Most of us when started we started making our first cents with Google AdSense to then work hard and increase constantly our AdSense earnigns, many of us failed while few of us are having a great success with AdSense and are making a living out of AdSense. The good part of AdSense is that the ads are relevant to the content on which the ads appear so people do see relevant ads and are willing to click. But what is that they do to become successful and you aren’t

The Niche of the Website

The niche which your site covers, or rather the topic you are writing about could be very important. Most of the high earners either know the niche very well or they are very good at building websites and give visitors valuable content, but not always this turns to be the best thing to get into a niche that you are familiar with. Many new enterpreneurs jump into a niche that is not as profitable, however it is easy to drive traffic, just to name some; proxy sites and gaming related sites.

The good thing about these sites is that you can easily drive traffic to the site. However the downside of such sites is that AdWords advertisers pay less per click on keywords relevant to gaming or proxy so the earnings would be less too and the effort would be bigger.

To put it simple, if you have a budget to hire a writer to write about a topic where advertisers pay big money per click and you are able to market that site online and drive quality traffic then you should chose a high paying adsense keywords for your niche, and here is an article on how to find high paying adsense keywords or another one on how to find high paying adsense keywords for your niche with Google’s Search-based keyword tool.

AdSense Ad Placement

The placement of the ad is anther important factor of the CTR, since the ads are closely related to the content that your visitors read it is good to keep the ads above the fold, right in front of their eyes so visitors could see the ads and if intrigued by the advertisement to click on it, as suggested by AdSense Team on their heatmap image to better illustrate the placement of the ad.

The formats that result in better CTR are the bigger rectangular ads, 326×280, 300×250, the leader board of 726×90 and the skyscrapper 160×600. However not always you should stick with these sizes, you can always try and test the best performing ad for your site. Another tip is to blend the ads with your content, however, even here do not always stick with it and try to diversify and test until you reach the best CTR you can.

Driving Targetted Traffic to Your Site

The keywords you might chose for your AdSense based website is not always going to be an easy one to drive traffic for, the competition might be too high or even too tough to rank for that your site might most likely not see the first page on the major search engines ever, and that means you might never have visitors to your site so no clicks, unless you are a great marketer and know what you are doing.

But for newbies I suggest that you try to find unsaturated niches with less competition, here is an article that explains how to find unsaturated niches. The key is in that to find a keyword where advertisers are bidding Top Dollars to have their ads visible in the AdSense program, but also that the competition in the SERPs of the search engines to be as low as possible so we could rank as easy as possible and drive targeted traffic.

To shortly explain what unsaturated niche is, the subset of the market on which a specific product is focusing and there is a high demand (great search volume and possibilities to drive good amount of targetted traffic) but there is not many resources regarding that specific product/topic (means, less websites are tending to rank for that specific keyword).

It might take awhile to find a perfect niche that is not saturate and it would be easy to rank for, however with all the seo tools out there such data can be collected pretty easily. One seo software that I do recommend is the market samurai, you can read this market samurai review for more details on that seo software.

Now that you know what the successful guys are doing, which are their key points and you know the tool that can help you out, all it remains to do is START WORKING AND MAKE MONEY ONLINE.

Get rich fast

People have a faith that the online home business can bring overnight richness. But it is impossible and it requires a constant hard work for years together like any other field. People are quickly attracted by the catchy wordings like “No Investment; Make money easily everyday by spending few minutes”. These get rich quick schemes are more suspicious than other online offers. Some websites will ask for investment before the job is granted. Before paying the money check out whether the website or the individual is reliable. In order to find this you can go through the forums and have a look at the feedback forms. You can have a discussion with your online friends who have experience in this field. In some cases they ask for your credit card details. Be more careful before feeding the details.

You are selling something

Online marketing is becoming more popular in the modern days because there is a myth that you need not strain too much to sell a product. But the fact is different. You should have a powerful and sharp marketing knowledge. It is difficult to sell all the products directly. So you should look for the distributing agent who can make more profit for you. You can enhance the business to a great extent. You can choose the potential distributors by interviewing their skills. You can choose the distributing agent for various sites and allocate them the target to be met. You can build a quality and enthusiastic network to promote your products.

All schemes are pyramids

Some people have the myth that all the businesses have a network involved in it and all are same as multi level marketing. This myth continues because it takes long time to get the product or the payment through online. In some cases this fact may be true and it may not be in some cases. Some marketers directly deal with customers to avoid the fraudulent activities. There is a belief that people can make money if they add a person into the network. But this can be made clear when we come to know whether people get paid if they sell the products or they get money if they sell the goods.

Similarly there are several myths that exist about the online home industry. Some other myths are people think that we can do an online home job if we are only a computer genius and it is easier than the manual labor. The aim of this article is to raise awareness about the myths and scams that exists in the online home industry and help people to get success in this field.

No offense to chatters, I do chat often too, but I believe that chatting is really a huge time waster, unless it is not a chat about work and similar. How ever, how do you turn that “boring” moments into bucks you might be wondering? Yeah exactly that famous say Time is money.

Today I had again that blank moment, I have it every day actually and recently more often then what I should permit to myself. However later on the day I did read a friends blog and he had a post about something called Bux.To. Nice name no? Bux.to…do what? Well I had heard about them earlier, but never saw the picture in the way I am describing it to you (time is money)..Bux.to is actually a pay-per-view program, where you get paid cents to view an advertisement (liked it or not, all you have to do is just view the ad for full 30 seconds and earn a cent for the view).

Before I even continue, you will need an account with AlertPay in order to get paid from Bux.to.

Now, you have already created your Bux.to account and you click on the “Surf Ads” button. A list will be presented with ads that you can surf and get paid for. All you have to do is click in the link, and stay in the page for 30 seconds (pay attention in the countdown at the top, it should change to Done when you can close the window).

Can you get rich with Bux.to?

Well, first of all it depends what “RICH” means for you. $300 a month won’t make me rich for sure, but for a student thats a good money especially if doing nothing. I bet you got confused now, I was first referring that you earn 1 cent for surfing an ad and now referring to $300 a month earnings, hold on..let me explain.

People like me do it when they have time to waste, some others got into this much deeper and actually pull even more then $300 a month, but to understand better read bellow how the system actually works.

Earnings Example

• You click 10 ads per day = $0.10
• 20 referrals click 10 ads per day = $2.00
• Your daily earnings = $2.10
• Your weekly earnings = $14.70
• Your monthly earnings = $63.00

So practically you view 10 ads a day and earn $0.10 cents for the day. But if you have 20 referrals under your Bux.to and all 20 referrals do the same your daily earnings becomes $2.10 a day instead of $0.10 a day.

The sweetest part is that if having referrals under your account is hard with any other program with Bux.to it is not hard at all actually. You can actually buy those “non referred” users for a fairly cheap price. For example you can buy

• 15 referrals for $16.98
• 35 referraks for $34.95
• 100 referrals for $98.00

Why I am telling you fairly cheap price is because the ROI is good. Presume you buy the cheapest plan, 15 referrals for less then $17 and all 15 referrals do view 10 ads a day thats $1.50 USD a day (plus 0.10 a day from ads you will view), in 10 days you have already pulled back the money you invested and all the rest is pure earnings. If you purchase 35 referrals you get back your invested money in less then 10 days and so on you can create an empire of users until you reach a point that you earn enough money a day without doing anything but simply buying some referrals from time to time, sit in your back, view some ads when you are bored and cash in the money.

Are you convinced that time IS really money and that even cents can turn out to become real bucks quickly enough? Subscribe to Bux.to and build your money empire (and don’t forget to get a AlertPay account too).

Once you start making some money online you realize your real potential to make money online which then influences you to raise your daily target and explore more monetization methods. If you feel happy with the current money you are making then you are probably losing a lot of opportunities and maybe you wont ever realize the full potential of your blog as money maker.

My latest experiment on making money online was with AdBrite an advertising marketplace that offers you different type of advertisement, CPC (Cost Per Click) or CPM (Cost Per Thousand Impressions). With AdBrite you can chose 3 different methods to monetize your site

• Place banner advertisements on your site
• Place textual links on your site
• Place In-Content Ads

Here at another night shift you will notice I am using only in-content ads as I want to check out how much I can actually monetize my content. The in-content ads are those double lined dark green keywords you will notice, that when you hover the mouse a an ad window will display.

So far I have tested AdBrite on another not so competitive niche and I have to admit that the PayPerClick is way much better then with Kontera, hence I am giving them a try even here on this blog to see how much it can really pull.

You can expect the results at the end of this month. You can subscribe to my RSS feed if you want to find out how well AdBrite performs in this site.

With adsense for search you can give the possibility to visitors of your website or weblog to perform a search query on Google.com right from within your site or let them perform a search query for your site/blog through Google search engine by simply querying your site and the visitors performed keywords in the search.

Some of the possibilities were limited tho with AdSense search and you could not really have much of control over the search button, but today, the AdSense team has announced that adsense for search has been combined all together with the custom Google search and a bunch of new features have been added such as

• Improved indexing of your pages
• Vertical search
• Tuning search results and ads with keywords
• Selecting ad location
• Quick and easy updates

These points are explained in details on the official adsense blog. This information is so hot that I took the time to first blog about it instead of go and modify my AdSense for search code and checkout how this will perform, but I am confident it will perform quiet well.

Don’t miss the opportunity to make few more bucks out of your site with Google AdSense, give a try to AdSense for search and don’t let the visitors go away from your site without making you any profits.

Amazon Associates came out with Carousel Widget just few days ago. This widget is built in flash and is interactive, you can list at least 6 eBook or any other type of products that can be found on amazon within the widget, users can then rotate the books and click the one for which they show most interest. Currently I have listed 6 very interesting and useful books for those that want to learn more about blogging, seo and making money online, the listed book as

• How to Do Everything With Your Web 2.0 Blog
• ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way To a Six-Figures Income
• Building Findable Websites: Web Standards SEO and Beyond
• How to Make Money With Your Blog
• SEO: Search Engine Optimization Bible
• Blogging For Dummies
• Professional Search Engine Optimization with PHP

Their new ads are simply lovely, clean and fast to load. It doesn’t slow down the loading time of your site/blog and yet they are attractive. I have not used Amazon affiliate program to make money online, but these attractive ads definitively intrigued me to get started with Amazon Associates and give it a try.

You should to.

What is ShoppingAds?

I would define ShoppingAds as a bridge between your visitors and the merchant that is selling products. Publishers of ShoppingAds can make money online by installing their small javascript widget code and displaying relevant merchant ads on your website. The program pays on CPC (Cost Per Click) and on CPA (Cost Per Acquisition), and the publishers are divided in two categories. Standard publishers and Premium publishers. The division of these two groups is based on country location and on the traffic quality of your website. If you signup now and get accepted you will start as standard publisher, and if your traffic is quality traffic (read: US and Canada) you can email ShoppingAds (in case they forgot to upgrade your account) and request to revise your account and upgrade you to publisher account.

It wasn’t a coincidence that I asked are you exploring all monetization options for your website, some times what looks a yucky program for you it could be the right money maker for your site, but you will not know that until you give it a try. Same happened to me with ShoppingAds, at the beginning I was skeptic about the program and did not thought it was worth placing their ads.

The fact is that today I believe I never wasted my time thinking if their ads look good or not and I should have gave them a try long time ago. ShoppingAdsShoppingAds you can’t never say “this month is not doing good” until the month is over. While I was giving a test ride to ShoppingAds it was making cents and the day when I thought to remove them..boom $16+ the same day.

One thing is for sure with ShoppingAds, if your site is tech related, gadgets or product related site and you do have a healthy traffic you won’t fail making money.

The reason for acquiring this site was mainly its small but useful for me at the moment daily earnings the site was pulling from Google AdSense. The second reason was the traffic the site has from different resources, including search engine traffic.

Acquiring a website with decent traffic is good for several reasons 1). you don’t have to build that traffic, its time saving 2). gives you the flexibility to test/try different monetization methods.

After the acquisition of the site and replacing of the Google AdSense code the earnings were $0 and $0 and $0 for a week or so even tho there were several clicks on the ads but for some reason for Google AdSense those clicks were counted as invalid and were not paying the publisher (me). My first thought after a week was to sell the site away and get rid of it.

Did I sold the site? Nope and the reasons are several, even tho I acquired the site because of the adsense earnings the traffic was big enough and the quality of the traffic was good, it has 99% of UK traffic. What I did was trying another way to make money out of that site so I tried couple affiliate networks that were related to rave music, dj equipment and similar stuff, but they were all just paying low commissions and I had to subscribe to different programs which was not in my intentions.

Again the thought of selling this site crossed my mind, but once again an alternative halted me from doing this. I knew I have been subscribed with a affiliate type of program which pays on commissions and on pay per click but I had never gave it a try really, because I was lazy. I decided this was the perfect timing to give a try to ShoppingAds.

After placing the ShoppingAds the idea of selling the site vanished out of my mind and the site is now pulling a decent revenue. If you want to know more about ShoppingAds subscribe to my RSS feed to read the following post on ShoppingAds on more details.

Reviews do work and will work for a long period of time, it is possible that it will change shape in internet but it will exist in one or another way. Lets take a banal example, you are about to get your first web hosting account and host your website at since you got tired of the free hostings that limit your website functionality and you want to get more flexible on that regard. The first thing you do is look after a web hosting that has good testimonials. These testimonials are that same shape of review, where existing customers review the hosting company they are with and share their experience with them.

Okey, the web hosting testimonials and the website reviews that we see now on daily basis is not quiet the same thing. For example the testimonials are much shorters and hit the nail on the personal experience (like, the hosting company has great support staff which helped me within a short time, or the technical staff is polite and fast, their prices are cheap and the up time rocks).

While the testimonials are short and go right to core and expressing customers experience with that hosting company, with the reviews we do see lately on blogs we don’t read anymore those “first person experience” but rather they do write a review for the website owner in first place and then this review serves as a great marketing tool as well. When a blogger reviews a website he is exposing that website to his/her readers, readers which might turn out to become customers of the website if non the less visitors of the website.

Some smart folks did see these reviews as great money making opportunity and they created a online marketplace where advertisers could find blogs on which they could get reviewed and exposed as well as for bloggers to find websites to review and get paid for this, and here is where that middle man is making profits for introducing YOU as blogger to the ADVERTISER, simple and clean, but sometimes things flip out of hands when there is the middle man, even tho in many cases it helps you start growing.

The middle man has the power to determine the price for which you can charge their advertisers for a review, of course you can negotiate this or rather, you can try and prove them that a review on your blog is worth more then what they are actually paying you. But how does the marketplace holder determine the price of which you can charge? They take in account some small (and I would say useless) factors such as the PageRank of your site (and this kinda comes in first place), your websites alexa ranking (easily tricked) and then your technorati ranking (much better, but this works only for blogs and is being determined from links coming to your site from other blogs while the static sites are being ignored).

Based on these informations is determined the value of a review in your blog. Even tho this can sound pretty fair, some times it can become frustrating when the company is paying you small cash for a review based on the informations they have to determine this. What slips out is your “time” from their calculation, or rather they don’t put that in account when determining the price of a review.

To write a real review for a website you need to surf the advertisers website, take notes on things that work and things that don’t work, you have to take a close lookup on their history (you would not want to advertise with positive review a company that has a shady background), and then finally you have to sum up all that and write a detailed review for the website owner and as well for your readers. It takes close to an hour to come up with “decent” informations for a company which you are reviewing and writing the review. Now imagine the schenario, the middle man says that a review on your website costs $7 no matter how much time you will need to come up with the informations and write the review. Whats for sure is that you MUST write a review which is not going to be short and spammy (at least if you want to continue with them) and you have to link out from you site to the advertisers website.

When these scenarios show up to me the answer is simple and clear NO.

But, how do you handle this? Do you prefer to write a scam like review of few words without looking at who you are reviewing and take the money? Would you really waste all that time to earn $7 ? Or you’d actually ask the middle man to raise the price or you will try an alternative. I’d be happy to know.

Usually when I see such websites I close them as they load, waiting for it to load in most cases is a waste of time and filled with bunch of content (if we really want to call it that way their most likely faked testimonials or maybe not) and if I even get interested to buy that i have to scroll a mile to reach the buy button. Well let me put it clear, you are forcing me to read the testimonials, you are preselling your product based on what testimonials say, which doesn’t tell me much about your product but that you have no clue how you can define your product and how you can pre sell it to me, if I wanted to read what testimonials say I would rather click on a page called testimonials and not have it slapped in my face as the page loads.

I have a theory that If they designed their pages in a smarter way and with marketing in mind, they would build more credibility with their “sales page” visitors and most likely will increase sales as well. Since I am not into that business scheme, and I do not actually sell ebooks I don’t have such a page, but would love to run an experiment on such a page.

And to run my experiment I want to get my hands on a website that is already using a sales letter page for awhile now, that is actually selling a copy or two a day of his product (don’t care if its ebook or whatever) or that at least has a decent traffic stream over at his website (via targeted PPC ads or organic traffic like 500+ uniques a day) but it is not managing to sell enough copies of his/her product. Than to redesign the site (for FREE) the way I think it will best perform and to see the results of the sales after a month, with the same traffic amount (PPC targeted or Organic targeted if we want to see really the results). Why I am asking for PPC or organic targeted traffic is simply, because the traffic IS targeted and it is not JUST traffic.

If you have such site and you are willing to get your site a design liftup for free and agree to get my hands and run this experiment on your site, please comment on this post and I will contact you (no need to mention your site, we can discuss that later on via email).