Why Your Adsense Income is going down and what to do about it

January 2008 has turned out to be a record month for my income from Google Adsense and I hope the trend will continue for the rest of the year. I have not done any work on my Adsense empire and it is pretty much running itself. Many bloggers complained about how they lost income from Adsense when Google reduced the clickable area of the Adsense ads a short few months ago. Many forum members at Digitalpoint.com have been whining how unfair Google is to them and how their “hard earned” Adsense payments go lower and lower. For whatever reason that change Google made does not seem to have affected me at all (knock on wood). I think this really only affected those people who were trying to lure visitors to click on something that was blended so well into the page design that the ads were not recognized as such. In one way I think that if that was/is your business model you are setup for failure anyway. Using the sneaky way to make money from Adsense is short-term and ill-advised. You are not providing value and your goal is to fool visitors and make them click ads. My approach is rather to provide value and eventually make profit from when a targeted ad shows up that provides value to a customer (one reason why I dumped YPN from all but one site, because their ad targeting sucks). Sure, I think nicely positioned ads well blended into the page design are a good way to put Adsense on a website, but how much blending is too much?! I think a visitor needs to be able to make a decision without being fooled into making a click onto something she thinks is part of your website. If you take away the ability to make the decision for a website visitor, that moment you take away the trust your website has eventually earned. Let visitors decide if they want to click an ad or not. Don’t fool them into clicking just so that your Adsense income goes up. If your website shows laser-targeted ads your website visitors receive value. If you run a pregnancy website and the ads are about pregnancy related products, it complements your content and a great offer shown in an ad provides value to visitors.

Why do you think Google made these changes to Adsense? Think “value” again. Google has pointed out several times that they put a lot of emphasis onto value for their customers. If there is no value, Google does not like it. So, for long-term business success with Google Adsense you really need to reconsider what you are doing. If you are one of those complaining about how your Google Adsense incomes goes down all the time, it might be time to revisit how you have it implemented and what value are you providing to your website visitors. The solution is not to put up more cheesy websites, but to build better design implementations and then drive traffic to it. Google Adsense is a great way to make money – if done right. It is an even better way to make money if it runs on auto-pilot while you can work on other things. This only works if you think long-term. What is your approach on Adsense?

Tax Season kicking into High Gear

January 31 is finally here. That means that businesses and banks need to have mailed all tax related forms to customers. I am still waiting for some tax documents though. Some of the late senders are Yahoo, Amazon.com and Azoogleads. We will see if they meet the federal guidelines or if they blame the mailman . Anyway – I will most likely file my own tax return some time in February. I do expect to eventually owe a small amount of a few hundred dollars, but nothing too major (so I hope). Since I still have a full-time job I use the tax deduction at work and therefore avoid quarterly payments to the IRS through my business. My employer is taking extra money out of my paycheck (done through the W4 tax form) and sends it to Uncle Sam for me. I might change this in 2008 since I hope to have more business income than my payroll deduction “can handle”. In December I signed up for EFTS – the federal electronic tax filing system. That will allow me to easily make the change when I see my income go up.

Anyway – tax season is also big for affiliates since there are lots of opportunities to make money. It starts will offering products like TaxCut or Turbo Tax through Amazon and does not end with advertising online tax file services like Tax Brain or TaxAct. Last year in April I started my preparation for the 2008 tax season by putting a tax help website online. The site is now aged and filled with some good content. Organic traffic is flowing in – increasing day by day now that tax season is finally here. I placed the first tax return offers on the site this evening and will add more as the affiliate networks start offering those. COPEAC has the Tax Brain offer which pays over $5.00 per lead. If you are not an affiliate for Copeac – sign up now. As mentioned I am also using Amazon’s affiliate program and overall offer a variety of products to website visitors. I will probably start some PPC campaigns as well fairly soon (depending on my available time). The aged website should help to get a good Google Adwords Quality Score, too. So, hopefully there will be a nice burst in income during February and March this year. Are you working tax season related affiliate offers, too? When do your preparations start?

PS: There are affiliate links in this posting. If you think this is a good posting and you are considering taking advantage of those offers, please use my links. Thanks.

This is Your last Chance …..

Back in November I bought Affiliate Elite and are using it ever since. Affiliate Elite is a software that supports your affiliate marketing efforts. When I bought the software the deal included a 30 minute one-on-one consultation. I was contacted shortly after my purchase and scheduled an appointment. When the appointment time came, nobody contacted me and so I let it go. The next day the same guy contacts me again via email wanting to schedule the appointment “because I had not done so yet” and ‘warned’ me that this was one of my last chances to get this finally done. Well, since then I am ignoring this guy “Keith” from the “The Everyday Wealth Team” – just to receive more notifications that this deal is about to expire. I guess by now you know how the story ends. I am still being contacted about twice per week. No it gets even worse. If I schedule an appointment for a consultation this week I will receive access to some super-dooper eZWeb tools that allow me to build a website without knowing any HTML, MySQL, FTP, or whatever.

You know – I am all up for help if it allows me to become more efficient and to eventually grow my business. I buy different tools, sometimes an e-book, or subscribe to fee-based services as needed for a while. I think I am pretty good in seeing what eventually helps and what is a scam or a rip-off. This offer here I gladly let go by and will not take advantage of it. Why? Because this is just one of those “freebie” deals that come with a big upsell package and I don’t need that. If I have spare money I would probably know what to buy easily, but this won’t fit that category. So, my advice if you are in a similar situation. Don’t believe everything people have to offer. Don’t buy every crappy e-book or software. If a deal sounds too good to be true, it most-likely is. Making large amounts of money on the Internet is not as easy as those ‘people’ will want you to believe. There is much more work involved than you think.

Saturn Vue Hybrid – Not very impressive

A while ago I wrote about how I was involved in an accident when a Cadillac rear-ended my Jeep grand Cherokee. During Winter it is taking a long time here in Colorado to get an appointment at a body shop. So, yesterday it was finally my turn to drop off my car. Arrangements were made for a rental and Enterprise-Rent-A-Car was waiting for me at the body shop. I received a 2007 Saturn Vue SUV with hybrid technology. I have to say, I am not very impressed by this vehicle. First of all the Saturn really feels cheap inside. Cheap plastic, cheap design, cheap (lousy) seats – just not a comparison at all to the Grand Cherokee of mine (and that is not an very expensive or high-end vehicle itself). The difference is really dramatic in my opinion. So, once I was working myself through all the cheap plastic I was interested to see how a Hybrid would do. Going Green is the right thing to do and maybe this would motivate me to buy a Hybrid the next time a car buying opportunity comes around. I gotta say – I am (again) not impressed with the Saturn. Maybe it is the altitude? I live in Highlands Ranch, Colorado which is about 5,900 feet high. As a rule of thumb cars lose about 10% of their power due to the altitude. I don’t know if this car is good enough at sea-level, but it is under-motorized for Colorado for sure. Acceleration feels really slow – especially at speeds when you sometimes need to floor it to pass somebody. Putting the pedal to the metal here did not do anything – it was just slow. Once travel speed was reached it drives OK and at ~65 MPH it is doing, but getting there can be an issue.

So, I am not impressed by this Hybrid. I don’t know how other Hybrids – especially Toyota and Honda – feel like, but so far this would no really motivate me to buy a Hybrid. Maybe one of the new Diesels in a Jeep SUV will work better? I heard Diesels are becoming more clean and they are more fuel-efficient, too.

PPC Campaign Updates

I know I have been lazy posting more on my blog. Lazy is the wrong term – I have been caught up in so much other stuff that I just could not get a complete post written and published. Anyway – mixed results in my PPC marketing efforts. Got some great campaigns going and beat the Adwords Quality Score slap pretty much. Still missing conversions and that’s where I am working on. Testing different landing pages is very time-consuming – especially if you still have a full-time job like I do.

So, how’s my PPC stuff really going. Really Good and Really Bad. Let’s look at the good stuff first. My campaigns are getting very good CTRs and I have been fine-tuning keywords and stuff. Click prices are slowly coming down. I am getting good conversion results on product related keywords that directly hit the product page of the matching product. Bad is that it does not mean much traffic as it is very narrow and that means not many conversions (some though). I am also running campaigns on broad keywords that are topic related and link to a landing page from where the visitors would drill down to the products herself. Example: a product related campaign links directly to the specific product. Let’s take Rachael Ray cooking books as an example. If I link directly to the book with the matching book title as the keyword I am seeing conversions. If I run a campaign that links to the Rachael Ray Category site with several titles displayed, I am seeing crap. I am still using cooking books related keywords and the ad copy is detailed enough as well. The latter is the section where I can generate much more traffic and need to optimize my landing page(s) more because the traffic does not convert. I will take the weekend to grab the keywords that generated the most traffic and see how I can merge products and more generic keywords into a winning combination.

This is one of my PPC issues I am seeing. I am too targeted and then generate barely page views and the overall conversion volume is just not high enough to justify the efforts and I have not found a reliable way around it. If you are more experienced in PPC – what would you recommend?

Anyway – I know I am blowing some money out of the window and I hope it is a good investment. It is at least good to know that my Adsense income is on track to be a record month for me. I am already way past the $1,000.00 marker for the month and today is just the 25th of January. January is traditionally a good month for me. A very large commercial website (they operate online and offline) always licenses content from me on a recurring base and I am expecting the check for 2008 in the mail here shortly. I receive about $10 per content page and it comes out to be a very nice 3-digit check (closer to 4-digits than closer to 2-digits). Every year we add between 5-15 new articles to the list and this is a very nice stream of income. Enough for today. I am on call for my full-time job this week and was called into work at around ~1 AM and have been working since then (can you say 11th hour … lol). But that job is fun so far and this just comes with the package (every 10 weeks I am on call for 1 week).

PS: I am not promoting Rachael Ray Cook Books, just in case you were wondering. I am using a CJ.com vendor that offers a data feed for their products.

Do cheap directory submissions help to really get more traffic?

Many many moons ago it was pretty efficient to have your website submitted to directory websites and traffic was scheduled to come in. This was a good deal and a great step when doing SEO for a website. Directory submissions always helped a little bit, even though traffic barely reached hundreds of visitors per day that way. I recently did a test on one of my websites and bought a 750 Directory submission package over at Digital Point. The initial traffic surge upon ordering the package was good. Many directory owners at least took a look and then accepted the website. I probably received about 70 or 80 confirmed listings which I think is pretty decent. But how much link value did I receive? Apparently not much because my stats show a pretty clear picture. 10 unique visitors just does not represent any significant traffic. I used to see more traffic on a new website a year ago. Directory submissions might help to get a website indexed, but they do not help anymore to get any significant rankings in search engines. So, for me that helps to decide to rather spend the $35.00 (or whatever it was) on other forms of SEO.

SEO has become more difficult and you have to be much more creative nowadays to drive traffic to your website. I am sure Google has already de-valued links from del.icio.us and other “top” bookmarking websites. Smaller bookmarking websites might still work for some link power, but in the long run every average SEO will use the same source to get links. The above average SEOs know better sources for sure and still find loopholes around the higher requirements. Anyone who has build up a network of folks has a significant advantage in today’s Internet traffic market.

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