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Google Adsense as Supplemental Income

May 28th, 2009 No comments

There are times Google’s heralded ad affiliate program isn’t in your long term business interest.

There are times Google’s heralded ad affiliate program isn’t in your long term business interest. Oh no I said it!

AdSense isn’t the unstoppable revenue engine for every eBusiness. Before I am taken out and flogged by the eCommerce pundits — please let me explain what I mean in my defense.

I make revenues from AdSense at a very high click-through rate. I experience high click-through rates with AdSense without resorting to questionable tactics like tricking site users with photos (the AdSense trick and tip dujour).

There are times Google’s heralded ad affiliate program isn’t in your long term business interest. Oh no I said it!

AdSense isn’t the unstoppable revenue engine for every eBusiness. Before I am taken out and flogged by the eCommerce pundits — please let me explain what I mean in my defense.

I make revenues from AdSense at a very high click-through rate. I experience high click-through rates with AdSense without resorting to questionable tactics like tricking site users with photos (the AdSense trick and tip dujour).

So my perspective is from one who has made decent income from AdSense to fund aspects of his business like advertising seminars — and outsourcing to his virtual assistants. Yes, AdSense is a legitimate and significant revenue source. However evaluate AdSense with some type of balance.

By now you may have heard about people like 6 figure income with AdSense, or Jason Calacanis of Weblogs being on his way to generating 1 million dollars in AdSense revenue. Google’s Ad revenue sharing affiliate program for publishers certainly seems to be an eSales Nirvana for many webmasters.

But there are obvious and not so obvious times not to use AdSense ads on your sites. Let’s list – examine – and explain them below.

1. On Sales or Mini-sites

This is a no-brainer. If you are trying to sell a particular product that is important to your bottomline, you don’t want AdSense ads distracting your customers from either joining your email list, or hindering your site’s online sales process.

However I do see hybrid sites that are mini-sites or full scale eCommerce sites, with AdSense at the bottom of their pages. This might not be so bad since only 1% – 15% of your site visitors will either buy from you or fill out a form.

The thinking with this approach is you might as well make money from disinterested parties using up your server’s bandwidth.

2. SEO Business Sites

If your livelihood depends on search engine optimization or marketing for a living you might want to think twice about displaying AdSense Ads on your site. I can tell you this from personal experience. I once was on top of MSN for search engine marketing in my local area. I concentrated on my local area because I found people felt more comfortable hiring an eCommerce consultant locally.

One day my site fails totally out of the MSN index. After intense study I noticed that I obviously had a filter on my site from MSN.

I analyzed all the top ranking sites in MSN and noticed the only difference between me and the other top ranking sites was I had Google AdSense ads on my site. Someone at MSN felt that my AdSense ads, and perhaps to a less extent, my book on SEO, was getting a free ride in the MSN search engine database.

In fact I noticed that there were no sites with AdSense ads for at least the first 3 pages. Plus the sites with AdSense were only using 1 ad unit at the bottom of the home page (there were very few of them in the top 5 pages).

I knew it was strange to not have AdSense ads on the top Internet marketing sites. This prompted me to scan other industries where I noticed the same trend.

Many of the leading SEO gurus have sites that have been banned from the top listings by the search engines. It seems the more visible you become, the more of a target your sites are to the search engine auditors.

Some of my sites are still on the top of MSN with AdSense ads but that doesn’t mean they won’t also be targets in the future.

Let’s face the facts. MSN and Yahoo! have competing ad networks to Google’s, and this competitive situation is rife for a potential backlash against SEO sites with AdSense ads.

Many SEOs will point to exceptions to this position. However you have been warned!

Think about it, how long will MSN and Yahoo! sit back and watch SEO driven websites use their search indexes to fund Google? Did you know SEO in MSN and Yahoo(!) — is much easier to obtain.

Therefore optimized sites are creating an ad sales wealth transfer from MSN and Yahoo into the pockets of Google! It won’t be long before Yahoo! and MSN begin to devalue ranking on AdSense sites in their databases — if not outright ban them.

If you are in the search engine business stay search engine neutral, or create multiple sites for different search engines.

3. When AdSense Becomes Your Only Business Model

When you become so myopic in your thinking that you build a business solely on AdSense revenue — think again my friend. Why build a business solely on the largess of Google?

I don’t know if your realize it or not, but the sites making the real big AdSense money usually have a following that doesn’t depend on the search engines. Internet mavens like Chris Pirillo or Joel Comm have been on the Internet a while and have followings for their websites. Therefore they can consistently make six figures with AdSense.

These content powerhouses are an asset to Google and not the other way around. But do you think Google is going to sit back and watch just anybody make big bucks off of their top rankings?

If you do a search on most keywords you will notice many of the top ranking sites are news sites, .gov sites, or .org sites these days. The only exception is in industries where these sites don’t really exist like eCommerce industries (clothing, shopping, etc.).

No doubt in most industries you will notice a conspicuous scarity of AdSense sites in the top rankings. In other words don’t bet your future fortunes on AdSense.

An IPO based on projections of AdSense revenue isn’t in the future for the average eBusiness. Think of Google AdSense as supplemental income. Building a business solely on AdSense revenue isn’t just silly — it’s just plain stupid.


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Google Adsense as Supplemental Income

Categories: Adsense, Marketing Tags:

Is Twitter Useful for Vision Mapping

May 26th, 2009 No comments

Twitter has taken the internet with a storm, everywhere you look, everywhere you search everyone is sending twits and is twittering. The question is, is this worth the time and effort to get involved in? The answer to this question is, yes.

Twitter has taken the internet with a storm, everywhere you look, everywhere you search everyone is sending twits and is twittering. The question is, is this worth the time and effort to get involved in? The answer to this question is, yes.

 l. Twitter is a free social networking site where you post what they call tweets, it gives you the ability to keep in touch with hundreds maybe thousands of people on a daily and sometimes hourly basis with current events and information. Twitter is also called a micro-blogging service that allows users to post short messages of text of not more than 140 characters or about 25 words and share them with your “followers”. Tweets can be posted via the web site, text messages from a cell phone or any of the various third-party applications designed to work with Twitter.

2. These messages are posted to your profile or your blog, sent to your followers, and are searchable on Twitter search. Twitter offers many ways to post updates, from the web in the update box, from your phone, from your mobile web browser using Twitter.com. After you click the follow button on someone’s profile, you’re following them. The follow button will change to a box that says “Following” with a drop down option to remove a person if you want to. See a list of people you’re following by clicking on the following link on your profile or your home page’s sidebar.

3. All you need to use Twitter is an internet connection or a mobile phone. To get an idea of what other people are saying or doing on Twitter you can search by keyword or just check out the trending topics to what’s hot on Twitter right now. If you’ve registered your phone with Twitter, you can set up text preferences for a person as well; Twitter sends you an email when someone new follows you.

4. What does it mean to follow someone on Twitter? Following someone simply means receiving their Twitter updates. When you follow someone, every time they post a new message, it will appear in your Twitter home page. Twitter offers other ways to follow people too: you can get updates from certain people on your phone. When you create an account, you can search for people by name or user name, import friends from other networks, or invite friends via email. Once you’ve found your friends or business associates, follow them to start getting their updates. New messages are added to your home page as people post them, so you always get the updates in real time. When you log in, you can see what the latest updates are.

5. Everyone can view your Twitter profile as it is public by default, if you’re hesitant to have strangers read your updates, you can protect your profile by selecting approved followers and keep your updates out of search. There are spammers on Twitter and it is encouraged for you to block them, and every one on Twitter will thank you for that. It is good to know that Twitter Support keeps an eye on block reports to see who is getting in trouble on Twitter.

6. Miscellaneous Twitter trivia: Oprah is now on Twitter and it is said she is posting her own Twitters; Ashton Kutcher became the first Twitter user to have one million followers; Twitter users can gather, meet and socialize while raising money for charity; it has been said that if they hear the word ‘Twitter’ one more time they are going to go virtual postal and the same goes for Tweet, Tweetted, Twittering and Tweeter; Britney Spears and many of your favorite celebrities are active Twitter members; why is there a star at the end of updates?. The star is a way for you to mark an update as favorite.

7. As in any social setting there are certain common courtesies and Twittiquete one should keep in mind; and on Twitter it is no different, some people take the “What are you doing?” question a little too literal, and also fill the site with 20 updates a day. Learn the etiquette on Twitter and be a fun and interesting Twitterer and find out how much great information is out there and what your favorite followers are doing without being obnoxious.

8. Last but not least, Twitter is great for marketing and finding information that is useful for your personal empowerment and/or improvement, this can include building your business and the use of vision mapping to manifest the business you intend to improve and/or develop into what you want for it to be. Vision mapping is a great visualization tool to manifest your hearts desires and the tool to use for this is Vision Map Videos, it is said that if you watch your video once a day for 30 days you will see every area of your life and/or business being created the way you visualize it.

If you haven’t joined the Twitter micro-blogging world, now is the time to start, but do beware, it can be addictive.


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Is Twitter Useful for Vision Mapping

Categories: Internet Marketing, Twitter Tags:

Make Money Online – 5 Tips to Help You Make Money Online

May 26th, 2009 No comments

Make money online is not an easy business. We present 5 tips that can make the job of making money online much easier. Make money online is the reason why so many blogs or internet marketing websites exist.

Make money online is not an easy business. We present 5 tips that can make the job of making money online much easier.

Make money online is the reason why so many blogs or internet marketing websites exist. Some make money online easily and some struggle to cover the basic costs of maintaining a web presence.

Although many factors are important so as to make money online there are 5 tips or guiding lines that any successful business should follow to make money online. There is no guarantee on how much money can you make but these 5 tips will make your money making adventure more pleasant.

Make money online tip 1: What is the answer to your customers needs?

We do not expect to make a demographics survey or statistical analysis but knowing your visitors or readers if you run a blog is very crucial. Think like your visitors. Does your content make them really have an interest in your offers or products? Out of thousands websites they have visited what is the unique feature of your business that will gain instantly their attention?

How will you convince them that you have what they are searching for? Think of your content in terms of being a potential customer. Would you buy from your website if you were a random visitor?

Make money online tip 2: Who are your customers?

Do you present a generic website for everyone online or does your website is suitable for specific products and searches like geographical restrictions on vacations? You need targeted visitors or just visitors that will browse through your online business and depending on web traffic you will make sales?

Make money online tip 3: How will you make a sale?

Now that you have answered with success to what is your web site about and who are really your potential customers you need to define how will you make in fact a real sale. Do you have a unique offer? Do you have an exclusive product or service? Do you make a gift with any other purchase or have free shipping? What is the link bait that makes your website interesting?

Make money online tip 4: Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action.

AIDA or Attention, Interest, Desire, Action is a proven sales technique that speaks directly to the needs of any customer increasing the odds that a sale will occur. There are many free articles on the Internet about AIDA approach in sales but the main points are to create the attention of your online visitors from the start, giving them an answer to their search. After all they landed on your pages for searching something, give then in an interesting way grabbing their attention that your website is what they are looking for. You can give then all the information, advice, answers that any visitor to your website is looking for so you save them form time and effort. And since time is money ask them to trust you and buy your goods or services. So ask them for action. The AIDA approach seems very sophisticated while in reality it is very simple and effective. It is like when you want to ask for the first time someone on a date. You can spend days, weeks, months searching for the right words or action while a simple straightforward approach would save you from anxiety and time giving you immediately a positive or negative answer. Simplicity is the key to success and in sales.

Make money online tip 5: never stop searching the web for new ideas.

The Internet offers great information on almost everything and in most time it is for free. Free Internet marketing articles, ideas, web traffic tips, search engine optimisation provides valuable ideas and resources on how to make money online. Make a habit searching often on a schedule that suits you for information on how to make money online in forums, article directories, visiting blogs or special sections on major marketing websites. Information and ideas can help your productivity and the make the design of your website much more effective adding more sales to your annual balance sheet.

Make money online is definitely not easy as many people claim. Having the right resources, ideas or tips presented in this article is an essential step to make the difference in sales and finally give an answer to your top important question how to make money online.


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Make Money Online – 5 Tips to Help You Make Money Online

Deciding On your Online Advertising Mix

May 24th, 2009 No comments

As an ingredient of online business success, it crucial to decide on the advertising mix that you are going to use.

As an ingredient of online business success, it crucial to decide on the advertising mix that you are going to use. Yet the problem that is faced in online business is that the online business advertising media is not known.

Let us look at it from a different angle. In the offline business world, people who work in Marketing or advertising fields, usually have university degrees in those fields. Meaning, they have got years of training before entering the field, and then they will need to get experience and make achievements before they can move on with their careers.

This is not the case in the online business world. The majority of people who venture into online business are establishing businesses whether with their own products/services or as affiliates without having the slightest idea about how to market online. Accordingly, the advertising tools will be totally unknown. Thus it will be impossible to decide on the online advertising mix.

Therefore, for any person who wants to venture into online business needs to learn all the different tools available for online advertising. Then each tool should be studied to know how to use these tools effectively. Although there are numerous books and e-books written on the subject, they are lost in a pile of scam e-books that basically give no information whatsoever about the subject. Only the lucky ones are able to find a program that walks them one step at a time in the world of online advertising either by finding a real e-book or by affiliating with a program that actually gives such a detailed training and not only a bunch of tools and unorganized material.

After knowing all the tools available, how to use them and costs associated with each of those tools, a person would be able to decide on the suitable online advertising mix. Although the factors affecting the decision to choose the suitable online advertising mix are the same as those affecting the choice of a suitable offline advertising mix, the priority of those factors would differ between the two marketplaces.

The factors are:

1-Type of business
2-Target market/segment
3-Budget availability
4-Skills
5-Availability of resources including time

The priority of these factors when deciding on an offline advertising mix would look like this:

1-Type of business
2-Target market/segment
3-Budget availability
4-Resources and skills are at the same level.

The priority of these factors when deciding on an online advertising mix would look like this:

1-Budget availability
2-Resources, especially time
3-Skills
4-Target market/segment
5-Type of business

Many internet marketers might find the details of this article debatable but they would all agree on the steps advised which are briefly as follows:

1-Get to know all the advertising tools available for online advertising
2-Know the ins and outs of each tool
3-Try the ones that you are able to afford and test their effectiveness
4-Depending on your situation decide on the online advertising mix that you are going to use.

It is important to note here that for the offline business world consider the internet as one advertising tool to use; similarly the online business world consider offline advertising as one of the tools that can be used to advertise online businesses.

It should be very clear that deciding on the online advertising mix does not guarantee success for the mere factor that the mix itself is not engraved in stone and it could be changed depending on the changes that could occur on the above mentioned factors. Deciding on the online advertising mix is the beginning of the online business journey.


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Deciding On your Online Advertising Mix

Categories: Internet Marketing, Online Business Tags:

Do Banner Ads Count as Backlinks?

March 3rd, 2008 No comments

Banner ads are bright, flashy, and in-your-face. They demand that people sit up and take notice of your website or product. But are they really the best source of advertising?

With other ads—text ads, for example, or static image ads—there are not one, but two benefits. First, of course, people who actually click through the ads will end up at your site and may purchase your product. That is well and good, of course, and highly desirable. But it´s not all they offer.

Even if surfers don´t click through to your site, text ads and static image ads still offer a very real benefit; they count as backlinks with most search engines. And backlinks are a key factor in getting your website on a higher Search Engine Ranking Page (SERP). Even if no one ever clicks on your ads, they´re still serving a vital purpose.

Banner ads don´t offer that. They irritate more people than they entice, for starters, and while a conversion ratio of one click per thousand views might be fine for a text ad, where you had a secondary benefit, it´s pretty pathetic for a banner ad. At that conversion ratio, you would almost have to limit banner ads to places with hundreds of thousands of visitors per day, if you wanted them to have any worthwhile effect.

And search engines don´t count banner ads as backlinks. This is because most banner ads—the ones that move or change—have no text for the search engine to read. Spiders can´t crawl banner ads. And you deprive yourself of what might have been a valuable resource; the ability to make one ad count for two purposes.

Tips And Tricks For Promoting Your Website

February 21st, 2008 No comments

It is not a hard fact that website marketing is one of the important factors in promoting website. On the other hand it is no easy task as well. So how do you market your website? Well, as a website owner, I have personally learnt so much in regards to creating, maintaining and promoting a website online. Tips and techniques offered here will save you time and cash regardless of the kind of website you own.Website Hosting Plans

First you would need a good and reliable web hosting company that offers steadfast service at reasonable price. But make sure you do not just go with very cheap company out there. First thing about the note you are going to send to your existing customer. On the initial page just give the introduction of your website and make sure the page is not too busy. It is ok to use some of the attractive text and eye-catching graphics to draw viewer’s attention. If you are actually serious about the website business then purchase a domain name from Netfirms for just $5.95 and get your web hosting from the world’s best web hosting provider HostGator.com for just $0.01.

Preamble

Additional reasonable priced technique of letting people come to know about the website is to make some of home flier or brochures. It does not require being great and neither it takes time to make it. Basically, your flier needs to carry a big bold, positive heading, which creates desire for people to it lift up. Incorporate your fresh website address in attractive text; comprising a couple of short sections explaining out the main features of it and how it would serve them.

Display Ads Marketing

Listing your website address via display ads marketing is another cost-effective way for promoting. These are nothing but your local news paper and class papers that people read it on daily basis. Most, if not each papers, have a system and/or Internet marketing services directory group besides a categorization associated to main business. If you use newspaper or handset book for display advertising, visibility of your website address or e-mail address would give great response.

Business/Visiting Cards

Even though this may look like a very obvious technique to promote a web site, many webmasters yet fail to study counting their web site address and e-mail address as part of their big business contact information. However, note that having website address on your business/visiting cards are important and may have huge impact when it comes to business.

You might try these tips and techniques to get started when promoting your website to the existing clients and actual world. In fact, there are loads of other technique as well to attract attention such as creative site marketing, article submission and many other tools you can try out. However, try as many different methods as possible, go with great experiment with different copy to see what works best with you. I always enjoy getting feedback on my articles, as feedback is important for me to improvise on my writing. I hope you enjoyed this article as much as I enjoyed writing it.

5 Effective Techniques To Work With Pay-Per-Click Advertising

February 12th, 2008 No comments

The fact is not hard to accept that Pay-per-click advertising is a great supplement to the usual search engine optimization process in case you keep some of the tactics in mind. PPC can actually offer you instant traffic and will as well permit you to test fresh business models in concurrent. Agreed, that pay per click market is competitive, however it is worth spending a far-reaching period of time to learn how to come up with creative and targeted ads, how to track your existing competitors and how to do deep keyword research before actually moving towards it. Just check out the below given 5 steps:

Appropriate Search Terms – You need to concentrate on the search term that you going to make use of. If you are going with broad terms and phrases then it is sure that you will pay high dollars. Do your best for finding more expressive and precise search terms, which reflect your products and services.

Strategies – Strategy is always important for any business and so though for PPC. Do not follow each and every possible terms and keyword you search for. Target your online live ads around the business priorities more like seasonal purchases, moneymaking products and services etc.

Bid Management Software – Always go with bid management software. This software is capable to regulate your bid and other turn off keywords. You might only be interested in the clicks received during the business hours and would not encourage the clicks appearing at 1 am, as a result management software could be helpful.

Targeted Ads – When you deal with Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Marketing or Microsoft Adcenter you will find that they have limits on description characters on per line. When dealing with Google, it’s very difficult not to push the limits, as the space offered is so narrow. With Yahoo! Searching Marketing, concentrate on getting your note across with no overwhelming every character. Long ads might actually discourage people from reading though them.

Try and Test – Try and test various keywords, advertisement copy, landing pages and other calls to action. Put across your budget – no matter what size it happens to be – to the most excellent use after valuable evaluation. The Search Engine Marketing Industry is been predicted to reach $23 billion by 2010. Huge majority of SEM investment in the coming years would certainly involve pay-per-click.

I especially appreciate the SEM vendors and other companies that are capable to set a logical plant, which in turn generates outstanding conversions.  However, people are more likely to click on the natural listing that is done by SEO. So, Again be very careful when you spend your money on online business and make sure they work for you!