Alternatives to Google Adsense

Published
by
KevinKarter
on December 4, 2008
in Advertising Networks and Making Money
. 5 Comments

Every now and then, people get banned from Google Adsense for some reason. I hold the view that Google will ban you only if you have done something wrong. Not otherwise. But many people have many different views on that. Anyway, this post is not about how not to get banned from Google Adsense, but on what the alternatives are if you do get banned from Adsense! This is one of the most common question asked of me by email, what are the alternatives to monetize a blog, or a website if you cannot use Google Adsense.

Here is the list of a few Google Adsense alternatives:

  • Kontera - Kontera is not exactly an alternative to Google Adsense, being an inline text link, but it is something that works best with it. This is my second best earner after Adsense.
  • ValueClickMedia - ValueClickMedia is one of the two best CPM/CPC based network (the other being CasaleMedia). It is difficult to get accepted into it. But if you get into it with a quality site, there is nothing quite like it.
  • CasaleMedia - The second best CPM/CPC based quality network which can make you good money online. Not that difficult to get accepted and they have many quality campaigns for good CPM and CPC.
  • NeverBlueAds - My first choice for proper affiliate programs. They have good collection of advertisers and quite good support too.
  • ClickBank - If you are new to affiliate marketing and want to try selling digital products, this is the best network available. You get auto accepted. They have digital products for most of the niches on the net. So whatever the niche of your website, you will find a product to sell on it.
  • Adbrite - Adbrite is also a good Google Adsense alternative for making money online. This works best for website which have a huge number of impressions. I use them for my low quality websites which have quite high page impressions.
  • Chitika - Chitika is a network whichwas quite bad, but has learned from it’s mistakes and is now quite good. They have started different kinds of new products.
  • Amazon - I use amazon by putting just one or two related books/cd/dvds link on all my sites. It is good to just put one related link of a book or related product and forget about it. I am starting to get some good results with their widget products as well.
  • TNX - A new link selling network which allows you to sell links on any site with or without traffic, or even decent Page Rank. So if you have a new site, you can make some money with TNX by just selling one unique link on a page.
  • WidgetBucks - If you have a website related to electronics products or other shopping related sites, then you can make good money with widget bucks
  • Adtoll - Adtoll is a new and promising Adbrite type of advertising network, which allows you to sell your own links as well as RON links.
  • Adversal - If you run wallpapers, pictures or celebrity related sites and you don’t have a problem running pop-ups, then Adversal is the best pop-up network at the moment.

What about you? Tell us about your experience with these networks and any others that you like.

Affiliate Strategies for Newbies

Published
by
KevinKarter
on November 2, 2008
in Advertising Networks, Making Money and internet marketing
. 0 Comments

Many times I get asked a simple question from newbies:

I am a newbie to affiliate marketing and PPC, can you let me know few tips and tricks to getting started?

Well, I don’t have any tricks up my sleeve, but yes, there are some tips.

I think the easiest way to learn affiliate marketing and PPC is to try it yourself. What is the simplest place to start? In my opinion, many online marketers have started and having good success with clickbank, and is a good place to start. I recommend it.

For newbies in this field, its is difficult to make websites (or landing pages) as it involves a lots of different stuff. So, the simplest way is to send the traffic directly to advertiser’s website. It is not the best way, but it is the simplest way to start. Remember to do a little bit of research and try to choose a non-saturated clickbank niche for your campaigns. Here is a list of good campaigns and advertisers, I would advise that you try some yourself to see how they work:

  1. Commission Blueprint - huge commissions and easy conversions makes good money for affiliates marketers.
  2. Make Money Flipping Websites - a video series teaches anyone how to earn money from home flipping websites.
  3. 12 Month Millionaire - amazing money making secrets of a 28 year old who made $100 million in two years!
  4. Web 2.0 Wealth - learn how to make multiple incomes from custom Wordpress blog with multiple income options.
  5. Flipping Domain Names - learn how to make $1,000 a month simply buying and selling domain names.
  6. Recession Rescue System - 3 giants of the internet marketing world show you how to make money in a recession.
  7. Blogging to the Bank - the best blogging advice on the net. Highly recommended.
  8. Secret Affiliate Code - send traffic and make money, great promotional tools are here

So what are you waiting for, get started today and soon you’ll be earning good money.

13 Good Place to Buy and Sell Websites

Published
by
KevinKarter
on February 15, 2008
in Buying Websites
. 0 Comments

From time to time I get an email asking where is a good place to go and buy a website. So I have compiled a list of good places to buy (and sell) websites. Continue reading ‘13 Good Place to Buy and Sell Websites’

The Mistake of the Make Money Online Brigade

Published
by
KevinKarter
on February 11, 2008
in Blog, Making Money and internet marketing
. 6 Comments

What is the biggest mistake any ‘newbie’ can make when starting a Make Money Online business? They  plan to make money in the “make money online” niche!

But that is what you are doing Kevin I hear you say! Yes, but I am not doing this to make money, I am doing this to tell everybody how much I am making from all my other niches :-)

So why is it a mistake for newbies to start in the Make Money Online niche?
Making money in this niche is not an easy task and here are some of the reasons why it may not be a very good idea to start your online business in “make money online” niche:

  1. It is already a saturated niche with some big players like problogger.net, shoemoney.com, johnchow.com, and thousands of others making some serious cash.
  2. The people that visit such sites are webmasters and most of them are ad blind. So it is very difficult to make money from webmasters.
  3. Most of the people in this niche already know, and tell the tricks in this field. So it would be difficult to find and write something new which is not known to them.
  4. CPC costs in this niche is much less than others niches like finance, auto, health etc.
  5. If you find something new/great in this niche, it gets copied/duplicated quite fast on blogs bigger than yours as well in some other form. And they get the credit instead of you.
  6. Huge search engine competition in this niche.

So, in what niche should you try to make money?

Try something which you are interested in. It can be anything. My suggestion is think outside “make money online” niche. Spend some time, do some research and find a niche which interest you and does not have massive competition.

Affiliate or Adsense ?

Published
by
KevinKarter
on February 10, 2008
in Advertising Networks, Making Money and internet marketing
. 11 Comments

I have a website in the health niche. This site is about 2 years old and makes around $500/month consistently with adsense since last year. This site has a top 5 ranking on most search engines for some very good keywords and gets around 1,000 unique visitors a day. So, with those 30,000 uniques and $500 in adsense, I was happy with $16 eCPM. Who wouldn’t be? That is a pretty good eCPM. So, I was very happy with this site. Until a couple of days ago.

So what happened two days ago?

I got an email from one of my competitors, saying that he is willing to buy my site (they had seen the search engine rankings for it). I told them that the site is not for sale. Then, they gave me an offer which was very difficult to refuse. An offer of $20,000 for the site. I was shocked. Is my site that worth? How he is going to monetize the site making that much money? All these questions came to my mind.

At first, with the amazing offer price, I was just about to sell it. But then I thought, wait, why not try and see what he is going to do with the site. I can do that myself and see if my earnings can be increased. So I started researching the related sites and found that most of my competitors are not running Adsense but running some affiliate links which have some very big payouts.

I put those affiliate links on my site 48 hours ago and here are the stats I see for those 48 hours:

So in 48 hours, that’s a total of $652.60. So if I keep earning that sort of money every day, that would be around $9,789.00 per month from this site alone! Even if I average the figures down a bit to $200 per day (instead of current $326.30), I will be making at least $6,000 per month from this site, which was only making me $500 per month through Adsense until now.

So, Adsense is not always the best way to monetize your website. If you can the right type of affiliate programs which pay well and suit your niche, you can earn more, a LOT more!

Later on this month I will update you all on how the month went.

So, whats next?
As of now I have kept adsense on the site. I will keep them for next 5 days (total of seven days). Then I will remove them for next 7 days and will compare my affiliate earnings from these two weeks. That will decide whether I should remove adsense completely from the site or not.

What do you think? Have any of you had similar experience with changing from adsense to affiliate, or even the other way around?

16 Tips on How to Buy a Website

Published
by
KevinKarter
on February 8, 2008
in Buying Websites
. 6 Comments

One of my friends had some money he wanted to invest in building an online business. We discussed it in some detail and my suggestion to him was to just go out to the marketplace and buy some good websites. I even gave him some tips on what to look for when buying websites.

About 2 months ago, he went out and bought 6 websites for a total sum of $28,000. We did some some search engine optimization and link building work for the websites. Now these sites are making around $3,000 in monthly revenues with a monthly expense of around $200. That is a very good ROI I would say. He should get his money back in less than 10 months. Amazing! Which other business would provide that sort of ROI.

So what are the tips I gave to my friend for buying websites?
Here are those tips. just remember them while going into the marketplace and buying a website:

  1. The first thing you need to remember is that you should try to buy website with minimum amount of work required. That is the key to building your “online real-estate empire”.
  2. Always use escrow service. Even if it is at the cost of your own money. This will give you time to verify ALL the claims by the seller about the monthly traffic and revenue. If those claims are not met, feel free to reject the deal.
  3. When viewing the traffic stats, make sure you view the referrals stats as well. These days many people create quick traffic with sites like digg and stumbleupon and then sell the website. Such websites may not have a good business model to work on in the long run. So make sure that you view the referral stats to see how much traffic is coming from search engines. If around 70%+ traffic is coming from various search engines, you are good to go.
  4. If the seller is not using adsense on his website, make sure he is not banned from using it.
  5. When person is showing the revenue stats (lets say from adsense), make sure that CTR is not very high. If it is too high, make sure that the person is not in any sort of violation of policy on the page, for example, images above the ads, extra attention to the ads, etc.
  6. When you see the page rank of the website, don’t just believe it. Check the back-links of the website and verify that these back-links actually make sense with respect to the page rank of the site.
  7. When verifying the back-links, check if there are many site-wide back-links. If yes, ask the person whether these are his own sites. If yes, ask him how long the the links will stay. If not, ask him what sort of understanding with the other site is, so that those links can stay there.
  8. Make sure that internal pages of the site also have some page rank.
  9. Ask the seller if he has ever sold any site before (on the same forum/marketplace or other). If yes, check his history and transaction with previous buyers.
  10. Make sure that the site is listed in Google and pages are cached.
  11. Make sure you ask the seller whether the content on the site is unique. If yes, ask him who has written the content. Use the copyscape to verify what the person says. Also inquire about the images used on the website. Make sure they are not in any copyright violation with some other site. If they are, you should know about it.
  12. Check the age of the site. The older the better. Check the archive of the website at archive.org to see what has been the past of the site. Make sure it is not a site which was created on a old domain grabbed which had some other site in past.
  13. Ask the person whether he bought the site from somebody else. If yes, when.
  14. Find out what softwares/scripts he is using on the site. Make sure you are comfortable with those. Else it can create problem later on.
  15. Don’t ever belive the “webalizer” stats. They are much inflated. Ask the person to provide stats from any third party like google analytics or scripts like awstats.
  16. Last and finally, ask the person if he/she would help you moving the site to your server. Most people will agree to it, but its always good to ask first.

So now you know what are the things you need to know while going for the business of buying website and creating your own online real estate empire.

Are there any tips you would like to add here?

Google Adsense Has New Terms and Conditions

Published
by
KevinKarter
on February 5, 2008
in Advertising Networks, google and internet marketing
. 4 Comments

The Google Adsense policy has changed. They announce about it here. Of course you will also see it when you login to your account. So what has changed?

The most common change in the policy is that most instances of “Website(s)” is changed to “Property(ies)” to take care of the new Adsense avenues like gadgets. The second major change is the privacy policy where you need to have a privacy policy on your site which needs to mention about cookies.

Here are the other changes (other than the mentioned above)

In Point one:

Program is subject to Google prior approval

is changed to

Program is subject to Google’s prior approval

and

located at https://www.google.com/adsense/policies, or such other URL as Google may provide from time to time

is changed to

located at https://www.google.com/adsense/policies, and/or such other URL as Google may provide from time to time

and

By enrolling in the Program, You represent that You are at least 18 years of age and agree that Google may serve third party and/or Google provided advertisements (such Google-served advertisements, collectively, “Ads”), related Google queries and/or Ad search box(es) (collectively, “Links”), Google Web and/or Site search results (collectively, “Search Results”), and/or Google referral Ads (“Referral Buttons”) in connection with the Web site(s) that You designate and the Atom, RSS, or other feeds distributed through such Web site(s) (each such Web site or feed, a “Site”). For the avoidance of doubt, any reference in this Agreement or the Program Policies to an individual “Web page”, “Web site”, “Web site page” or the like that is part of the Site will also mean feeds distributed through such Web site. Multiple accounts held by the same individual or entity are subject to immediate termination unless expressly authorized in writing by Google (including by electronic mail).

is changed to (read it, it is important. About privacy and cookies):

By enrolling in the Program, You represent that You are at least 18 years of age and agree that Google may serve (a) third party and/or Google provided advertisements and/or other content (such third party provided advertisements, Google provided advertisements and other content, collectively, “Ads”), provided, however, that if Google serves non-compensated content, You will have the ability to opt out of receiving such content as part of the Program, (b) related Google queries and/or Ad search box(es) (collectively, “Links”), (c) Google Web and/or Site search results (collectively, “Search Results”), and/or (d) Google referral Ads (”Referral Buttons”), each in connection with the Web site(s), media player(s), video content and/or mobile content that You designate, or such other properties expressly authorized in writing by Google (including by electronic mail) (such other properties, “Other Properties”), and the Atom, RSS, or other feeds distributed through such Web site(s) , media player(s), video content, mobile content and/or Other Properties (each such Web site, media player, video content, mobile content, Other Property or feed, a “Property”). For the avoidance of doubt, any reference in this Agreement or the Program Policies to an individual “Web page”, “Web site”, “Web site page” or the like that is part of the Property will also mean feeds and media players distributed through such Web site. Multiple accounts held by the same individual or entity are subject to immediate termination unless expressly authorized in writing by Google (including by electronic mail). In some circumstances expressly authorized in writing by Google (including by electronic mail), You may enroll in the Program and create an account for the sole purpose of receiving payment from Google, and not, for purposes of clarification, for the purpose of displaying Ads, Links, Search Results and/or Referral Buttons on a Property. If, however, You subsequently use your Account to participate in the Program (i.e. for the purpose of displaying Ads, Links, Search Results and/or Referral Buttons on a Property), then such use of the Program will be governed by the terms of this Agreement. You must have and abide by an appropriate privacy policy that clearly discloses that third parties may be placing and reading cookies on your users’ browser, or using web beacons to collect information, in the course of ads being served on your website. Your privacy policy should also include information about user options for cookie management.

There are many other changes, but in short the major changes (as per my understanding of the above differences) are:

  1. You can put adsense search and referral ads on pages without content
  2. You can put adsense on error, registration, chat and thank you pages
  3. You need privacy policy on your site with says that advertisers (google) may use cookies to track information
  4. You can show adsense ads from more than one adsense account on same page at the same time
  5. You can now run contextual ads from other companies like yahoo on the same page

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When to Put Advertising on Your Blog

Published
by
KevinKarter
on February 2, 2008
in Blog
. 0 Comments

On of the questions I often get asked is when is the best time to put advertising on your blog?

Nowadays, people are trying to earn money from some unusual sources. Before now people used to earn money from a particular businees, or trade, but now money is so tight that people can’t depend on single business. Many people start blogging to earn a bit extra so that they can pay their bills, or whatever.

As I said earlier, earning money from blogging is not easy and it takes patience. If you are greedy or need to make money in a hurry then blogging shouldn’t be your choice. Yes! I have to say that because blogging will not make you a rich person overnight. It needs a lot of experience and perseverance to make your blog popular.

Everybody knows that money CAN be made by blogging, but you need to have enough visitors and not only visitors, but potential visitors. If you are thinking of making serious money from blogging then you have to take decision of putting advertising on your blog. Advertising ads on blog is an effective method to make money online and you should know when to put ads on your blog. You should ask yourself before putting ads on your blog, when is the right time to put advertising on my blog?

What is the best time to put advertising on your blog?

I thought a lot about it before putting advertising on this blog. I read lots of articles on the internet about this topic and I came to some conclusions from them which I want to share with you today. According to me, you should have at least 100+ unique visitors per day to put advertising on blog. To get that many visitors is quite easy. If your content is good, well written and unique then you will get visitors for sure. Keep adding new content to blog and you will get more visitors.

The niche your blog is in, is quite important. For example, if your blog is related to technology, make money online, health, celebs etc. then you are sure to get a good number of visitors who will keep visiting, but if your blog is a personal blog or a very general blog, or very niche blog, then it will be little more difficult to get visitors,but conversely it may be able to keep them and develop quite a loyal following.

Why 100 unique visitors per day?

I said a 100 visitors per day, but this is quite a small number if you have a general niche blog. Many different niches require many more visitors before you can start advertising on your blog.

Many visitors just come to get one specific piece of information and will close the window after reading what they want. This type of visitors are always in the majority i.e. around 85-90% and although this percentage is totally dependent on the content of your blog so it can vary from time to time. Your blog should have strong and interactive content so that large number of visitor will surf through more content and will also come back to see what is new on blog.

Even if you are planning to put advertising then don’t just put ads from one or two advertising network. I would recommend you to use a combination of one PPC ad and one text link ad which will give better results. Give time to your blog to grow, add new content on regular basis and slowly experiment with ads of different networks. Make sure you are always informing your readers, or combining information from different sources so as to shed new light on a subject. Also try and reward your readers with giveaways and coupons so that there is a real, tangible reward for their loyalty.

Now I think it would be good to hear from you, dear reader. When did you first put ads on your blog? What was your experience? What changes did you make as the results of your ads started to come in?

Four Things I Wanted to Do

Published
by
KevinKarter
on January 9, 2008
in Blog
. 0 Comments

I had planned to do 4 things to my blog from the start, but I got kind of sidetracked. What did you want to do I hear you ask? Well nothing very big, but here is the list below:

  1. Change the default wordpress theme to something a bit more distinctive.
  2. Install the “Recent Comments Wordpress Plugin”, so that I can give something back (a link) to people participating in the blog posts.
  3. Add feedburner to the blog so that I can track how many people are subscribing to my blog. Its always good to know about your readers.
  4. Put my personal earning statistics on this blog which will encourage myself and others to earn more.

Out of these 4 steps, I have just complete the first three. That is, I have added this new theme (called K2) to my blog. I hope you like it.

I have also added the feedburner on the top right corner. Feel free to subscribe to my blog as I will be adding more and more content now quite frequently.

I have added the recent commentators plugin to the blog. So if you want a backlink from this blog, keep participating in the posts.

I will start adding my monthly earnings with screenshots to this blog starting with the earnings for the month of February.

From $0 a month to $600 a month in 5 months

Published
by
KevinKarter
on January 6, 2008
in Link Building
. 1 Comment

This post is about one of my friends who is studying to be an electrical engineer. He contacted me about 6 months ago asking whether he can earn money on the net without spending a single penny. I thought a lot about it and this was my reply to him:

Hi *******,
Yes you can, but it will take you awhile before you start making any money. Maybe as much as year, or two. Here are some steps you can take if you don’t want to spend much money:

Create a blog on http://www.worpress.org on the subject of your choice (make sure you choose a subject which you are interested in).

Use a simple and clean template and put your Google Adsense code on it to earn the money.
Devote one hour every day to your blog and try to write two good posts (current events, news, reviews etc) on the topic you have chosen.

Submit each of your posts to all the famous bookmarking sites like digg, stumble upon etc. (this will take an extra 10 mins).
Go everyday to http://forums.digitalpoint.com/forumdisplay.php?f=65 and see the NEW DIRECTORY ANNOUNCEMENTS in the section. Submit your site to two new directories every day free of cost.
Register with some forums in your niche and put your website URL in your signature. Use the forum everyday for half an hour and interact with people in the forum
When you start getting some traffic from bookmarking sites or forum threads or search engines, you will be making some money out of it in Google Adsense.
When you get your first $10, start hunting for cheap links for your blog. Remember to get ONLY related links. Please remember to put all your money back into the site (promoting it) for quite some long time. Then will only it will rise.
Get more and more links when you get more and more money. That will give you more and more traffic. Which means more and more money.
So these are the steps I think I can tell you. Do let me know if you actually plan to follow them.

So the main points here were to get some free traffic first, which will make you some money, use that money to get some paid links, which will increase your traffic further.

Yesterday I was discussing with him like how is his project going. So he showed me his Google Adsense for the last month (5th month). In his 5th month he made around $602. But he has put in all the money he has earned back into his blogs promotion.

Today his 300+ post strong blog (niche: renewable energy news) gets around 1200 uniques per day and make him around $600/month. He says, he still does not need any money right now, so he will be using all his money back into his blog for next 6 months :-)