So, if you’re keen to see a photo of my latest cheque from Google, visit this page:

My Google AdSense Cheque (or Check for Americans)

Hopefully people will be keen to share their success stories as well.

Until next time…

He gives a nice (EXTREMELY brief) tutorial/introduction to PHP, and then goes on to show how you can use it to make your AdSense and WordPress (or any PHP enabled website) admin a lot easier by having “templates” which contain your different AdSense units, and just using “includes” to put them into your pages.

This means having to change just one file containing your AdSense code, as opposed to changing every location where this code is used…

I think I might actually start using this idea. Thanks Eric

If you haven’t heard of plentyoffish.com (that’s Plenty Of Fish), it’s a dating site run by 1 person. This person, (Markus Frind I believe) also runs AdSense on his site. Ok, so he gets millions of visitors a day, but there’s no reason why any normal person can’t make something close to this. Personally, I’m aiming to make his DAILY amount, my MONTHLY amount.

And, that amount is…. $10,000. A DAY.

Feel inspired. Click here.

I’ve read this in so many places. But it always gets said by people claiming to make thousands of dollars a month. What about for the people just starting out? Well, even for the little guys, putting fewer AdSense ads on a site will increase the Cost per Click (CPC) of an ad.

Here’s my theory on that.

Google is out to make money. If you have 12 ads on your site, of course Google will try to put the high-paying ads on your page, but if it runs out of those, it will put what it can onto your page. Now you have to hope your visitors are clicking on a high-paying ad. BUT, if you put 3 WELL PLACED ads on your site, Google still tries to serve the high paying ads, and if a visitor clicks the ad, voila, you earn more (and GOOGLE earns more).

- Do I honestly think this works? DEFINITELY!
- How well? It increased the CPC of ads on one of my blogs by 10 to 20 times. Fair enough, this was from a VERY few cents, to NOT very few cents…

So, remember, you now have an AdSense Secret to success. But I think that if everybody followed this theory, EVERYBODY who uses AdSense would benefit. I mean, if you are only showing 3 high-paying ads, this would mean that those people bidding low amounts would have to “up” their bid to get viewed, meaning still more high-paying ads…

So, spread the word… This could be quite a secret to success for everybody.

Benjamin Cohen, the former teenaged dot.com millionaire, has run into a problem as he tries to make his next million: Google won’t pay him for ads run on his website

He has signed up a couple of times, even after being told he won’t be allowed to sign up again, and each time he has been banned due to click fraud. The fact that Google won’t tell him why they believe he (or someone else) is committing click fraud on his site is quite frustrating:

After a number of e-mails to Google without replies and no response from their press office, I decided to cut my losses and concentrate on selling advertising direct to clients, thereby bypassing Google’s system.

So, what do you do in a situation like this, when Google doesn’t respond to your queries, or, if your duspute is not resolved in your favour (which, I believe, does actually happen)? You could always do what this author and EX-AdSense-Publisher did:

In the end, I decided not to bother chasing Google any more for the couple of hundred pounds they owed my company or the cheques (totalling a further £1,500) I received well after the six-month deadline for banking a cheque. Instead, I decided to sign PinkNews up to Yahoo!’s pay per click programme, carefully noting the right to speak to a real human being, 24/7, if we were unhappy with the figures they provided

On a side note, if you’re like me and like as much info on one screen at once as possible, there’s a little link tucked away on the side of the AdSense help page called “Print entire Google AdSense FAQ“. What this does is give you 1 page containing the whole of the Google AdSense FAQ. Very helpful if you don’t mind waiting for a large page to download. I’ve often wanted to be able to see what info is in the FAQ without having to use the search feature.

You will probably find your site generating these sorts of ads a lot at the beginning. This is attributed to the fact that Google doesn’t quite know what ads to serve just yet. Don’t worry, they will disappear, and relevant ads will start to show. If you see these ads for a long time after you start using AdSense, it would be advisable to send off a “request for help” to the Google AdSense team. They might be able to respond and tell you if there’s a specific reason you are seeing these sorts of ads.

1. Must the ad blend in with my site?
2. Can I make an ad a “shocking” color?
3. Do I need to rotate my colors?

Some of these questions might seem strange, but consider these answers:

1 – Most people recommend that the ads blend in with the site. Even Google says that “Ad color palette should blend in to the colors of the page” (Taken from their Optimization webinar). I think blending in works well in helping a reader overcome the “advert aversion” problem. I’m sure a lot of people out there hate ads. I mean, when I listen to the radio, I want music, not ads. If I record a TV show, I definitely skip over the ads. But thanks to Google’s “relevant ads”, if you blend them into your website, it almost looks like it’s a PART of your site.

2 – I’ve been told MANY a time that ads that match the color of your site are best. I tend to agree, but this is not always the case. On another site of mine, I decided to change the ads from a “blended in grey” to a “shocking green” to see if this would help people notice them. The results? My CTR practically doubled. So, I think it is always feasible to put your ads in strange colors.

3 – In a later post I will talk about a tip for rotating ad colors automatically. But for now, let me introduce a term “Ad Blindness”. This is when visitors start to skip over the ads with ease, possibly because of familiarity with the ads. Rotating the colors of your ads will help prevent this.

There is only 1 REAL answer to these questions, and this is found via testing. Use channels to test different ad formats and colors, and see what works best. It might be a slower approach, but change an ad color for a week or 3, and see what happens.

If you have any ideas or results you’d like to share, PLEASE leave a comment…

There are a few things to note from this image:

• The closer the ad is to the content, the better
• Ads on the left do better than ads on the right
• Ads at the top do better than ads at the bottom

This picture is especially relevant for westerners, as they read from left to right and from top to bottom. You HAVE to remember where the readers eyes are or will be. If they are looking at the ads, there is more chance that they will see something relevant, and click on it.

This is just an introduction to Google AdSense ad placement. There are MANY, MANY more things to consider about the placement and optimization of ads. I will try to touch on as many of them as possible in the coming articles.

So, in the previous post, “Creating AdSense Ads“, the last step you did was get the code generated by Google AdSense that will display your Ad Unit chosen.

1 – Find the file that needs to be modified:

Because I have placed this ad on the right side of this page, I know that I have to look for the file that contains this section of the page. In WordPress templates, generally there are files that contain the “instructions” for the page layout and contents in different files per section of the page. Occasionally, if you have 2 side-bars (left AND right), they are contained in 1 file, something like “sidebar.php”. Other times, like with this theme, they are split up into 2 files, for example, “left.php” and “right.php”. Not all WordPress themes are the same, and they can be named anything the author wants to name them.

So, in my theme, the file I need to modify is “right.php”

2 – Find the section in the file that needs to be modified:

As you can see, my Ads appear after a section called “Links”. So, editing the file “right.php”, I look for this section in the file by scanning for the phrase “Links:”, and I see that it appears like this:

<li class=”menustyle” id=”links”><?php _e(‘Links:’); ?>
<ul>
<?php get_links(-1, ‘<li>’, ‘</li>’, ‘<br />’, TRUE, ‘id’, FALSE, TRUE, -1, TRUE); ?>
</ul>
</li>

So, to keep my ads in the same theme as the menu structure, I’ve just replaced the middle 3 lines, which LISTS my links, and placed my AdSense code. Like this:

<li class=”menustyle” id=”links”><?php _e(‘Sponsors:’); ?>
— all my adsense code here —
</li>

Obviously, instead of “all my adsense code here”, you would place the code that you got from the last post’s instructions.

3 – Upload your new Template:

Having modified your blog’s template, you will need to modify the live version of this template. In most cases, this is really simple, especially so in WordPress. It is just a case of going into the WordPress Admin console, clicking “Presentation”, clicking on “Theme Editor” and selecting your file on the right. Then, just overwrite the current file by pasting into the Text Area, and click “Update File” and you’re done.

::::::::::::

So, now that you have placed your AdSense ad on your site, you should be able to monitor it’s progress. Don’t worry, the dollars don’t just start flooding in. There are a whole lot of other customisations and improvements to the ads and your site that can be done to optimize your site. For example, there is Ad Placement, and blending… We’ll discuss these in a later post.