Affiliate products make up a large part of my income. They’re one of the revenue streams that I use on my websites and I often recommend selected products to the people on my mailing list. I use them for all sorts of reasons – and money is only one of them. Sure, an affiliate commission…
Whatever your biggest motivation for starting your business, you want to make your life easier. You want to make it wealthier, happier, freer, more comfortable… but also easier to manage. That doesn’t go too well with running a website, even a small one. Being an entrepreneur is difficult, especially at the beginning when you’ll be…
It shouldn’t be a difficult question. If you want to know whether your site is a success, you don’t have to look further than the last line in your AdSense stats. If you’re happy with the amount that’s going to appear on Google’s check this month, you’re successful. But what if an advertiser asked how…
If you do your job well, you shouldn’t get paid anything at all for it. That doesn’t sound fair, does it? But as an online publisher, that’s exactly what should happen. Your job is to provide information to your readers. That could be information that educates them. It could be information that makes them think….
Google is continually looking for ways to put the kabosh on click fraud. It is important that they protect the rights of their advertisers by making sure each click is an intentional click. That is, they want to be certain that the person clicking the ad is doing so deliberatel. Otherwise, the advertiser is paying…
Google’s referral programs have never impressed me very much. Although the commissions are now fair, they started out very low. But even at the new(ish) rates, few sites are going to benefit from them. They’re only good for publishers who aim their content at other publishers. That’s always been the problem with Google’s referrals: there…
Whenever I see a news story about Google’s development plans, I usually give it a read, make sure it’s not going to affect my AdSense earnings… and daydream for a minute or two about running a multi-billion dollar business. Google’s recent spat with eBay though caught my attention. It was one of those rare times…
Let’s face it. Google’s AdSense program is absolutely ingenious. It’s not perfect, but it is ingenious. Occasionally, an ad will display that is not relevant to the content on the page. But more often than not, the AdSense bot knows what ads to show. This was never truer than the ad I saw displayed on…
There’s a look that I’ve seen way too many times. It doesn’t happen often, but even once is enough. I’ll be standing in front of an audience at a conference or teaching a class, and I’ll see my audience’s eyes glaze over. Instead of looking at me, they start looking at the conference program or…
Don’t you just hate it when someone comes along and spoils all the fun? For a long time now I’ve been recommending that publishers put little images next to their AdSense units to draw users’ eyes. So if you were showing ads for televisions and cameras, then you could put pictures of televisions and cameras…
Alright.. been at this web site thing since 1995… that’s ancient in ‘net years. Still, I struggle when asked to explain what I do. Typical conversation goes like this… “What do you do?” “I have an Internet business” “Oh, you build web sites. My cousin’s sister’s twice-removed great aunt wants to have a web site….