Caydel’s SEO Blog

You have a blog, and you want to make some money off of it. Ok, fair enough. You, and 20 million other bloggers have the same dream. In fact, I share that dream with you. So, I have decided to write a ‘Monetize Your Blog’ series as a bit of a learning process for myself, as well as to provide a resource for anyone else who wants to follow in my footsteps. As it is said, why re-invent the wheel?

As it stands, the information within this series will be blog-oriented, but you should be able to take the basic concepts from what I have written here, and apply them to your own site, no matter what type of site it is. Right up front, I want to make sure everyone knows that I welcome questions, comments, and suggestions. in fact, they are encouraged.

Game Plan

Now, there is no point in even starting a project like this without some sort of a game plan. So, to give you a sneak preview into what you expect, here is the series as I envision it:

1. Introduction
2. Set Your Goals
3. Select Your Advertising Programs
4. Creating House Ads
5. Creating an Ad Sales Page
6. Optimizing Your Ad Company’s Copy
7. Estimating and Setting Your Initial Price
8. Attracting Advertisers
9. Summary and Results

Of course, this will be subject to change as we go on. I may encounter issues and subjects which should be touched upon, or I may take a post to answer questions or comments.

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I just came across a post on Eches Blog where he espouses the idea of filtering all the MFA (Made For Adsense) sites from your Adsense ads by using the Adsense competitive ad filter. He also mentions that by doing this you may cause your adsense earnings to increase. Additionally, the post also links to AdsBlackList.com, a site which lists a variety of MFA and low-paying sites with the idea that you use the competitive ad filter to remove these low-paying ads. From AdsBlackList.com:

Why would I use AdsBlackList?

There are three main reasons.

1) Increase your adsense revenue up to 50%
2) Increase the reputation of your website by NOT linking to Made for Adsense sites
3) Save the quality of contextual advertising in global

In other words, subscribing to ABL and submitting MFA sites that you’ve discovered, you will be helping yourself to make more money and helping your customers to find quality information when they click on your adsense ad

I am not sure I understand how this could lead to higher adsense revenues. Adsense works on a priority system where cost and relevancy are balanced in order to bring you the best blend of relevancy and price available to you. By blocking certain ads, the ads you do get are likely to be priced lower than the original ads. So, how can they justify the theory that creating a blacklist a mile long and blocking ads which Google would normally show as the best paying ads for that block can increase your revenue at all, let alone by as much as 50%?

Somebody, enlighten me, please!

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Text Links Ads, one of the premiere companies in the link-sales industry has now launched a new Link Baiting service. In short, they offer two plans, one at the $5000 level, and one which will cost you $10,000. With both plans, they create a link bait item, submit it to the major social media sites, and mail them to appropriate bloggers. The $10,000 plan also gives you additional creative ideas in addition to the idea for the link bait, they submit to a wider range of social media sites, email twice as many bloggers, and, if possible, submit your site to CSS galleries.

Patrick Gavin and Andy Hagens are two of the top names in the Link-Building field, and the price of this service reflects that. Would a service like this be worth the high cost? This is cheap in comparison to some of the other link baiting services available, but I can hardly believe that this is worth $10,000. Let’s be honest, the major time is spent in coming up with the idea. If you are somewhat skilled at crafting your own headlines and summaries, you could do the submissions yourself, in addition to emailing relevant bloggers.

So, is the idea worth $10,000 to you? I would appreciate hearing from anyone who has purchased a link baiting service in the past. Tell me how well it worked! I want to know hat type of ROI you think you received from this service! 

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Well, as you all may remember, there was a class action suit launched against Google a few months ago with regards to click fraud. I joined into the suit, and recieved my settlement just a few moments ago. 5 minutes ago, I just recieved the following email:

Dear Google AdWords advertiser:

We are writing to notify you that we have processed your claim for
Account Number *removed* under the Lane’s Gifts v. Google class-
action settlement. We are issuing credits to the AdWords account
identified in your claim.

To view your credit award, log in to your account and open your
Billing Summary page. Your credit award will appear under the label
‘Adjustment - Click Quality’ between the dates 10/27 and 10/28. In
some cases, it may take a few days for an award to be reflected on
this page, so if you don’t see it at first, please check back soon.

You don’t need to do anything to redeem your credit. Google will
automatically apply it to future invoices for your credited AdWords
account. The credits are valid for one year from their date of
issuance and may be canceled at any time after that.

Credits are awarded on a pro rata basis, taking into account these
factors:
- The amount you paid Google for advertising
- Google’s revenues from online advertising since January 1, 2002,
and your claim percentage
- The total amount of credits available in the settlement, which is
US$60M.

If you have any questions, please contact us at
https://adwords.google.com/support/bin/request.py?hl=en_US.

Thank you for your continued support of Google.

Sincerely,

The Google AdWords Team

Being somewhat excited by this, I quickly logged into my Adwords account to see how much I recieved back. And, *drumroll* I got $0.48.

Yes, you heard correctly. $0.48 bloody sense. This is a touch rediculous. now, I am not a large scale advertiser. But when I filed my claim, I claimed $198.42 on my account, at an estimated 30% click fraud rate, in line with the numbers resulting from a variety of studies which had been reported around the time that I had filed.

Just to emphasize how rediculous this compensation is, I was compensated for 0.24% of my advertising costs. ie, Google is compensating me for an estimated 0.24% click fraud rate. Now, I didn’t expect to get the full 30% I claimed back. I would have been happy to get 5% back.

We all *know* that there is a higher click fraud rate than that. If this has proven anything, it has proven that the only people who actually are making good on this suit were the lawyers arguing it.

At any rate, I will relish my 2 free advertising clicks. With any luck, at least one of them will convert. If anyone else has recieved their settlement, let me know. I want to know if what I recieved is in line with the settlements other people have recieved.

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Today, Adbrite launched some great new features to publishers.

New IAB Ad Units: A bunch of new ad unit sizes have been released in accordance with the Internet Advertising Bureau’s Standards and Guidelines for Internet Marketing Units. This will allow even more flexibility when placing ad units into layouts.

Reserve Pricing: Are you an Google Adsense user? Well, now AdBrite has a new feature in which you can enter your Adsense client code. The AdBrite unit will then show Google Adsense ads until the estimated CPM for your site falls below a certain reserve level you set. At that point, AdBrite will step in and display their own ads, if they can deliver a CPM above the reserve you set.

From the Ad Zone setup page

We want you to earn as much as possible from your ad placements, whether that’s through AdBrite or the networks you’re already working with.

You can run ads from your current ad networks within your AdBrite code, and we’ll always show the ads that earn you the most money. In other words, when we can earn you the most, we’ll show our ads. When we can’t, we’ll rotate your other ads back in. You can’t lose.

If you go to my main InfoHatter site, you will see an AdBrite skyscraper on the left hand side. At the moment, it should be displaying Google ads wrapped in the AdBrite box. And I apologize in advance for the horrible look of that page!
It seems that AdBrite has been working quite hard launching many new features lately. I guess they have to; in the arena with Google, MSN and Yahoo! no doubt means that they have to step up to compete. I think we can expect to continue seeing great features from AdBrite in days to come!

P.S. When I tried to create a new text link zone, the form now say ‘Text and Banner Zones’. I guess this means that AdBrite’s long-awaited banner advertising network is soon! I would hazard a guess that this is no more than a week or two away!

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Kevin Weatherman of AdBrite just informed me that AdBrite has launched an entire new help section which *exhaustively* covers every step of the AdBrite process. This should make it a lot easier for AdBrite Advertisers and Publishers alike to find whatever they need, from questions about placing or purchasing ads right down to placement tips and ad selection tips.

AdBrite lately seems to be working harder in order to compete with Adcenter, AdWords/Adsense and Yahoo! Search Marketing. Additionally, Kevin also gave the heads up that there will be more announcements forthcoming from the AdBrite camp. I can’t wait to see what else they are coming out with.

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My wife was checking her e-mail earlier, and was reading an e-mail from a friend concerning an upcoming wedding for her cousin who will be getting married next summer. This ad was on the sidebar of her Gmail account:

Honor this Special Time
Puberty can be a tough time for
parents too. Chinaberry can help
http://www.chinaberry.com

This struck me as somewhat funny, since it seemed to be accusing the Bride and Groom of only just hitting puberty themselves…

The wording struck me as a little strange as well. since in my Dutch background, puberty was something that either was not talked about, or was teased mercilessly; hardly, an ‘honored time’. I guess it may apply to Jewish or other backgrounds where puberty *is* an honored time. Either way, doesn’t really fit with the whole wedding thing in general.

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