Well I got back from a great week off in Calgary last week and I am starting to work my way through the back log of things that accumulated while I was gone. One of my daily routines is to check in on how my websites are doing, usually that includes traffic stats, advertising and earnings. I was pleasantly surprised that while I was away traffic for many of my sites was up overall 2% and earnings were up 3% for the last 7 days compared to the 7 days before that. This is certainly not the norm. Usually when I go away traffic and earnings take a slight drop. Nice to know that I can take some time off and still have some income coming in. One of the great things about making money from the Internet.

Adsense just released a new messages section. Publishers will get messages each month that will help them to optimize their adsense to improve performance. There is no guarantee the tips will increase a publishers earnings, but the tip will be worth looking into by the publisher to see if there could be an increase in performance.

It will be interesting to see if the tips do increase performance in the long run. I have implemented the tip that I received on my account and I will have to track over this month to see if there is an overall increase in ad performance.

Read more on the Adsense blog.

I like to try out services and get a feel for them before recommending them to clients. One of the services I have been testing recently is Text Link Ads. I have been hesitant to try Text Link Ads, even though I have read many good reviews of the company and how effective it can be at placing links for advertisers and selling links for publishers.

Here are some things you need to know as a publisher before diving right in.

• Server Requirements: Your site and server need to be running PHP. This is not a great difficulty, since any decent host offers PHP. But it is something to be aware of before you sign up.
• Site Acceptance: Getting a website accepted as a publisher can be a little more tricky than some other programs. I tried submitting several sites, and from what I can tell website acceptance is based mainly on PageRank and Alexa rank. If your website is not at least a PageRank 4 you might want to hold off on joining.
• Ad Acceptance: Once you have a website approved and have added the PHP code you can choose how the links are approved for your website. The default when I signed up was to allow Text Link Ads to approve the ads. I changed it to having me approve the ads. This way you will get an email when a new advertiser purchases a link and you can approve or deny the link. If you don’t do anything in 24 hours Text Link Ads will review the ad.
• Payment: Text Link Ads pay be check or PayPal with a minimum payout of $25.00 for check payments. They pay promptly which is nice. You are paid no matter what so you don’t need to be paranoid about whether or not anyone will click on your ads to make you money.
• Ad Pricing: Publishers receive 50% of the price of the links sold, with Text Link Ads keeping the other 50%. If ads are sold mid-month the cost is prorated for the month. Just be aware of that when you check your stats.
• Other Ad Systems: Text Link Ads can be run with all other ad systems becuase the Text Link Ads are not contextual. This mainly applies to Google Adsense publishers and Yahoo Publisher Network. This could always change in the future so make sure you know your terms of service from the other networks.

I was sceptical about the service at the start, but after 48 hours I had my first advertiser, and within five days I had sold out my site. I initially only offered 4 spots. I increased that to eight after I sold out. It is nice having a revenue source to help cover hosting bills that I don’t have to worry about getting clicks on, or click fraud and all the other nasty things that can happen with other network ads. I plan on sticking with Text Link Ads for a few more months and I would recommend the service to those of you looking to add a relatively stable income source to your website without much work.

Want to make the most out of your Adsense ad units? Here are seven simple tips that will work to help increase your earnings.

Choose the Right Ad Units

As a general rule the rectangle ad units work best. The 336×280 large rectangle and 300X250 in line rectangle are your best performers. I have also had very good performance with the 200X200 square, the 125×125 button and the 160X600 wide skyscraper. The button and wide skyscraper performance depends on placement. Keep the button in the main body of the text and it can perform well. The wide skyscraper works well on long pages or in a three column layout with it near the top. Personally I recommend you avoid the 468X60 banner. It does not perform well no matter where you place it.

Website Colors

Make the ad unit colors so they blend in with your site. If your color scheme is dark purple on white with dark purple links use the same colors in the ad units. Most people will say that you should blend your ads with your site by setting the border of the ad unit to the same as the background color of your site. This does work well, but I recommend that you actually rotate your color schemes of your ads, including setting the border color so it stands out occasionally. It helps to overcome ad blindness.

Put the Ads in the Hot Zones

The Google Adsense help has a great heat map of where to place ads. The hottest spot is in the main content area above the fold. If you don’t want the ad unit to take up all the room at the top of the main content area use a smaller unit and float it left or right at the top of the main content.

Use Channels

Google provides channels to track ad performance. Use them! Assign a different channel to each ad unit, not just a catch all channel for your site. This will give you a better idea of what units a performing better than others and give you better ideas on how to tweak them.

Use a Horizontal Link Unit

A horizontal link unit placed right front and center on a page either by the top navigation or the top of the main content perform well. Personally, don’t bother with adding a vertical link unit, there are other ad programs that could use that space.

Less is More

Just because you are allowed to have three Adsense ad units on your page does not mean you have to use three. Google will display the highest paying ads they can. The more ad units you have the lower the ads will pay on the ad units further down the page. Try displaying less ad units and track your earnings with channels. Odds are your earnings will actually rise.

Use Alternate Ads

Adsense will not always display ads and will display a public service announcement instead. You have the option of using an alternate ad in case Google does not have an ad to display, so look for a good alternate ad to fill that location. There are lots of other ad services and affiliate programs out there that you can sign up for that can use that space.

Overall Google Adsense is a great program to monetize your website and with a little tweaking of your ad units it can earn you good money.

One of the easiest ways to start to monetize a website or blog is to sign up for Google Adsense. Google Adsense ads are contextual, which means the ads should be related to the information that is on your website, and should be of interest to your visitors. There is a lot of good information out on the web already about Google Adsense so instead of writing yet another Google Adsense guide I thought I would use a Trailfire trail to lead you on a tour of where you can get more information about Google Adsense.

You can start following the “Google Adsense Essential Reading” trail by going to the Trailfire website. There are currently ten pages marked on the trail, the last page bringing you back to this post. You can also subscribe to the trails RSS feed to be updated when I add more pages to it.

• Google AdSense Tour
• Google AdSense Terms of Service
• Google Official Adsense FAQ.
• Unofficial Google AdSense FAQ
• Google Adsense Blog – Inside AdSense
• AdSense: ProBlogger Blog Tips
• Adsense Tips for Bloggers 1
• Adsense Notifier | Firefox Add-ons | Mozilla Corporation
• The Internet’s Biggest Google Whores
• LGR Blog: Google Adsense – Essential Reading

If you have pages you feel should be added to the trail please post the page in the comments so I can add them. Enjoy the trail!

It was confirmed on the Google Adsense blog yesterday that some Google Adsense ads have a tiny shopping cart badge alongside the ad title to signify that people can purchase the item advertised via Google Checkout.

What is interesting is what the blog post does not say. It does not say whether a click on the cart still pays the publisher the same as a click on an ad? One could probably assume that is true, but they do not say for certain.

It has been suggested that Google should make this a referral product as well so publishers could get paid when someone new signs up for Google Checkout.

Google Checkout is still not available to sellers that do not have a U.S. bank account. This leaves out all the potential sellers here in Canada, who may have the same products as U.S. companies and sell and ship primarily to the U.S., often at better prices.

It is nice to see that they are giving some extra promotion to Google Checkout sellers, but they need to expand the countries that sellers are allowed to be from before rolling out these extra features just for U.S. sellers.

I must admit I am in a bit of a vile mood here tonight. I have been struggling with getting a project done and I keep running into problems. To help relax and ease my mind a little I thought I would do some reading, so I went and checked in on some blogs that I read semi-regularly. The first stop was problogger. Going back through the posts I found one that caught my eye. AGLOCO – First Impressions, sounded interesting. Well it did not take me long into the post to realize that it sounded to me like AGLOCO has got to be one of the biggest scams going on the internet right now. Usually problogger discusses good quality programs and has some good advice. I thought it was a little surprising that he was talking about AGLOCO.

Next stop was John Chow, who’s blog I checked out because I had been hearing quite a bit about it since he made The Vancouver Sun. Well, the blog looks good, some good writing, but what do I find? A whole category of posts about AGLOCO! I counted six out of 14 posts that just talked about how many referrals he has. I was almost afraid of what I would find on another blog, so I thought I would check out this AGLOCO myself.

What did I find? I found out several things that I think are important to know about AGLOCO. First it is a reincarnation of AllAdvantage. Anyone remember that company? They were a pay to surf company that went belly up in 2001. Wikipedia states that the reason was due to the dot-com bubble burst and advertiser money disappeared. From what I remember about AllAdvantage (yes I was a member) it really was not about getting paid to surf, but more about referring new members to install the viewbar. I never got paid, I guess I never referred enough members.

Visiting the AGLOCO site, I noticed very quickly in the second paragraph that users have to install a viewbar. Well that sounds familiar doesn’t it? In a world of spyware, malware, and all kinds of other nasties out there they are bringing back a viewbar that sits on the bottom of the users screen. They claim it is not spyware, but spyware companies out there state that their product is not spyware. Perhaps if this company was Google they would have a better chance of people trusting them to install a viewbar. Is anyone out there going to trust this viewbar and what data it collects? What is even more interesting is the page that talks about the viewbar in more detail, tells you that it is not even out yet! This company is recruiting members and having people refer others and their main product/service is not even finished yet? Sounds a little suspicious to me there AGLOCO.

Back to the home page and the third paragraph. Here it is, talk about the referral program. The detail page on the referral program is the standard type of stuff. You refer so many members, and they refer so many members etc. The only good thing I noticed was that it was only 5 levels deep.

I thought I would sign up and give them the benefit of the doubt just to see what the sign up is like and the account center. Perhaps it is not as suspicious as I was thinking/feeling. I had a few problems with their captcha system but once that was taken care of registration and activation went smoothly. Unfortunately the look and emphasis on the account side is all focused on how many people you have referred. The only mention of the viewbar that I can see on the account center is the main menu link for the viewbar. You would think that if the viewbar, which appears to be the main product/service for end users, was so important that they would provide more details on what it does, how it does it and how it is going to benefit the people you refer. If it is there anywhere I did not see it.

I have to say it appears that AGLOCO is nothing but a lot of hot air, and internet hype. For all of you out there hoping to strike it rich surfing the internet I just don’t think it will happen with AGLOCO. Of course I am now an affiliate, so if you want to prove me wrong go right ahead. Here is my affiliate link. I will even go one step further, if I ever actually get paid from them I will donate 2/3 of it to cancer research. Let’s see those full-time bloggers with 6 figure incomes do that, they certainly don’t need the money.

There is an excellent post on the Adsense blog this morning clarifying why publishers can draw attention to the referral products Google offers. Google referral products include Google Adsense, Google Adwords, Firefox with Google Toolbar and the Google Pack. recently Picasa was rolled in with the Google Pack, if you was wondering where it went.

To sum up the post you can draw attention to Google’s referral products because they are a cost per action basis, opposed to a cost per click, and because you know exactly what product you are referring, unlike ads where it could be almost anything.

Of course you are still not allowed to have people click or install products for deceptive purposes, and the attention should be done in a way that supports the product or service. I hope that means NO POPUPS, since I absolutely hate them.

I wanted to make a quick post about a great blog that I read on a regular basis about contextual advertising like Google Adsense, and Yahoo Publisher Network. JenSense – Making Sense of Contextual Advertising does a great job of keeping an eye on the latest updates in the world of contextual advertising. Very often when Google changes its terms of service you can find easy to understand explanations on JenSense. If you are serious about making money with contextual advertising then make a note of reading JenSense, it is a great resource.