The Online Home of Peter Claridge

July 14th, 2007

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In the past couple of weeks, Google has revamped it’s referrals program to not only include Google products, but hundreds of other products too! It can literally mean the difference between a 1 cent click and a $5 click.

With the new referrals program, Google has moved into an area traditionally dominated by the likes of Commission Junction and other smaller companies like ClixGalore and ShareaSale. By adding banners and links to your page you can now get paid through Google’s AdSense program for leads and sales generated from your website (as well as the traditional pay per click revenue).

The Pay Per Lead opportunities are a great way of making some fast extra cash. 99% of the time the companies paying you for a lead just need the name and email address of the person you are referring. So now, when you write an article, instead of putting normal PPC (pay per click) ads at the bottom, you can tell people to find out more by sending them to a page where they have to give their email address and you get paid up to $2 for sending that lead. Sure beats sending someone to another site for a measly 20 cents!

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Posted in Articles, AdSense | No Comments »

June 27th, 2007

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I was in my AdSense account earlier toady grabbing some code to put on my site and I noticed a new drop down box that I hadn’t seen before.

Google have added a new feature where you can now select what style of corner your ad borders have. They now have 3 styles to choose from. These are as follows:

Square Corner
This is the traditional square corner that has been around since the beginning. Nothing fancy here.

Slightly Rounded Corner
This is one of the new rounded corners which has a subtle curved edge.

Very Rounded Corner
This is one of the large rounded corners. The radius is a lot larger and pronounced

The New Code
To tell AdSense what sort of corner you want on your ads there is a new line code added to the text that you copy and paste.

• google_ui_features = “rc:0″; => Square Corners
• google_ui_features = “rc:6″; => Slightly Rounded Corners
• google_ui_features = “rc:10″; => Very Rounded Corners

Effectiveness
Current AdSense theory still says that the best way to optimize your ads is to make them not look like your ads; in other words, blend them in with your content and background and don’t make them stand out like a sore thumb.

I haven’t heard anyone mention anything to say this is no longer the case, so whether or not anyone will make use of these new borders or if they increase CTR is as yet unknown.

To find out if there is any point using these new rounded corners, I will be adding them to one of my popular sites called PayPalPages.net which already makes use of rounded corners for the content boxes.

I’ll report back in a week or two with my findings. I’ll also add some images to this post so you can see what the rounded borders look like.

Posted in AdSense | No Comments »

June 17th, 2007

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I just noticed that Google AdSense now has the option to show ads in websites that would previously have been inaccessible due to the page requiring the user to login (authenticate themselves as a legitimate user). For many marketers who run restricted access membership sites it was a pain because we couldn’t put adsense ads in there due to the fact that the spider was unable to check the content and provide relevant ads.

I’m not entirely sure how old this feature is as I’ve only just noticed it myself. Here is a screenshot of what it looks like if you haven’t seen it already:
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Posted in AdSense | No Comments »

October 31st, 2006

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First off: I want it to be know that I really like Google as a company and use and love most of their products.

However, I have to tell everyone about just how utterly vague they are when there’s a problem and it’s driving me nuts!

I make a very nice income from Google AdSense. This program lets me put some text adverts on my site and everytime someone clicks on an advert, I get paid a small amount of money, pretty cool, huh?

I’ve been using AdSense for about 18 months now and do very well off of it. Now in order to protect their advertisers, Google has a lot of rules about what you can and cannot do with your adsense code. For example, you can’t click your own links - even if you are really interested in the advertisers advert. You can’t ask your friends or visitors to click your links to ’support your site’ and various other things like that.

I have AdSense code on well over 200 websites, some don’t earn much, others earn a lot. But it all adds up

The other day I got a message from the Google AdSense team stating that they had detected fraudlent clicks and traffic to one of my sites and if I didn’t stop it I would have my account closed down.

Hello Peter Claridge,

It has come to our attention that invalid clicks or impressions have
been generated on the Google ads on your site(s) through users of
third-party programs paid or provided with other incentives to visit
your site. Such programs may include, but are not limited to auto-surf,
pay-to-surf, pay-to-read, or pay-to-click sites.

This is seriously bad news for me, as I rely on AdSense for a good part of my income. However I know that I’m only using natural organic search engine results to generate traffic and I’m certainly not stupid enough to encourage people to click on my ads - I know that’s a fast track way to get your account shut down.

So I sent them an email back asking for specific information so I can just take down the site. It seems like a reasonable request, right? They are telling me there’s a problem, I need to know where the problem lies.

I rapidly fire off an email asking where the problem is and wait nervously for the reply, praying that it’s not with one of my higher earning sites.

The reply comes back…

As you know, Google treats instances of invalid click and impression activity very seriously. As a reminder, we cannot disclose any details about how our monitoring technology works or what specifics we found on your account. However, we can assure you that we have thoroughly re-reviewed your account, and have confirmed that your account violated our program’s Terms and Conditions.

Hmm…

So now Google is saying that “look, there’s a major problem on your account and it could cause you to lose your account, but hey, we can’t actually tell you what the problem is because it’s much more fun to leave you guessing”.

I reply back asking some more questions about their ToS, they reply with even more vagueness than before!

Aragh! Google, you are killing me!

Today I took down over 150 websites that I don’t monitor in the hope that it’s something to do with them. I also removed the code from my highest earning website, just in case ;-(

A colleague of mine had his account shut down a couple of months ago, but they didn’t even give any warning. He only had 2 forum/community websites and he had over a years worth of earnings saved up. EEK!

If anyone in the UK here’s a feint scream along the lines of “Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooo” then don’t worry, it’s just me finding out that Google has shut down my AdSense account

Posted in AdSense | 4 Comments »

July 7th, 2006

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I’ve just been out and bought 20 new domain names for use with the Instant Adsense Templates that I bought yesterday. At $2.75 a go for a .net from registerfly.com, you really can’t go too far wrong in my opinion!

Usually I like to use .com’s, but as these cost $6.99 each, it would cost me nearly $770 for the 110 domains that I would need instead of the $302 for the .net’s.

I thought the categories and articles had an air of familiararity (yet again, Google teaches me how to spell), and I read today that Joel Comm has simply used the PLR templates that are provided by privatelabelmonthly.com - a little cheeky in my opinion, and bloody annoying as this was going to be my idea!

As I mentioned yesterday, the template designs are actually really not all that bad - much better than I was expecting. As an example of the quality, check out this instant adsense template website that I threw up today: Commercial Real Estate.

Not bad, huh?

I’m not entirely convinced about how much the images next to the adsense conflict with Google’s adsense terms, but Joel Comm says that apparently they are ok and do not conflict. This is what he has to say:

NOTE: At the time of this publication, Google terms of service do not prohibit the use of pictures next to AdSense blocks. However, it is known that Google has asked some publishers to put a border around the ad block to distinguish it from the pictures (even though it is not in the TOS).

Therefore, you may wish to choose a border color that does not match your background. For example, if your background is white you could choose a light gray (color #E0E0E0) border. Again this is just a suggestion, and you can experiment as you wish. Just be sure to comply with Google’s TOS at all times.

All I have to do now is work out how I want to promote all these sites (yeah, all 110 of them!). I thought I’d start off by adding them to my new free link directory and to a special blog that pings dozens of spiders each time I make a post.

I also want to add a few bits and pieces to these sites, like Amazon feeds, ebay feeds, clickbank products and some other contextual advertising that highlights keywords in your text.

Posted in AdSense, Marketing | 1 Comment »