I’ve written many blogs now about making money online with little or no effort, recounting tales about how you could earn thousands while you while away your time gardening, watching TV, or cheating at the local pub quiz on your Internet phone (James).
Well now it’s time to go into a little detail, some ‘put up or shut up’ facts to turn your casual hobby into a full-time career. Forget the websites that offer to teach you how to make money with Adsense in exchange for paying them a consultancy fee, or buying their expensive eBooks. They’re idiots, and they’re trying to scam money from you. The real gold is right here… for free.
If you’ve read my previous blogs you’ll know about choosing a niche for your website, filling it with regularly updated unique content and monetising the socks off it – this time we go into detail about how to make that little extra money become a lot, with Google’s very own Adsense.
Step 1 – Ad Types
Choosing your Ad format is the first step to make, as remember Google’s Adsense is mostly an EPC (Earnings per Click) scheme whereby you get money each time someone clicks on the ads rather than when visitors simply view them, or actually buys something at the end of it. Therefore it’s in your best interest to have as many of your visitors as possible click on your adverts.
Obvious that is, easy that is not, hmm?
So what are the best performing ad sizes? According to Google the best performing ones are:
160×600 Skyscraper: Google say that advertisers like these size ads and tend to bid more for them, who are we to argue?
728×90 Leader board: Very popular for site headers, footers and forums
300×250 + 336×280 Rectangles: Another popular size and one Google personally recommends, also used quite extensively for video ads.
Link Units: These are recommended by Google for sites that have limited space, and recommended by me because they can be slipped into a horizontal navigation seamlessly 
Step 2 – Position your Ads
Location, location, location!
Slapping your ads on a page and hoping for success will lead to failure just as sure as eating a curry after 14 pints ‘to settle the stomach’ will lead to vomiting. You need to know where the hotspots are on your website; the locations that users are most likely to click (what is a hotspot not? …not a good spot! Actually in this instance it’s very good, so read on). Identifying these hotspots is simple, as user trends are fairly constant. Then you place an ad where the user is most likely to go first.
In fact, if you’re unsure about where users are most likely to click on your website, Google Analytics even shows you an overlay of your website marked out where your visitors click – if you have it installed; if you don’t, why not?
So where are visitors most likely to go? Why, the navigation links of course! They can usually be found vertically on the left of the page and horizontally at the top of the page. When visitors naturally head for these hot-spots they’ll be finding your ads instead of site navigation, earning you money.
If you’re thinking any of this might be a little underhand, or against Google’s TOS, don’t panic… Google actually offers advice on this itself in the Adsense FAQ, and even offers extra tips for ad placement within your forums and blogs.
Let’s look at a couple of examples of successful advert placement from some Adsense websites.
This website utilises the left hand navigation slot for the Adsense links, knowing that most users will automatically look there in an attempt to navigate the website – earning the website owner money from the clicks.
Notice the links at the top of the page? They’re not navigation links; they’re Google Adsense link units, masquerading as navigation.
For a much better example however I’ve used one of my own sites, anonymously of course, to show how to truly Adsense up your website.
Here you can see use of the Link Unit and the 160×600 skyscraper to maximum effect. Obviously with the normal navigation slots used for Adsense placement the usability of the site suffers, and the bounce-rate is extremely high… but the exit links are almost always to Adsense. That, of course, is the idea!
Step 3 – Style your Ads
This is the real trick, where the serious optimisation comes in. Your CTR will soar if your ads don’t look like ads, and instead look like the rest of your site.
Now hold on! We can’t go and style up our Adsense ads outside of the limited colour changes Google affords us can we, it goes against their TOS? True, you can’t… however, you can style up your own text and links to match the Google ads. This is perfectly OK with the big G. Make sure that your link text is the same colour, same font and same size as the Adsense ads and that it is underlined the same. Also make sure you have descriptions underneath your links to match the style and layout of the Google ads.
To be really sneaky (and again even Google recommends this) you can make your Adsense adverts’ background colour the same as your website’s, AND even lose the border on the Adsense ads. This makes them blend in seamlessly with your website.
With your navigation links and your Adsense links working in perfect harmony your website doesn’t look like an ad-fest when visitors first visit it.
Darren
Affiliate Marketing
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I’ve previously blogged about how you can earn money from your website by doing very little, and in many cases; absolutely nothing work wise with the benefit of some well researched SEO. I’ve focused on a few specifics such as advert placement and content generation, but now I’d like to go down that well trodden route of creating a list… a list of the best affiliate schemes for you to join.
These are the guys that pay you the dosh, the business end of making money online. If you haven’t heard of any of these I’d suggest you check them out because you could be missing out on some revenue potential for your website.
So, in no particular order here are the people who are falling over themselves to give you money.
eBay
affiliates.ebay.com
Everyone uses eBay these days, surely? It’s the world’s biggest marketplace after all. Did you know though that you don’t need to actually sell anything on eBay in order to make money from it? Interesting eh? In fact you don’t need to ever browse eBay’s labyrinthine category structure or ever have to look at a listing for the latest Big Brother spin off merchandise. In fact anyone who makes money from eBay by actually trading in items is positively passé.
These days the big money is in profiting from other people’s auctions. eBay even produces a variety of kits to aid you in this most capitalist of crusades. With the eBay editor kit and the product kit you can create dynamic auction listings direct onto your website, with the latest bid price, buy it now options and end date all displayed. So for example if you ran a website about Video Games featuring reviews of the latest games you can have auction listings for the games displayed dynamically on your reviews pages. This works superbly for conversion rates because visitors to your site will get to read about the product, and then be presented with a selection of related auction listings to purchase the item.
You need to do no work whatsoever to get these dynamic listings, eBay does the rest.
eBay, being the behemoth that it is, uses a variety of providers for its affiliate scheme, including Commission Junction who we’ll come onto in a moment.
Amazon
associates.amazon.com
Amazon is one of the first .com businesses, and one of the most successful. They survived the .com crash and have become a global brand to send shivers down the spines of any high street retailer, and with Amazon’s move into new areas such as groceries, furniture and basically anything you can legally buy in this world of ours; all high street retailers should be scared.
The great thing about Amazon though is that you can earn commission on anything anyone buys from your website. If you own a website about book reviews you can add direct purchase links to products on Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk (they’re different schemes, so you need to sign up twice) and you’ll earn money as soon as anyone clicks through to buy the product.
Amazon used to pay out at the end of every Quarter, but had just moved to monthly pay-outs. You need to reach the minimum payout amount before any cheque is issued however. Amazon.co.uk do direct deposit into your account, but UK residents have to receive cheques from Amazon.com – which is annoying if you’ve ever had to pay a foreign cheque into your bank.
Commission Junction
www.cj.com
CJ as they’re affectionately know are one of the biggest affiliate networks in the world and have some of the biggest online retailers ready to supply you with graphics and links for your website. eBay, the BBC and Warner Brothers all use CJ, and the collective money you make from all of the different websites is combined through CJ for bigger and more regular payouts.
That’s the main advantage with using a site like CJ. If you sign up to Amazon you need to meet Amazon’s minimum earnings threshold before you receive any money, but with CJ you can be a member of hundreds of their affiliate schemes and the earnings are all combined for a payout. So for example if you only make $4 with WickedCoolStuff.com in a month you’ll still get paid your money so long as your other schemes within the CJ network total their minimum payment threshold, and with eBay being involved that’s very likely.
CJ have a great system whereby you can create a ‘pool’ of ads to use on your website, so you add one piece of code and then control which adverts for which companies show up on your site through the CJ control panel. Their reporting is excellent and allows you to break down which pools are the best performing, which partners and which sites.
CJ make a direct deposit every month into your bank account.
Tradedoubler
www.tradedoubler.co.uk
Similar to CJ and home of some of the more funky UK retailers such as Play.com and GAME; unlike CJ however the reporting on Tradedoubler is very messy and difficult to use. Their control panel isn’t very intuitive and their ad units aren’t very flexible. The best affiliate schemes (like Amazon) allow you to make the maximum amount of money with the minimum amount of work. Tradedoubler isn’t like that. You need to put the hours in.
If you have a DVD or Video games related website however, Tradedoubler is essential to master. Tradedoubler make monthly direct deposits to your bank once the minimum payment threshold of £30 has been reached.
Google
www.google.com/adsense
As with most things online, Google have cornered the market in giving money away as well. Their Adsense programme is the proverbial daddy of passive revenue streams as it allows the webmaster to automatically display adverts on their website relevant to their content. There is no need to select products or destination links for your site, Google does it all for you. If your website is about reviewing Golf courses in the UK (hmm, I’ll write that one down) then Google will automatically display adverts for Golf clubs, golfing holidays and golf equipment.
Assuming you optimise your website correctly with advert location and colour schemes you can potentially achieve a CPM of over $4. This means $4 for every 1,000 impressions. So if you have 1,000,000 page impressions in a month you could make over $4,000 just from Google.
That’s worth signing up to Adsense for. Google Adsense makes direct deposits into your account each month once you’ve earned over $100.
ReviewMe
www.reviewme.com
This site is genius. If you have an opinion, you can get paid for it. ReviewMe is generally aimed at Blog sites, but any site that updates regularly with news can sign up. Your website is given a score based on your Alexa rank (remember, this is one of the two uses for Alexa?) and your Technorati score; this combined score then determines how much it costs others to have a review on your website. All you need to do then is agree to the offers you get from the website, and write your 200 word minimum reviews. They don’t even need to be positive; you can be as honest or as opinionated as you wish.
At the end of each month, you get paid via PayPal. Simple as that!
You can earn as much or as little as you want, depending on how many reviews you want to do. Reviews can pay $5 or they can pay $4,000 depending on how powerful ReviewMe deems your website to be. Sign up and find out!
That’s about it for now, there are more websites out there desperate to give you money but these should suffice for now. If you’re not receiving money from any of these websites; why not? There is cold hard cash waiting for you to collect it; you just need a website and a bit of SEO. The more traffic your site gets, the more money you should be making from it.
Monetise your website today.
Darren
SEO Programmer
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