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Click Fraud

Posted by staying alive is not enough Thursday, July 17, 2014 0 comments

If you're using AdWords or AdSense you must have heard about an emerging practice in the underworld of computing called "click fraud". But what exactly is click fraud and how is it accomplished?

Well AdSense uses a payment mechanism that awards a certain amount of money to a publisher (someone who holds an AdSense banner on their page) every time a person clicks on the said banner. So click fraud is the attempt to have people clicking the ads just so that they can earn a greater income.

There are people setting up sites for the sole purpose of fraudulently generating revenue through Google's AdSense program. These users achieve an incredible number of clicks through many methods, some complex and sophisticated and some rudimentary and simple.

One of the most complex is through the use of so called "hitbots". These are automated programs who emulate clicking the links in AdSense banners (there are some that actually click the banners as well).

Google's AdSense protection scheme is by no means perfect and nearly anyone can find the details of surmounting the protection mechanism, ironically just by doing a Google search.

Another, more rudimentary method is to hire a lot of people in a poor country to click the links on your site. This means these people will actually sit all day and just click links so you can earn a fortune. They come from very poor countries like India, and they're prepared to do so for just $0.50 an hour.

Of course, there's a problem with this mechanism. Once Google receives a large number of clicks from a single address, the address and the site that had the AdSense banner will be banned, and the illicit behavior might even get the fraudster sued.

To prevent this from happening, many people use a large number of proxy servers for the purpose of clicking. These are basically trojans, located on computers throughout the world (though mostly in the US). What's even more daunting is that these clicks will appear to originate from an actual computer so such scams are really hard to detect.

And don't think this happens only in isolated instances. There is a great deal of illegal activity in this domain.

In fact there's so much that if search engine companies don't increase their security with such programs as AdSense, such criminal behavior could become more become even more damaging.

Google has a very strict policy regarding click fraud, and it has sued those employing such techniques in the past. But while the search engine giant tries its best to minimize the risk of click fraud there's certainly room for a lot of improvement.

It is estimated that more then 20% of the clicks that follow an AdSense link are just done in order to get money from the person paying for the ad. Some people believe the number of fraudulent clicks to be even twice as large.

There are a great deal more schemes involving click fraud, such as groups of AdSense publishers clicking each other's links (which is referred to as "clicking rings", or spamming people so that they click such links.

Despite Google still holding click fraud on a leash, the phenomenon is certainly raising concerns for the advertisers on AdWords, but despite this advertising with Google's AdSense still remains more profitable for the advertiser, as opposed to traditional untargeted advertising schemes.

There are some means of protection against such schemes and all advertisers should be savvy enough to employ them. Many advertisers choose to avoid the content network all together for fear of click fraud.

Top Paying Keywords

Posted by staying alive is not enough Sunday, July 13, 2014 0 comments

In people's search for higher incomes from Google AdSense a lot of AdSense publishers are looking to find those keywords that really bring the best income possible. The higher an advertiser pays for a keyword, they more the advertiser receives when they click on a link.

But how can you find such words for your site? Well, the answer to that question depends a little on who you are and what you're prepared to do to get those keywords. But the general good news is that you can indeed find such words if you need them.

Of course, if you can afford such a solution, one of the best ways of getting your hands on those words would be to pay for them. There are specialized companies that do business by finding people good keywords, not only for the purpose of more AdSense revenue but for search engine optimization as well.

Such a service can be found on "Top Paying Keywords" http://www.toppayingkeywords.com/?hop=moneymkr and this is a no-brainer to getting relevant content on your site and increasing your revenue by a whole bunch quickly.

Of course, if such a solution does not work for you, you can ultimately resort to a method of personal investigation. That means you try out keywords by yourself and see which ones work better or worse for yourself.

While you might also be doing this for the first method (paying someone else to get the keywords) it would probably be better then this because you'd at least be narrowing down search to certain items.

While you're trying this make sure to keep using AdSense's 'channels' feature along the way as it can be a very good way of letting you know which sections of your site are generating income and which aren't.

Of course, you can also yield a great amount of help from AdSense's arch enemy Overture. Overture gives you the possibility of entering keywords and finding out not only how much advertisers are paying to get them on your page, but how much people are clicking on the words as well. This service can be found at: http://www.pixelfast.com/overture/

You can also try out a tool called Word Tracker http://jeremyburns.com/a/wordtracker. What this tool can do is tell you how many sites are already using the same keywords. Learn from this lesson and don't try to use the words that a lot of people are already using.

Also, a great aid may very well be found in Google itself. Search Google for any keywords you may wish to include in your pages and look at the results. The results on the left will probably be your competitors (and if they have Google AdSense ads on their page you can bet then are) while the links on the right display ads relevant to your search.

If your search doesn't yield any AdSense results then you might want to reconsider including those keywords in your site.

Make sure you don't use any dead words (words that don't get any links on AdSense other then public ads. That is probably the most important thing you should be doing.

Of course these are only a few methods of getting out of the dead zone and starting to make serious money with AdSense. If you've seen a lot of people with "not so hot" websites generating a lot of AdSense revenue, using these tips can get you right behind them (or in front if you're really smart) very fast. Although this is the case it is also very important to remember that having the highest paying words does not mean that you make the most money. You have to also consider how many times the advert is clicked on.

How Much Money Will I earn Through Adsense?

Posted by staying alive is not enough Friday, July 11, 2014 0 comments

If you're looking at Google's AdSense program you're surely asking yourself how much you could make from such a program, and you probably think you can't make as much as you can from traditional advertising schemes.

How Much Money Will I earn Through Adsense?

Google, of course, keeps a great deal of secrecy regarding how much AdWords advertisers pay per each click directed to their site and the same applies for how much AdSense banner holders make from their websites.

While there's nothing official, rumors circulate around the Internet concerning the amount of cash a website can earn by using AdSense. And many people (illegally) disclose how much they have been making with AdSense. There are stories of people raising over one thousand dollars per month using AdSense.

There are also stories of people exceeding $100,000.00 per month but it's a bit hard to believe such stories. The truth to the matter is that if you have a small website and you just want it to support itself, and don't wish to reach your pocket for its maintenance costs you can probably do this with AdSense.

AdSense is also very good for people who host a lot of pages. Even if the said pages don't generate a lot of traffic individually, every click counts and you can earn up with a lot of money by doing this. And that just goes to prove that sometimes quantity matters nearly as much as quality.

There's no telling how much money you're going to make by using Google's AdSense but you can sort of tell for yourself, before actually starting, by taking a few things into consideration.

First, is the amount of visits you get every day. While there's no way to estimate precisely on this, you can generally make a safe assumption that if you have a lot of clicks per day you'll be making good money.

Also, this depends on what exactly your site is about. If your site is about anything popular (music, sex, whatever) you're bound to get a lot of banner clicks. These have a coefficient associated with them, called the CTR (click through ratio).

Basically, what it translates to is that if a large proportion of your site's visitors click the ads you'll be making more money. And the best way to do this is to have some popular content in your site, ensuring the links direct users towards popular items as well.

Then of course, there's the position and number of ads on your website. While you don't want to overdo it, having many links will undoubtedly generate more income for you as a webmaster. Do not however believe, that if you just add a lot of ads in an important portion of your site, visitors could always just skip them (and be assured that many do just that).

There's something between an art and a science to positioning your ads. People generally look in certain places and never look in others, and knowing this a website author and/or webmaster can do a great deal of things to increase his earnings with AdSense.

All in all, the amount of money you make with AdSense depends on many factors. But if you have a site with interesting contents and/or many pages, and if you see a constantly large amount of traffic every day, you can bet you'll be making a lot of money with AdSense.

Even if you aren't in the above categories, AdSense is still worth using because there's very little hassle in setting it up, and many times it can help financially support the site, whilst being a nice bonus to get through the post at the end of the month.

Tips To Success on Adsense

Posted by staying alive is not enough Thursday, July 10, 2014 0 comments

As you use Google's AdSense for more and more time you begin to learn from the mistakes of the past, and you slowly begin to realize which of your actions kept your site from reaching its full potential.

But an important part to making a mistake is telling people about it and teaching them how to avoid making the same mistake. So this is a list of the top five mistakes people using AdSense make.

You should read them well, and see if any of them is applicable to your contents. If it is, you must stop and attempt to fix such errors as quickly as possible.

The first major no-no that everyone seems to be hitting at one point or another has to do with breaking the rules. Google's AdSense is a great program but it relies on you respecting a few set rules.

The most important thing is not to create "artificial clicks" through any means possible. Never click your own links, never ask your friends or close ones to click the links and never, by any means have your content encouraging the visitors to click the links. You run the risk of being permanently banned, and that will definitely damage your revenue.

Failing to comply with Google's terms could have your AdSense account suspended. And this is why this rule is by all means the most important one of all. It's because this is the difference between life or death.

The second thing users get wrong a lot of time is having a bad color palette for ads. Many times this happens because the publishers aren't knowledgeable enough to change default color palettes.

Others just can't seem to spend enough time in changing those defaults. Having bad ads that stand out is sure to push people away from clicking; whilst having something which is clearly visible yet distinctive will.

Third, of course, the position of the ads is probably the key element you should get right if you want to maximize your profits with AdSense. This is noted in a lot of places on the web and Google talks about this as well. Google can provide you with statistics which illustrate what positions work particularly well on your website.

Fourthly, banner ads are also a very bad idea if you're using AdSense. 480x60 type ads are a sure way to drive many people away as most Internet surfers have developed a natural resistance to such means of advertising.

And last, but clearly not least, is not taking care of the site running the ads. Because ultimately it doesn't matter how cool the site is itself. If it doesn't have updated contents and a lot of daily visitors it will probably never earn you any serious AdSense revenues.

So these are the most important five things people get wrong while using the AdSense program. But of course if you don't like this means of expressing the issues, here are the top five things you should do to ensure your AdSense ads are constantly bringing in that revenue.

Never break Google's policy. Don't make visitors create "artificial clicks" on your website regardless of the person doing so or the reason. Make sure your ads have the right colors that blend in with your site, and make sure they're positioned in the right places to attract as many customers as possible. Always try to avoid using banner-like (480x60) adds unless you really know what you're doing and constantly keep your site fresh and up to date.

So with that in mind you should be raising your AdSense revenues in no time.

Tools for Google Adsense

Posted by staying alive is not enough Tuesday, July 8, 2014 0 comments

If you're just boarding on the AdSense train, and looking to find a quick way to make the profits you've seen all being pulled of all over the Internet, you might be interested in a couple of tools.

These software tools are designed to aid AdSense publishers in getting a better understanding on how traffic flows through their site. Some will help you in understanding which keywords gain you more money and which locations give you the best AdSense payment.

One of the best such tools available is AdSense Gold (http://www.profitbooks.com/go/astracker) which allows you to have a better understanding of which ads and formats actually get more clicks and which are useful or nearly useless.

This program works by tracking views and clicks on all the publisher's pages. It even goes as far as offering you the possibility to see which referrer each visitor came in through.

There's a free tool called SynSense (http://www.singerscreations.com/RSS/Posts/235.asp) which is more of an AdSense monitoring tool. This sits in the tray and offers actualized AdSense stats as you hover your mouse over its icon. It's a very nice tool for those which like to be informed on how their AdSense is doing at all times of the day.

Google provides you with stats in a csv format on their site. So someone made a tool that can automatically download such files and extract a lot of information from them. The name of this tool is CSV AdStats and it is available from http://www.nix.fr/en/csvadstats.aspx?q=download

It has a large number of features, including the possibility to highly customize reported stats, exporting data and charts to other formats. It's in French but the language can very easily be changed to English.

Of course any tool can only access these stats as often as 15 minutes but the authors are well aware of that fact and none of these tools will get you in trouble with Google because of that.

If, however, you're browsing content most of the time, and your tool of choice is the Firefox Internet browser, there's an extension for this program that allows you to view the stats in your status bar.

Again, this software is aware of Google's 15 minute rule and enforces its usage, 15 minutes being the minimum time between updates. The Google AdSense notifier for Firefox can be obtained from http://code.mincus.com/?p=3

There is also a program called Golden Keywords out there that helps you in getting the best keywords for your site. It's really efficient and very easy to use. It does come with a price tag though, it costs $49.95 and it can be obtained from http://www.regnow.com/softsell/nph-softsell.cgi?item=8616-2

So as you can see, software developers are making more and more programs meant to help you in your quest to maximize your AdSense profits. But before you go out looking for them remember that Google has a few features of its own as well.

It does offer some reports (albeit a bit more limited) and using the 'channels' feature is a good way of finding out which ads on your site are really bringing in most of the revenue.

Be on the look out as new tools appear daily and make sure to invest time in your site, as that is the real key in success with AdSense.

Why Use Google Adsense?

Posted by staying alive is not enough Sunday, July 6, 2014 0 comments

Undoubtedly, you've heard about Google's AdSense and you are thinking about giving it a go. But is it really worth placing an AdSense banner on your site?

The answer is a definite yes. You could always have some other banner on your site, or even use some search of affiliate ad program and that would probably make you some money, given of course that your site enjoys a healthy amount of visitors. However with affiliate marketing, it is expected that the visitor from your website completes a sale before you are remunerated.

But that's nowhere near what you get for using AdSense. There are people who earn in excess of 100.000 dollars per year by using AdSense. And it doesn't just stop with making more money. Firstly, the ads are text only. That means they're by far less obtrusive on your visitors then your average, flashy banner that's designed to catch the eye of the visitor.

Sure, you'll have to ensure they get better placement, so as to be noticed but despite that they don't bother viewer’s as much as traditional ads. Think about the many sites you've seen using pop-ups, floating banners and many other schemes that will have visitors screaming in anger every time they visit the said website. You can actually do better then that, annoying people less and still making an amount of money.

Secondly, the ads are generated based on the contents of your site automatically. When you use an affiliate ad program, you have to specify certain categories that your sites belong to.

However, if any page on your site falls outside of these categories, the banners aren't targeted anymore. And what that means is that you're potentially showing ads to people who don't have any interest in them and that can lead to inefficiencies.

With Google AdSense that just about never happens: the ads present on your site will always be in sync with whatever your visitors are interested in and that adds to your site's value and to the revenue it produces.

What's more, the look of these banners and their size is customizable, which means they will feel more integrated with the rest of your site's content, which brings an increase in your site's overall visual quality as opposed to a traditional approach.

For many people, there's also a great problem with finding people to advertise on their site as well. AdSense is clearly the easiest solution available to this problem today.

It's free to join the AdSense program and it almost takes no time at all. The potential database of websites from AdWords is larger then anything you might encounter from any competitor, numbering over 150.000 users. This means as more people compete the CPC or cost per click for search terms will inevitably rise.

Also, setting up AdSense on your site is a breeze, and you can complete the whole process in less then an hour. It takes a lot less to do then any form of affiliate advertising which is yet another reason to choose the easy AdSense approach.

All you need to do is add an AdSense banner on your website (other then registering with the program of course) is to copy & paste a few lines and you're all done, you get to choose where the banners go, how large they are and how they integrate with the rest of your site.

For any webmaster out there, that's a killer scheme because it lets you draw the line between your site's usability level and the amount of advertising you wish to have. Some people need the money badly while others just keep AdSense running to pay for the hosting of their website.

AdSense is a great advertising program because a lot of thought has went into making it "just work for everyone". It works great for the people who use AdWords, for the webmasters using AdSense, and most importantly for the visitors of the websites.

Getting Started With Adsense

Posted by staying alive is not enough Friday, July 4, 2014 0 comments

A very important element in the rapid adoption of AdSense is that it has been very easy for publishers to get the ads on their site as quickly as possible.

Integrating AdSense in your website takes only a few minutes, and you can be on your way with one or more nicely integrated AdSense ads.

The first thing you need to do is navigate to http://www.google.com/adsense and either apply or log in with your existing account and password. What follows is a page presenting the Google AdSense Terms and Conditions which you must agree to in order to proceed.

You are presented with a report page which you can use to get a detailed status on how your AdSense advertising is doing. This allows you to improve your site's contents and layout to maximize your AdSense earnings.

On the top of your page you also have link to the setup section where you can generate the code that will need to be pasted on your website in order to have AdSense banners on your page.

You can use AdSense for text (the said ads), using a search box or with referrals. Your choice among these options depends on how users will navigate your site.

Finally, there is a "My Account" tab which allows you to set up details concerning your account, payment and tax information.

To add a text ad on your site, go back to the "AdSense Setup" tab and click the "AdSense for content" link. Make sure you have cookies enabled in your browser.

You can make a choice between ad units and link units. The former contain text and or images concerning a certain site for each unit, most with a detailed description, the latter only contain links to certain types.

Of course, it's a bit hard to know which type you should use so you should probably experiment with both for a while before you decide.

You can also view an example of how the unit will look to the right of your page. However, you may only use three ad units and one link unit on any given page. This is believed to be a step which Google takes for quality control.

The next step is to choose your add format and colors. You can basically select any color palette you choose with Google offering some of its own if you don't have the time or skill to create one. You can constantly view how the palette will look through the aid of an example. The one that works best in terms of appearance and revenues will vary with the look, feel and content of a website.

However, your ad formats are limited to a choice of eleven formats. There's an "Ad Formats" link which takes you to a page that lets you see all even of these in action so you can decide best which one suits your site. Sometimes the most intrusive, doesn’t work best however again, this can vary from website to website.

After you finish with customization, you can click "Continue" from the bottom of the page.

You are now presented with a section entitled "AdSense for Content". You can click anywhere in the text and that shows the JavaScript required to get AdSense running. This will automatically select the text in the box.

You can then copy it and paste it into your pages directly. If you use dynamic pages, you should paste this code within your template so as to ensure that it gets displayed on any page of your website. Some advertisers choose not to display Adsense on every page, and this is understandable. An example of this is a company that has adsense, may also have terms and condition which would inevitably provide legal resources which would probably be deemed inappropriate.

What is then left for you to do is get content on your page (provided you didn't have any already). Google AdSense crawlers will soon visit your site, making sure that the ads displayed are relevant to your site's content.

And you're all done. For a simple page this should indeed be a matter of a few minutes, which is precisely what makes AdSense the choice for so many. Although it is quick, its mass appeal also makes it the best. Through being the most popular, advertisers and publishers alike see Adsense and Adwords as their natural first choice.

Adsense is for Everyone

Posted by staying alive is not enough Wednesday, July 2, 2014 0 comments

When Google's AdSense appeared, there were a lot of people who doubted Google's idea would be marketable and actually generate any profits. Yet as we stand here today it's probably the most well known pay per click venture in the world.

Yes, all those nay sayers ended up eating their own words in the end. And that is because the folks at Google never go and do something without assessing whether or not it will be profitable, or exactly how profitable it is.

But of course, as you might very well know, AdSense isn't just profitable for Google. It's also profitable for the people who advertise via AdWords and very profitable for publishers who use it to make earnings which are sometimes just enormous.

So one must ask himself why this is such a good deal for everybody. And the question in itself is very justified because you hardly ever come across something that's profitable for everyone in the chain. So why would AdSense be any different.

Well, AdSense is where it stands today, giving benefits for everybody in the game because it exploits a gap in the Internet's advertising model.

You see, the Internet is a very interactive environment, and its interactions come from the people who are browsing. They choose whether or not to follow a certain link and the term "navigating" is probably the most precise one at describing this situation.

So AdSense is great because it links together buyers and sellers. Yes, you have to hand it out to Google for a brilliant idea. They know there are people out there that want to buy stuff and people who want to sell them what they're interested in. And Google AdSense helps members of the two categories find each other.

It works for the visitors, because the model is very transparent. You don't see a huge graphic banner which tries to lure you into buying something. You just see a few words. And if you like what you see you can just click it. It works because visitors don't have that feeling of someone trying to lure them into spending money. Ironically, however, they're wrong.

It works for the AdWords advertisers because their ads go everywhere. Not only will they find themselves listed in Google's search which gets gazillions of hits per day, up front without working as much for SEO and waiting so much.

Their ads can reach any website that deals with anything similar to what they're trying to sell. Now you must realize they could never pull of such great advertising by themselves. And that brings us to the thing that makes Google's AdSense a publisher's best friend.

It comes from the fact that the ads are contextual, that they somehow related to the keywords you deal with on your page. Because people or on your site, which deals with a certain topic, you already know they're interested in that topic.

But, hey, wait a minute, Google knows some companies which want to sell your visitors something related to their topic. Google wants your visitors, you want Google's advertisers and the visitors just want to buy stuff. And that is the essence of what makes AdSense a great deal for everybody.

This is by far the most profitable hook-up deal you're ever going to see anywhere on the Internet.

So you have to appreciate Google for realizing a killer deal. You have to appreciate how well thought out, yet simple this scheme really is. Sure, in practice it has a few quirks but those are minor and, up to this point everyone seems to be enjoying Google's AdSense.

What is Google adsense?

Posted by staying alive is not enough Thursday, June 26, 2014 0 comments

If you look at the Internet a few years back, you'll see that advertising was done in a way that was very similar to other types of media like television, or actually, more like what you see in a newspaper.

You'd enter a site, and in some location you'd get to see a banner (often these were quite numerous and very large), which would present and ad for whatever company was paying for adds on your space.

But there was one problem with this kind of advertising. It really wasn't exploiting the fact that the adds weren't in some newspaper, but were instead presented over the Internet.

You've probably noticed a lot of things like this over the pages you've browsed. You're looking at an on-line shop, looking for a watch but you get a banner that advertises a car.

While you might, at some later point want to buy a car, right now you're looking for a watch and it would have surely been nice if the banner were advertising a watch, because then you would have probably clicked it.

Well that's also what the folks at Google thought of, so they came up with a killer idea. This is knows as Google AdSense, and it's known as a targeted advertising program

What you do (as a web designer / website owner) is, instead of jumping through hoops to get some banner on your site that your visitors won't even care about, is you just allocate some region of the screen.

You then sign up for the Google AdSense program, you insert a small snippet of code in your webpage and Google ensures that in the location you specify, a banner will appear, presenting adds relevant to the contents of your site.

It's very easy for Google to do this because Google is a search engine company. It looks for the key words in your page, searches a database of websites to find the ones related to whatever is on your page and presto: a targeted ad.

You (the webmaster) get a fee for each visitor that clicks on an adsense banner on your site. Now that's bound to happen more often then with a traditional banner because people are actually interested in what's in that banner (otherwise, they wouldn't be on your page would they?).

But, this also does wonders for the people who want to advertise. And it's because of the same reason. The greatest thing about Google AdSense is that all the content in a banner is relevant.

This relevancy is the key to the programs success, and also the reason why everyone remains happy. The advertiser has a relevantly placed advert, the publisher earns money from their content and Google take their cut.

Of course, as always, Google has set some high standards for its AdSense program, in terms of looks and functionality. You can't have more than two such banners on your website and Google only inserts text in these banners.

So an extra benefit is that AdSense advertising is a lot less obtrusive then regular advertising. But this also means you should position the banner better because it's possible that visitors might miss it altogether.

So in the end, Google AdSense is an advertising program that is unique because the ads are relevant to the content on the site. Anyone that wants to advertise pays Google for it. Anyone who wants to place ads on their site does this through AdSense, getting paid by Google in the process.

All transactions are run through Google, and the advertisers and publishers get access to statistics which help them to understand and moderate the effectiveness of their campaign.

The whole process is elegant, simple and effective from anyone in the chain, from site visitors to advertisers, and it's one of the reasons Google are known for their innovation and new thinking.

Adsense