AdMoolah News and Views

AdSense is a great way for beginning Webmasters to make some revenue. There is a lot to like about AdSense – it’s easy to set up, it can display ads in almost any niche, once you have it set you can just forget about it and watch the money build up in your account. A lot of publishers seem to get overly focused on AdSense, and forget that there might be other options out there. But that’s a mistake.

It seems like most people I know who make good money from Websites tend to use more than just AdSense. AdSense may be a good default, but there are so many different ways to make money, people usually diversify and find a lot of different programs that bring in some good income. I do pretty well with AdSense, but a few months ago I tried an affiliate program on my top AdSense site. It ended up paying out more than AdSense does, and my AdSense income hasn’t dropped at all. I’ve also gotten checks from Amazon, Text Link Ads, direct sales, ReviewMe, affiliate programs, and other sources. And I still experiment with different programs all the time.

Look at Darren Rowse, his number one money maker is Chitika, AdSense is #2 on the list. And he lists six other revenue streams.

Look at John Chow, he makes more money from various affiliates, ReviewMe, Direct Sales and Text-Link-Ads than he does with AdSense.

Every webmaster should experiment with different programs for two reasons:

1. It’s good to have diversified income streams – never put all your eggs in one basket.
2. You never know which program or combination of programs will make you the most money. Try lots and lots of affiliate and advertising programs. Some will make you nothing, some will do OK, and then you might hit on one that will make more for you than AdSense ever did. You never know until you try what will make you the most money.

Don’t get me wrong, AdSense is a great advertising network, and should be in the mix of every publisher’s revenue stream, but don’t limit yourself. If AdSense is the only thing you’ve ever tried, go ahead and do yourself a favor and try something new. Here are a few (affiliate) links to try out:

Chitika
AuctionAds
BidVertiser
Text Link Ads
ReviewMe

Google announced today that the new referrals program is out of beta and will soon be available to all publishers.

AdSense referrals is a program that lets you put ads on your site, but instead of being payed per view or per click, you get payed per action. That means in order to get paid the user has to click on the ad and then complete some action such as joining a newsletter or making a purchase. This means that you don’t get paid as often, but when you do get paid its usually a much higher payout then you would for a click. These pay-per-action models are usually associated with affiliate programs.

I’m lucky enough to have been in the initial beta and I have experimented with the referral program. I have had some success, but nothing very dramatic. I think it is worth a try, but I think there are some disadvantages with it compared to some other CPC programs. The two main ones are:

1. You cannot choose the text you want to link with. One great thing about most affiliate programs is that you get to choose what text you want to link with. This makes it easy to slip the link into your normal content with it sounding awkward. This can help raise conversion rates significantly.
2. You cannot choose which page to link to. With most affiliate programs, you can link to any page on a site you want. For example if you are an Amazon.com affiliate and you write a review of a book, you can link directly to the book’s page on Amazon. With AdSense referral you are stuck linking to the page the advertiser chooses, usually the home page.

One advantage of AdSense referral programs is that you can chose the keywords you want to use to display ads. If you have ever had trouble targeting AdSense for Content ads, this could be a great option for you. You can even choose individual ads that you want to display on your site. Again, if you are in a small niche, this could be a great way to get some very targeted ads.

Again, even though there are disadvantages to it, I would advise most publishers to give it a try. You never know which advertising option is going to work best for you.

This is my first review as part of the ReviewBack system. ReviewBack allows bloggers to review each other’s sites. I had a couple of other review requests, but rejected them because the sites were not relevant to AdMoolah’s audience.

The review I’m writing is for JCM’s – The 15000-dollar mission. I found this blog worthy of review because it is all about a bloggers quest to make $15,000 from on line activities. JCM’s blog began in December. He choose $15,000 dollars as the amount because he figured he had spent that much money on the internet, so it was time to make it back.

So far he has made a little over $2,000. At this pace he is going to take another 3 years to reach his goal! This slow ace is not for lack of trying however, JCM has made money from 18 different revenue stream including direct sales, AdSense, Text-Link-Ads, PayperPost and AuctionAds. One thing I’d like to hear more about is how he has generated his direct sales. This always seems like one of the more difficult things to get going, and JCM has seemed to do pretty well with it. He may have a post or two about this already, but I wasn’t able to find them.

It’s an interesting blog to read, because I like getting a peek into another webmaster’s efforts to make money. I hope JCM reaches his $15,000 goal soon!

Advertisers in Google AdWords program now have the ability to get data on the individual sites where their ads are being run. For each domain or URL, advertisers will now be able to see impressions, clicks, and conversion data. This means that advertisers will have good information to decide exactly which sites they want to advertise on.

This should be good news for sites which perform well for advertisers. Sites with data that the advertisers don’t like will see less competition for their ad space, resulting in lower bids.

Found via Search Engine Land

A new website ReviewBack launched today. It provides a service where people can review each others blog. The sign up is free and there are no fees involved in getting or giving reviews.

This service is sort of like ReviewMe or PayPerPost, except that instead of paying cash for a review, you pay by providing your own review back to the site that reviewed you. So far, I don’t see any signs of how they are going to monetize this service, but I assume that it will be advertising based revenue.

This seems like a great way for smaller blogs to get some link love and attention from other bloggers. I have signed up, along with about 60 other blogs. Right now there hasn’t been any “review action”, so I’m not even sure how the whole process works. If you want to find out how this thing work, sign up and request a review from me! I have to warn you that I will be very very picky about who I accept a review exchange from.

AdSense has updated their program policies with two significant changes:

1) A new paragraph has been added to the Site and Ad Behavior section

Publishers using online advertising to drive traffic to pages showing Google ads must comply with the spirit of Google’s Landing Page Quality Guidelines. For instance, if you advertise for sites participating in the AdSense program, the advertising should not be deceptive to users.

This sounds like it is simply enforcing what Google did when they sent out their emails cracking down on low quality sites. This won’t effect most publishers and will probably only worry those doing arbitrage with MFA sites.

2) AdSense now allows three link units on a page. Previously they only allowed a single link unit. Link ads are fairly small and unobtrusive, so I think this will be a good way for some publishers to increase the number of ads on a page in a way that is not too annoying for users.

Yahoo! today announced to its publishers and advertisers that it has introduced “Quality Based Pricing”. This seems like it is very similar to Google’s Smart Pricing.

From the Quality Based Pricing FAQ:

What is quality-based pricing?

As part of the evolution of the Yahoo Search Marketing advertising system, we now include an assessment of the quality of our publisher’s traffic when you are charged for a click from that source. Depending on the quality of the traffic from the partner or publisher where the click came from, the cost of your click can be automatically discounted by a certain percentage.

This means that many publishers will see the amount they earn on each click go down. The initial impact may be limited because Yahoo is introducing it to a limited set of keywords, but the number of keywords effected will increase over time.

There are constant complaints about smart pricing in AdSense forums, I have a feeling we will start seeing similar complaints on the YPN forums as well.

I have an Smart Pricing FAQ that tries to explain Smart pricing as much as possible.