Surf the Mind

Archive for February, 2005

I’ve been having great success with AdSense lately, thanks in no small part to AdSense Gold.

As age-old wisdom declares, “The more you have, the more you want.” And it’s true. Now that I’m making what might be considered good money from my sites, I want to figure out how to make even more.

So, I’ve been looking at different advertising networks outside of Google, and I’ve found two in particular that might be worth looking into.

First, there’s Targetpoint.

Targetpoint has contextual text ads, like Google’s AdSense. I don’t think, however, that this is where the money is with these guys. If you’re going to go for text ads, it’s probably best to stick to the 800 lb Google gorilla.

Targetpointalso offers one form of advertising that Google does not. They call it ExitPoint, and in essence, it is a way of putting a small frame with contextual advertising on external sites you link to.

The Targetpoint Website says:

Every website has its exit traffic links, now you can generate money from them. Exitpoint provides content-specific ads in pages you link to, enabling you to display ads on web pages that are not under your editorial control. With Exitpoint, any page you link to, will start working for you – it’s another great way to produce meaningful additional income from your site. Like Adpoint – Exitpoint can be completely automatic and is also very easy to deploy.

The legality and morality of this particular scheme is a little iffy, I think. There have been lawsuits launched over framing other people’s sites with your own advertising. I’ll have to do some research before implementing, but as I’ve got over 3000 external links on my Publishing site alone, the prospect of extracting a few bucks from those link collections is appealing.

The second ad network I’m looking into is Aptimus.

Aptimus places offers from various advertisers on intermediary pages that appear when your visitor actually requests something. That could be site registration, subscribing to a newsletter, or downloading a document or software.

They advertise that they produce higher revenues per impression than any other advertising network.

I’ve signed up for Targetpoint, and am awaiting approval. I’ll have to consider if and how I can best use the Aptimus model for my current and future sites.

I’ve been online a long time. I’ve bought some good ebooks and software, and I’ve bought some that stunk. But I’ve never been one to get hyped up about any of them. But then, none of the digital products I bought paid for themselves on the very day I bought them.

Until Now.

Not too long ago I bought a copy of AdSense Gold from Johnathan Leger. The changes I was able to make to my pages began increasing my click-through rate and my income within minutes!

The Adsense Gold package includes:

• The Ebook, “Triple Your AdSense CTR in Three Easy Steps,” which will show you which ad formats, colors and placements produce the best click-through rates.
• AdSense Tracker software that shows you how well your ad formats, pages, and channels are performing RIGHT NOW. No more waiting for Google stats to catch up.
• A list of Overture’s most valuable keywords — including several that bidders pay $100 per click for!
• Content – 11,000+ articles ready to add to your site

To show you the power of just the first two items in the package, I’m going to show you my preliminary stats on my own site.

The images come from the AdSense Tracker software included in the package. Because the stats don’t come from Google, revealing these will not violate their terms of service. I’m also hiding the ad format information, because I truly believe you should pick up a copy of AdSense Gold yourself. The author of the script and ebook truly deserves any income he derives from the sale of it for making this absolutely fabulous information public rather than keeping it for himself.

First, lets look at my Click-Through-Rate on one particular ad format:

Now, 3.22% isn’t bad in my book, and I was pretty proud of that rate — until I started working with the advice offered in the “Triple Your AdSense CTR” ebook.

Here’s how one small change in the Link Text and URL Text color values based on the information in that ebook changed my click-through rate overnight:

And, once I’d discovered how great a difference one small change could make, I tried a few things with the border and background colors recommended in the book — tracking the results of each carefully with AdSense Tracker. The change that proved most successful led to this:

Then, testing something that’s not in the book, I tried wrapping the content around the ad, so people wouldn’t just skip past it right away, and voila!

From 3.22% to 9.02% in a week. I had a huge advantage over other AdSense publishers because I had AdSense Tracker to tell me exactly which ads were working in real time! By the time Google had updated the channel stats for the first day, I had already made several profitable changes, knowing exactly what the result of each was nearly immediately.

After seeing the results on my own site, I helped my friend Ian with a site we thought was a dud. It had lots of traffic but the AdSense ads on that site were only getting a 1% click-through rate. We had, for the last year, thought that the poor showing was due to the nature of the topic, since his site is in a very non-commercial niche.

But when we applied the same tactics that I had used with my site, the CTR jumped to 6%, which, for Ian, means an extra $600.00 each month!

And as you are reading this, odds are that Ian and I are busy working on other sites that utilize the information in AdSense Gold to increase our income even more.

Do you have a site that could benefit from this information? Then please, do yourself a favor and buy a copy of AdSense Gold and begin using it immediately! Every instant you delay you are missing out on clicks and revenue that you could be collecting. Believe me, I’m kicking myself that I left so much money on the table for over a year before I started optimizing my Adsense ads.

Click here to visit the AdSense Gold official site where you can purchase with any major credit card

I promise you that this is one purchase you will not regret.

At least that’s what OKCupid.com’s test tells me.

Because of a move and some other related issues, I cut blogging out of my schedule for a while.

Then, just as I wanted to get back into it, I discovered that Thingamablog had somehow corrupted my database, and I could no longer update.

Bummer.

So I quit blogging for even longer.

Now, I’ve managed to get WordPress installed, and the template almost all converted into something at least marginally resembling the old layout, so I’m back.

The old archives, because they were just static pages created by Thingamablog, are still here — listed beneath the archives generated by WordPress.

I still have some layout work to do, and I need to re-create my categories, but at least I’ve managed a first post!