I want you to read this very interesting article by a guy who is an experienced Adsense pub. He takes a long look at stats, which we never really do – I just look at traffic, and what Adsense shows we have made. You can’t get too caught up in the numbers during the early day, because all these databases are updating at different times. You really don’t how your day is until the next morning when you crack open your account again.

Here’s the piece this guy wrote; (robbed from Google forum)

No one seems to have realized yet that the vast majority of ads being fed into the AdSense publisher pool are coming from the “Google-certified” ad networks. Google has been busy flogging us to nearly every other advertising network on the web: “Give us your ads, we’ll target them for you and deliver them to our extensive and well-trained publisher network.” So the other networks survive on even cheaper ad rates than Google, Google delivers their ads to us and takes a percentage off the top for the service, we get paid whatever’s left over if we are “lucky” enough to elicit a click… Since March my traffic is up 10%, my CTR is steady, my eCPM is down almost 40% and my AdSense earnings are off around 27%. This is just since the third week of March. If you compare it to the numbers from the summer of 2008, we’re getting very close to those rocks at the foot of the cliff…

Go to your ad review center in your AdSense dashboard. Scroll down to the “Google-certified ad networks” section. Then scroll through the list of who is now delivering ads to your site. When this whole debacle began there were only 13 names on that list. I think it’s now at 102. The only ones I don’t remember seeing are AdBrite, InfoLinks and BidVertizer.

I think whatever you find in the AdWords keyword-pricing tool is what advertisers are paying for inclusion in Google’s own services. We, as AdSense publishers, don’t seem to be any longer within that circle. If that’s true, the numbers you see in that tool have little-to-no relevance for us. We seem to be getting the dregs of the dregs after Google has siphoned off what they want… and we’re talking “where’s the money?” here, right? And Google keeps posting record profits every quarter, right?

As for the various ad filters: Google has self-admittedly lost control. If you try to filter one ad, you’ll end up filtering whole blocks of ad networks. There is so much flowing in they can’t filter the content themselves (apparently they can only filter for the dollar signs attached, and they shunt any larger numbers directly to Google Search). Where we used to have reasonably granular control, now we’re using the equivalent of a nuclear fly swatter and getting horrible results. Witness the “Harrington Brooks” crap: even Google couldn’t shut them off and keep them off.

The only reasonable answer for this is to direct-sell your own ad inventory. That’s always been the only reasonable answer and the only answer to offer a reasonable return for your efforts. I just returned from a three-week sail around the Caribbean and while I was gone, I direct-sold about 90% of my available ad inventory on one of the three sites I still have left (I sold everything else before I went for the sail). So now I get to pull all the severely under-performing and non-performing Google, Chitika and Infolinks code off about a thousand pages and add one of several single ad units to each page. Less clutter, happier visitors, stable cash flow, more money in the bank… and I come fully into compliance with the dictates of Google’s new “page load speed” tool: the single biggest complaint that tool had with my stuff was the results of the Google, Chitika and Infolinks codes, Google itself being the single greatest impediment to faster page loads.

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If you are not paid via EFT your fix will take longer, and they may rectify your currency exchange goof on your next check – next month.

Last time this happened we actually gained from it (so my wife tells me) because she said the exchange rate had changed to our favor when they rectified the payment issue. The first time this happened it was quite the big deal, because we had over 26000 dollars USD coming in and our Canadian dollar was only worth 83 USD cents. That’s a big chunk of change.

It can leave you feeling a little bit queasy about Google and the Adsense system, because the thinking goes,

“If they can screw something this big up……..what else can they screw up!!!!!”

No worries gang – the Adsense team gets on top of it and sorts it out – they always have without fail, and they do it in a very professional manner as always.

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Easy to say right? Well my wife and I have a total of over $26,000 USD due in Adsense income so we could certainly stress about it, but after 5 years of always getting our money, we choose NOT to stress it.

Here is a quote on Twitter from the Adsense team. This sounds like the Adsense team for sure. Adsense has ALWAYS paid me and my wife, even though they have been late the odd time.

Most Adsense publishers don’t panic if they are a little late with payments because they always get their money. My wife and I can get a little bit concerned, but since we always get paid (for 5 years now) we don’t sweat it too much.

Don’t Worry About Your Adsense Payments Being Late

Why? Because Google is one of the most solid companies on the planet and they have a very reasonable Adsense Team, contrary to what some publishers complain about online. They have always kept us informed as to what is going on, and they have always paid us.

In time when we have had our accounts reviewed and we have been sent an email from the Adsense team stating that we had a site that was not in compliance with their TOS (terms of services) and/or their policies, we simply responded RIGHT AWAY with an honest and polite email. We fix whatever issue we may have overlooked and we continue on. The importance of being earnest in these matters is crucial. You must be forthright and honest about your web pages and do what is asked of you. Don’t argue what is obviously in the Adsense TOS, and DO NOT GET ANGRY. You have way too much to lose by “burning your bridges”.

If you have an issue, make sure you read the TOS and policies carefully and ask yourself an honest question, “are you following the TOS and the policies to the tee?”

Then answer yourself honestly. This is the key. Don’t optimize your web pages using tactics that go against the grain of the Adsense/Adwords model even if you can create much higher profit due to CTR (click through rates). Just present your Google ads tastefully and do as you are asked. It’s better to make some money without worrying about having your Adsense account shutdown, then make more money worrying about your Adsense account being shut down.

If you use the old Google mantra when publishing your pages you will be fine. “Don’t be evil”. Don’t mislead people, and always makes sure your Adsense ads are placed in a way that your visitors understand clearly that they are indeed ads. Don’t try and trick your visitors into thinking the Google ads are part of your web site and that you are making the offers the Adwords advertisers are making.

Make sure to read the Adsense TOS – here is a good post on what not to do.

Different Ways to Get Paid From Adsense

Keep in mind that there is a few ways to get paid your Adsense income and they all vary in respect to when you see the money. These are the three methods;

1. EFT (electronic funds transfer)

You usually see your Adsense income show up in your account between the 23rd and the 26th of the month. Rarely it is later than that. The latest I have been paid is the 28th of the month, and today is the 28th of April (the morning). My guess is that the Adsense publishers who are paid via EFT will see their earnings in their accounts by this afternoon or tomorrow afternoon. As far as EFT is concerned, Google tells all publishers that they will see their money appear in their accounts by the 30th of the month. I have never been paid that late before n EFT.

Google states that if you don’t see your EFT transfer by the 5th of the next month, inform them and they will take care of you.

2. Snail Mail

The other option (which Google likely doe not like) is the snail mail option. This is a more time consuming and expensive way to send payments to Adsense publishers. My wife and I have an Adsense account in her name that is paid using the snail mail method. Generally these checks show up between the end of the month and the first 5 days of the month.

We have had two occasions whereby these Adsense earnings checks never showed up at all. We simply followed the Google Adsense team’s instructions and cancelled the checks from out account. This automatically throws those earning into the tally and are paid the following month via snail mail check delivery.

On both occasions where we did not get a check in the mail on time, we were paid on time the following month and made whole again. We have since changed my wife’s personal Adsense account to EFT.

If you have not received your snail mail check from Google Adsense by the 25th of the month, that is when you cancel the check and get it reissued for the following month. This is why most publishers choose the EFT payment method.

3. Registered Mail Delivery Courier

The 3rd option is the Registered Mail Delivery Courier option. This is popular for overseas Adsense publishers if their country is not yet eligible for the EFT method. Most publishers in North America use either the snail mail option or the EFT option because there is not cost.

There is a cost to the registered mail option and I’m pretty sure it’s close to $30 bucks per mail out (I’m too lazy to go into one of our Adsense accounts and check). It’s worth it for publishers who live in far away countries like India etc. , because they can get their money faster and more securely. I think the EFT method is coming to more and more countries “as we speak” so that is welcome news to these publishers.

We live in Canada so we have all three payment options to choose from.

Update! I just checked my Adsense accounts and it shows Payment In Process. See – no worries.

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I was hooked on the idea of big Adsense income profits once upon a time. May 2004 to be more precise. I was dumbfounded by the reality that you could own a website for under $40 a year in cost, and could make anywhere from $5 bucks a month to over $10,000 a month. The $80 bucks a year is broken down into: $8 per year for domain fees, and $3 per month for hosting fees.

The paragraph is so old hat for experienced Internet entrepreneurs it would put them to sleep in a heart beat. For those webmasters who are succeeding online, the above paragraph is a big “so what”, and for those who have been trying for years, it’s a big “yeah right”. For those who are just discovering what Google Adsense is and have just found that they could make money with simply writing content on a website (and work from home without a boss), it’s a big, “holy shit!

Sounds so good right. The only problem is finding the time to learn all the tricks of the trade, and then apply all those tricks consistently over time. After 5 years of working on the Adsense dream, and trying all of the so-called tricks of the trade, I learned a very important fact. Tricks don’t work. Why? Because the search engines are so sophisticated now that trying to game the system is a futile endeavour. Yes, there are some young, inexperienced, and crafty webmasters who believe that they CAN game the search engines, and they can. For a very limited amount of time. I don’t call a temporary profit garnered from temporary traffic as succeeding at the Adsense dream. Making the Adsense Dream come true means having web properties that have a consistent flow of traffic and that traffic is consistent and growing. You are receiving traffic because the content on your website or blog is pure original content.

How To Make The Adsense Dream Come True

It’s simple. Original content consistently loaded on to your domain. Very simple right. Problem is you need LOTS of this quality original content.

The Adsense Dream With Your Own Content

You do this yourself with great results and make up and above $1200 a day. Don’t believe it’s possible. This guy makes more than that. Now, to do what Ask The Builder (home improvement) did you have to write information that people need and want. Information that is passed around the Internet and gets incoming links from other websites, blogs, and webmasters. ATB gets repeat traffic from users who want to see his information multiple times, and it’s a big snowball effect.

The Adsense Dream With Other Peoples Content

The other option which can produce insane amounts of website traffic and make your wildest Adsense Dreams come true, is using other peoples content. A perfect example of this would be the ingenious web property called Plenty of Fish (dating). Other people use the site and create a non-stop flow of fresh original content. At the same time, other websites link to it as an authority in the genre. This website makes upwards of $80,000 – $100,000 per month. This is the most amazing way to make money online. Setup a community based website that millions of visitors spend time making your money for you. The catch is that you need to provide them with a reason to be on your website.

Now, you may be asking yourself how much I make from Adsense. It varies from month to month depending which way the cyber-wind is blowing, but we average about $6000 per month profit. We pay for some traffic, and some of it is free traffic. The reason we finally succeeded is because we quit trying to game the search engines, stopped trying to create inbound link, quite trying to rehash used Internet content, and simply created web sites that have original fresh content.

My wife and I don’t make crazy amounts of money from the Adsense Dream, but we make more than we ever did working for someone, and we work from home. If I want some extra cash for “special things”, like home improvement, or travel, then sometimes I’ll go work for someone else – but only on a temporary contract basis.

What astonishes me the most is that when I stop working on the Internet for months at a time, the money still keeps flowing into our bank accounts. The people keep surfing the Internet, and they keep finding our sites and blogs, and a small percentage of those visitors decide to click an “Ad By Google”.

Since I’ve seen the magic of web building business, I have been formulating ways to create a community based web site that uses the 2nd example of the Adsense dream. This is not a simple task as most good ideas have been used to death. For every successful idea there are thousands of copycats. You need to create something completely original.

Have fun and don’t stop dreaming. Someday your Adsense Dream may come true!

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Q - how do I embed my Adsense code into my WordPress theme

A - If you’ve never customized a WordPress blog with your Adsense code. (I mean hard-wiring your Adsense code into your blog template without using like Adsense Deluxe)

1. Start by loading the WordPress Default theme instead of whatever Theme you’re in love with at the moment. (just do it…..we’ll come back to the theme you are in love with later) Do that by going Dashboard/Presentation and clicking the Default theme. Check your blog to make sure it took. 

2.

 a) Watch this video on how to upload my custom Adsence Default template PHP files: http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3682320675084757149

b) (click here to download my Adsense ready PHP files for the WordPress Default theme – This download is a .RAR archive file, (I use .RAR instead of .ZIP), but your unzip program should be able to expand the .RAR) 

c) Make sure you open all of my customized PHP files with notepad, or your html editor, after you download them, and put your Adsense publisher ID and channel codes in place of the XXXXXXs I have there.  

d) After you have downloaded my PHP files, and changed all the Adsense code to yours, you need to upload them using your FTP client. Upload them to your WordPress Themes directory, into the Default Theme folder/directory. Click YES OK TO COPY OVER FILES IN THERE ALREADY.  

3. NOW…take a look at your blog. You should see the nice Adsense ads all over the place bucko. So now you’re still saying,

“But Terry, I want to use the WordPress theme that I’m so in love with (today anyway)”

You can, but first you need to go into your Dashboard, then click Presentation, then click Theme Editor. Yo can now see all of your Default Theme PHP files listed on the right hand side.

Take a look at all of the theme files that I had you upload. You’ll see where the Adsense code is because you were already there when you changed all my XXXXXXXXs into your Adsense code. 

Now take a GOOD close look at where I pasted the Adsense code. Guess how I knew where to place Adsense code?………I didn’t know!

It was all trial and error by your humble narrator. I just kept placing different Adsense ads into different places in the PHP files until it looked great. You need to do the same, but MAKE SURE you backup your theme first on your desktop, so when you play around with your Adsense placement and inevitably destroy your template files, you can quickly revert back to the original PHP file, and get your blog all back together again.   

This is what you have to do to hard-wire your Adsense code into ANY WordPress template you want. Trial and error my friend. No-one said this Interent income thing was going to be easy, and if they did……..well I probably did. 

Have fun, and make your Adsense ads stick out like sore thumbs. That’s where the money is.  

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That said, I still buy up every eBook on the subject of black-hat techniques, and I’ve been eagerly awaiting the “Project Black Mask”, or “Black Mask Adsense” release.

I’m aware of most black-hat techinques (well at least I thought I was), but after first reading this lengthy document, and watching the videos, my brain is in overload. The people who do this stuff are brilliant, and the Black Mask Adsense project is an 11 out of 10 rating.

The Best Part About Black Mask Adsense

The best part about Project Black Mask is that many of these techniques can be used on legitimate web properties. I’ll be using at least 3 of these easy techniques on my “pure as snow” white-hat sites immedeatly.

The Worst Thing About Black Mask Adsense

The worst thing about Black Mask Adsense, is that it’s available to all who are interested in making bags of money from online traffic. These techniques have never been issued to the mainstream – this creates more competition.

So that’s it. If you’re wanting to take a trip on the dark side, I’d have to say Black Mask is worth it.  

– Terry 

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When I’m working on a blog, I’m loading pages frequently to the tune of a couple hundred page loads in one day of work. This not a good thing when your Adsense ads on those pages. This makes your Adsense CTR and eCPM drop like a stone. Not good, as there is great speculation among Adsense publishers that low CTR (and in turn lower eCPM) can cause low paying Adwords ads placed on your pages.

Anyway, I did not remove the Adsense code from my blog as I worked on it. After a week of work, my income per click on my Adsense account dropped considerably. I caught myself slowly, and removed my Adsense on the busy working pages that I was modifying. Keep in mind that I have been working on WordPress blog theme customization, so I have to load pages often to test my work. After a week of my CTR climbing, and my eCPM as well, the ads presented on my pages began to climb up again.

Lesson learned: when working on your sites and blogs consider removing your Google Adsense code until you are done. 

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Of course you want good traffic and high click through rates, but there is more to it then that in my opinion. I think that publisher history and track record come into play as well. This is not a popular theory, and for good reason. Say we dabbled in what I call “crap sites” that hold very little value, and were made simply for gathering clicker traffic. Say we did that on a string of sites. It’s possible the web site reputation can come into play here as well. Tell you the truth, I hope I’m dead wrong on that guess, or stab in the dark, because I too have dabbled in crap sites when I started out.

All I know, is that creating a good site or blog, with rich and original content, is the key to almost everything. Once again I’ll say it – don’t bother trying to game Google Adsense, Google Adwords, or the search engines at large. Just post content that is 100% original, and can be of use to your readers and visitors. Eventually that approach will help you get big traffic and big paying Adsense ads on your site. 

One last note on Smart Pricing. I’ve always believed that creating one site, and focusing hard on it is the way to go. Stay with that one site for months before you even think about moving on to another one. If you put in a solid effort on one of your domains, the search engines will notice, your visitors will notice, and other webmasters will notice. This way you can compete in some of the most competitive keyword markets online.

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While I was gone the commissions kept on coming in and everything was fine as far as my Internet business goes, but I did have one issue to deal with. The Google Adsense team emailed me and said that one of my sites was not in compliance with the Google Adsense TOS (terms of service).

Turns out that one of my sites had some Google Ads presented in a way that broke the Adsense publisher rules. I had two Google ads (in the Medium Rectangle format) that had a title above them including the word “directory”. This could be misleading to my visitors in that they would see Adsense ads only, and yet they are told it’s a directory. So this is what I did.

I emailed the Google Adsense Team ASAP, and showed them the site amendments I had made. I thanked them for their attention and detailed how I had fixed the oversight as soon as I had received their email. It’s very important that you respond quickly to any emails from the Google Adsense Team.

As a result, I received an email back within 12 hours stating that my site was now in compliance with the Google Adsense program’s terms of service. This is the 3rd email I have received from Google Adsense regarding my page layout and design. Every time I responded the same way, quickly, accurately, and with courtesy.

You will hear of webmasters that have their Adsense accounts shutdown out of the blue, but I’m here to tell you the Adsense Team does not normally whack out sites (or accounts) without first trying to give the web site owner a chance to fix the issue.

So it’s back to work on a number of projects this week. I will making more posts for the Affordable SEO series.

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The allure of Adsense profit building has been intense for the last four years due to the fact that web site and blog publishers don’t need to convert actual sales to make money. Converting affiliate sales is not an easy job, and some affiliate programs can be a little flaky with making payments to publishers (don’t get me wrong – there are many high quality affiliate programs to choose from). Adsense publishers have the advantage of making money from simple traffic to their web sites, and Google pays their publishers in full, and on time. If they ever make a payment error, they have it straightened out expeditiously. All this is nothing new for experienced netrepreneurs. 

There have been hundreds of ebooks and like-minded products promising the magic ticket for creating Adsense profits. Until now I would have only recommended Joel’s Adsense Secrets which is a proven resource for Adsense publishers. I’m confident that Michael’s Adsense Videos is now in the same league. Both products preach sound practises and steer clear of cheap tricks. I still believe that getting quality and targeted traffic to your web sites or blogs requires hard work and a knowledge of the Internet. Michael discusses some of the key factors required if you hope to receiving quality traffic.

On a side note — over at the Entrepreneur’s Journey blog Yaro Starak has an audio interview with Michael. You can listen to Michael tell his story on the launch of his Adsense Videos, how much he has made, and what led up to his launch. A very interesting bit of audio for all who are interested. Michael is a sincere and hard-working guy. I’m glad he is experiencing this well deserved success. 

Technorati Tags: Adsense Videos, Adsense Secrets, Adsense Profits

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