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.

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.

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.

Passive Online Income

As passive income we can categorize websites that are being set with a landing page from where we do sell products, for example Make Money Online eBook or any other type of product that does not involve us actively in setting up, shipping the product or even configuring something. It does not even include services we provide as that actually does require that we are active since we need to work in order to provide services. As passive online income alternative rather than selling products can be considered making money through affiliates, where you create a landing page, setup a PPC advertising campaign with Google AdWords or any other PPC campaign and get the traffic that is being sent to your PPC advertising campaign convert through your affiliate link and make money, easy enough (kinda).

Active Online Income

Active online income is same as having a daily job and you are being active in your work, apart that you have the commodity to stay home and make money from home rather than working for another person. As active online income I would call blogging, where you have to actually post daily, gather readership, be creative to sell through affiliate links and constantly work to improve your blogs traffic (organic or via referrals). Another online active income I would consider web design and web development, where you actually have to work and provide your clients with web design services.

Do you prefer active or passive online income?

Before you get even the chance to answer (like you do have the guts to comment) let me tell you what do I prefer. Active online income, and the reasons are simple. To achieve active online income you actually have to work, to do something, to read, to learn to test, optimize and get known with other folks. All this gives you that regular rhythem of living that you are most likely missing while sitting in front of the computer, but in a certain way you re compensate that time by learning something and actually doing something rather than just sitting and being annoyed.

To achieve your goal and actually make money from blogging you need to learn many techniques, as optimization of your site to bring maximum revenue, you need to also learn seo and drive organic targeted traffic to your website, you also need to learn some internet marketing strategies to promote your blog as well as to promote the advertisers or affiliates.

So what do you prefer, passive over active online income or vice versa?

In my recent case, where I am offering services for a determined price and it is higher than what my competitors from the rest of the world charge something strange happened. In a forum where people need for freelancer designers/coders the customer was asking for advice and looking for a coder to fix his site. When I saw that thread there were already something like 7-8 entries, all prices were 50%-70% cheaper than me, at first view I guessed it is not really worth to let my note with folks offering such low price for their services.

Reading all the entries from top to bottom I notice something that the “customer” was asking for but no one really answered his question. In a certain way the customer had highlighted the fact that he wanted advice as well, but he also note that he needs to know a price quote for the service. My competitors replies were ALL based on price, and it seemed like they were all competing on price (it sounded like a auction honestly). When I notice that i also notice they were lacking in customer service and non of them was worried to give the client answer on his question regarding the advices.

That hole tempted me to see if clients could be blinded from the price only, or they also care about customer service too. I took my time and wrote him a long detailed entry, where I highlighted all his concerns and gave him extra options that could be done with his website to gain the maximum exposure and still be user friendly site.

After the client read my advice (and others did as well) I not only over beat my competitors, even tho my price was higher by 70% but I also gained more customers from people that read that thread.

The moral of this story post is that it does not matter if you offer services at low cost or expensive, you will always have your clients and will be able to gain even more clients if you can help your clients instead of just doing the job for them. Providing clients with service is a must, being able to explain the client all the alternatives that you can apply and placing all the options on the plate for the client will sure built your credibility in the business area and trust with your customer.

The OIOPublisher plugin is a plugin designed for advertisers and all the money maker bloggers (and not only) on the net that would like to keep 100% of the profits and get rid of the middle mane that takes % of all your sales. Of course, having a middle man might help you get exposed in front of a bigger market place, like Text Link Ads on the textual advertising marketplace, but when you need to sell banner advertising spots you need to lean toward another company to handle that. With this plugin for advertisers you get all in one, and if you got a the reader base and the interest of advertisers to advertise on your site you can easily get rid of the middle man and handle ALL advertising spots on sale from one single place.

The Functions

• Sell sidebar link Ads
• Sell inpost link Ads
• Sell video Ads
• Sell RSS Ads
• Sell Banner Ads

As you can see from the functions, it handles ALL the needed advertising options you could offer to your readers, and as if all that was not enough the plugin has built in a affiliate program as well to help you promote your services and blog easier, where you can give % of the advertising sales (or flat rate) you will make from visitors that were referred from users that signed up with your affiliate program.

The plugin has also built in payment method, via PayPal only currently, and has a reminder system as well, which will remind advertisers of your site that their ad is about to expire and they need to renew them. You can also setup the period of the ads on your site on days, 5,10,30 or more.

With all these functions that the plugin has, the price for which you can buy the plugin ($37) is bargain cheap and to highlight the fact that this plugin is going to get rid of the middle man and you can keep 100% of the profits from each sale you make (unless you decide to run the affiliate and give % of the earnings to them). To note tho, that having the affiliate program enabled you might be giving a small % of your earnings, but you will be saving loads of money on promotion as others will promote your site for a slice of your revenue. Grab the plugin you have been dreaming of now and start making money with your blog.