Plumb AdWords for keywords

Hopefully you've been following my ongoing series of Google AdSense Tips in your quest for better earnings with AdSense. This tip is for those who followed my advice in AdSense Tip #10: Join the AdWords program. If you're not an AdWords customer, you can't do this.

AdWords customers have access to a number of useful tools, including the following:

* Keyword Tool to build keyword lists and do keyword comparisons
* Traffic Estimator to see how well certain keywords perform

Now while these tools are designed for advertisers to use, they're also extremely useful for us publishers. Particularly in finding the right keyword combinations for attracting more visitors (and ideally more clicks) to our site.

Here's what you do, it's all very simple. First, log in to your AdWords account. Then click on the Tools link in the Campaign Management tag:

Next, click on Keyword Tool:

Now type in the main keyword/keyphrase for your site and press the Get More Keywords button:

Scroll to the bottom of the page and click the Additional keywords to consider link:

Scroll back to the top and select Cost and ad position estimates in the Show columns drop-down list:

You won't see any estimates until you enter a value in the Calculate Estimates using Max CPC field. Use the maximum value for the currency you're working with, which in my case is CA$120 (approximately US$100), and press Recalculate:

Now you'll see estimated average cost-per-click values for each of the keywords in the list. Click twice on the Estimated Avg. CPC link to sort the list in descending order (highest to lowest value):

And presto!, you have a list of potential keywords showing what it would cost you on average to get top billing for your ad:

AdSense earnings are based on what the publisher pays per click, so this handy tool gives you a good idea of which specific phrases are good ones to target. That said, be aware that the price you see listed here is only the maximum bidding price and that most advertisers will in fact pay less. That and Google's smart pricing algorithms will all conspire to reduce the amount of money you actually earn on a per-click basis. So don't treat the values you see here as the Gospel truth — but they're good for judging the relative worth of different keyword combinations. See my high-paying keywords page for more information.

Once you've looked through your list and identified promising keywords, head back up to the Show columns drop-down and select Keyword popularity to see which keywords are the most searched for and which how popular they are with advertisers. If most of your traffic comes from search engine traffic, you'll use this information to further refine the list of keywords you should target.

As you can see, AdWords is a great way to plumb for keyword information! Now I need to revise my
Invisible Fence Guide (or maybe I should be calling
it the PetSafe Invisible Fence Guide) to take
advantage of some of these keyphrases… Well, maybe after the AdSense case study is done…

Join the AdWords program

This is a continuation of my irregular Google AdSense Tips series. I'll get back to my ongoing AdSense case study tomorrow. (If you haven't seen the case study, it's a step-by-step account of what I'm doing to build a nice-oriented money-making site called the Invisible Fence Guide.)

For a long time now, I've recommended that AdSense publishers join Google's AdWords program. (If you don't know what AdWords is, see my AdWords summary.) There were two good reasons for joining:

* To access good keyword estimates
* To drive traffic to your own sites by buying ads

Now there's a third, even more compelling reason: AdWords customers get access to the Google Analytics service for free! (Actually, the program is free to all comers, but AdWords customers aren't limited to the number of page views they can track.) Google Analytics tracks how visitors use your sites by gathering all kinds of statistics. All you do is register your sites and embed some simple JavaScript code onto your pages. Google takes care of the rest.

Google Analytics is something that Google acquired during one of its (few) recent acquisitions. (Google doesn't buy many companies, and the ones it does tend to be small, Google seems just as interested in getting good people as well as intellectual property. I doubt you'll see them ever buying a big company because of that — too much chaff. But I digress.) As a company, Google loves to collect and analyze statistics, so it's no wonder that they're interested in collecting statistics about how people visit websites in their quest to provide better searching and advertising services.

Google Analytics is already causing a lot of buzz, so spend the money to join AdWords (it only requires a credit card and a small initial payment of $10 or less — it depends on where you are in the world) and reap the benefits of seeing what's happening. The great thing about this is that even bloggers whose blogs are hosted on sites they don't control — like the blogspot.com domain — can use this service. This is a great way to get some good data on what people are doing on your site.

Note: expect delays when trying to access the Google Analytics site for a while, at least until the dust settles due to the excitement this is causing in the webmaster community.

Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book. Or add it directly to your Amazon shopping cart!

Access your console from alternate domains

It's rare, but on occasion access to the AdSense management console is unavailable from the usual www.google.com/adsense address. If it's not working and you really need to check your earnings, try logging in through one of the alternate domains like www.google.ca/adsense or www.google.fr/adsense, since these entry points may be up even if the main “google.com” site is down or inaccessible. You'll get a “Domain name mismatch” error from your browser because the security certificate is for “google.com” and not “google.ca” or “google.fr”, but if you just ignore that you can still access the management console. You may have to select a different language using the language selection box at the top of the login page — for example, “google.fr” defaults to (big surprise) French text.

This tip brought to you courtesy of Eric Giguere, author of Make Easy Money with Google, an AdSense book for the non-technical.

When NOT to use CSS

Cascading style sheets (CSS) are a great way to control how Web pages look. They make it easy to separate the presentation from the structure of the content. However, some people go overboard and use CSS in ways it shouldn't. When this happens, AdSense publishers often find that the ads being displayed on their sites are mistargeted. What's happening?

As I explain in Make Easy Money with Google, HTML is a markup language. Its primary purpose is to describe the structure of a Web page. Tags let you specify which parts are headings, which are paragraphs, what the title is, and so on. HTML tags also let you format text using tags like < i> and < b> to indicate italic and bold text, for example. However, much of the formatting was done poorly and it polluted the content — there were < font> tags all over the place and all kinds of tricks were done with < table> tags to get things to position where the Web page designers wanted them.

The emergence of CSS removed the need for many HTML formatting tricks, which is great. HTML returned to describing the structure of a document. However, there are a few tags that you should not remove. For example, don't remove the header tags (< h1> and so on). Don't remove < b> or < i> tags. The tags are used by AdSense and search engines to figure out which keywords are prominent and important in your content. If you take them out, you're making it harder for them to figure out what your content is all about. Leave them in, but take out the other formatting tricks.

Carefully craft blog or forum pages

My series of AdSense tips continues with a tip closely related to AdSense Tip #1: Don't put ads on empty pages. This tip is AdSense Tip #6: Carefully craft blog or forum pages.

AdSense publishers often complain that the ads that get shown on blog and forum pages are not really that relevant to the topics being discussed. This is because the Mediapartners crawler — the crawler that fetches and analyzes pages that display AdSense ads — visits pages at unpredictable intervals. The first impression you make to that crawler, as discussed in Tip #1, is therefore extremely important. The first time the crawler visits your forum/blog there better be some relevant content on display there.

There's another problem with many blogs and forums: the keyword density is skewed by all the links and extra “fluff” found on the page. For example, many blogs have multiple feed links listed on the page. These are often images. If those images all have alt attributes that say something like “RSS feed for GoofySite.com, a blog about Goofy” then “blog”, “feed” and “Goofy” will have higher densities than you might expect, especially if (in this case) “Goofy” and “GoofySite.com” show up in other places on the page (links to the home page, links to other pages on the site, alt attributes for images, and so on). You shouldn't be surprised if all the ads you see for that blog end up being related to blogging and/or Goofy, and not necessarily the specific topics being discussed.

There's no predicting when the Mediapartners crawler shows up, so it's hard to tune things for it. You can control when the first crawl occurs, though, so spend some time tuning that first crawl by making sure the blog/forum is displaying the right kind of content. Use a keyword density checker on the page before you place ads on it to make sure things are OK, then activate AdSense for that page.

Note that you'll have better control over permalink pages and thread-specific pages, provided again that you don't have too much fluff on those pages, either.

If things are really bad, rename the page and place a redirect in the old page's place. I had to do this recently with my Vioxx page. In Make Easy Money with Google I point readers to the www.memwg.com/vioxx-withdrawal address for additional information about Vioxx. But the ads that were showing weren't well-targeted, because in my hurry to get the page up (there's another AdSense tip — take your time!) I had neglected to check the keyword density. But when I did, after the fact, it's because that “fluff” I mentioned above was overpowering the Vioxx-related keywords. So after I fixed the page I renamed it to www.memwg.com/vioxx-recall and changed the original to redirect to the new one. When I activated the ads on the new page, the crawler was able to correctly figure out what the keywords were and now the ads that are shown there are highly relevant.

The fix-and-rename technique works well, but it's not always possible to do it, in which case you just have to wait for the Mediapartner crawler to revisit your site. Perhaps Google's new sitemap feature will help in this regard, but I haven't done any experiments yet to know if that's true or not.

Manage your own AdSense account

My series of AdSense tips (the inspiration for my AdSense book Make Easy Money with Google) continues with a tip about who should control an AdSense account. This tip comes directly from a conversation I had with someone who had been ripped off. Why were they ripped off? Because they weren't in control of their AdSense account.

For some sites, an AdSense account is like a license to print money. Now, most sites aren't making thousands of dollars a month from AdSense, but it's very feasible for niche sites to make a hundred or more dollars a month — see Rick's recent entry on Feedbuzzard, for example. Whether you're making a lot or not so much, it's still extra income that should be coming your way.

I say should because the reality is that many people outsource the management of their sites third parties. Not everyone has the time or the expertise to develop their own Web pages (though it's not that's difficult to learn the basics, as I show in Make Easy Money with Google), so outsourcing the development and maintenance of a site may make sense in many cases. But don't outsource the management of your AdSense account or, worse yet, let someone else use their own account to display ads on your site. The AdSense account should be registered in your name (or the name of your business), not in anyone else's name. The money should be sent to you directly, as should the tax information. If you want to give the guys maintaining your site a cut of the revenue, fine, but do it yourself from the money that Google sends you, don't have the money sent to Google.

For similar reasons, make sure that the ownership and control of your domain name rests with you and not a third party. Your domain name (or domain names, it's common to have more than one, even if they just point to the same site) is a valuable resource, it's part of your brand. Take the time to learn how to use a domain name registrar (it's easy) and manage the names yourself. If you ever have problems with your hosting service, for example, you won't be held hostage by them (you do have local backup copies of your website, don't you?) if you control the domain name — there are plenty of web hosting companies out there eager for your business.

Tip #4: Check your keyword density

Although Google doesn't release exact details as to how they determine the ads to serve on a given page, they do tell us that it's the text content of the page that matters, not the meta tags. Before serving ads on a page, then, you might want to check its keyword density. A good, free tool for doing this is found here:

http://www.ranks.nl/tools/spider.html

This lets you fine-tune the page before exposing it to the AdSense crawler.

Tip #3: Avoid non-English characters on English pages

This one is a bug, to be honest. My surname is French, and I prefer to write it out correctly with the accent grave on the first "e". Every page on my site would then include at least two accented letters, because my name shows up twice in the footer. On some pages my name shows up two or three more times.

Normally, this wouldn't be an issue. But on some pages the presence of the accented characters is enough to cause AdSense to display non-relevant ads in French. This happens whether the browser indicates a preference for French or not. When I reported this to Google, this is the answer they gave me:

Hello Eric,

Thank you for bringing this issue to our attention.

We are currently working as quickly as we can to address this problem. As soon as we have more information for you, we will email you again.

We appreciate your patience.

Sincerely,

The Google Team

Until this is resolved, I've decided to strip out all accents except on the pages that are actually in French.

Tip #2: Don't be afraid to ask questions

If you're wondering about something, don't be afraid to ask Google. So far, they've always responded to my questions within a working day. There are two email addresses to use, depending on the type of question:
Please feel free to email us at adsense-tech@google.com if you have additional technical questions or concerns. For general program or account questions, please email adsense-support@google.com.

Their responses are always very polite, and they appreciate getting problem reports and suggestions.

Tip #1: Don't put ads on empty pages.

When I reworked my site, I built a skeleton set of pages that had no content, just titles and some meta tags. I displayed ads on those pages, however. Although all you see are public service ads at first, the very act of displaying ads on a page causes the AdSense web crawler to quickly fetch that page for analysis. A page with good content will thus begin showing relevant paying ads fairly quickly.

If you don't have any content, then, Google will have to guess as what your page is about. It may guess wrong, and so the ads that it displays may not be relevant. You'll have to wait until Google re-crawls the site for the ads to correct themselves. Here is what Google had to say when I asked them about how often the AdSense crawler updates a site:

Thank you for taking the time to update your site. New ads will start appearing on your site the next time our crawler re-indexes your site. Unfortunately at this time, we are unable to control how often our crawlers index the content on your site.

Crawling is done automatically by our bots. When new pages are added to your website or introduced to the AdSense program, our crawlers will usually get to them within 30 minutes. If you make changes to a page, however, it may take up to 2 or 3 weeks before the changes are reflected in our index. Until we are able to crawl your web pages, you may notice public service ads, for which you will not receive any earnings.

It's better to flesh out the page before you start displaying ads on it.

If you have found this list, well done. You have completed the first step in your journey. This checklist covers many steps that you will need to follow in order to find online success. The list is being updated almost daily.

Deciding To Start An Online Business

• Making Money Online - Is This Business For You?

Methods Of Making Money Online

• Make Money Blogging
• Makin’ Money With Traditional Websites

Creating Your Site

• Ideas For Profitable Blogs
• How To Choose A Killer Topic For A Blog
• Choosing A Domain Name
  • Should You Use Your Own Domain Or Use A Free Blog Host?
  • Picking A Great Name
  • Registering A Domain Name
• Setting Up Hosting
• Creating A Blog
• Creating A More Traditional Site

Traffic, Traffic, And More Traffic

• Becoming A Master Of Content
• Where Do You Rank Right Now?
• Search Engine Optimization
  • Optimizing Your Blog
  • Keyword Research
  • Building Your Link Network
  • Getting Into Web Directories
• Get More Traffic - Technorati Tags
  
• Pinging
• Social Networking
• Technorati Bootcamp

Revenue Streams

• When Do I Start To Monetize?
• Google Adsense / Yahoo! Publishing
• Contextual
• Affiliate
• Direct Ads
• Direct Sales

This entry is part of my ‘Checklist For Success‘ series

Should you be trying to make money online? Is this the right business for you?

Is it really possible?
Absolutely. I do it, in fact. I don’t have another job, and I do quite well, by my standards. You can earn a nice income, some of you can probably become very wealthy.

Can anyone do it?
Absolutely not. It isn’t for everyone. I’m not at all trying to make the ‘making money online’ community some kind of exclusive club, in fact I have realized that many businesses out there aren’t for me. I tried sales for a few years, and it really didn’t work out for me at all! I was barely able to get by. It wasn’t a good fit for me. This business is!

Each business takes unique talents and abilities; mine are well suited for making money with the internet, and yours might be as well. However, you might be well-suited for sales, management, to be a personal trainer, to invent new products, or for some other profession.

The last thing I want to do is discourage anyone. I simply want each of you to realize what qualities you will need to have (or develop) to make it. During this entry, I’m going to ask you some tough questions. Be honest with yourself! If you can honestly answer ‘yes’ to most of these, this business might be a good fit for you.

• Are you self-motivated? In this business you are on your own. Can you work without supervision? Can you produce without encouragement?
• Can you write? When I ask this question to people I mentor in person, they usually chuckle a little. Most people aren’t very confident about their writing skills. If you’re writing skills aren’t the best, are you willing to learn? If you aren’t willing, close this browser right now! This isn’t the business for you. You don’t need to be an award-winning author, but you will have to learn how to convey a message to your readers.
• Do you know anything about the web? Are you willing to learn? Many people who start in the business have no intention of learning anything about html/css, publishing, search engines, css, pings, tags, or anything else. Do you know what this stuff is? Are you willing to learn it? I can help you here, but you need to be willing to learn. You will never need to be an expert with these concepts, but you do need to be able to learn some of it.
• Can you learn on your own? If you don’t understand something, will you read about it? Will you search for the answer? Will you search until you find it? Everyone I have ever met who has found success in this business has been willing to learn on their own. I can help you with almost everything you need to learn, but you also need to develop your own problem solving skills.
• Can you adapt? The internet is always changing. Those who find success can adapt to those changes.
• Do you have something to offer? You need knowledge about something to make it! In order for you to find success, you will need to become an expert about something! What do you know a lot about? What do you read about? I think you could make it with almost anything if you learned enough about it.
• Can you overcome fear? You’re going to have to! Learning something new can be scary. Being in the public eye can be terrifying. Can you overcome it?

Hopefully this has given you some perspective. If you can honestly answer yes to these questions, I think you’re a good fit for the business.

In order to blog effectively, you have to know about Technorati. More specifically, in order to properly monetize your blog you have to know how to make it work to your advantage. That’s why I have created the Technorati Bootcamp. It is the intense, thorough Technorati training you need to jumpstart your making money online career.

Each step in the training will help you to understand more about Technorati.

Summary of the Technorati Bootcamp

• What Technorati Is
• How Technorati Is Different Than Google
• How Technorati Rankings Work
• How To Find Where You’re Ranked In Technorati
• Technorati Authority Rating
• Why You Need Technorati To Make More Money Online
• How To Better Your Technorati Ranking In A Hurry (If you know everything else about Technorati please feel free to scroll down to this section.)

What Technorati Is

Technorati is a blog search engine. Think ‘Google’, except Technorati only searches in blogs while Google searches through information on blogs and other types of websites. If you went to Technorati, you could search for anything, just like you can search in Google. Technorati will then return results from the 71 million blogs they have in their database.

How Technorati Is Different Than Google

Technorati searches for information in real-time. You can easily find something in Technorati that was published on a blog 5 minutes ago. Technorati’s database is updated when blogs add new content. It will usually take at least a few days for the same content to get in the Google index, depending on the site that it’s published on. (It happens more quickly on highly ranked sites.)

If you’re searching for today’s information in Google, you’re probably wasting your time, in Technorati you’ll likely find it.

How Technorati Rankings Work

Technorati ranks each and every blog in the world, at least they rank all of the ones they know about. Engadget is currently the world’s #1 blog according to Technorati. The reason that Engadget is #1 is because they have more links from other blogs than any other blog.

The Technorati ranking system is based 100% on links from other blogs. The more blogs you get links from, the higher you will be ranked. Technorati recently published their ranking system, you can read about it here. It basically says that they calculate rankings based on the unique amount of blogs that have linked to you in the last 6 months.

How To Find Where You’re Ranked In Technorati

You will first go to Technorati. You will then look for the search bar, which you will find towards the top of the page. It looks like this:

You will simply type in your domain name and click ’search’. For the purpose of this example I will type ‘courtneytuttle.com’, which is of course my domain name:

Once you have typed in your domain name, you will of course click search. You will then see a chart that looks like this:

If you don’t see it, you haven’t claimed your blog. This means that you haven’t let Technorati know that it’s yours! Follow this link, sign up for Technorati, and claim your blog. Then come back and finish the lesson!

If you do see it, you should be able to easily see what your ranking is. As you can see, mine says, “Rank: 45,767″. This means that my blog is ranked as the 45,767th blog in the world, at least it was at the time I wrote this post. This means that there are 45,766 blogs that have been linked to more than mine.

If you’re just starting out you will probably be ranked between 1,000,000 and 2,000,000. Technorati ranking is very much like golf, the lower the better.

Technorati Authority

Your Technorati authority rating is simple, it is the number of unique blogs that have linked to you. The authority rating for this site is 94; this means that 94 different blogs have linked to me so far. As my authority rating goes up, my Technorati ranking goes down. Remember that down is good for your Technorati ranking.

Why You Need Technorati To Make More Money Online

Many advertisers will decide how much to pay you based on what your Technorati ranking is. If you’re ranked 500,000 advertisers may not want to advertise on your site; they at least won’t want to pay you very much. Here are some specific examples of better opportunities that are only available to sites that have a good Technorati ranking:

• Right now there is an opportunity at PayPerPost that would pay you $25 to write a teeny, 50 word review if your Technorati ranking was better than 9,999. If you don’t have a good ranking, most of your opportunities will only pay about $5. If you can get a really, really good ranking you can take advantage of opportunities that pay $150+. It should take you about 5 minutes to write a 50 word review.
• ReviewMe determines the value of reviews on your site based on your Technorati ranking and PageRank. Bettering you Technorati ranking will better your PageRank. You can read more about increasing PageRank here.
• As you get a better Technorati ranking, you will look a lot better to companies like Text-Link-Ads, who base the amount a link on your site is worth by the amount of links your site has.

As your Technorati rankings increase, you will find that readers will stick around your site longer. If they see that you are ranked in the top 10,000, they will want to know why. I’m not there yet, but I do know that people are finally starting to trust what I say, even though I’m not any smarter than I was two months ago when my site was ranked over 1,000,000 in Technorati.

If you want to build a high-traffic site, you will definitely need a good Technorati ranking.

How To Better Your Technorati Ranking In A Hurry

Now we’re finally getting to what you all want to read right? You want to know how to better your Technorati ranking. Since your Technorati ranking is based 100% on links from other blogs, you need to get links from other blogs! Here are some of the easiest and most effective ways to get those links:

• Use the D-List. You can gets links from those sites by simply commenting on the blogs on the list. Don’t leave junky comments! If you leave productive, relevant, informative comments those bloggers will surely visit your site. You will receive emails from many of them. They will link to good posts that they find. Building links is about building relationships; junk comments defeat the purpose and many of the bloggers won’t even allow them to be published. Write good ones! There are well over 100 sites on the D-List that you can contribute to and get links from.
• Use blog carnivals. Each week I take my best articles for the week and submit them to blog carnivals. Blog carnivals list a whole bunch of articles on a given topic. This article will probably be submitted to a handful of blog carnivals. This means that it will be linked to from several different sites. You can easily pick up 10-15 links per quality article you write.
• Be social. I went out today and commented on about 50 new blogs. Many of the webmasters visitited my site and a few of them linked to articles they found here. When you’re friendly and cool people want to get to know you; they’ll visit your site. Getting them to your site is half the battle, writing content that is worth linking to is the other half.
• Work relentlessly on your site. The more value you can provide, the more you will get linked to. My best articles get linked to often, the ones that aren’t as good don’t ever get linked to. Most bloggers miss this step entirely! They like doing the marketing but don’t like to work on providing more value. Would you rather work to get a visitor to your site once or work to get a visitor that will return everyday? If you provide value, they’ll keep on coming back. They will also keep linking to your articles.

Even if you were starting today you should easily be able to get into the top 100,000 blogs of Technorati in less than 30 days. The positive effects will surely follow. If you are already in the top 100,000, try to get in the top 50,000. I’m trying to get into the top 5,000. I’ll be able to get there and you can too if you’re willing to work for it.

Since the time I posted my April earnings, I have had several people express concern that disclosing my Adsense income was against the Adsense terms of service. I wanted to make sure that I was in compliance, so I did a little investigative reporting, which is a fancy way of saying that I read a bunch of really boring documents.

I found a paragraph in the Google AdSense^TM Online Standard Terms and Conditions that shows that I’m ok. (If you want to see for yourself follow the link):

Confidentiality. You agree not to disclose Google Confidential Information without Google’s prior written consent. “Google Confidential Information” includes without limitation: (a) all Google software, technology, programming, specifications, materials, guidelines and documentation relating to the Program; (b) click-through rates or other statistics relating to Site performance in the Program provided to You by Google; and (c) any other information designated in writing by Google as “Confidential” or an equivalent designation. However, You may accurately disclose the amount of Google’s gross payments to You pursuant to the Program. Google Confidential Information does not include information that has become publicly known through no breach by You or Google, or information that has been (i) independently developed without access to Google Confidential Information, as evidenced in writing; (ii) rightfully received by You from a third party; or (iii) required to be disclosed by law or by a governmental authority.

I made the sentence bold that shows that you can disclose the amount that you make from Adsense.

What You Can’t Disclose

• Adsense Click-Through Rates Of Your Site(s)
• Amount of Clicks on Adsense Ads
• Average Commission Per Click
• Earnings Per Thousand Impressions (eCPM)
• An Inaccurate Representation of Gross Earnings

Since I’m not disclosing any of that information it appears that I am in compliance. I am only disclosing the gross amount which is ok.

refer to :http://courtneytuttle.com/2007/05/09/can-bloggers-disclose-adsense-earnings/

Good websites and blogs target a main set of keywords. With most of my sites, I will target 3-5 keywords with my homepage. This site is about ‘make money online’, ‘make money online free’, ‘earn money online’, ‘internet marketing’, ‘make money blogging’, and some other subjects, so I naturally target all of those keywords.
Choosing Keywords

When you choose the keywords you want your site to be about, make sure you know what you’re getting yourself into. Do you know how hard it’s going to be to get ranked for your site’s keywords? Some keywords are extremely difficult. I’ve chosen a few of those, but at least I knew what I was getting myself into. If you’re just starting out, I would recommend choosing some easier ones. You can move toward more difficult ones after you get some experience.

Let’s have a look at the keywords I’ve chosen so that we can get an idea of how difficult they are. In order to get an idea of how difficult each of the keywords are, I’m going to use the keyword difficulty tool at SEOChat.com. It shows difficulty by percentage - the higher the percentage, the more difficult the keyword is to target.

* ‘make money online’ - 81.85%
* ‘make money online free’ - 83.7%
* ‘internet marketing’ - 84.58%
* ‘make money blogging’ - 80.96%
* ‘earn money online’ - 66.17%

The top four keywords are going to be nearly impossible for most beginners, but the bottom one would be attainable. Even if you know what you’re doing, plan on working for about a year to get ranked on the first page of Google for the top four. Even though ‘earn money online’ doesn’t get searched for as much as some of the others, it brings me the most traffic - because it’s an easier keyword.

Now let’s take a look at some of the long-tail keywords I regularly get traffic from:

* how to find out if supplemental google - 49%
* insert google adsense on my blog - 45.64%
* how to float my adsense unit - 5.48%

These keywords are obviously quite a bit easier to target, and you can see why I go after long-tail keywords for my Saturday case study, HowToMobile.com.
Keyword Difficulty Rules

* If you’re a new blogger or webmaster, go after keywords that have less than 70% difficulty.
* If you go after keywords that have more than 80% difficulty, plan on working for about a year before you get to the first page in Google.
* For instant traffic, target keywords that have less than 50% difficulty.

How difficult are your keywords? I would love to know how difficult the words are that everyone is going after. Who is going after the hardest keyword? Does anyone target one that’s harder than ‘internet marketing’? Who targets the easiest one?

I spent the majority of the last two months experimenting relentlessly with my Adsense placement. According the the Google Adsense Online Standard Terms and Conditions, I can’t publish the exact click-through rates of each of my experiments, but I will tell you that the best placement without question was the 300×250 medium rectangle, inserted directly into each post. The click-through rate on that placement was about 50% higher than it was with any other placement.

You will notice that I still have a vertical Adsense banner in my sidebar, except on my home page, where it usually doesn’t show up due to the fact that only three Google ads will show up at any given time. If I have Adsense on three different posts, Google won’t display the one on the sidebar. It shows up on most of my other pages, including my individual post pages. The sidebar ad unit is still getting clicked somewhat, but the 300×250 medium rectangle gets clicked about three times as much.

How To Insert The 300×250 Ad Unit Into Your Posts
This was a trick that took me a while to refine. I originally added some code into my WordPress loop that did the trick - it only worked temporarily because as soon as I started writing sponsored posts, I couldn’t use that method anymore. Most of the sponsored post companies don’t want Adsense units within their sponsored posts. I had to find a way to insert Adsense into my content posts, without inserting it into my sponsored posts. I removed the code that inserted the ad units and found a different way.

Installing The Adsense Plugin
The easiest way I found to handle the problem was by installing the Adsense plugin for WordPress. The plugin gives me a simple button in my WordPress admin that allows me to insert the 300×250 ad unit into each post:

I click the button, and the plugin inserts the Google ad. When I write sponsored posts, I simply don’t click the Adsense button.

Installing the Adsense plugin isn’t super complicated. Here’s what you need to know to install it:

• How to download and extract files
• Editing a file using Notepad
• How to setup Google ads
• FTP/ File uploading

I’ll walk you through the steps, but it’s obviously going to help if you already know how to do that stuff.

Step-By-Step Installation Instructions

1. Download the Adsense plugin.
2. Extract the plugin. Right click your mouse on the file you downloaded and select ‘Extract All’, ‘Extract Here’ or whatever version of extract your computer has. Continue with the extraction.
3. Open the extracted file with notepad. You can do this by right-clicking your mouse on the file and selecting ‘Open With’. You will then choose notepad and it will open up.
4. In Notepad, look for the following piece of code:
   Your Google Adsense code should be here, but you forgot
   to edit the plugins/adsense.php file and replace the code
   there with your own.
   
   
5. Delete that entire section of code, you’re going to replace it with the code for your 300×250 rectangle.
6. Replace the code you just deleted with this new one:
   
   delete this and paste your 300×250 Google ad code here
   
   Adding that code will make a special box that will make your Google ad float to the right side of your post. If you want to make it float to the left, replace float: right with float: left. Note: make sure you delete what I told you, replacing it with your 300×250 Adsense code - you’re going to have to log into your Adsense account to get it!
7. Save the file and upload it to your wp-content/plugins directory.
8. Log in to your WordPress admin and go to ‘Plugins’.
9. Activate the Adsense plugin.

You’ve done it!

Using The Plugin To Insert Adsense Into Your Posts
When I first installed the plugin, I thought that I had done it incorrectly, because the Adsense button wasn’t there at first. I quickly figured out that the button only appears after the post has been saved. In order to make the button appear, you’ll first have to click your ‘Save and Continue Editing’ button on your ‘Write Post’ screen.

You should then be able to see the button by clicking into your code view:

You should then see the Adsense button in there:

Wherever your cursor is when you click the button is where your ad will appear. I usually insert my Adsense right up at the top, so I place my cursor at the beginning of the post:

After clicking the Adsense button, it should look like this:

In the spot where the shows, the plugin will insert your Adsense. Remember that I created a special box that makes my Adsense float to the right.

This should help everyone to get more clicks from their Adsense. Make sure you let me know if you run into problems anywhere. Be specific if you need to ask a question! If you only tell me that it didn’t work I probably won’t be able to help you out. I’m going to need to know at what point you ran into the problem and what the ’symptoms’ are!

I see affiliates from two perspectives.

Firstly as an affiliate, I see myself as a business partner to those merchants that I promote. I send them traffic, and if I make sales for them, I expect to be paid for my efforts in the form of a predefined percentage or lump sum.

As a merchant, I see my affiliates as partners and value the traffic they send me. My utmost priority is to make sure that any sales that are made are credited to the affiliate that sends me the traffic. This is essential if my affiliates are going to trust me and put effort into promoting my products. This is essential if I want my business to grow!

Most of my own products are related to internet marketing and webmaster tools. Because of the nature of these products, those visitors are likely to be knowledgeable of affiliate programs and probably Clickbank as well.

Imagine this scenario:

Joe goes to Google and searches for "webmaster tools". Something caught his attention over in the Pay Per Click ads, an affiliate link to a product that promises to make link exchanges easier.

"Hmmm" thought Joe. "That looks like a great tool".

Joe clicks on the PPC link and is redirected to a sales page. Scrolling to the bottom of the page, Joe sees that the product is $97.

"I want this", thought Joe, "but $97 is a bit steep".

Joe searches the webpage for that magic link, and he finds it easily.

"Great" says Joe out loud. "A link to a Clickbank affiliate program, and this program pays 50%".

After a few minutes, Joe has signed up for the affiliate program, created his own affiliate link, typed it into his browser, and revisits the sales page.

Joe's mouse clicks the buy link. He fills in his credit card details and clicks the purchase button. Closing his browser, he checks his e-mail. He watches as two e-mails are downloaded to his machine. The first is the download information for the new software he purchased, the second one is an e-mail with the Subject "Congratulations Joe, you have made a sale".

Joe checks his stats online for this new affiliate program and sure enough, he has made $48.50 commission on this purchase. In other words, he only paid $48.50 for the product.

OK, what is wrong with this scenario?

Is it fair that Joe used his own affiliate link to make a purchase?

What about the affiliate who advertised this affiliate program at Google? That affiliate paid for the click that started the sale process, yet did not get the commission.

What is going through the minds of merchants who place links to their affiliate programs on their sales page?

I would imagine that some merchants think about these points:

* I want to make $48.50 per sale minimum.

* If I offer it for $97 and give 50% commission to affiliates I will make my goal of $48.50 per sale.

* By adding an affiliate sign up link to the sales page, I can encourage people to sign up for my affiliate program, buy through their own link and get the software for the real price of $48.50, but the customer will be happy thinking they saved $48.50.

*Great plan!

I am sure that a lot of merchants don't see things this way - they just don't think hard enough about their affiliates.

A merchant that uses a link to his/her affiliate program on the sales page is using affiliate traffic as free traffic (whether they intend to or not). After all, the merchant does not need to spend time optimising pages or buying traffic - their affiliates will do that and send the traffic to the sales page for free. If an affiliate sends someone who becomes a customer, the merchant will make their money.

The big problem here is that being an affiliate is hard work. You do have to create content, buy and review products, possibly even pay for advertising. If YOU are doing these things as an affiliate, is your merchant doing their bit to protect your you? Unfortunately the majority of Clickbank merchants don't, and affiliates waste their time building pages and buying advertising to promote merchants who don't deserve it.

The bottom line
----------------

If you are promoting products aimed at webmasters, the traffic you send will likely know how to "steal" your commission. In this situation it is vital to only promote merchants without the affiliate sign up link.

If on the other hand you are promoting products to the general public, e.g. weight loss products, dog training eBooks etc, this affiliate sign up link poses less of a problem since most of the traffic you generate wont be affiliates themselves (most wont even know what an affiliate is) and wont have the necessary skills to sign up at Clickbank, create a link and purchase through their link just to get a commission.

What can you do?
----------------

If you find a merchant that you want to promote and they have an affiliate sign up link on the sales page, contact them. Tell them about your concerns and that they should treat you as a partner, not the source of free traffic. Suggest that they remove this affiliate sign up link.

The usual reaction I get
------------------------

Merchant: "I get a lot of affiliate sign ups from this link, there is no way I am removing it!"

Ask the merchant how many of those affiliates ever make a sale or ever send any traffic. This is exactly my point. The merchant is getting a lot of sign ups purely to get a discount. For every person who signs up as an affiliate to get a discount, there is one affiliate somewhere being robbed of his/her rightful commission.

Most of the "affiliates" you get via a sign up link on the sales page are only signing up to get a discount, they are unlikely to ever try to sell that product.

The only affiliates who will promote the product, are those that buy the software, use it and like it. They see the benefits and can sell it well to their visitors. These are the only affiliates worth getting, and you wont get them from an affiliate sign up link on the sales page.

The best way of getting hard working affiliates is to protect your affiliates from this type of link hijacking, gain their trust and do everything you can to help them out. Build a relationship with your affiliates and most of all, make sure they are rewarded for the traffic they send. To this end, remove that affiliate sign up link, and when someone buys your product, send them an e-mail outlining the benefits of your affiliate program. Active affiliates respond well to knowing their merchants are protecting their interests.

A final thought
---------------

If there are two similar products, similar price, similar commission, one sales page with an affiliate sign up link, one without, which would you prefer to promote? If you want to make money online with affiliate programs, take it seriously and start contacting merchants.

*****************************************************
Andy Williams is author of the free, ezSEO internet marketing newsletter, offering subscribers up-to-date information on all aspects of internet marketing.
*****************************************************

There will be a million and one affiliates out there who will tell you that the affiliate program they promote is going to be the best one for you.

But have you considered who is really making the money and who gains the most out of affiliate programs.

Let's take a step back and look at the AFFILIATE.

What exactly is the role of the affilate?

* The sole purpose of the affiliate is to PROMOTE the product and/or service

What are the benefits of being an affiliate?

* Get paid a minimal commission that is regulated by the owner of the product/service

In short, As an affiliate it is your responsibility to make someone else rich whilst doing all the hard work. You take on the expenses of advertising, you are the one who usually misses out on subscribers if you haven't first made them your client before they buy the product/service you are promoting.

And all this for what??? Maybe $20 per sale if you are really, really lucky.

You also need to remember that when you are an affiliate, YOU are not the only person promoting that very same product/service.

So what will make your offer any different to someone else who is promoting the exact same product, usually using the same sales technique, offering it at the same price.

To be in the top 5%, which is the amount of affiliates who make more than $100.00 per month, you need to first have a really good, clean, targeted subscribers list of more than 50,000 subscribers, know exactly how to gain targeted traffic, and have a huge advertising budget.

For the other 95%, the only way you are going to make alot of money from and affiliate program is to OWN YOUR OWN.

It really isn't as hard as you might think to set up.

So in conclusion, the best AFFILIATE PROGRAM, obviously is the one you OWN.

About the Author:

Gillian Tarawhiti, is Founder and CEO of Community Training Centre, an Internet Marketing firm providing Online Training and Support to the new and not so new netpreneurs. Gillian is also the author of eBay Billion Dollar Goldmine and the creator of the Multiple Ripple Effect System © 2004.

Permission is granted to reprint this article in print or on your web site so long as the paragraph above is included and contact information is provided to http://www.ezy-money.com

In the last few years, webmasters have discovered that affiliate marketing can be an extremely lucrative way to earn additional revenues from their sites. Now, a purely informational website that doesn't sell anything can generate massive revenues by adding recommendations to products and services via online affiliate programs.

Signing up for affiliate marketing programs can be a very effective way of paying for webhosting fees and bandwidth, domain names, and the time it takes to keep an informational site updated.

So what exactly is an affiliate marketing program? Affiliate programs are nothing more than partnerships with various business online. Partnering up with these businesses gives you the ability to offer additional resources to your visitors and is a valuable way to attract and retain your visitors because you are adding additional value.

Online affiliate programs have a track record of being very successful. They have been responsible for creating massive wealth over the last few years and have really become a popular addition to the webmaster community.

Joining an affiliate program requires you to apply and you can usually gain approval immediately. Many affiliate programs provide you with a host of banners and other tools that you can use to market their products and services and each tool is linked to your unique affiliate ID to ensure that you get credit for the sale.

If you're interested in becoming an affiliate marketer, there are many different programs and products that you can promote. From online poker rooms to diapers and everything in between, there is an opportunity for all. To get started, I would recommend that you check out Commission Junction, one of the leading affiliate marketing networks and one that will give you access to thousands and thousands of different products and services that you can begin to earn money from immediately.

Learn how to become a super poker affiliate by promoting the best poker affiliate programs at http://www.epokeraffiliate.com/.

1. Create an infopacked mini site. Build your mini site for a specific niche audience and then choose affiliate programs specifically for that niche audience.

2. Test and track your ads and promotions for your affiliate programs.

Tracking and testing your ads will show you exactly which ads, promotions and affiliate programs pay off the most for you and are excellent choices for you to continue to promote.

3. Publish an ezine.

Your ezine will give you a powerful way to promote your affiliate programs to your subscribers.

Choose affiliate programs that relate to the content of your ezine and that make it worth your while to promote them.

4. Promote your affiliate programs by recommending their products.

You could recommend your affiliate programs to your ezine subscribers in your publisher's note or you could create a recommended resources section where you promote your affiliate programs in every issue.

You could also recommend your affiliate programs to your visitors by creating a recommended affiliate programs section where you list your favorite affiliate programs along with descriptions of their products or services.

In addition, you could create a best affiliate programs section that helps you build up your second tier by listing the affiliate programs that have paid off the most for you.

5. Write product reviews where you detail the benefits you like about your affiliate program's product.

Make your product reviews honest and hype f~ree and post them on your site along with your other articles.

6. Write your own ads for your affiliate program.

A good way to create your ads is to look at the ad copy on the site of the business you want to promote and also ads they provide for their affiliates to use, and use their unique selling proposition or USP to write your ads.

Their unique selling proposition is a unique benefit that they promote in their ad copy that their competitors don't stress or offer to their visitors.

It could be that their product saves lots of time, is easy to understand, that their product is a complete answer to a problem, or it could involve their price.

Some businesses develop more than one USP so you'll be able to choose the one that you think works best in getting more targeted visitors to their site.

7. Try out the support of the companies you want to promote by asking questions.

This will help you to find out how long it takes them to respond to emails (if they respond to emails) and how professional they are.

8. Create freebies that promote your affiliate programs.

You could offer your visitors a f~ree email course, an ebook filled with your tips or articles or an ebook that provides your visitors with places to promote their businesses.

When creating freebies for an affiliate program that is 2 tier, increase your profits by letting your affiliates in your second tier use your freebies as a promotional item.

9. Create a directory.

Your directory could be an article, ezine, ebook or affiliate program directory.

List your own resources within your directory to increase your commissions. For example, you could add your own affiliate programs to your affiliate programs directory or your ebooks to your ebook directory.

Add a what's new section to your directory to garner more repeat traffic from your visitors.

You could also provide a tutorial on the subject of your directory, or add things to your directory that your visitors can use on a regular basis to get more repeat traffic.

10. Run ezine ads for your affiliate programs.

You could purchase sponsor, feature, classified or solo ads for your affiliate program.

Choose ezines with subscribers targeted to be interested in the products of the business you want to promote.

Run your ads for multiple issues in a row when possible to maximize the profit you get from your ads.

You can also run f~ree ads in ezines as many ezines offer
f~ree advertising on a weekly, monthly or per issue basis to
get more new subscriptions.

Running f~ree ads can help you find out which ads work best,
and which ezines are most responsive before you purchase
ezine advertising.

Article by writer, Ken Hill. Get more marketing tips by
joining Ken's Top Notch Marketing Ezine at:
http://www.netpromarketer.com/