be interested in what you have to offer from a product or service standpoint.
Making money online from your blog should be easy if you have a reasonable following
Monday, June 17, 2013
Update: I’ve updated this post below with an update from AdSense. Please read it.
AdSense have today announced a new type of ad – Expandable Ad Units.
I’m pretty sure that I’ve seen these ads being tested on one of my sites (although bizarrely I am not able to use the ads as I’m not located in a country that they are available for – see below) and they are basically an ad that looks like a normal image ad but which expands when a reader interacts with it (by clicking it).
AdSense say that these ads are served on both a CPC (cost per click) or CPM (cost per impression) basis (advertisers choice). If they are CPC you only get paid if people click the ad and visit the advertiser (I have a bit of a problem with this – see below).
Ads will only be available to publishers meeting all of three criteria:
- If they’re located in North America or Europe, with a website in Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, or Spanish
- If they’ve added the AdSense code directly into their site’s source code
- If they’ve enabled image ads
OK – interesting. On one hand I think this is cool, while AdSense don’t say it I suspect these ads could pay more than normal ads. They’re rich media and in general advertisers wanting to use these sorts of technologies are willing to pay a premium and are generally top tier advertisers with recognizable brands and good budgets.
AdSense today announced at Adspace and on their blog that they’re developing a much requested feature for publishes – category filtering.
“Category filtering will give publishers the ability to block ads that fall into specific categories such as dating, religion, and politics. Regardless of how ads are targeted, they’ll be filtered if they’re within one of the selected categories. We’ll also show the percentage of recent revenue that ads in each category generate, so publishers can predict how filtering selections will impact their revenue.”
The feature is being launched as a beta test to a small group of publishers so don’t expect to see it too soon unless you’re in the test group.
Here’s a screenshot of what the feature currently looks like (click to enlarge):
Looks like a useful feature – particularly for those who regularly get irrelevant ads on their blog.
If you run AdSense on your blog and are looking to attract advertisers to target it specific with their ads then you’ll want to check out a new tool that AdSense have just announced on their blog –Google AdPlanner’s Publisher Center.
Ad Planner is a tool that advertisers use to find sites related to their ads and this new publisher center you can have some say over what they see when they’re looking for sites to advertise on.
First you need to claim your site (there are two methods either through Webmaster Tools or if you’re a DoubleClick Directory User) and then you can customize the description for your site, highlight the ad types that you run, share Google Analytics data (if you wish – this will replace the estimated traffic numbers that Ad Planner currently gives advertisers), choose categories for your site etc.
See more about Google’s Ad Planner Publisher Center in this video:
AdSense Font Size
One of the more commonly requested features that I see AdSense publishers making is for the ability to be able to change font size in their ads.
The AdSense blog today announces this change:
Also announced in the post is that the default size for ads will soon be automatically increased from ‘small’ to ‘medium’. This is due to testing that they’ve done which shows that larger size is performing better.
Doubled My Adsense Revenue
In this post ATUM from Home Construction Improvement and Today’s Green Constructionshares how he doubled the AdSense revenue on his blog with a few simple changes.
Several simple changes in my Adsense approach and layout have almost doubled my blog’s revenue. The results were so drastic and eye opening that I convinced a friend (www.oneprojectcloser.com) to make the same changes to his blog with even better results. The changes involve two simple ideas that can be easily incorporated into any Adsense monetized website or blog.
I’ve been blogging for over two years now and growing traffic, authority and readership slow and steady. Along with the steady increase in traffic the site has continued to increase it’s Adsense revenue at a similar pace with no sudden increases regardless of all the changes and adjustments I’ve made. That was true until I took the time to study many different published Adsense approaches. As I read all of these different approaches three distinct ideas came to the forefront.
Three Important Adsense Approaches
- Less is More – This concept is really simple yet I hadn’t really given it much thought before. First off the top ad is the highest paying ad and you want that in the best possible position.
Secondly, if you’re using all three of the allotted Adsense units on a given page then there are quite a few ads all competing for attention or a click through. However, if you only use one Adsense unit then you’re limiting the number of ads served and improving the likelihood that one of those ads will get clicked. Therefore, the theory is that an advertiser will be willing to pay a higher rate for less competition.
- Size Matters – If you read enough Adsense guides you’ll find that the 336 x 280 Large Rectangle is the most effective Adsense unit. It typically offers four ads and they are likely to be very related to the topic based on the position between the post title and body.
- Position, Position, Position – Placing your Adsense unit above the fold is imperative for success. This makes sense to me for one reason. Every day my site (and I assume most sites) gets a majority of it’s traffic from search engines. This traffic is generated from people searching for something. So when they land on my page and they decide that it’s not the content they were looking for then I want them to see the Adsense unit right where they land so that becomes an “outclick” option.
How I Doubled My Adsense Revenue
In order to understand the approach I used to double my Adsense revenue I’ll use two graphics that show the same post before the changes and after the changes. First – the before shot:
And here’s the after shot:
My Old Adsense Layout Included:
- 468 x 60 Text Only Unit located in the header area of my page.
- 468 x 60 Text Only Unit located between the post title and the body of the post.
- 468 x 60 Text Only Unit located at the end of the post before the comment section.
Revised Adsense Layout Includes:
- Remove the old 468 x 60 Text Only Unit completely and replaced with an affiliate banner. The idea here is to remove some of the units in order to address concept #1 of Less is More.
- Replace the old 468 x 60 Text Only Unit with the 336 x 280 large rectangle unit. This unit is above the fold between the post title and body which makes it a very prominent position. This change addresses both of concept #2 and #3 for Size Matters and Position.
- Remove the old 468 x 60 Text Only Unit completely. I actually replaced this with the new Chitika Jumbo unit which is also performing quite well. Again the removal helps address the Less is More concept.
Immediate Results
If you look at the graph of my Adsense revenue over the last two months you’ll see that the increased revenue was immediate. The changes were made as indicated by the Red Circle #1. As you can see my revenue went from under $150 per week to almost $300 per week. Immediate should be taken with a grain of salt, the increase happened over several days and it’s likely to take some time for Adsense to incorporate the reduced number of ads being served on your site.
Summary Of Improved Adsense Layout
While I’d be naive to think that this will double any and all Adsense revenue for any site I think the principal is worth evaluating on all sites. The concept is really simple; make one large, well positioned ad do all the work. This will make your page look cleaner and it’s likely to improve your revenue immediately. It’s also important that you follow some of the basic suggestions of blended ads that match the color and fonts of your site. So far I’ve done this on two of my sites and a friend’s site with the same result, improved Adsense revenue.
Note from Darren: I think that the key with optimizing a blog for AdSense (or other ad networks) is to experiment. The best thing that Todd did here was to try something new and to track the results. What he’s done has worked for him but it might not work for everyone – the key is to keep trying different combinations of numbers of ads, ad sizes, ad positions, ad design (color, fonts etc) and to try different ad types until you find what works best for your blog.
Keep an AdSense Account in Good Standing
Over the last week or two there’s been an increase amount of chatter on forums and blogs about invalid clicks and AdSense. Some of the talk has contained information that has been a little confusing and perhaps even ill-informed (and some ‘influenced’ by companies with their own agendas) – so I got in touch with AdSense and asked if they had any information to help their publishers protect themselves against invalid clicks.
The following is what they replied with – in their words it is ‘a concise guide to how to prevent and monitor invalid clicks, and keep an AdSense account in good standing.’ I hope that it is helpful to AdSense publishers everywhere:
The Google AdSense team has heard many concerns about how Google treats invalid click activity on publisher’s sites, and there have been questions on how to keep your AdSense account in good standing. The Google Ads Quality Traffic Team wants to help all publishers keep their accounts in good order, so here are some tips to keep in mind.
We understand that it’s not always possible to control the behavior of your users, but you can be proactive about monitoring your traffic, and you can take steps to ensure that your site provides a helpful and safe environment for users and advertisers. Here are some top tips for keeping your account in good standing (which you may have seen before):https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=23921
Expanding on the tip “Be aware of how your site is promoted.” we’d like to remind you that, should you purchase traffic to promote your site, you do so at your own risk. There are many site promotion services out there that appear to be legitimate PPC advertising companies or search engines, but actually may be sending artificial traffic to your site for their own gain. (For legal reasons, we’re not allowed to disclose the names of such services.)
To combat this, we highly recommend that you use channels to segment your traffic by source (e.g. a channel for your site’s Google AdWords traffic only). If one channel’s reports look particularly suspicious, you may want to consider unsubscribing from that traffic service. We also recommend using Analytics to slice and dice your traffic reports further to ensure that you’re receiving clicks from users who are genuinely interested in your ads.
Though we encourage you to be proactive about monitoring your site and ad traffic, we highly discourage the use of click tracking via third-party software or custom ad implementations. These methods may:
- inadvertently disclose sensitive information about you or your site to a third-party
- disrupt Google’s ad delivery or click logging in a way that violates our Terms and Conditions
In addition, click tracking may not provide you with significantly more information than you can already find in your AdSense or Analytics reports. We believe that the creative use of channels can help you gain detailed insights into your account.
If you see unusual activity on your account, feel free to submit this form to let us know:https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/request.py?contact=invalid_clicks_contact Please note that we will only respond if we find a significant issue with your account.
Invalid clicks can come from many sources, as described athttps://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=16737. While we’re unable to go into the details of our monitoring system, you should know that invalid clicks don’t always mean clicking on your own ads or using click bots. Our Ad Traffic Quality Team looks for numerous types of activity that may inflate advertiser costs, then takes the necessary actions to protect our advertisers.
That said, we still find that many publishers are clicking on their own ads, possibly because they feel that Google is disregarding those clicks. Keep in mind that even though we filter the revenue from an invalid click, we don’t ignore it completely. If we detect significant invalid activity on your AdSense ads, we may take action on your account to protect our advertisers from inflated costs. Here are some examples of situations in which clicking your own ads is prohibited:
- Clicking out of interest in the ad content
- Clicking to see an ad’s destination URL, such as for filtering purposes (we recommend trying the AdSense Preview Tool, available at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=10005)
- Clicking to ensure that Google is properly registering clicks on your ads (we log all ad clicks, but it can sometimes take up to 24 hours before your reports are finalized)
- Clicking to test your website
For general invalid click questions, you can find more information athttps://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?topic=8426
For questions about AdSense accounts disabled for invalid clicks, you can find more information athttps://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=57153.
AdSense Costing you Money?
My journey into affiliate marketing.
Before I start, I’d like to make two disclaimers:
- I don’t hate google or AdSense—this article isn’t a rant against either.
- I recognize that every blog is different—what I’m about to say may not apply to your blog. Regardless, I think you should ask yourself the question I’m presenting here.
Disclaimers finished; let’s get to the point:
The Parable of the Lemonade Stand
Imagine a lemonade stand. The entrepreneurs get the ingredients, start up their business, and have dozens of customers per day. It earns twenty dollars a day. Not bad for a humble lemonade stand, right?
Now, let me throw in a twist: imagine the before-mentioned entrepreneurs are in their 30’s. They own the lot on which the lemonade stand is located. The lot is located along a major highway in a rapidly growing suburban area. All adjacent lots have businesses making thousands of dollars per day. Suddenly our lemonade stand seems rather silly.
This concept is called opportunity cost—the economic consequences of choosing one thing over another. I’m learning about this the hard way — I’ve been making pennies per click when I could have been making dollars per click.
Let me explain in a little more detail. As I’ve mentioned before, strongandfit.net is the first profitable blog I’ve ever had. As my traffic increased, so did my AdSense earnings. A few dollars a day ads up, so I was finally seeing checks come in at the end of every month (I’m new to making money online, so I’m easily amused).
But I started noticing something: a few products in particular kept showing up over and over on my blog (in the AdSense widget). “Wait a minute,” I thought to myself, “these products obviously convert well if someone is willing to spend money promoting them.” I realized I had inadvertently put myself at the bottom of the economic food chain: I was getting paid a few cents per click while someone else was earning commissions on sales produced by these clicks.
I did a little research and started directly advertising these products with affiliate marketing. So far it seems to be paying off—my blog is making more money.
But there’s another benefit: I have complete control over what gets advertised on my blog. It’s turning into a win-win situation: my readers are referred to high quality products, and I earn more in commissions.
I still use AdSense, but I’m devoting more of my prime “real estate” on my blog to affiliate marketing. Maybe you should also consider doing this.
A Note from Darren
Like Kevin says, I don’t have anything against AdSense either. In fact I find that it works quite well on some of my sites. For me the idea of ‘Opportunity Cost’ is a powerful one. For every decision you make to use ANY type ad unit on your blog (whether it is AdSense, some other ad network, an Affiliate product, an ad sold directly to an advertiser, an ad for a product of your own there is a potential opportunity cost of that decision.
The key is to test different options. Kevin has had success in substituting affiliate ads in the place of AdSense, for others affiliate products might not work, but an ad for your own product might. For others it might be about swapping ads to Chitika or another ad network. For others it could monetize better by selling ads directly. For others still it could be better to not have ads at all but to sell yourself on your blog as a consultant.
AdSense Earnings In 30 Days
I have been using Google AdSense to monetize my blogs and websites for as long as I remember. In fact it was the first method I ever tried (I made a whooping $15 on my first month… back in 2005). Over the years I migrated to other methods (e.g., direct sponsors and affiliate marketing), which made AdSense become merely an inventory filler. I was still making around $1,000 monthly from it, but whenever I could I would use other methods over it.
Then some months ago I started noticing an upward trend on the CPC of my sites, and I figured that I should give AdSense another try. I started applying some tricks here and there, and the next month I made over $3,000 with it (that is combining all my sites). I was pleasantly surprised, and I decided to keep using it actively on some sites.
In this article I want to share with you the tips and tricks I used to triple my AdSense earnings in one month.
1. I added units to my Big Websites
Daily Blog Tips and Daily Writing Tips are my largest websites in terms of traffic. They are getting close to one million monthly page views (combined). Despite that I was not using AdSense on them, mainly because the direct sponsorship model was working relatively well.
Some months ago I decided to load some AdSense units on the sites, however, and the results were very positive. Around 70% of the boost I generated to my earnings came from these two sites. At the same time I managed to keep the other monetization methods working fine, and no reader ever complained about the new ads (more on that later).
Even if your blog is already making money with direct sponsors and affiliate marketing, therefore, you could still manage to increment your earnings by strategically adding some AdSense units.
2. I added units to my Small Websites
As many webmasters do, I have a bunch of small websites scattered around the web. Some are on free hosted platforms like Blogger, and others are self hosted sites that I abandoned along the way. Most of these sites still get traffic, however. Not much, but combined the numbers get decent.
I figured that adding AdSense units to all these sites could yield some money, and I was right. The main reason is that, since these are abandoned sites and don’t have loyal visitors, I can place the units very aggressively. The result was a very high CTR (Click-through rate), which compensates the small traffic levels.
Don’t underestimate the earning potential of small websites, especially if you are willing to place AdSense units aggressively.
3. I used the Large Units
If you want to make money with AdSense you’ll inevitably need to use one of these units: the 336×280 large rectangle, the 300×250 rectangle, the 120×600 large skyscraper or the 728×90 leaderboard.
Whenever I tried to use smaller units the results were disappointing. Even if I positioned them aggressively the CTR was just too low.
All four units mentioned above can produce good results, but the best performing one is by far the 336×280 large rectangle, and that is the one I used to boost my earnings.
4. I placed the Units above the Fold
My first trial was to place the 336×280 large rectangle between the post and the comments section of my blogs. The results were OK. I then decided to try placing them below the post titles for one week, and the CTR skyrocketed. In fact I still need to find a placement/unit combination that will beat placing a 336×280 unit below post titles.
I knew this rule, but I guess I needed to test and get confirmation. The rule is: if you want to make money with Google AdSense, you must place your units above the fold.
5. I Focused on Organic Traffic
My main concern with adding a large AdSense unit right below my post titles was that some of the loyal readers could get annoyed with it. At the same time I knew that loyal readers become ad blind quite fast, and that the bulk of my money would come from organic visitors (i.e., people coming via search engines to my posts).
To solve this problem I decided to display the large rectangle only on posts older than seven days (using the Why Do Work WordPress plugin). It worked like a charm, as loyal readers don’t even notice the ad units when they are browsing through my recent posts, and organic visitors almost always see the ads because they usually land on posts older than seven days.
6. I started using AdSense for Search
I was not sure how much money I would be able to make with AdSense for Search, but I was not happy with the search results provided by WordPress, so I decided to give it a shot anyway.
Currently I am making around $60 monthly with AdSense for Search. It is not much, but if you sum it over one year we are talking about $720. On top of that the search results are as relevant as you’ll get, so it is a win win situation.
7. I started using AdSense for Feeds
Another AdSense product I decided to try was the AdSense for Feeds one. I opted to display the ads below my feed items (you can also place them on top, but this would be too intrusive in my opinion). The results here were pretty good, both in terms of CTR and earnings.
You obviously need a large RSS subscriber base to make this work, but I am guessing that even with a couple thousand subscribers you could already make $100 monthly from feed ads.
8. I played around with section targeting
Section targeting is an AdSense feature that allows you to suggest specific sections of your site that should be used when matching ads. You can read more about it here.
I found that on niche and small websites section targeting can help a lot. Often times Google was displaying unrelated ads on these sites because there weren’t enough pages. After using section targeting I managed to increase the relevancy of the ads and consequently the CTRs.
9. I tested with Different Colors and Fonts
If you enabled both image and text ads on your units you should be able to customize the colors and fonts. I did some testing with both of these factors, and it helped to increase the numbers. Nothing dramatic, but it was definitely worth my time.
You just need to track your CTR for a couple of weeks. Then change the color or font and track it for another week, seeing if you can beat the original CTR. If you can, keep the new format. If you the performance decreased, try a new color or font and track the CTR for another week, until you find the optimal combination.
On my sites the best results came from making the ad units merge with the look of the site, but on some sites contrasting colors perform better, so testing is a must.
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