Blogging Way of Life

Google AdSense Team sent an e-mail yesterday informing the publishers that AdSense have enabled third-party ads from now on which means that we won’t only publish Google AdSense Ads but also ads from other Google approved ad networks. The third-party ads will be in English and only in image format for now. The official announcment from Google AdSense Blog : http://adsense.blogspot.com/2008/05/introducing-third-party-ads-on-google.html

You have to set you ads to image format from AdSense Control Panel : Manage Ads section. If you don’t want to display the third-party ads you can change the ad settings to text only and go on with the AdSense Ads. I have set up the ads at my main page to image only to see the performance of the new third-party ads. The bloggers aren’t sure about the outcomes of introducing other ad networks to Google AdSense because now they will be in control of CPC.

I think that Google knows the best and they have probably taken their precautions to protect their publishers. They are now offering limited number of third-party networks only from America. Here is a list of approved third-party publishers:

North America: Ad servers

• DoubleClick DFA (www.doubleclick.com)
• Mediaplex (www.mediaplex.com)

North America: Rich media

• DoubleClick Rich Media (www.doubleclick.com)
• Eyeblaster (www.eyeblaster.com)
• EyeWonder (www.eyewonder.com)
• Interpolls (www.interpolls.com)
• Pointroll (www.pointroll.com)
• Unicast (www.unicast.com)

North America: Research

• Dynamic Logic/Safecount (www.safecount.net)
• Factor TG (www.factortg.com)
• IAG (www.iagr.com)
• InsightExpress (www.insightexpress.com)

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This month I’ve focused my attention to Hubpages. (You can check my review of Hubpages) Regarding that I don’t have so much time from my day work I choose Hubpages because it offers good organic traffic without any effort at all. It also gives me the freedom to write on any topic. This month I created two new Hubs:

Solar Power - Ways of Producing Electricty from Sun

PES 2008 TRICKS & MOVES

Both of them started generating Google traffic immediately. My Hub traffic is rising constantly and I expect double income in 2 months. Let’s cut the talk and come to the facts:

Earnings for January: 9,57$

My adsense earnings slightly increased from last month but my Amazon affiliates not producing any income somehow. Although I created a Hub about science fiction movies which seemed perfect for Amazon ads, I couldn’t get any orders.

I expect to find some time from my work this month and put some effort on my blog at the same time with my Hubs and at least earn more than 15$ in February.

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I don’t like to say “I knew it was coming” but I knew. I’ve written a post weeks before Agloco - Dead Already??? I was questioning how people could fall into the idea of getting rich by doing nothing. The real question to be asked was how did the big guys like John Chow got into this.

John Chowpublished Agloco’s mail to him telling that they can’t fund the operations anymore. It wasn’t a big surprise after-all. I was expecting better from them at least in admitting that they have failed. Agloco home page doesn’t show any signs of this catastrophe. An internet user can look at the page and still get the feeling that Agloco can make them rich. The ship has already sunk and captain (I guess we can consider John Chow as the captain of the ship regarding 29.668 people in his network)

I wonder when will the new super pyramid scheme idea emerge after this disaster and how many of those who believed Agloco will also believe in that brand new pyramid scheme?

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This is the first month my blog is published and I have started monetizing my blog. In the first month of the blog I wasn’t expecting any income actually because of the low content and no regular visitors at all. I have started this blog with 100$ spending (for my hosting and domain name) and the worst case scenario for me is losing that money. Looking at my earnings I won’t lose that money even if my earnings stays same. (which isn’t likely because as the content increases and I gain regular visitors the traffic is more likely to increase in an exponential graph)

Earnings for November: 15,76$

• Google Adsense Earnings : 13,12$
• Amazon Affiliate Earnings: 2,64$

 As you can see I don’t use Amazon Ads in my blog because it’s not an item/product related blog. I am publishing my Amazon ads at my Hubs. I have sold 4 items and this is a good amount as a beginner at Hubpages. I have earned from Adsense from my blog and my hubpages account. I have accomplished my first amount with a decent amount for the first month of a blog and I am expecting the 100$ limit in a few months.

My blog has been visited 1,813 times with 3,034 page visits. The best traffic source is StumbleUpon for now. Referring Sites has %86 percentage in my traffic while search engines are %4,5. (Which is normal for a new blog) For a new blog social networking sources seems the best way to start driving traffic.

Regarding all the effort I am spending on my my Hubs created 1,620 visits in November with %60 of the traffic is from search engines. So you can use Hubpages if you want to benefit from free organic traffic without any effort.

Thanks to all supporters and followers.

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Do you still remember the name Agloco? They tried to gain success using the same old story, “Get rich by doing nothing”. I am turning my spider senses on if someone proposes me getting rich by doing nothing. In my opinion Agloco was another pyramid scheme and I didn’t think of signing up before I see a cheque signed by them. I don’t know how an expert like John Chow got into this (money tastes sweet) but I think that he lost his hopes also. John Chow’s Agloco Page have been updated at the beginning and mid of each month until July and no more updates since then. I don’t think that even he has the toolbar installed but he was relying on 21.000 referrals in his network.

 You have to study some human behaviours before getting in a project at this scale. Agloco managed to get huge number of users following their announcement. (1.000.000 sign ups as last statistics) The idea of earning money from referrals attends people. While each individual signs up and make other people sign up as referrals, those new users will also see that the way of earning money depends on earnings from referrals so they look out for referrals too, but there comes a time when the community is saturated and no more users are signing up as referrals. No more chains added. What happens next? The last ring of chain breaks-up because they aren’t making any money actually and the links get broken from bottom to top. What you get actually is the reverse chain reaction. Agloco could prevent that by distributing cash immediately and keeping the chains connected but they are promising income in a very far away future. You can’t expect people to be patient in such a system.

Everybody knows that systems based on pyramid schemes don’t last long. It only makes the links at the top rich. I guess that John Chow knew that and he tried his luck. If Agloco ever pays out money, John Chow will be the one getting it.

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I am a supporter of Google Adsense for bringing quality to the online ad services and they have set the standards higher for advertisers and publishers. I am using adsense units because of the confidence and believing in their good intention to provide a good experience for both advertisers and publishers. I can understand their tendency to look out for advertisers because they are the source of money. The latest news already created some buzz for publishers even before officially announced.

According to Problogger’s news Google will announce shortly the new ad click system which disables the clicks to background and texts, making clicks only available through title and url. According to Problogger Google is explaining this situation by telling :

“We’re rolling out a change to our text ad formats to help reduce accidental clicks and increase value for advertisers…..This new format will match the changes we’ve implemented on Google.com to help decrease the number of accidental clicks and increase the number of ad conversions. A reduction in accidental clicks will keep users on your pages, interacting with your content until they choose to click on an ad. This change will enhance the user’s overall experience with your websites and improve advertiser campaign value, but it’s likely that your click-through rate will decrease.”

I have no objection to increasing targeted clicks but doing this by disabling click-able areas doesn’t seem okay with me. Google will also cancel some targeted clicks by the way. I tried to figure out the effects by making an experiment myself. I looked at some ads in various pages and I realized that I was trying to click the ads through backgrounds mostly. That’s because Google Ads has been a brand itself and our eyes are perceiving whole ad unit as a block. You can argue that people would find a way to click ads somehow but this is ads we are speaking of and people won’t be so persistent to click ads.

There’s an opinion that advertisers are going to increase the rates and the changes won’t effect publishers but I think that it will create bad results in short term and will push publishers to look out for new sources.

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You know all the buzz going about Google Pagerank penalty for text link ad users. There is still too much discussion going about why and how but marketing people stopped discussing and provided a solution which is approved by Google Judges.

 ScratchBack is a new widget developed by text-link-ads to provide a solution for the Pagerank related problems. The problem with text link ads was Google started to see that as a fraud which provides people high pagerank links for money. ScratchBack solves this problem by creating this javascript widget which provides nofollow links. Which means that Google spiders won’t follow those links and it’s not a danger to pagerank system. ScratchBack says that they got approval from Google for this new system.

Google created such a fear for text links that ScratchBack use the term “tip” instead of “ads”. The system works as follows:

You place the widget on your blog and people can place their links for ad purposes or just for tipping the blogger. You choose the cost for links which starts from a minimum of 1$ and going up. (1$ can be considered as a tip) When a person tips you the link moves to the top position in your link list and goes one step down each time new ad is displayed. (You can disable this feature and enable a limited time display)

The system is in beta phase now and I hope they improve designs and provide a custom design option for selecting color patterns and let you give a title to the list.

The system seems like good to give it a try. You can try by giving me a tip (or scratch my back:) for just 1 $ or just follow the link “Get Your Own Top List”.

Edit: I’ve sent my own design to scratchback team and trying to change design but could’t find an easy way to do so I am removing the widget until they provide an easy color selection tool like adsense products.

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I know that reading long program policies may be boring. Don’t worry, BloggerDollar is here to let you skip the boring part and dive in to earning cash.

However there are some facts you need the know about your most reliable source Adsense. If you don’t want to get banned from Adsense and spend rest of your life looking for a subsitute, keep some important facts about Adsense in your mind:

1. Invalid Clicks

Google has a strong policy to prevent invalid clicks to keep their advertisers pleased. Don’t forget that Google guys are propably smarter then you so don’t even bother creating artificial traffic/clicks.

2. Own Clicks

Don’t ever click your own ads. Even if the ad actually interests you or you just wanna check out if the ads work. Google has the magical powers to sense you clicking your own ads so be careful. If you click your own ads by mistake inform Adsense about the situation. 1 or 2 clicks won’t get you rich so it isn’t worth the risk.

3. Encouraging Clicks

Don’t ever use terms like “click my ads, visit my sponsors, make me rich, i will die if you don’t click those links”.  (However you may use the term “Sponsored Links”)

Don’t try to trick users by hiding ads, showing as part of text etc..

Don’t point out ads by arrows, images etc..

In this situation Google magic works again and you will be caught.

4. Contextual Ads

This one is a little confusing. Google allows other ads and PayPerClick programs to be placed on your website but other ads shouldn’t be resembling google ads. So placing an ad linking to dirty sites is damaging google’s reputation so that is prohibited (That’s understandable).

Google also doesn’t want competition so ads resembling Google Ads isn’t allowed. That one is a little confusing. This term may be to prevent Yahoo’s affiliate service (which looks like Google ads in a sense). So be cautious before placing other ads to your site.

5. Illegal Content

I think I don’t have to mention mature content, hacks/cracks are illegal. You have to be careful with the material you publish because sharing a mp3 you like with your community may seem innocent to you but that is illegal.

6. Site Behaviour

If you have got a free hosting you should check if your service is no pop-up. Many free hosting companies force their pop-up ads with your site and this will ban you from Adsense.

7. Ad Placement

You can’t place more than 3 ad units and 2 search boxes. Even if you do place more than 3 ads they won’t be displayed. There is no penalty for that but broken links in your website is a bad impression for your community.

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Not so fast.. Here is the deal; you start advertising other websites or help them promote their products from your blog. The most reliable and the perfect start for advertising is Google Adsense (as you probably already know). After opening your account in Google Adsense, you create your personal Ad Code by entering Adsense setup menu and following the instructions.

Adsense offers several types of ads to match your blog. You can check them here. I used Banner and vertical banner in my blog (As we change our blog design we can try different options). While choosing the banner color you can try to find suitable combinations to match your blogs theme. Most bloggers claim that their incomes remarkably raised when they optimized the ad colors to their blogs.

When you generate the adcode, you have to implement the code to your blog. You can try out several plug-ins to implement the code automatically (I will review a few of them in the following days). For start you can try to implement code yourself (Nothing so hard, i tried and failed several times and success at last). For implementing codes yourself go to the theme editor in your wordpress admin menu. You see the files at right. I added my codes to top of main index and bottom of sidebar. In the main index I added the code right after second line “div id=”content” class=”narrowcolumn” and in the side bar I added the code right before last line “/div”. You can try out different type of ads with different positioning.

Now we have the ads placed so does the cash start to flow? No! You can stare at your own ads forever and this one will not make you earn a dollar you can be sure. So we have to start building some traffic.

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