Whenever I build the site I use a similar strategy, however I tend not to build the websites for AdSense only and I have some specific criteria that I do follow and one of those is that the site must be somehow related to products and that have a decent market but it doesn’t have to be to saturated. But from the other site, it is also a good strategy to build a few mini sites that would bring some income to pay the bills or even to fund the “main” sites economically too. Since these smaller sites purpose is not only informative but as well to generate a decent income and mainly from AdSense it has to;

• Have a decent search volume – means it there are people showing interest for this type of product/information
• AdWords advertisers should BID a certain amount per click – usually I track down those that have over $1.50 USD per click or even $2 per click
• The site should also be also product driven – in case it shows successful and exceeds my expectations I could then integrate more programs to generate even more revenue

Researching High Paying Keywords for our Niche site

Now that we have got a clean view of what type of site we want to build and that we have a clue on what market we want to build our site what we should do is perform a search based on the main keyword so we can find a more specific niche keyword in the market field that will have a high enough PPC bid. In this example we will use as main keyword “car” and with the use of the Search-based Keyword Tool (or rather, SKTool)we will try to dig deeper and find the perfect keywords for our site.

Once landing in the sktool homepage we see the form as in the above image. Insert you main keyword in the Word/Phrase field and hit the Find Keywords button. Sktool will then perform a search and display results of suggested keywords for our main keyword together with monthly search volume data, competition, suggested PPC bid and some other information’s as shown in the bellow image.

Now that we have the results and keyword ideas based on our main keyword all what we have to do is click on the Suggested Bid tab (which is highlighted in the above image) to organize the display of the results from the highest suggested BID result to lowest, you might also want to align the same results based on monthly search volume to make sure you chose a keyword that does indeed have a decent search volume otherwise we might be just wasting time building a site over a keyword that nobody searches for. You might also want to use a SEO software to perform an analyse over the competition for a certain keyword, check the market samurai review, a seo software that I strongly recommend.

With our results in front of our eyes all what we have to do next is check through the list and find some keywords with decent search volume, that has advertisers bidding over that keyword and make sure that the competition over that keyword isn’t too strong so we can get the site in the top 10 rankings and if possible by just using the free & effective internet marketing strategies so we keep our investment as cheaper as less as possible.

Expanding your site based on other high paying keywords on the same niche

We have our main keyword, we have checked the competition and everything looks good enough for us to jump in and build our site. But don’t rush, the next step you should do is perform yet another search on the keyword you have picked and find other keywords that are related to that niche so you can expand your site based on other high paying adsense keywords on the same niche, drive more traffic and of course generate more revenue.

In the following article under the make money online category I will write on how to check the competition for certain keyword and ways we can expand our site by integrating relevant programs to generate more income, so don’t forget to subscribe to my RSS feed (it is completely free, but you already know that) and get updated when the article gets published.

OIO Publisher Coupon for October 2009 – TERRA-DNSEO Buy Now for $37

Once you have created the account, apply coupon code TERRA-DNSEO and you will receive immediate discount of $10 on OIOPublisher plugin.

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• Easy to install, with just one click like all normal plugins
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• Affiliate access to other users, let others advertise your services for you and give them % of your earnings

All those features included with OIOPublisher can really make your online orders much easier to manage. You can create channels, sell different type of advertisement (banners, videos, links etc) or you can even easily customize it and use it as billing software for your services by setting up flat rates or recurring payments.

For full features of this lovely plugin please visit OIOPublisher website, do not waste time purchase this plugin within the month of October and use coupon code TERRA-DNSEO to receive $10 discount.

I do not know if this is something new or old actually, but today when I logged on my adsense account I did notice a link that was telling me that now I can link (integrate) my AdSense account with my Analytics account. In either case this is a great feature as it would give more space to webmasters to optimize their content, learn more about their users how did they found their website and how do the visitors actually interact with webmaster’s content, it also can help you optimize your website design and even optimize the position of your AdSense ad blocks.

That does sound cool doesn’t it? Actually it sounds incredible you would say, but hold on a second, we are talking about Google here, the master of “gathering data” and turning those data into cold cash for them.

It kinda turns out that this great feature you have dreamed about has a bad side too no? Well for sure it can help you learn more about your website, your visitors, your content, your design and even helps you to make more money online by optimizing all possible aspects of your site, but it also…in a legal way you give access to Google to actually share, compare AND use your traffic stats data and possibly classify AdWords advertisers on how much they are actually bidding on a keyword and on which sites would they get displayed too (The higher bidders on more traffic sites?!). Does it make sense to you? For me its crystal clear and personally I do not have anything against all that as it can’t turn worst, but it could definitively turn into better if your site grows.

However, lets leave the “presumptions” aside, for those that are interested to integrate their Google AdSense with their Google Analytics account, as always, Google has already thought about making a video tutorial for that (even tho it is too simple to be guided by a video).

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After I read that post on Paul’s blog I decided to signup under his account and give it a try even tho I had doubts about this kind of “stuff” since always. In addition I referred a friend which at the same moment was complaining that he has nothing smart to do at the moment, told him about bux.to and that he could make some extra money online instead of boring me off on MSN.

Couple months later, my friend had reached $10 with bux.to and to not waste more time he requested the money to be transfered on his AlertPay account so he would not be wasting any more time if it wasn’t something legit. What made my friend to request the money at this point instead of waiting to increase his earnings were some rumors he had heard about bux.to not paying his publishers..

Since the day he told me he made the request have passed 2 months. In meanwhile, another local friend told me he had requested to be paid since 3 months now but not even a cent sitting on his AlertPay account. At that point it crossed my mind that bux.to might just not be a way of making money online, but rather like an entertainment website where you can waste some of your time in a different way then watching a blank screen.

No matter what friends have been telling me so far, I have decided to check this one by myself, before I was checking bux.to rarely, maybe 2-3 times a month, now I want to reach a certain amount (at least $18, $4 more missing) and request the money to see if my friends stories are true or there is something shady going on with users from less developed countries.

I can’t speak much about bux.to from personal experience at this time, nor about sites with similar schemes as I have always considered them as waste of time, but I would love to hear your story about bux.to or other similar sites as bux.to and what your experience has been with such sites.

If you want to know if bux.to is going to send me the money or not subscribe to my RSS feed or have the posts delivered to you via email.

Well for my luck I was wrong (phewww), the email was announcing that Google AdSense was going to retire their referrals program since the last week of August and all the referral codes starting from the last week of August were not going to display a thing.

Naturally they did not closed the doors to more revenue for them, actually they gave an alternative..the DoubleClick Performics Affiliate Network which will operate as the Google Affiliate Network for advertisers targeting users located in the United States.

Another news is the next one

AdSense for content ads: If you have less than three AdSense for content ad units on a page, you may wish to replace the referral ad units with standard AFC ad units.

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The result was total failure, just little over $10 for several months with Kontera and the poll results just convinced me even more that the traffic I was sending away from seo optimization blog for those cents was not worth, end results…removed Kontera.

I do personally like inline ads, similar to Kontera, and I don’t find them disturbing my browsing experience on other sites so I tried to find a new company that can take over Kontera’s place. However I ended up with AdBrite.

I have to admit that AdBrite’s CPC up to date is way much better then Konteras, tho it has some points that I don’t like either such as

• I feel the advertisers database is a bit low
• not much of control over the color of the inline ads
• payout is via checks only

However, there might be even this option enabled, but so far I have not found it (raises an eyebrow) and the payout method is really so old style. I first hesitated to sign up with them because of the payout method, I believe another optional payout (maybe PayPal) would incentive more users to sign up with them. What i do like tho is the CPC (cost per click) which is 5-10 times better then what Kontera used to pay me.

Aside the inline ads with AdBrite you can chose different type of advertisement, textual links, ad banners or even full page. However those options are something I have already excluded from using here at dnseo.net. The fullpage ads are really annoying and when I endup surfing on them I really feel disturbed, the textual links is something I have since always avoided and will avoid, not because of Google but because I feel like to keep the site clean from that perspective and way of making money (maybe in feature I don’t know) and if I would want to replace the affiliate banners on this site then I will certainly sell them privately (already have refused a good amount of proposals) but thats when I can organize my time a little bit better.

However, I would like to hear your opinions and experience with AdBrite if you have used them in the past (or currently).

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Sometimes it is hard to find the proper plugins which you might want to use in your blog, I can’t remember when I first started how many plugins I had to download test them and pick those that mostly suited for my needs. What made my research more easier were websites that had posts similar to this, listed with a nice amount of plugins which users could download and use.

However I have now compiled a short list of plugins (which I have used and some I still do use) that can make your blogging experience even better. Bellow you will find a list of plugins separated in categories, SEO Plugins, Browsing and Entertainment, RSS feed plugins, Advertisement Plugins (related to make money online) and social bookmarking plugins. Hope this will turn useful.

SEO Plugins

Of course I have to give precedence to the SEO plugins first. You can also find my previous list of recommended seo plugins for wordpress, however let me compile the list again.

• All In One SEO Pack
• SEO Slugs Plugin
• Related Posts Plugin
• XML Sitemap Generator
• Textual Sitemap Generator
• RSS Footer For Scrapers

Social Bookmarking Plugin

There are different social bookmarking plugins out there and you can just be embarrassed which one to chose. Whoever I prefer more plugins that don’t invate the site and keep the layout clean.

• Alexa King’s Share This
• Apostolos Social Bookmarking
• AddThis Social Bookmarking

RSS Feed Plugins

The value of a blog actually lays on RSS readers (the regular readers which actually say that this blog is worth reading, we are reading it daily). However you need to remind them that you do actually have a RSS feed in your blog some times, and with these plugins it will be easier to get started.

• FeedSmith for FeedBurner
• Notify Uncofirmed Subscribers

Advertising Plugins

Not all of us start a blog to monetize it, but all of us end up doing that sooner or later. Here are some useful plugins that will help you monetize your blog by placing advertisement (private ones or as PPC publisher).

• Sell Ads Privately
• WP Ads (Rotate your ads)
• AdSense DeLuxe
• Got Banners
• Monetize Your Feed (Feed Footer)

Browsing and Entertainment

With the bellow plugins you can assure that your visitors will have a better browsing experience and make it easier for them to reach you.

• WP Page Navigation
• WP Polls Plugin
• Enhanced WordPress ContactForm Plugin

If you find this post useful, feel free to stumble, digg or bookmark on del.icio.us this post for feature reference. You can also subscribe to my RSS feed and get updated whenever a new post is published.

This latest poll I placed about Kontera and if it does annoys the readers had that destiny of equal results. The visitors of the blog voted 50% Yes it annoys and 50% no it doesn’t annoy them while reading the articles.

Even tho there is 50% of readers that say it doesn’t bug them (and personally me it does not bug when another blogger uses Kontera ads) I have to think twice about keeping them or not, since there is also a good 50% of readers that don’t like Kontera. Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying I will remove Kontera ads just because my readers don’t like them (even tho it is a valid reason), I had actually intentions to remove Kontera ads for several reasons…yeah I know, Money.

The Kontera Poll Results

The money that Kontera pays me (especially per click) is really not worth bugging the 50% of the voters of this poll. There are few reasons why i should remove Kontera

• PayPerClick is too low
• Losing visitors of the blog for few cents
• Annoys half of the readers

Unfortunately I can’t come up with a good reason why I should keep Kontera ads but I will take another week or so to decide if I should remove them or not, so don’t get surprised if one day you will no longer see the Kontera ads in this blog.

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The reason for Google to take action against those that do sell textual links without the nofollow tag was (as publicly announced) that selling or acquiring links without the nofollow tag purpose is to trick the search engines algorithm and obtain better search engine rankings. The search engines algorithm is made so that websites are being ranked based on votes (links pointing to a website with their main keywords in anchor text).

From link selling/buying business many would profit, one would be the link buyer who with the help of the acquired links would rank higher in the SERPs for his/her targeted keyword. The second person that would profit is the link seller who would earn money from the text links he would sell (or from the blog reviews that the webmaster is going to sell).

Apparently Google did not liked that their algorithm was being tricked, or didn’t liked that webmasters could make profits out of their algorithm by selling textual links, how ever it is Google decided that those webmasters (sites) that do sell textual links deserve to be punished and penalized. This took act with decrease in PageRank for websites that was mainly using the next marketplaces

• Text Link Ads
• Review Me
• PayPerPost
• SponsoredReviews

Webmasters that had their websites listed in the marketplace of one of those websites got their pagerank practically wiped, white..

Did this penalization stopped webmasters from selling textual links? Well I can tell you that it didn’t, as I mentioned in the previous post on around the web and back, Paul had highlighted pretty well that the link sales business is not over yet and he is right. Not only that the link selling business didn’t stopped, but actually prices increased since the risk was higher which was not bad at all for the webmasters that were making a living out of this business.

Those tho that got penalized, what were they doing? Well just a small amount of them did actually stopped writing reviews or selling text links after the penalization. The big amount tho continued and what they did was changing the methods to measure the quality of their site from previously based on PageRank to

• Traffic stats (finally they started publishing stats)
• Alexa Ranking
• RSS Feed readers number

In addition they started to even include testimonials to enforce their advertising page and to give more credibility to their site.

Breathing PageRank

Now as you see there was a PageRank update just yesterday, and the results are definitively what people wouldn’t expect. Many of the previously penalized websites started breathing PageRank again and can see their PR bar go green, even for just a few points but at least it is not white.

You might thinking that Google gave up on all this? Well you might be even right, or maybe I am just paranoid thinking that this is just a tactic to get in surface more webmasters that do this type of business. Or maybe it is just that Google has came up with another algorithm that won’t hurt your pagerank but definitively cuts out the value of the links that are going out from your site…? i don’t know…if you have an idea comment bellow.

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Anyway lets continue further. If you paid attention in the previous article where I briefly explained how people advertise on AdWords and how those advertisers get published on your AdSense ad blocks you have most likely understood that AdWords advertisers need to BID for a keyword to have more exposure, i.e. to appear on more popular sites or to dominate the advertising market for that keyword.

Many of you are aware of what BID means, to those that don’t, bidding is making a price offer on a auction (is it a product, services, stock exchange doesn’t matter as long as it is an auction).

So presume the bidding start price for the keyword SEO in AdWords is $0.20. If you want a better exposure, you have to bid 0.25 per click. This system makes so that AdWords advertisers have to compete between each other to gain more exposure (we don’t care about the fact that AdWords will benefit out of this, what we care is to understand how things go). So if a seo services company wants good exposure for the keyword SEO they have to bid higher, but since there are thousands of SEO companies many others will start bidding too so the price for the keyword SEO on AdWords goes higher and higher.

All those advertisers that bid for that keyword get advertised on AdSense program, which is a sister program of AdWords of the same parent, Google Inc. Each of the advertisers will now get published on blogs, websites and forums that do use Google AdSense and their content is SEO related. So practically advertisers bid on keywords, the AdSense system will now logically place the higher paying bidders on the more visible blocks. But what happens when you use more adsense ad blocks in a site?

Using more AdSense blocks in a site increases the advertising space and makes more room for the low paying bidders as well. How can this affect your earnings? Well it is possible that your best performing ad block is the one where the lowest paying advertisers are being published, since you can’t really control this where which advertisers should be published directly, this may occur. Presume you have 3 ad blocks in a page. This directly tells Google AdSense that you are selling your ad spots for too cheap, and it would not make logical sense to serve high paying advertisers and low paying advertisers in the same page but on different ad blocks.

You have most likely heard people speaking about smart pricing right? Who they do blame is Google AdSense, which is not the case, who actually needs to be blamed is the webmaster itself because he is blatantly telling to Google that his site is not of a great value and he is ready to sell his ad spots for bargain cheap to much more advertisers, AdSense team follows what the webmaster told him and so he gets the low paying ads.

I find it very intelligent and honest from Google AdSense team to not place the high paying advertisers and the low paying advertisers competing in the same page, where one advertisers pays top bucks and the other pays few cents for getting exposure in the same page.

What can you do to get this problem solved and increase your AdSense earnings really? Well if you haven’t so far, you should start using AdSense channels to monitor which ad blocks perform best, which get the most of the clicks and which ad blocks pay the most for click. Once you have spotted these points and now you have enough informations on how AdSense is performing in your site, which advertisers mostly appear in a certain ad spot you are ready to do two main things.

• Ad Spot One Case – receives those high paying clicks, but the click through rate is low enough. The story of this case is that most likely the ad spot is small enough, but the position of the ad block is not optimal and visitors don’t pay attention to it. You need some how to figure out how to move the high paying advertisers in a ad block that does receive way much more clicks.
• Ad Spot Two Case – The second ad spot is the one that receives low paying clicks, but the click through rate is wonderful. This is clearly telling you that visitors of your site do like the position of this ad block, it is close to their eyes and the ads in there are interesting for them. In other words, this means that the advertisers of ad spot one you want to be shown in the ad spot two. How?

If you remember, the advertisers need to be BID to be placed on top of the ad block. And we know that the higher we are position in a competitive spot, the better exposure we get (you were not taught to read a book from the bottom of the page to top, were you?). So, the first block gets the advertisers that are bidding high for a keyword, the lower the ad spot is, the lower paying bidders are being displayed.

Now you know where the high paying ads are sitting, you also know which ad block is performing better in your site you just need to move those high paying advertisers in a ad block that is receiving most of the clicks. You can’t email each of the high paying advertisers and tell them to “target” their ads in your ad block which receives more clicks (well you can, but thats the long route). What you can do tho is play a bit with AdSense (remember, test test test…success). The only logical way to move those high paying folks in a higher CTR ad block is to eliminate the ad spot where they appear mostly (Google AdSense displays top bidders on top, remember, memorize, don’t forget).

Now that the ad block where the high paying advertisers doesn’t exist anymore Google AdSense needs to find a new spot for the folks, after all they are paying the best money. What is the case now? The case is that there is less space to advertise in your site, which makes the advertising space in your site more competitive, a more competitive ad space means more money. Those top paying ads you had in the previous block should be now moved on a new spot, or rather in an existing AdSense advertising space in your site. Since these advertisers are those that bid higher, they get in the top of the ad block again, the others move slowly lower, and lower..so now you have an ad block which has excellent click through rate and in addition with advertisers that pay mediocre amount to advertise.

Does it make sense to you?

Hope it was worth waiting for this article. If you liked the article you can subscribe to my RSS feed and read my blog through you preferred feed reader or have the posts delivered via email in your inbox. If you have any questions and/or doubts don’t be shy…just ask and you will receive an answer.

Disclaimer: The informations above are not taken of any source nor have any written proofs or confirmed from Google Inc. What is written in this blog post is from own experience in the past. You have the right to use this technique or dump it, I take no responsibilities and no complains, you can test all this out in your own risk.