How To NOT Make Money Online

Inline Contextual Text Popup Ads with Amazon and Blogger

2010-10-08T13:01:00.002-04:00

Google has been making a lot of improvements to their free blogging platform, Blogger.com. One of these recent changes has been the integration of Blogger with the Amazon Affiliate program. Now you can easily link your blog with your Amazon Associates tracking id. One of the benefits is you can quickly and easily add affiliate links to products on Amazon.com by using the Amazon Product Finder

Getting Better Results with Amazon Associate Program

2009-06-23T19:43:00.002-04:00

The Amazon Associate program is one of the oldest and most popular affiliate program out there. It was the first affiliate program I joined. I didn't have a whole lot of success with it at first and forgot about it for a while. Then I decided to try and learn more about it and find ways to improve my results. It's also been a while since I posted on this site so I thought I'd come back and

A Hard Way To Make Easy Money

2009-04-14T10:06:00.011-04:00

A lot of poker players use this line, "a hard way to make an easy living" and I think it also applies here. This is literally going to be very hard if you want to get started. This isn't a program where you sit and click your way to make money. Having the best technical skills or being able to program the best interactive Web 2.0 website may help but it's meaningless unless you put in a lot of

Moving beyond Shared Hosting

2009-03-14T00:16:00.004-04:00

You worked hard building your website, and it has payed off! The amount of activity on your site has far exceeded your expectations, and as a result, you need to look for more advanced hosting options. These days, you have a lot of options including Virtual Private Servers (VPS), Dedicated Servers and Server Colocation. If you're confused about which option to choose, this post should

How To NOT Start A Start-up

2009-03-03T19:34:00.010-05:00

I saw this video the other day while searching for some information and I was absolutely in shock! While I have to say it's pretty cool to have that in your garage, and I myself have some older servers that I use to mess around with, this is the wrong way to start your start-up's data center. I can't think of a single reason why anyone would do that. Some of the servers look like P3's and P4's.

Update on MSN/Live and Yahoo Traffic

2009-01-30T12:53:00.007-05:00

It's been almost a month since I started working on getting more traffic from Yahoo and MSN/Live.com search engines on one of my sites, but my efforts seem to be paying off. All the changes were on site, mainly changes to my robots.txt, sitemap.xml and pinging updates when the site ads new content. Compare to the previous period, traffic improved across all major search engines. Google was

Tell Googlebot to Crawl Faster

2009-01-23T10:04:00.006-05:00

Google's Webmaster Tools has changed the interface that allows a webmaster to control how fast or how slow Googlebot crawls a site. I just noticed the change today, in the past, there were 3 radio buttons for normal, faster and slower. Many webmasters could only set it to normal and slower because faster was disabled unless Google thought your site really needed to be updated faster and could

AdSense Revenues Increase But Publishers Keep Less

2009-01-22T17:42:00.009-05:00

Today, January 22, 2009, Google filed their 2008 Annual report which includes information for the 4th quarter of 2008. In it is information that AdSense publishers will find interesting. Google reported that they received 18% more clicks in 4Q08 than they did in the fourth quarter of 2007 and 10% more than the third quarter of 2008. That's total clicks across Google's own sites and sites within

Small Business Blogging

2009-01-21T07:43:00.003-05:00

Blogs have been around for quite some time now and are used in many different ways by different types of people. They're not just for teenage girls to write about what boys they like at school. Many companies have blogs these days, including Fortune 500 companies. Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, was the first Fortune 500 blogger. Even the new White House website has blogs.

Large Ad vs Multiple Smaller Ads

2009-01-19T06:48:00.005-05:00

Yesterday I discussed how it's not a good idea to rotate banners if you don't have a lot of traffic. Instead, you can try putting multiple ads in the space where a full ad would go. This will help you determine which advertisers work best with your site. You don't want to go nuts including dozens of ads on your page, but you want to give the handful of ads you'd like to test an opportunity to

Web 2. Oh No! The End of the Attention Economy?

2009-01-19T06:06:00.005-05:00

Last Tuesday, I was wondering if Google might be dropping AdSense because of the weaker performance in recent years. My opinion was that it would be likely, but it seems that Google took other measures to cut costs. What could this mean to those that are fighting it out to make a fortune in the Web 2.0 world that exists because of the Attention Economy? This past weekend, the blogosphere was

Google Updates AdSense Appeal Form For Disabled Accounts

2009-01-18T18:11:00.004-05:00

I just noticed that Google has updated their AdSense Appeal Form. No, my account wasn't disabled. The AdSense appeal form is for users that had their AdSense account disabled mainly for invalid clicks. The old appeal form, used the words Invalid Clicks while this new appeal form is titled Invalid Activity. Lately, it seems like many people have been complaining about losing their AdSense

Don't Worry About Optimizing Ad Placement

2009-01-18T09:50:00.005-05:00

First let me say that testing your ad placements, ad formats and appearance is very important. Whether you're using AdSense or some other CPC program, using CPM or affiliate network, the benefits you get from optimizing and testing can be great. So why would I tell you not to worry about it? Because there might be better things you can do to increase your ad revenue. This is primarily geared

Biggest Mistake People Make With Affiliate Banners

2009-01-17T06:31:00.011-05:00

Using affiliate banners on your site is a great way to make money. One of the big problems is choosing the best affiliate banners to use. Related to that, is the biggest mistake affiliate marketers make. Rotating too many banners. This all boils down to average human response to web advertising. Your site may do better or worse because there are things you can do to make your site perform

Why Does Google Disable AdSense Accounts When they Reach $100?

2009-01-15T07:20:00.004-05:00

You decide to build a site or start blogging and you throw some AdSense ads to try and cover some of your costs and time. You're not trying to make it a million dollar business, but you're happy to maybe get a six pack once in a while for your efforts. When you started, you weren't sure if you'd make any money with AdSense, but you see that you're doing better than you expected. Google

Adding Your Blog to Webmaster Tools got Easier

2009-01-15T00:13:00.002-05:00

Google's Webmaster Tools, is a great way to track how Google crawls and indexes your blog, what search terms are being used for it and other important information In the past, you needed to enter a line of HTML into your Blogger.com blog to verify you owned the blog before you could start enjoying the benefits of Google Webmaster Tools. While this may sound easy, many people that use

AdSense vs Affiliate Banners

2009-01-14T06:28:00.008-05:00

Google's AdSense is a very popular way people who make money online earn revenues. It is not the only option though. In many cases AdSense does not have the most profit potential, but it is the most profitable for many content sites. The reason for this is that AdSense is very easy to use and the targeting behind it is very sophisticated. With affiliate marketing you're going to need to do a

Why Horizontal Scrolling is Bad

2009-01-14T02:30:00.012-05:00

I know it's been said a million times but some people still don't seem to get it. Horizontal Scroll bars are bad! They're bad for your site and they're bad for your users. The worst are sites and designs that are just a few pixels too wide, as shown in the screenshot on the right. For some reason, this is very common on Blogger templates because of how some browsers (Internet Explorer) handle

White Hat Vs Black Hat AdSense Tips

2009-01-13T11:52:00.006-05:00

I'm always looking for new tips and techniques to help increase AdSense revenues and this past weekend I had an opportunity to read a number of eBooks on the subject. I didn't purchase them myself, someone asked for my opinion on them and I was curious so I gave them a read. Three stood out as names I recognized. Two had Black Hat AdSense tips and one had White Hat AdSense tips. All three

Google Dropping AdSense?

2009-01-13T06:39:00.007-05:00

A few days ago in a post about whether Google was being fair to AdSense publishers, I mentioned how Google's share of AdSense revenue has actually been declining in the past year. In the beginning of 2007, Google gave an average of around 84% of revenue earned through AdSense back to publishers, but in the last 4 reported quarters, it's been 89%. AdSense revenue also seems to have stalled,

How To Get More Traffic From Yahoo and MSN/Live.com

2009-01-12T00:49:00.014-05:00

If you're like me, then you likely look at the web stats and see how much traffic you're getting from Google and wish you could even get half as much from the other big search engines, Yahoo! and MSN/Live. The bad news is you aren't likely to get a significant amount of traffic from the other search engines. It's a pretty simple reason why. The other search engines just don't get that much

Why are Ads on the Right of Many Blogs?

2009-01-10T20:35:00.011-05:00

In the past few years, you've likely noticed that a lot of blogs and websites have there content on the left and their ads on their right. Some even go so far to use that sort of two column layout and push their content below the fold and only display ads above the fold. I never understood why this became popular. Before this, many websites used to have navigation on the left side of their

Is Google Fair to AdSense Publishers?

2009-01-10T06:33:00.001-05:00

There has been much discussion lately on blogs, forums and even the AdSense Support Forum from publishers reporting that they've seen some pretty big drops in AdSense revenues. By now, everyone should know about the global economic crisis and there's no denying that the US is in a recession. Advertising gets hit hard during a recession and many publishers are taking notice. I decided to take a

Re: How to Launch a Blog and Have Fresh Content for Weeks

2009-01-09T15:03:00.005-05:00

Darren Rowse posted an entry How to Launch a Blog and Have Fresh Content for Weeks where he gave advice on starting a blog and asked for reader comments. I decided to respond here because my comments always seem to go in moderation, likely due to my choice of domain names, and because I've noticed that lately readers of that blog don't tend to read and reply to other comments and it's rare now

Strong Vs B and Em Vs I

2009-01-08T21:08:00.001-05:00

Some of you may know that text that has been marked as bold or italics registers as more important than plain text on websites, according to search engines. Matt Cutts, who heads Google's Webspam team, had released a video a couple of years ago that clears up a few questions regarding these SEO tips and techniques. First, while you want to keep SEO in mind, you want to primarily design your