AdMoolah News and Views

I often see advice in forums telling people not to use AdWords to drive traffic to a site that uses AdSense. For example, today, this threadd at DigitalPoint forums, which asks “Will I get banned if use adwords on my site with adsense?”. One person advises:

using adwords to get traffic to an adsense optimized site IS called Arbitrage which google doesn’t like. i would not suggest it

I also found this advice in another thread at DigitalPoint:

Hey, thats againt TOS. You cannot send Adwords traffic to Adsense Sites.

Obviously there is a strong belief out there that Google frowns upon using AdWords to drive traffic to an AdSense site. The fact is that Google does not mind you using AdWords to send traffic to your AdSense site. Look at this post at Google’s official AdSense blog. In it they say

We’d like to share some of Peter’s insights with you about monetising his sites with AdSense and his experience using AdWords to attract visitors.

Clearly if Google is sharing stories about an AdSense publisher using AdWords, they do not frown upon this practice.

There is one thing that Google will ban your AdSense account for, however. They do not like it when you use AdWords to send traffic to a low quality site that displays AdSense. These types of sites are frequently referred to as MFAs (Made For AdSense). This is what Google had to say about this:

This new policy requirement doesn’t mean that you can’t use online advertising; it simply means that if you do, you need to be sure that the way you advertise meets with the guidelines, whether it’s through AdWords or through any other advertising program.

So how do you know what Google considers a “quality” site. You can read all about it at Google’s Landing Page and Site Quality Guidelines. The quality guidelines boil down to three things:

1. Original Content – Make sure the content is original and is relevant to any advertising you do.
2. Transparency – Make sure: your visitors know who there dealing with; don’t mess with their browsers or automatically download software; and have a clear privacy statement.
3. Navigation – Make sure you site is easy to navigate and doesn’t force them to click on ads to get away from you site.

Basically if you have a real website that you built for users, you will have no problems advertising with AdWords and keeping you AdSense account safe.

The Inside AdSense blog today announced that they now have a Known Issues page. This page lists anything that Google is aware of that may cause problems, and possible work arounds.

I’m not sure if this is something that they have been working on for a while and it was just a coincidence that they launched this the day they had a major reporting outage, or if they whipped this together today. My guess is that it’s the former.

This will be a good place to check out if you notice something amiss with AdSense. I’m sure today’s outage caused a lot of publisher to panic (Are my sites down? Did I get banned?) and this should help next time something like this happens.

If the first thing you do in the morning is log into your AdSense control panel, you probably had a little bit of a scare. It looks like the AdSense reports have not been updated since a little after midnight on pacific time. It does look like ads are still displaying normally, so I am assuming impressions and clicks are being counted, just not reported.

AdSense occasionally goes through reporting outages, but this one is much longer than normal.

Update: 3:00pm It looks like things are back to normal now.

When I launched my first website, it was an immediate success. It was on the first page of Google SERPs for the terms I thought it would, and it quickly shot up to a Page Rank 6. Was this because I was a skilled SEO? Not at all. I didn’t even no what the terms SEO and Page Rank meant. The first time someone pointed out that my site had a Page Rank of 6, I had to ask what that even was.

Why was this site so successful? I built a site that was actually informative and useful for people. I put a lot of hard work into building the content of the site and asked a lot of people for feedback. People liked the site so they linked to it. It quickly became an authority site in the eyes of Google.

I firmly believe that the best way to get traffic to a site is to have content that people actually want to see.

Does this mean that I think that SEO is useless? No, I think it has its place. If you are writing an article for your pet site about fantastic large dog breeds you might want to do a bit of keyword research. If your article was originally titled “Great Large Dog Breeds” and you do a bit of research and find that people actually search for “Best Large Dog Breed” a lot more than they search for “Great Large Dog Breeds” you may want to re-title your article. You also want to do things like make sure your site is easily spiderable by search engine robots.

My point is that when you originally conceive of a site you shouldn’t be thinking, “What will be a killer site for search engines?”, you should be asking “What will be a killer site for my visitors?”.

I just signed up for The Black Ink Project. It is a free online course on using affiliate programs. I usually don’t go for these types of things, but the pitch was pretty good. They weren’t saying it’s a get-rich-quick type of course, it seemed like it was very reasonable.

There will be 4 1-week modules in the course. Each module has 5 hour long sessions via WebEx conferences. After each week of sessions there is a week off to do “homework”.

Since it’s free I figured I have nothing to lose except a little time, and I might pick up some good information. There is limited space, so sign up now if you want to get in on it.

I have been using twitter for a few weeks now and can now see why people like it so much. I’m not totally addicted yet, but I think that’s mostly because no one I know personally are twits. Once Twitter gets more popular and my personal friends are on there, I could see using it a lot more. Here are some initial thoughts:

• Twitter is to Blogging as IM is to EMail. Email and blogging are slower, more well thought out. IM and Twitter are quick and impulsive. EMail and IM are generally one-to-one (or one to a few), Blogging and Twitter are one-to-many. So think of Twitter as quick and impulsive blogging or one-to-many IMing.
  
• Great for staying up to the minute. It’s amazing how quickly news breaks on Twitter. After using Twitter for a while you feel out of the loop when you learn about something even a few hours after it happens.
• Off-twitter popularity translates to twitter popularity The best way to be popular on Twitter is to have a popular blog or site. There aren’t too many Twitter-only celebrities. If you have an A-List blog and start to Twitter, people will follow. Just look at John Battelle who announced today he was going to start to Twitter. He already has over 70 followers and he hasn’t even posted anything on Twitter yet!
• Lots of good tools. I have been using TwitterFox , a plugin for Firefox which shows you tweets from those who are following and allows you to send updates as well. I have also been using hahlo.com on my iPhone. There are lots of other tools and service out there as well.

If you feel like following me, see http://twitter.com/tlainevool. I only have 4 followers so I am feeling pretty lonely.

Back in February at Affiliate Summit West Jason Calacanis made some comments during his keynote that I’ve been thinking about lately. He seemed to think that people were wasting their time earning $100,000 a month in affiliate earnings and they should go out to create companies that they could sell for tens of millions of dollars.

I think Jason’s comments were probably more to get a reaction then a well thought out statement. I think there are some real differences between a “make money online” home based business and being a entrepreneur and doing a “real” start-up.

I think I have a pretty good perspective on this, I have co-founded a software product company, worked at several small companies, and am doing the whole home based “make money online” thing as well.

Here are several reasons why people might want to do one of these over the other.

1. Different Skill Sets. Building websites, doing SEO and running PPC campaigns takes a very different skill set than trying to organize a company, manage employees and raise funding. Presenting a PowerPoint slide to a VC is not the same as using keyword tools to come up with those winning long tail terms. Although being a “people person” can help with a home based business it is possible to get into it and make money without ever talking to a real person, but you can’t be a hermit and have employees and raise money from investors.
2. Different Lifestyle Choices. Running a startup usually means long hours, being responsible for other co-founders and employees and worrying about meeting revenue targets for investors. Running a start-up involves a lot of moving parts, and if you are the CEO, you need to make sure each one of those parts is functioning. (For example Jason Calacanis was fixing the air-conditioning at Mahalo today.) Although a start-up can have a relaxed atmosphere with no dress-code and free soda, it doesn’t compare with shuffling to your home office in the morning in your bathrobe and slippers to check the latest stats on you site, and than deciding to go skiing that day. I’m not saying the home business route is easy, but it is a lot more flexible then a lot of other choices.
3. Life Goals. To some people sitting around at home in their pajamas making a lot of money would not be very satisfying. There are those who would like to build something of substance that they could be proud of. If you start a company that you can sell for tens of millions of dollars you have something you can point to in your life and say “I did that.”

If I believed in things like personality types I would say that running a start-up is for type-As while working at home is for Type-Bs.

4. Different Risk Levels. When you start a home based business you can start expecting to get some money rolling in within a few months. When you found a start-up, you know it could be a long time before you can attract enough investment money to give yourself a salary. If you don’t have a good bank-roll, you could go hungry a few months into your start-up. If it flops you have nothing to show for it and you have to start from scratch. When you start a home based internet business you can have some reasonable expectation to make some money with enough hard work. And even if it doesn’t really take off you will have a small cash-flow going.

That being said I think there are some similarities between starting up a company and starting a home based business.

1. Need for IndependenceMost of the people who start home business or start-up companies aren’t satisfied working for someone else. They have their own ideas and want to see if they can make it on their own.
2. Self Discipline This is the flip-side of the last point. Now that you are out on your own and don’t have anyone telling you what to do, you need to get yourself to do things. If you’re not self-disciplined enough to put in enough work, no business that you start will succeed.

Of course, I think this is a bit of an artificial distinction between home-based businesses and “real” start ups. I look at people like Jeremy Schoemaker and Darren Rowse, who seem to be straddling the line between these two worlds.

Lately I’ve been thinking about the different strategies individuals use to make money purely online. By individuals I mean someone working alone (or maybe with a partner) who hasn’t gotten any funding, typically works from home and has no desire to build up a large company with employees. These strategies are also purely online, so selling items on EBay isn’t included since it involves physical goods. Here are the different strategies I have come up with.

1. Content Site Publishing. Building websites and writing blogs. Usually this involves make money from a combination of CPC networks like AdSense, affiliate programs and direct ad sales. Another monetization strategy for content sites is subscriptions. Often this starts by building a site for fun and then realizing that the site can be monetized. Darren Rowse (ProBlogger) is a good example of someone who uses this strategy with CPC networks. Jeremy Schoemaker (Shoemoney) is someone who has had success with subscription sites. John Chow is someone who has done well with direct sales and affiliate programs. I also put myself in this category with CPC and affiliate programs.
2. Paid Search Marketing. The goal here run massive PPC campaigns on networks like AdWords and Yahoo Search Marketing to drive traffic to landing pages. Affiliate programs are used almost exclusively for this strategy. Amit Mehta is a well known PPC Marketer.
3. Email List Marketing. Some online marketers build up huge email lists and then sell informational products (i.e. ebooks) through messages to the email lists. Almost any AdSense “Guru” uses this strategy. Examples are Joel Comm (AdSense Secrets Revealed) and Mike Filsaime (Butterfly Marketing)
4. Arbitrage. The strategy here is to but PPC traffic for relatively cheap and then send the traffic to sites that have a ads with good CPC on them. I can’t point to examples of people who use this strategy as they tend fly under the radar.
5. MFA Spammers. MFA is Made For AdSense. The idea here is to make pages having little content, or creating content by scraping other sites. You then place CPC ads on the page and drive traffic to them. Since there is little content on the site, people end up clicking the ads. This strategy is getting harder to do since Google has been cracking down on these types of sites. Again, most people who use this strategy aren’t willing to admit it because it is seen as unethical.

Of course many people use more than one of these strategies to varying degrees of success.

I’d love to hear your feedback. Which strategies do you use? Am I missing any major strategies?

I’ve decided to start using Twitter. I’m so far behind the curve on this that there are some people, like Hugh McLeod, are even burnt out on Twitter. There is also someone selling their Twitter account on EBay right now. The current bid is $465. The auction is set to end April 22nd.

I thought I’d see what all the fuss is about so I’m starting to Twitter. You can follow me at: http://twitter.com/tlainevool . I’m going to try to keep the tweets more aimed at online/tech things more than what-I-had-for-lunch type posts, but this whole thing is an experiment so we’ll see how it goes.

Here are some free e-books about making money online that I have run across lately. The important thing to remember about ebooks, or anything else you read, is that they can give you the best advice in the world, but that advice won’t earn you a penny unless you actually take action.

How to Develop Money-Making Niche Sites with WordPress
This is a good entry-level introduction to setting up a WordPress site with the idea of making money in mind. A great read for those not yet familiar with WordPress.

Make Money Online with John Chow dot Com
This book goes beyond just setting up a WordPress blog. It discusses the techniques that John Chow used to start making over $30,000 a month from blogging.

High Performance Affiliate Marketing
This is an extensive look at affiliate marketing, weighing in at 148 pages. It goes through an introduction to affiliate marketing, shows how to pick niches, build websites and then get traffic to the site via Paid Search and SEO.

If you have any favorites that I have not listed here, leave a comment. I’ll update the post with the books that I check out and like.