A 10% click through rate is rather unrealistic unless the site is really optimized with Ads and no other links exist on it. Many webmasters hate Made for Adsense sites and ban them using the competitive web filter offered by Google Adsense. Jensense is now reporting that “Google AdSense (is) disabling arbitrage publisher accounts as of June 1st”. There is no word on the exact amount of Adsense account holders who received the official email from Google.

Right now, I have only heard from those doing either “Made for AdSense” style of sites or those doing arbitrage, and it does include publishers making significant money per month ($10,000 USD and higher). So they are not giving a pass to those who are earning above a certain threshold. And it seems that no one who is outside of the arbitrage/MFA area of AdSense earnings has been affected thus far.

And good news is that Google will be paying out earnings to those publishers, so they do not need to worry that they will lose any income earned thus far.

I think that it will be very interesting to see how normal websites are affected by this “exodus” of Made for Adsense websites. It normally should not affect them to much taking into consideration that the amount paid per click is as low as it can get.

I furthermore agree with Jennifer that it could drive more Adwords Advertisers back to the so called Content Network. Most Adwords Advertisers prefer to advertise only on the search result pages instead of websites that run Adsense. It could mean higher payouts for website owners that run Adsense.

Was it the right move that was long due ? What is your stance on the matter ?

Yaro, the owner of Entrepreneur’s Journey, posted his top seven blog monetization methods. Let me first list the monetization methods and comment on them afterwards:

Recursive Affiliate Income
Direct Ad Sales
Text-Link-Ads.com Brokering Service
One Time Affiliate Income
Paid Reviews
Google AdSense
Miscellaneous Programs

When I first read the article I was astonished to see Adsense making it barely into the list while affiliate sales made the number one spot. If you ask a blogger about the kind of advertisement that he is using on his blog the number one answer will surely be Google Adsense which will most likely be also the number one earner of most blogs.

Text Link Ads and Paid Reviews only work if you have either a high enough Pagerank / Alexa Rank / Traffic level or are some kind of personality. While some bloggers like John Chow have great success with Paid Reviews most blogs will barely write any reviews in a year.

Affiliate sales are a great way of earning more money if the topic of the blog is suitable for this kind of sales. A blog about general topics will have a hard time making any affiliate sales while one about digital camera reviews will surely create some.

Direct Ad sales are a very good method of earning revenue without someone else profiting from it as well. You get paid all of the money from the sale. You need to take the initiative here nevertheless and either write mails to companies who would fit nicely or create a Advertise page on your blog to show everyone that they can advertise on your website.

I personally think that Adsense is not implemented correctly on many popular websites (Yaro’s for one, John Chow is also making not enough money with Adsense considering his traffic levels) and therefor underrated in their lists.

Another example (of Adsense being underrated) would be Chad Randall’s article The Seven Levels of Revenue of your Blog which lists Adsense on level 1 (the lowest level) while CPM Banners make level 6 and fixed sponsors level 7.

Both articles are worth the time to read through them. You still have to take a look at the current status of your blog, the most important factors are: Traffic level, Pagerank, Authority, Alexa ranking and the topics that you write about. My suggestion would be to try hard at any of the methods offered and see which work in your case and which do not.

I tried affiliate systems for two months on my blog with no success and decided for myself that they simply do not work there.

It basically can be summed up by this: You do need to know what you are doing before you do it. This does not hold true for all aspects of course. You should still make certain decisions before you start pumping out articles like a professional blogger all day. What do you normally do when you have a question ? Right, you visit Google and enter the question hoping that a valid answer comes up.

I know of someone who made this mistake. He spotted a free ebook about Google Adsense only to find out that a tip given in the book (placing images next to ads increases click through rate) would result in a ban if Google found out about it.

This leads to the conclusion that a far better way to receive an answer is to seek people that work in the same area and use a way to get the newest valid information. The best way that I can think of are forums. Some might disagree here and prefer chat rooms instead but I personally dislike chat rooms because they could be rather “brutal” for new users.

You have all the time in the world to write the request that you have in the forum. It is of course a good idea to read and search first before you ask a question that has been answered a hundred times before.

The following list contains all the forums that were a great help for me when I started blogging. I learned so much from simply reading the forums that I’m eternally thankful for their existence.

• Digitalpoints - Great Adsense forum with help about guidelines, placement, reporting and payments. Good for affiliate marketing as well plus the biggest marketplace (trade services, buy websites, domains, freebies) that I know off. My number one choice for questions of all sort.
• Namepros - concentrates on everything related to domain names. Has a good marketplace as well
• DNForum - the name suggests it already. The Domain Name Forum is probably the best forum for questions related to domain names. Great marketplace for domain names.
• Sitepoint - I normally only take a look at the marketplace which has the best interface of all forums. If you want to sell a website for an expensive price you should try it here.
• Webmaster World - A huge forum that covers all topics.
• The Warrior Forum - Affiliate marketing at its best. If you want to sell products using affiliates you should take a look at this forum.
• Wicked Fire - Another affiliate marketing forum
• Earner Forum - a forum with less visitors than the other ones listed above. Has some great articles nevertheless.

This are the forums that I visit. I do visit digitalpoints everyday and the others several times a week. It is absolutely essential to read, read and read. Even if you think you are the number 1 problogger you need to read. Probably even more than someone who is just starting his blog.

Did I miss a important forum ? Let me know.

A far better way to monitor the uptime of your website is the free service Montastic. You can add up to 100 addresses that will be checked every ten minutes from two different locations. Whenever a website goes down you receive an email and a new RSS feed entry is generated as well. Once the website is up again you receive another notification.

This does not help of course if you are sleeping but it helps a lot during work times. I don’t know anyone who checks his own website every ten minutes just to make sure it is still online. Once you receive the email you can analyze the problem and reduce the downtime to a minimum.

There is another reason why every webmaster should constantly monitor his websites. You do get a very good impression about the quality of your hoster. If you witness a lot of downtimes for instance you should consider to change hosters to use a more reliable one.

SEO Plugins For Your Wordpress Blog [pureblogging.com]

Deep Secrets of Successful Blogging” -FREE eBook! [chitika.com]
Direct-link to the pdf: blogbash.pdf [chitika.com]

A blogger like Steve Pavlina rakes in about $1000 per day - that’s right - per day. Impressive.

If you have the time, it’s pretty interesting to go through all the source links as most of them contains some good information. John Chow’s post for instance - he makes around $12 000 each month and most of that money isn’t from Google Adsense as most of you probably think. Only 9% of his blog income comes from Google and the bulk, close to 40%, comes from ReviewMe

Paula’s List of Blogger Salaries…Are you on the list?
via [Connected Internet]