I’ve been planning, thanks to suggestions made by commentors in recent posts (PayPerClickTrick and On Stage Lighting) to do some split testing of Adsense ad colors and formats. If the term split testing is new to you, the basic idea is that you run ads two different ways and see which one works best. “Works best” can mean whatever you want it to mean…best click through rate, best earnings, etc. My plan had been to do serial split testing. Run ads the way I have them for a two week period... Read Full Story

The first sponsored blog over at The Advisory Panel is getting under way. The niche chosen for the blog is stay at home jobs for parents. Topics could include freelance writing, ebay, affiliate marketing, etc. It’s a fairly large niche, but unified by the focus on parents who want to earn an income from home so they can stay with their children. As a sponsored blog, the blog is hosted and paid for by the forum. Advisory Panel member volunteers will write the posts, and keep any affiliate... Read Full Story

I don’t spend a lot of time these days surfing traffic exchanges or the PTR sites, since I’m spending a lot of time at The Advisory Panel, and creating content for niche sites. But now and then I do to get a sense for what’s being promoted. Normally they’re all the same, they show you an affiliate page, which is pretty much 0% effective at getting results (I really get tired of seeing that beach bum with his laptop). The more advanced people show you an opt-in page for an ecourse, and... Read Full Story

A couple of days ago I started hunting for information on improving the cost-per-click (CPC) you get with Adsense ads. I was a bit tired of losing visitors from my sites for an 11 cent click (that’s an extreme example, but it happens). I know that the amount you make per click with Adsense is dependent on a number of factors that you don’t control directly, including your click-through-rate compared to other sites in your niche. But I knew that Adsense allows you to block specific... Read Full Story

So you’re convinced that you need to make the switch to creating products rather than selling someone else’s products. And ebooks seem simple enough to create, so you decide to write an ebook and sell it. But how do you come up with the subject of your ebook? Your first instinct will be to write an ebook about Internet Marketing. This is natural. After all, you’re trying to make money online, and have been investing a huge amount of time (and probably money) trying to learn how to do that... Read Full Story

Cash Crate, a popular get-paid-to (GPT) site has recently increased the amount of commissions you get from new members. Their basic commission structure is still in place. You get 20% of what your first level referrals get, and 10% of what their first level referrals get. This can amount to quite a bit of money over time, as your referral base grows. You can boost those numbers by referring more active members from the United States. The majority of offers are good only for those members... Read Full Story

You’ve probably heard that it’s a good idea to blend Adsense ads in with your site, so they don’t stand out. The default Google palette for Adsense ads looks nice, but the blue color scheme really stands out too much if your site is all greens and yellows. But actually blending the ads with your site’s colors can be a bit confusing, so here’s a tutorial. When you’re creating Adsense ads, you get to specify the colors for the border, title, background, text, and URL. But you can either... Read Full Story

I’ve been running a fun little plugin lately called Psychic Search. Psychic Search is a free plugin that records searches using your Wordpress search widget. There’s a wealth of information in those searches about what your readers want. For example, I know that a topic some of my readers want to know about is how to import sql. I can only imagine that they’re trying to figure out how to restore a backup of a blog, perhaps. I have a variety of technical tutorials, but haven’t done one on... Read Full Story

I just ran across Hub Pages the other day. Hub Pages is a Squidoo like site, where you can create web pages about pretty much any topic, and earn a share of the advertising and affiliate revenue generated by the page. The tools seem comparable, and make creating your page and embedding photos and videos quite easy. What distinguishes Hub Pages from Squidoo is the transparency of the accounting. At Squidoo, all revenue goes to Squidoo and at the end of the month you learn how much each of... Read Full Story

This tutorial is part of an email course I’m developing on creating niche websites. So if it seems like it’s a tutorial out of the blue, that’s why. It makes more sense in the context of the email course, but I thought that my readers might get some use out of it even without the course itself. Part of picking a topic for a niche website is making sure we’ll be able to profit from the site. We’ve already seen that one way to profit is by selling ads. In the early days of a niche website, the... Read Full Story