Adsense Portal

Most of the people who read my blog have been adsense publishers for some time butyesterday a guy wrote into me asking me the best way to apply for adsense. What kind of a website should his first one be in order to make sure that his application is not rejected and is actually approved as fast as possible.

Well fact is that the best way to get selected as an adsense publisher is not through a website but actually through blogging and that too through a blog on Blogger. General observation suggests that people who join through a Blogger blog are approved the most easily. Many a times your request can be rejected if you donot have adequate content on your site but no such problems here. I applied for adsense with just two posts and that too about how my day was.

Then the best thing is that it can get you hooked to the habit of blogging. Once you start writing you realise the fun that it can be. I dont need tot tell you that it can be a great source for revenue and a perfect place for advertising your site.

Now to the crucial question Why do Blogger? No real answers but I suppose that Google likes the fact that you are posting at a place that is owned by them. They may just like the fact that they can easily track you...

Q. What is the fuss about?
A. In every adsense publisher's unending quest for making Google's ads look like their own content, one of the most valuable tools are image. An image next to the link of your ad will make it look like a link recommended by you. A very colourful or striking picture can take the viewers eye away from the 'Ads By Google' notification around the ads as the eye is naturally drawn to the colurful pics and the coloured links and not to the rather drably coloured Ads By Google sign.


Q. Is that really useful?
A. You might be wondering if doing something as simple as adding a pic will do anything phenomenal for your CTR. Then rejoice because the increase can be phenomenal, sometimes as high as 300% in some cases. But adsense optimisation has always been about taking care of the small details. For example even removing your border can give your CTR a 25% boost.

Q. Wait I have an idea! I have a site which basically does reviews of laptops. So I will place pics of laptops close to my ads, now that should make my visitors click.
A. Their you go, thats what a good adsense publisher thinks like but evidently Google doesnot think like that. In e-mails to the Google team they have informed me that I cannot place images close to my Google ads if these images have any relevance to the content of your site. So there is no way you can place those laptops there.

Q. Hey look at this:

Its real good. Must be generating loads of revenue for the publisher. And you cant stop him can you? Even his images are not related.
A.Yeah you are right it must be working really well for him. But what he is doing is actually illegal too. Google is not at all pleased with people placing their images that close to their ad units. Truth be told Google does not want those images there at all but its kinda lenient and wont have any problems with you placing images there if it fulfils two conditions: 1) There should be some distance between the ad unit and the images. 2) There should be a line seperating the images from he ads. The pic below should be a good example:

Q. If all these conditions are to be fulfilled then it seems like loads of hard work.Can I simplify the process?
A. Havent seen many tools that can do that for you, but there is this great plugin available for wordpress users, its known as the adsense beautifier.

Q. Maybe I can put an image in the background of my ad.
Well somebody did think on those lines and actually created a tool to do that. But I think its arther dubious. I have done a review. Read about it here.

I've been a google premium publisher for over a year now, and have had an income ranging from between $50k to $100k per month.
Last week I logged into my account to see the 'Your payments are currently on hold' message, and the required action was to e-mail google, which I did.

Just received my e-mail back saying that after an investigation, it was found that there has been over $200k worth of invalid click activity on my account, and it will be deducted from my next payment (Which will be nowhere near that amount, one is to assume it'll be taken over the next few months, leaving me with nothing?) However, they then go on to tell me that my account is in good standing and they look forward to my continued participation in the program.

Surely if your company had been defrauded the sum of $200k, you wouldn't want to co-operate with them anymore? What makes matter more interesting is, over the last 5 months Google have paid out $386k to me, which means over 50% of all my clicks have been invalid. Assuming this has been going on for months and months, why was I never told this during any of the recent and frequent conversations I have with my member of the google optimization staff, especially when the converstaions were about increasing my revenue and optimizing my site?

I hope for certain that this is a decimal point error, but if they intend to deduct over $200,000 from my account over the next few months, I'll be left with little choice but to pull the google ads and replace them with adverts that will actually generate me some income.

So basically google has decided to do a $200,000 chargeback to this poor guy's account, deducting all of his new income from the total owed. Apparently he wasn't even trying to generate false clicks or anything, he just runs an insanely popular myspace generator site. (By the way, it'll take him 5 months to pay back google if they take all of his income).

There are a lot more of these stories cropping up, and dealing with greater and greater amounts of money. It's pretty implausible that they'd ALL be fake, especially because of the ever-increasing status of the sites and because some of these people have been posting on various forums about their adsense income for months or Years before this stuff happens.

Story sent by Vyom via e-mail.

Life seems to be more and more easy for adsense publishers everyday. In those good old days if you wanted to place an image close to your ad unit then you had to know how to create a table or use the img tag. But no more. Simplicity has been further simplified. Tools are available that will place that image where you want it without even knowing what html means.

One such tool that I saw was the Adsense Decorator. Its main purpose is to import a background image for your ad unit. I seriously doubt if it is legal. Google is against putting images close to your ads. I dont know how they will react to images inside your ad unit. Its a good tool if you wanted a colour picker though why you would take the pains is beyond me. The way the guys have integrated the ads on their page is not very impressive either. It looks a lot less like a Google ad but it doesnot look like anything else either. They say that you can get an instant preview too. Yawn.

But its worth trying out i suppose. Do tell me wether you liked it. Download it here.

A few days ago news had gone around that Google had bought the domain Adsense.com which was actually true. Earlier on it used to lead to the Adsense Consulting Marketing company. Rather unexpectedly the url lead to the Google home page that is the search page but now it has been re-routed to the Google Adsense page which was earlier to be found at google.com/adsense.
This move was first made because of a lot of complaints from Adsense Consulting Marketing Company regarding unwanted traffic and surfers who were searching for Adsense tips and tricks. One of the statements that was seen earlier on their site was "If you think you can get rich quick placing other people's ads on your site or blog, please contact Google who has taken and used our business name without permission or compensation."

I was amused to read an article from Online Ad Swami about a tool which was supposed to save you from your adsense account getting cancelled. If you are vey happy thinking that it might be a tool to save you from fraudalent clicks then think again. This tool actually saves you from clicking your own ads!!!!
This tool is will block all adsense ads from your browser when you are editing the page. But it doesnot affect the viewers who may be watching your site. I personally feel that it is a waste of time but if you think it is useful you can go check it out here.
I think there can be one useful feature though. It can help you to know the actual number of page impressions because it blocks the ads while you are editing the page. But this number is not too big for most webmasters so they can safely ignore it. The asking rate of about 20$ for a utility like this is pretty stiff.

Until now advertisers had the option of asking Adsense to place their ads on a specific site. This feature was known as site targetting. Now advertisers also have the choice of displaying ads according to the channels you have provided.
When you try to create a new custom channel there will be an option "Targeting: Show this channel to advertisers as an ad placement". By checking this option you can allow the advertisers the option of just targetting specific channels on your site. This can only work for custom channels, not for url channels. The advertiser can see the name of your channel. So it is important that the name you give to the channel is descriptive. If you want to allow targetting for a pre-existing channel the process is as follows:

1. Log into your account at http://www.google.com/adsense
2. Under the AdSense Setup tab, visit the Channels page.
3. Under the AdSense for content subtab, make sure you've selected custom channels.
4. Click the radio button next to the channel you'd like to make targetable, then click the corresponding 'edit settings' link.
5. Click the checkbox marked 'Show this channel to advertisers for targeting' and enter a description for your channel. Keep in mind that advertisers will see the name and description, so you want to provide something accurate and informative that will represent your site well.
6. Click 'Save channel'.

With this feature advertisers have the option of placing ads wherever they want to on your page. As most people create seperate channels for their ad units, advertisers can determine where their ads will be placed.

One of the most frequently used techniques used to disguise ads is the use of images next to the ad unit. For example if a series of pics are placed closed to a rectangular ad unit then they look like links which lead to whatever the pics show. Or alternatively if you keep a series of pics at the top of the page and then keep a leaderboard underneath it then too it looks more like the navigation bar that it is supposed to look like. Now what happens is that many people click on these ads either because: 1) They think that it is a part of the site navigation. 2) They think it is a link to the site which the picture is supposed to represent. People who reach websites in this way will generally disinterested in the products on the page. This is bad for the advertiser who paid to bring them there.
And Google doesnot want that to happen. So it has started stopping publishers from doing that. New Google rules stipulate that you cannot place images very close to the ads. If you are adamant on placing images close to them then you have to at least keep a line separating the ad unit from the images. If this trend of blocking Adsense publishers from disguising their ads goes on there might soon be a day when Google will allow us to do nothing but just to just copy paste the default ads. This is one more jolt to us publishers and one more shot in the arm for publishers.
One of them who could be banned is here. Notice how there are no borders there.

Was reading the newspaper today when I saw an ad with an offer that went something like this: Work at home. Earn 15000 rupees a month. Only an internet connection required. It was useless for me of course as I do not have net at my place but I thought ki it wont do me any harm to ask them what it was about. I realized that they were paying the money for clicking on various ads given out by contextual advertisers such as Google and Yahoo. Moreover they were asking people to surf the net and go to their sites which would cause the traffic to the site to go up.
Now this might seem alarming to some people but fact is that about ten percent of all clicks on ads are fraudalent. Those are Google's numbers. Independent analysts put it as high as 30%. The good thing is that Google is very strict about implementing its terms of service and whenever an adwords user eports an un natural number of clicks and he reports it to Google the money is refunded most of the time.

Today i was checking out some adsense forums when I read about this site. Well on first glance itself you know that something is wrong and that something is probably the ad at the top. Notice how Ads by google is written in brackets. There is no ad unit or format that displays the ads by google text in this manner. Then if you try to move your mouse over the ads you will notice that they change colour. This too never happens with a Google ad. Finally have a look at the source of the page. One glance through it and it becomes obvious that the code of the Google Ad has been changed. Anybody who uses adsense knows that the one thing that that you cannot do is change the adsense code. You are just supposed to copy paste it. Chances are they will be banned by Google soon.
This was originaly seen here.

Yes its true, Google has plans of entering the so far uncharted waters of print advertising. This new idea is a step towards their goal of developing a single system through which their advertisers can publish their ads in any medium of their choice. This creates a rather curious situation for newspapers. They are suffering fom decreased revenues and sales because of the internet and it seems as if the internet will be the one that will come to their rescue.
Many high profile newspaper companies such as The New York Times Company and the Washington Post Company have agreed to try this system out. About $48 billion is spent in the United States every year on newspaper advertising and Google wants a share of this pie. This system is also good for newspapers because out of the space that they allot to ads almost always some space is left unutilised. With Google small advertisers will also be access this service and get their ads on meropolitan newspapers which was difficult for them earlier.
Advertisers then can log into Google's main advertising system, known as AdWords, and click to go to the newspaper section. They will see a list of the participating papers and the sorts of ads that are available. They can then enter a bid for a certain type of advertisement, specifying the section and date range. Newspapers in turn see these bids and accept the ones they want.
One fact that stands out here is that there is no guarantee that the ads will be placed in the newspapers as the advertising space is often undecided almost until the last moment.
In the beginning Google will not be paid during the test. It will get a share of the revenue later on. This test will probably start later this month.
This news was sent by Vyom Mahadevia who blogs here

After all the integrating that you have done the most obvious give away could be the advertise on this site option. If you do not have more than 5000 viewers a day then advertsiers wont be interested and it would be useful to remove this.
To remove the link:
•Log into your AdSense account.
•Click the "My Account" tab.
•Go down to "OnSite advertiser Sign-Up and click edit.
•Uncheck the box include me box.

All of you out there know that Google's Page Rank (PR) is one of the most important factors in search engine optimization. So its important for every self respecting publisher to do what he can in order to make sure that they have the highest possible PRs for their sites. Now let us try and understand how this works. The basic principle that governs your page rank is the number of sites that link to your site. This was based on the principle adopted by Google that a link from somebody is a form of an approval and a recommendation from that site to your site. So is it just the number of links that matter? Not at all. The anchor text of the link to your site and also the content of the site that links to your site are as important as the number. Moreover if the site is known to keep on giving links to other sites then the value of that link decreases. But chances are that the links you will be receiving will be from sites that are related to your field, then the deciding factor for the value of that link will be the page rank of the site giving you that link. The higher the page rank, higher the value.
Now the next question is obvious, how do I get in those links? Well there are a number of strategies that you can adopt. The first and the slowest one is to hope to get links from people who are genuinely interested in your content. This is a slow option for sites on rather broad topics but if you have a site on a very targetted topic and if your site is genuinely good, then this could actually be one of the best ways. But in fields where there are a large number of sites this might not get you very far.
The other thing that you might like to do is request all these sites for a link. How tiring and stressful that can be is anybody's guess.
The first thing that you should realize as an adsense publisher is that the big earners are not big because they are samarter than you or even because they have better sites than you. The primary difference is in the tools that they use. One such tool that can revolutionize your SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is SEO elite. This tool can automatically search for the high page rank websites for a given keyword and send out link requests to all these websites at once. Thats like a thousand requests sent out in a few minutes. There are myriads of other uses too. Each time you get a link you might have to give a link in return. This tool is great to find out if the sites still link back to you. If you think that this is great then there is more. A fool proof guide Brad Callen on SEO. Its one of the best guides you will find on the net. To buy

Click Here!

Like most people I never read through Google's Adsense terms and conditions. So I was rather alarmed when I learnt that Google Ads cannot be placed on a site which gives a direct link to video or audio streaming. Which means that you cannot have adsense on your pages if you have a link that maybe a download link for audio or video. I saw this at Google's Forums.
Read more about it here.

Every now and then adsense publishers go crazy over the latest list of high paying keywords. Although they are an exercise in futility as far as I am concerned people do like to see this. If you are fairly confident about your search engine optimization abilities and website promotion then you may want to have a look at it. View the list here.

This is a screen shot of his ads. In order to view it just double click on it.
For those not in the know ( low probability if you are even remotely interested in India) India Uncut is one of India's best and one of my favourite blogs. Since the time I signed up for adsense placement and ad integration are about everything that I can think about. So when I visited India Uncut a couple of months ago I was surprised that almost nothing had been done to optimize the ads.
Let us first look at the positives that you can take from there:

• The background colour of the ads blends in beautifully with the background of the template.
• The border has been removed. This can have something like a 20% increase in your click through ratios.
• The colour of the text in the ads is the same as the colour in which the content is written.
• The use of the rectangle ad unit. It has one of the highest CTRs.
  

Now for the places where there could have been improvements:

• The colour of the title is a shade of red while the page titles are not. This doesnot make it look like content generated by the blogger himself resulting in less CTRs.
• The ad unit is isolated with no images or text around it. This discourages the user from going to that exchange.
• The URLs of the ads are clearly visible. If they had been integrated better then it might have seemed like recommended links from the blogger.
• The ads are placed at the end of a post which is a rarely looked at place in blogs.
• The theme of the blog is such that no particular product is endorsed so ad units in the middle of a post must be distruptive. What he can do is to probably place a half banner between posts this could make it look like a link.
  

For people like me web 2.0 was not a good thing at all. Earlier you could just sit down and create as many sites as you wanted. But with interactivity becoming the buzz word all such ambitions came tumbling down. The web along with being more reawrding for the user has become more taxing on the publisher. So it was refreshing when I read about this guy creating a web 2.0 project in 24 hours. To read his story click here.

Digg has been a wonderful discovery for me as it has increased the amount of viewers i get on my blog by about a factor of ten. But I started noticing a peculiarity, almost nobody seemed to be interested in my ads.
While Digg is excellent for getting a number of backlinks the users seem to hate clicking on ads. My CTR is just 0.01% if you consider users from Digg.
Then why be there on Digg? Just for one reason. Backlinks.

Going through today's newspaper I read about the restrictions that will be put on medical tourists coming into the country. While all the ideas were insane and were carefully crafted to destroy the fledgling industry, the most absurd rule among them all was that only blood relatives of the patients may be allowed with them. Now what can be more absurd? What possible problem can the government have with who is coming along with the patient? And even if they are family members then too they can at the most bring along two people which is the exact opposite of what the government should be doing. Instead of bringing in more people they are driving them away.
To read the full report click here.
Medical Tourism Worldwide.

One of the most absurd tendencies that I have seen in upstart adsense publishers is their tendency to try and find lists for the highest paying keywords and their almost always futile attempts at making money from them. What they do not realize is the fact that the list is not just available to them, it is also available to the hundreds of adsense gurus out there. These are the people who have spent a portion of their lifetimes researching on adsense and search engine optimization and chances are that you will be competing with these people. I am not discouraging you, once you are experts then the sky is the limit but until then it is best that you build sites for the keywords which are in the middle rung. Try your hand there and once you are fairly sure about yourselves then go for the highpaying keywords.
One advice that any adsense guru will give you is to create a website based on something you are interested in. This makes sure that you will always be motivated enough to find content for your site and update it. This is actually very good advice but what you really have to do is find your own niche. Lets look at an example, suppose I am interested in softwares then there is no way i should attempt to create a website simply on softwares because on search engines you will be competing against page rank 8 websites topping which is well.... difficult. So you try and narrow down, what are the softwares that I am interested in? Lets consider its photography related software.... even within that you may find newer and newer topics.
The basic advantage that you are using now is the fact that big websites do not have the time to concentrate on small areas. Thats where you have to focus.

Well if you have been folkowing my blog, you must have read that Muslims are vastly under represented in all fields of society. Sorry to say that I was wrong. Fact is that there is one field where they are over represented: Prisons. Figures from 8 states put the figure at an alarming 26% which is much more than their percentage of the population.
What this reflects is the failure of the so called leaders of the Muslim community. The so called guardians of the faith. No one is born a criminal and fact is that being a Muslim as well as poor in India provides a very conducive enviornment for developing into a criminal. But then the poor doesnot just consist of Muslims, it also consists of a fairly large chunk of other communities.... then why this problem with the Muslim community? My opinion is that the Madsrasa system of education is responsible for this. I am not against religious education but ultimately only secular education can get you anywhere ( unless of course you plan to become a God man, which is not a bad career choice at all). So the Madrasa system of education will ultimately result in a large number of unemployed youth which is exactly the profile of a criminal in the making: Unemployed and Poor.
Another problem is the number of illiterate women in the community. This virtually assures that atleast one parent is illiterate and the other tought in a Madrasa. So its a vicious circle.
I do not like to deal in stereotypes and what I have done in this article is precisely that; presented a stereotype. I apologize for that because there is a very large chunk of Muslims who are as educated as me or you. But then again this story is not about them at all. This is the story of the missing Muslim finally found behind bars.

If you are an Adsense publisher and you had adsense for search on your website or blog, there must have been days when you wished to know what exactly did viewers on your page search for. This would have helped you not only in knowing whether the content your users want is available on your site or not.
Finally all your problems have been solved, well almost. Google has started displaying the top 25 keywords that have been searched for from your page. Its not perfect of course, it will display a keyword only if it has been searched for atleast twice and then of course there is this ceiling on the number of results thats will displayed. This can be used for not only filling in info thats not available on your website but you can learn which are the most interesting bits and then put up more information on them.
To view your Top Queries report, you can click on the "Top Queries" link in the Quick Reports of the AdSense overview page, or you can access them by clicking on the link to "Advanced Reports - Search Performance".
I have been searching for innovations in this field for some time but this is the first major change that I have observed. So a day to rejoice for all you publishers out there.

One of the most absurd things that I have seen people do after getting Adsense on their blogs is nothing. Ya thats it. They prefer to do nothing at all. They just sit there and expect the revenues to flow in. At the most they make sure that their blog is regularly updated. But this is not at all enough and it is because of this very reason that only 1% of adsense publishers are paid above 50$ a month. This is the reason for a widespread disillusionment about adsense. Fact is adsense does not pay if you do not click and you have to get them to click.
One of the first things to do after getting adsense on your blog is to make sure that your ads blend in perfectly with your content. In other words do not make them look like ads, make them look like links recommended by you. One of the ways is to type in Recommended Links above your ads. Thats like maybe illegal. The legal way to do this is to place your own links close to your ads. Another very good way to do this is to put in text or pics around the links camouflaging them as your content. One very good way to blend in your ads is to use the blend template option in blogger. But thats not all you see because the url in the ad is stil very visible. Now choose the custom option and use the same colours for your url as your text. This way they are hidden rather well.
They key to success in adsense is experimentation. Keep mixing up the places where u paste your ads and observe the results. Seems like hard work???? Then nobody said this is child's play.

Technology has proved to be a rather damning thing as far as teachers are concerned. Kids are using their mobile phones to cheat and they have to somehow stop this. So what do they do??? Simple. Stop the mobile phone services in town for an hour. Thats what i call an idea. About as insane as they come.
Yup district authorities in Meerut, Karnal and Saharanpur have shot off letters to cellular operators asking them to shut off mobile services for a day because of reasons ranging from elections to examinations. Read the full report here.
This story was first seen at India Uncut.