I think that there are a number of advantages to this format :

• It adds interactivity to the ads; I believe visitors are more likely to click on an ad if they can interact with it.
• The abillity to scroll means that more ads (variety) can be displayed withing a limited space.
• This should allow for more opportunity for targetted ads to be displayed.
• If this format is applied to Referrals 2.0, then there is a possibility of more clicks (higher CTR).

I haven't seen it (this format) appearing on my sites as yet, but I think I have on other websites. Whether publishers like the format or not, one thing is clear (to me at least) - Google is pro-active and changing to meet the problems of ad blindness, in particular, Adsense blindness.

Tags: google adsense, adsense ad, adsense

My last Adsense check which has yet to be banked into my account

Okay... I know I'm a bit slow. This is probably the third payment that Adsense has released to Malaysians via Western Union. I waited for others to be the guinea pigs before changing my own payment option - mostly because I'm in no hurry to get the cash. All my online income is channelled into savings and investment, so it's not critical that I get my payments immediately. But now that I've done it, I highly recommend you change your payment option to Western Union Quick Cash for the following reasons :

1. It's FREE. No fee, no charge. With checks, I ended up with RM 70 less because of the bank charges here and in the US. Exchange rate will depend on when Adsense issued payment, NOT when you withdraw.
2. You get your payment the day after the status in your Adsense account changes to "Payment Issued".
3. No more waiting and wondering if your Adsense check has been cleared. If there's any problem with your check, then you have to request for a re-issue and that will mean another month or so before you get a new check.
4. It makes your financial planning and recording so much easier. With Adsense checks, I had to "forecast" my bank balance because it takes 2 months before we see the cash from Adsense checks.

How do you know when your Adsense payment is available for withdrawal?
When you log into you Adsense account, you should see a "View Payment History" link that will take you to your payment details page. If you see a "Payment Issued" statement, that means your payment has is ready for withdrawal (if you have opted to receive your payment via Western Union).

Clicking on the "details" link will take you to the details of your payment. This page contains important information that you will need when you fill in the Western Union form to receive money, the most important being the Money Transfer Control Number.

Where to withdraw your Adsense payment via Western Union?
Most banks in Malaysia provide Western Union services. Some banks only offer this service at selected branches. The 2 that I know of that offer Western Union services at all their branches are RHB Bank and CIMB Bank.

How to withdraw your payment via Western Union at CIMB Bank
Fill in the Western Union form to receive money from CIMB Bank. There are 2 types of forms. The Yellow one is for receiving money. The Green one is for sending money. Here's a tip so you don't make a silly mistake like me. The Western Union forms are carbon copy forms - one copy for the bank and one copy for you. The one I took from the counter only had 1 sheet (I assume it was messed up). NO problems though, because CIMB's staff are really helpful. The form is straightforward.

The branch I went to had a specific counter for Western Union services. Me thinks that's the same for any CIMB branch, which is great because you don't have to wait very long. You need to provide ID (any form of identification with your picture) as verification that you are who you say you are. Your ID must bear the same name as the one in your Adsense Payment details page.

It took approximately 10 minutes to get my money. Easy Peasy and I left with this :

I love making money online!
I love Google ADsense!
I love Western Union!

Tags: Google Adsense, Western Union, Adsense

Step 1 : Log into you Adsense account and click on the My Account tab.

Step 2 : Scroll down till you see the Payment Details section. Click "edit".

Click "continue".

Step 3 : You should see Western Union as an option if Adsense has enabled that payment method for your country.

Check the box that asks you to confirm you have a picture ID with a name that matches the name in your Adsense account.

If the name in your Adsense payment option doesn't match your official ID, then you will need to email Adsense and request that they change your payment name to you ID name.

One last thing - remember that you need to change your payment method before the 15th of the month. Making changes later than that means the changes will only take effect the next month.

Tags: Google Adsense, Western Union

Basically what this new change means is that ONLY the URL and the Title of the ad in your Adsense blocks will be live. Clicking any other place (ie white space) will NOT take your visitor to the advertiser's website. I've found that roll out is not complete yet. Some sites will have the old format where white space is still clickable. I expect the roll out to be completed very soon with the Christmas shopping season and holidays nearly upon us.

Most of us are familiar with when accidental clicks happen :

• If you still use one of those old-fashioned mouse with the roller ball, you know accidental clicks happen when you move the mouse and the pointer doesn't follow.
• You're sleepy (or bored) at work and you're surfing a site you're NOT supposed to. The boss walks in and you click like mad to try and close the window.
• You're working happily on your computer and your kid suddenly screams coz she slipped and landed in the toilet hole (wait till it happens to you - then you'll understand).
• You click on an ad, THEN see a more relevant one, but you can't do anything about it.
• You rush to finish that spanky new look for your web page and your wife walks past you in her very nice nightie asking when you're coming in to bed (ahem).

So why is Google bothered with such a silly little thing you wonder?

Accidental clicks are STILL clicks and every click registers in their humongous database. Advertisers PAY Google AND publishers for every click, so if a click was accidental, it means that advertisers lose money. Even if each click cost 5 cents, mutiply that by a hundred accidental clicks a day and you get $1850 paid for clicks that were never meant to be.

The new clickable areas are also good for publishers in the long run because :

• There is a lesser chance of you receiving that "nice little email" from Google telling you that they've detected invalid clicks and you're being tossed out of the program. Yes, you will very likely see your CTR and eCPM go down for a while IF you have been blending your ads like mad to try and "fool" your visitors or if your site somehow attracts drunken, sleepy visitors who can't aim their mouse properly.
• Less accidental clicks may attract more advertisers to the content network which translates to a wider range of ads and more potential for revenue.

In the Webmasterworld thread I mentioned above, AdsenseAdvisor (a Google staff who participates in the forum and acts as a representative for Adsense) has this to say :

So here are a couple of things you can do if you find your Adsense revenue affected by this change :

• Use BLUE for your links. There are the default color for links and your visitors are less likely to make accidental clicks on obvious links.
• Opt for image ads where the whole ad space is clickable or try a combination of text and image ads.
• Make your ads obvious - don't try to use blending as a way to "confuse" or "fool" your visitors into clicking ads.

Personally, I have not noticed any change in my Adsense revenue, and CTR continues to be the same. I don't think I WILL see any change because I opted long ago to make it easy for my visitors to distinguish ADs from content on ALL my sites.

Tags: Google Adsense, Adsense, Adsense clickable_areas

• I'm trying to keep my Adsense earnings at an optimum by reducing impressions.
• I'm trying to reduce my dependence on the big brother Google.

Your earnings per click (EPC) is derived from a complex calculation and no one is privy to that formula except Google themselves. However, it is generally accepted that to optimize your earnings, you want the have the following :

• Optimum CTR (Click-through Rate - Not too high and not too low)
• High number of impressions corresponding to targetted traffic
• High Earnings Per Click (EPC)

Now, just to explain things a bit, there are many other factors (just like any other business) which may also influence your Adsense EPC at any one time, causing the fluctuations that you see in your stats :

• Number of advertisers in your niche at any one time.
• Advertisers' budget.
• Seasonal trends - holidays, pre-Christmas, etc
• The general economy
• Many other reasons...

Many newbies to Adsense get all excited and display the maximum allowed Adsense blocks (three blocks are the maximum) on every page, only to see a sharp decline in eCPM, EPC, CTR and earnings. The reasoning is simple. It's called the dilution effect.

Adsense works because relevant ads are displayed based on your content. When people looking for information see relevant ads within your content, they are more likely to click on those ads. When more ads are clicked within a given number of impressions, your eCPM increases. eCPM is the predicted earnings for a thousand impressions.

If you add 3 large Adsense rectangles to every page, chances are Adsense will have a hard time finding 12 advertisers that match your page content EVERY time someone views that page. What happens then is you will get off target ads (ie. ad relevance is diluted). When you get off-target ads, your visitors are either going to ignore those ads altogether or worse, get irritated. Either way, they won't click on your ads AND you will probably lose any chance of that visitor returning.

In an experiment 18 months ago, I removed every Adsense block leaving only had ONE ad block per page. I tracked the performance of those ad blocks by creating channels for every category. Even after a week, I noticed a marked improvement in my eCPM and also my EPC. Of course earnings still fluctuated on a daily basis, but they were trending upwards. I waited another 3 weeks (to collect sufficient data) and then reviewed the performance of each channel. What I found was :

• article pages were performing very poorly despite the high number of impressions they were generating. I deduced this to mean that folks who visited these pages were interested in the content and not inclined to look elsewhere (or click on ads) for more information.
• pages with technical (how-to) information were also performing poorly. This again I deduced to mean that visitors were finding what they needed on those pages and did not need to click on ads.
• free services pages (eCards, downloads etc) were the worst performing.

We don't know for sure how Google arrives at the Earnings Per Click figure, but I'm sure that it varies from one publisher to another, based on a myriad of factors including those listed at the beginning of this post. Put together, my non-performing pages were generating thousands of impressions that were just not converting into clicks, so I removed Adsense altogether from those pages. Reducing impressions obviously meant that CTR increased but more importantly, EPC also increased.

I'm sure you understand now why there are no Adsense Ads on HomeWithAndrew.com. I've always read that blogs are NOT the best performing platforms for Adsense, especially when your blog doesn't focus very tightly on a specific niche. Another reason why many blogs report low CTRs and EPC is that visitors to a blog are more inclined to be repeat visitors who are more interested in the content or to keep in touch with the blogger.

HomeWithAndrew.com is still relatively unknown and most of my visitors are friends and fellow bloggers who visit mostly to keep in touch. This means that it is generating Adsense Ad impressions that don't convert to clicks. WHEN this blog starts to receive higher traffic, I will consider adding Adsense again, although it will be done on a controlled basis. I will add ad blocks one category at a time and monitor their performance.

I hope I've help you to understand how reducing Adsense impressions can actually increase your earnings in the long run! Remember that every blog or website is unique and the only way you can truly know if reducing impressions will optimize your Adsense earnings is to experiment.

Tags: Google Adsense, Adsense ad impressions, Adsense page impressions, Optimize Adsense earnings

• Number of customers who join
• Number of customers who stopped
• Total number of customers
• Total expenses
• Total profit

I also keep track of my online income by charting the various figures available to me for example for Adsense :

• Monthly Impressions
• Total earnings
• CTR
• eCPM
• Earnings per click

I don't use expensive software - just Microsoft Excel. I've got to admit it - I love seeing making colorful charts and looking at them (must be the creative genes in me) - but even keeping simple statistics can reveal a lot about your business.

For example, the stats for my home based catering business reveal an increase in customers stopping every September followed by a another dip in November and December every year. The first two years, it was quite unsettling to see this happen. Then as we continued to track the numbers we saw the same pattern every year. The many public holidays and long school break at the end of the year is probably the time families go for their vacations and don't need our catering service. We prepare ourselves for this annual 15 to 20 percent dip by setting aside additional savings each month. That way, we can still enjoy our annual family year-end holiday and not have to worry about the slide in revenue, because we know that it's a seasonal thing.

Then as the new year begins, we see a rise in business which usually peaks in July. Why? Well, we asked a couple of customers who used our service only for these 2 months and confirmed our suspicions - ladies just don't like going to the market or slaving in a stuffy, humid kitchen during these hot months, so they cater food from us. So we learnt that hot weather causes a nice upward trend in our earnings and customer count chart!

It also makes good sense to keep track of your statistics so you can see how your business is growing (or not). Whether it's our catering or online income, it's easy to get discouraged (and panicky) when you look at the daily/weekly fluctuations in earnings. But if you keep your stats long enough, you will have enough data to show you whether you are trending upwards(growing), downwards (shrinking or losing ground) or flatlining (no change). We know that our customer base has grown substantially from when we first started, but it's really an encouragement every time we see that growth represented in a chart. And like the example I gave you, your stats will show you seasonal trends so that you can prepare yourself and your business.

Running a business from home can be more stressful than your day job. Income and expenses will fluctuate everyday. Some days you win and some days you lose but if you lose sight of the big picture, it can drive you nuts, so I highly recommend that you keep statistics to preserve your sanity.

Tags: business statistics, small business statistics, home based business, making money online, making money

Okay, so Adsense has finally come to its senses and made available a new payment option to Malaysians via Western Union :

I haven't changed my payment option to Western Union yet though. I don't like to the first for these sort of things (in case there are bugs in the system). Another reason is that all online earnings are extra and saved or invested so I don't rely on it. However, I'm sure I will opt for payment via Western Union in the near future. Paper check travelling half way around the world and the long wait is just too risky.

Tags: Adsense, Google Adsense, Adsense payment via Western Union

We've just launched AdSense for mobile, which can help you expand your online content to new platforms. If you have a website optimized for mobile browsers, or are interested in creating one, you can start monetizing your mobile site by accessing a growing number of our mobile advertisers.

You can now see the new option in your Adsense Setup panel.

But if you're a Malaysian Adsenser, this is what you'll see :

Let's hope Adsense for mobile is successful and they extend it to all countries. We're living in a mobile crazy world. I'm confident Adsense for mobile can increase Adsenser's revenue.

Tags: Adsense, Google Adsense, Adsense for mobile

For the benefit of those who don't understand this, here's an example. Let's assume there is someone who has a grudge against you or a competitor who wants to get at you. One of the easiest ways is to create a website that clearly violates the Adsense Program Policies. Now, they'll use your Publisher ID in the code, knowing that eventually, Adsense will notice the violations. It's sort of like someone using your car number plates and breaking all the traffic rules!

The result - since YOUR publisher ID is the one recorded on the violating site, YOU are the one Google will ban. Even if you manage to prove that you are innocent, having your account suspended for any length of time can only create a big dent in your earnings?

So do you REALLY need to use this feature?
One piece of advice I got from an experienced Adsense publisher who makes five-figures monthly from Adsense is NEVER to let people know your URL. That isn't quite so easy when you run a blog is it? What was his reason for giving that advice? The Internet is filled with all sorts of people and most of them are strangers to you. Things happen... for example :

• You break up with your girlfriend / boyfriend and she / he wants to get back at you and knows exactly HOW you make money.
• Your best friend is peeved because you turned him down when he asked for a loan and he thinks "since you're so tight with your dough, we'll see how you like losing your cash cow"
• A visitor to your website gets pissed off with a comment you made, or a joke you make rubs hims up the wrong way or he just doesn't like your face.
• Jealous competitors eyeing your number one ranking or bigger slice of the pie decides if he can't compete on even ground, he'd try and hit you under the belt.

I've had the unfortunate experience of being clicked attacked. What started out as an online friendship between a group of Adsensers led to an intelectual discourse that quickly turned sour. To avoid taking sides and making things worse, I distanced myself from the group and this was misunderstood by one person as me being aloof and giving the group the cold shoulder. Well, the next thing I knew, I found myself having to explain to Google about a whole bunch of clicks that came from on IP. I believe that person could also have hijacked my publisher ID and used it to get back at me if he wanted to.

In any case, having the "Allowed Sites" feature plugs the hole on a weakness in the Adsense Program. I strongly suggest you use it if you value your Adsense earnings.

Tags: Google Adsense, Adsense allowed sites

Here's my take on what the Adsense Blog says about Referrals 2.0. (Adsense blog quotes are indented) :

Every Adsense publisher gets off target Adsense ads every now and then, especially on pages that don't really have a focussed topic, so placing Referrals 2.0 ads on those pages might be a better alternative. However, I don't consider Referrals 2.0's product inventory all that impressive right now. I'd like to have more choices of what to put on my sites. However, I think that they're on the right track. The Adwords advertiser stable is huge and everyone can benefit from Referrals 2.0. but they're probably playing a wait and see game before jumping into Referrals 2.0. When that happens, I believe it's going to be great.

Sounds good but lots of room for improvement. This is probably one of those kinks that Google hasn't ironed out yet - their categories aren't spot-on. Right from the start, when I looked into the inventory for the Business category, I found a couple that were totally out of place. One in particular stuck out like a sore thumb - a FREE dating site. They've got to get their categorization sorted out.

Because their categorization doesn't work all that well, if you check the "Pick Best Paying Ads" box, you'd best be prepared for some really off-topic ads. Imagine having spents months perfecting your homepage or internal pages on Business startup, getting the SEO correct, finding useful links for your visitors, getting matching ads to complement your content, and whammy out pops this "FREE dating site" ad. Not only does it stick out like a blatant money making plug, but it gives your visitors a bad impression of your site. You could always opt to uncheck the "Pick Best Paying Ads" box, but if you do, then if your chosen ads are not available, you will have a big hole on your page. Caught between a rock and a hard place, I think.

One of the problems with Adsense's contextual ads is that they often spit out off-target ads. Many believe that if the MediaPartners bot (Adsense bot) hasn't visited the page, they rely on key words or phrases in your domain name and/or folder and URL to determine what ads to display. I've experienced situations where Adsense refused to display on-target contextual ads on a page even though I included the keywords many times. It's as though they've hard-coded what my site is about and will not budge. I've found that if you use a site-wide template that's optimized for specific key words, you stand a higher chance of experiencing this problem. So short of creating a blank page with no links to your template, it seems like the only two options available to publishers in this situation would be to :

• wait for the Adsense bot to visit that page and hopefully get the targetting correct
• live with the off target ads

Let's say you have a site about Cars and you write a page about auto insurance or child safety seats. If you find that Adsense keeps giving you contextual ads about your site theme (cars) and NOT your page topic (auto insurance or safety seats) then Referrals 2.0 will probably solve this although you need to remember that Referrals 2.0 is Cost Per Action and NOT Cost Per Click ads.

I've found this to be 100% true. Some of my general sites perform badly with any sort of revenue generating program, especially contextual ad programs like Adsense. Targetted traffic is THE secret to making money with Referrals 2.0. If visitors come to your site from search results for "home business" and your Referral Ads are aligned with that theme, you are much more likely to get clicks AND conversions.

Finally, the thing I like best about Referrals 2.0 is the fact that you can plug it to your heart's content. Unlike Adsense' contextual ad blocks where you CANNOT draw attention or encourage visitors to click, with Referrals 2.0 you can :

• place huge blinking arrows pointing to the ad and it would be OK.
• create a page based on a specific niche, write content based on that niche and then encourage your visitors to click on those ads and it would be OK
• label your ads "We highly recommend the following :" and it would be OK.
• tell ALL your family and friends by email to visit your site and click on the ad and it would be OK.

In closing, I believe that Referrals will be a huge money maker for webmasters engaged in providing focussed content. There are bugs (and some of them ARE glaring) that need to be worked out. For example, this week, system errors apparently caused the servers to stop serving ads and many found their marketing campaigns pointing to pages with big holes in them where the ads were supposed to appear. However, like every other new program, there will be kinks that need to be ironed out and you can count on big brother Google to do it pronto. They're surely banking on Referrals 2.0 fattening their bottom line.

Why not take a whack at Referrals 2.0? You might just see a nice increase in your Adsense earnings.

Tags: Adsense referrals 2.0, Google Adsense, Adsense

But what if you could keep 100% of the ad revenue derived from your content, especially if you make money with Adsense? After all, it IS your content, and you should get your cake and eat it too don't you think? Well, Flixya.com recently announced the release of the Flixya 2.0 platform which allows just that.

To facilitate revenue sharing, you will be required to provide the email address you use when you signed up with Adsense (your login email address). On other revenue sharing sites, you may be required to provide your Adsense Publisher ID direcly. I contribute articles to blog.worldvillage.com, and have been pleasantly surprised that my Adsense stats records a number of clicks everyday from them. The total revenue can add up to a substantial percentage of your total Adsense earnings if you contribute to many sites that share the ad revenue.

And with Flixya offering to give ALL the ad revenue derived from user content, I'm sure many other sites will follow suit. So, if you've been posting your articles, videos and creative content to social network and article sites, check out if they offer you a share of the Ad revenue first. And remember that Flixya gives you 100% of your ad revenue so it's a great place to make money with Adsense.

Tags: Flixya Adsense revenue, Adsense earnings, Flixya, Google Adsense

I have to be honest... I tried to apply for Kontera a couple of years back when their pre-requisite included something about having half a million page view per month. My sites were still new at that time and that meant I didn't even bother to submit a request.

However, about a year ago (my page views for my highest site was still moderate then) Joel Comm struck a deal with Kontera. Basically, Kontera would allow anyone who was a subscriber to Joel's mailing list to gain entry. I immediately applied. Didn't know whether I would make money, but I was willing to give it a shot. No regrets.

From my interaction with my online buddies (some of whom make more money in one month than we make in a year), Kontera gives widely fluctuating results. Kontera seems to work well if your traffic is targetted. I understand from my them that blogs about general topics / family / friends etc, usually get less desirable results with Kontera, simply because you won't be using high paying keyword or attracting visitors who are in search or focussed topics based on these keywords. I can't really use HomeWithAndrew.com as a yardstick because I've yet to focus on driving targetted traffic to it. My other sites which are focussed on specific niches are doing well though.

Like I've said in previous posts, Kontera is not perfect and not for everyone, so I'll get the cons over with first :

• Used on a link or ad heavy page, Kontera can make things look pretty cluttered.
• Because you cannot fully customize how it looks, it can stick out like a sore thumb, clashing with your site's look when you roll over a Kontera ad.
• Not many features in the user admin. Many things still need to be managed with email to their support.
• As of this post's date, their stats reporting is not live. It is still delayed by between 1-2 days. I understand that this will be changed soon which is good news.

Now for the good stuff. Kontera has a couple of distinct advantages over Adsense :

Their ads are in-text, which basically means that you won't be victim of ad-blindness (where people get so used to seeing ads that they ignore them). There is NO WAY you can avoid seeing and reading a Kontera ad link because the active links are actual words in your content. When you mouse over a link, you get a short description in their pop-up which is pretty neat and looks really cool ;

Kontera complements Adsense by picking up keywords in your content and converts them to links. They fill in the gaps when Adsense gets its targetting wrong (which is quite often). Adsense generally serves ads based on what it determines your page is about. This means that if you talk about 3 widely varied topics on a page, you will likely get off-target Adsense ads as it struggles to find matching ads. However, with Kontera, you can write about 8 differents topics on one page, place competitive keywords within those paragraphs, and those keywords will be converted to Kontera links.

Does the technique above work 100%? NO. Kontera is not perfect. It is still a business entity with a profit target, so it will serve the highest paying ads, usually above the fold (top section of your content). Kontera allows you to customize your ads to suit your color scheme. This helps you blend your links to match your overall look.

Kontera's ad inventory is not the most comprehensive, so this leads to fluctuations in earnings but this also goes for every other ad program, including Adsense. For me, Kontera makes for a great supplementary revenue source. It contributes approximately 5 - 8% of my overall online income, but honestly, I don't know how it would perform if I were to use it exclusively - which I probably won't. So far, it's not in the same league as Adsense, but to sum it all up, Kontera can be a GOOD WAY TO MAKE MONEY. It's worth a try.

Apply to join Kontera here.

Tags: Kontera, Contentlink, Kontera ads, Contextual Ads, Adsense alternative

I make it a priority to read and understand any changes to the Adsense Program Policies as and when they occur. Taking the time to do that not only puts my mind at ease - it also helps me keep my account in good standing with Google. Very often though, things are beyond our control. Click attacks for example, are simply beyond our control. However, like I said in Part 2, you can avoid click attacks from offended or malicious persons by watching your manners online AND offline.

I believe that despite its many perceived weaknesses, Google is fair and professional in the way they treat Adsense publishers in general. I believe that they consider every publisher to be an important member of their team. Surely they realize that as publishers continue to improve the performance of their website(s) and continue to participate in the Adsense program, Google's revenue can only increase. Which is why Adsense does not ban publishers outright unless they consider the violation to be particularly serious.

Participating in online forums and communicating with publishers who have had the unfortunate experience of being cautioned or banned by Adsense, I have noticed that there are 3 stages in the BANNING process :

• Notification of issues that have contravened the Adsense Program Policies.
• Notification of the publisher's account being suspended.
• Notification that the publisher's account has been disabled (ban).

If you happen to find yourself in the unfortunate position of receiving notification for the first two points, you are still safe, but you need to take immediate action to rectify whatever situation that caused it. Contact Adsense immediately.

Step 1 : Email Adsense.

• BE NICE. Remember, it's your neck that's on the line, and that you are dealing with a staff who is as human as you are. Try to imagine if it was YOU who had to deal with a rude customer. Always maintain decorum in your communication with Adsense.
• BE SINCERE. Inform them that you "understand invalid clicks is a very real issue that threathens not only advertisers, but Adsense publishers and Google themselves". Be sincere when you say "I understand fully Adsense's Program Policies and have never tried to violate them".
• DON'T USE THREATS. This is a real no-no. Google has every right to protect its own interests and that of its advertisers. When you threaten legal action, your case finds its way to the legal department. Not only does this delay the whole process, it also shows Google that you're not willing to work with them to help solve the problem. Remember, there are millions of Adsense publishers. You have MORE to lose than Google.
• CHECK YOUR EMAIL. You want your email to be clear and easily understood. If you're not comfortable with how your email sounds, get someone to read it first and give their opinion.

Step 2 : Offer all the information you have

This includes server logs, traffic stats and if you use a third party ad tracker, the reports generated by it. I have had the unfortunate experience of being click attacked once. I noticed a big jump in clicks. I dismissed the spike, telling myself that Adsense will probably disregard those clicks and withhold any earnings from them. However, 2 days later I received the "invalid clicks" email. I immediately knew the cause and detailed the date, time and number of clicks involved. I was candid with Adsense and informed them that I assumed they would disregard those clicks. I offered my full cooperation and asked them how I could help prevent similar problems.

Step 3 : Offer your full cooperation

My invalid clicks issue was settled with a reply from them stating that the email I received merely to notify me of a potentially harmful situation in order for me to take preventive measures. Their reply went on to state that they appeciated my effort in trying to keep my account in good standing. I believe that this is a crucial part of being an Adsense Publisher that many people fail to see.

Imagine if YOU ran a business with hundreds of customers and suppliers. Wouldn't you somehow give your customers and suppliers a rating? I run a small business and I DO rate my customers and suppliers based on dealings with them even if it is not in writing. So it seems logical for Adsense to also rate their publishers. You may not agree but I believe that every email you send to them in trying to keep your account in good standing adds to your "trust rating". Then, future actions by them will be taken based on this "trust rating". If you've been pro-active in trying to keep your account in good standing, they will in turn be as helpful and trusting in their dealings with you. It's all about relationship building.

Step 4 : Don't worsen the situation

Online forums are filled with threads about publishers who claim to have been banned or suspended without reason. They rant and rave, then go on and on about how badly they've been mistreated by Google and they make threats of legal action.

The first cautionary email you receive notifying you of invalid clicks and/or suspension would probably be an automated one. However, when you email them, subsequent replies will probably be from a real person assigned to look into your case. You must remember that human review of your situation will take time and it only makes things worse if you blab about your case WHILE investigation is being carried out.

Google has staff who are assigned to participate in online forums - the most prominent one being AdsenseAdvisor who regularly posts feedback in the Adsense forums on WebmasterWorld. I am sure that when a publisher makes noise about a situation, Google takes notice of it even though the noise maker may think he hides behind the anonimity of his forum nick.

Again - let the process take its due course. Don't mess it up by disclosing the details online.

Step 4 : Follow up

Processes can drag on for a long time. You need to keep following up with Adsense and ask about your status, especially if your account has been suspended. Document ALL correspondence between you and Adsense. This serves as a reference for future communication. Remember to always maintain decorum in your communication with Adsense.

In closing, if you are unfortunate enough to have been banned, here are the 2 links from Part 1 again :

Keeping your Adsense account in good standing
and
Frequently Asked Questions about disabled accounts

How NOT To Get Banned By Adsense - Part 1
How NOT To Get Banned By Adsense - Part 2

Three years ago, I read in a forum post about this student who discovered how easy it was to make money with Adsense. He then went on to describe how he had figured out which ones were the high paying ads. He mentioned that it had become a routine for him to stop by his University Library during lunch and click on a couple of these high paying ads, and repeat the same thing once or twice every day. I have no doubt that he would have since been banned.

Self-clicking usually happens when the publisher is new (and ignorant) or desperate to somehow achieve self-imposed targets. The temptation to click on your own ads also increase when your revenue takes a dive. I believe EVERY Adsense publisher has thought about clicking on his own ads at one time or another. It's only natural. After all, you think "With hundreds of millions of clicks every day, how can Google know...", right? I personally don't know how Google tracks my activity, but I do know that they're infinitely smarter than I give them credit for so I'm not going to take chances on losing what could potentially be twenty years of revenue for the sake of making a few extra dollars.

Another mistake Adsense Publishers make is encouraging others to click on their ads. Many publishers have found out the hard way that it doesn't pay to ENCOURAGE your visitors to click on the ads. This can happen in numerous ways :

• Asking people to support your site by "visiting" the advertisers' website.
  This is probably one of the most basic mistakes made by newbies. Don't think that since there are billions of websites, Google will miss your site and what you're doing. Some are more advanced and use an image instead of actual text. Again, you must remember that Google not only relies on its own technology, but on tip-offs by other Adsense Publishers.
• Direct requests or Adsense Ads in emails.
  This goes on more frequently than we think. It's a short sighted approach to making money with Adsense. I spoke to one Adsense Publisher (who has since stopped displaying Adsense on his site - due to a ban I presume) who figured that if he sent out mass spam emails numbering in the millions, at a given CTR and EPC, he would make $xx,xxx in three months. I don't know if his gamble paid off, but I did my own math and figured if he had kept his Adsense account in good standing and made a conservative $x,xxx every year, he would probably amass much, much more than that in ten years.
• Telling your friends and family about your website and how you make money with Adsense.New Adsense publishers often make the mistake of telling ALL their friends and family about this wonderful money making opportunity they've discovered in Adsense. They go into detail about how they make money with every click of an Adsense ad. What happens next is a spike in "love clicks" made by these people in the belief that they are "helping" to increase the publisher's earnings.
• Placing images or animation that deliberately direct visitor attention to the ads.
  This was a grey area for a long time - placing images next to Adsense blocks that "sort of" drew visitors attention to the ads. In fact, this technique was encouraged by many Adsense gurus as a way of increasing CTR. Adsense has since made it clear that this is in violation of their Program Policies.

I've noticed that Adsense is a very addictive thing. You tend to want to tweak your website and modify your ad placement to maximize your earnings. Lack of self control and forgetting Adsense's Program Policies can quickly turn your website into a platform to display Adsense ads instead of content. Remember WHY people visit your website in the first place - your content.

One more common mistake I'd like to talk about is the practice of placing Adsense ads in such a way that they deceive visitors into thinking that they are part of your navigation.

A common approach to this is adding a "More Related Information" section at the end of your content. After displaying related information numbering 1 to 3, and Adsense block is placed followed by more related information. The font, style and size is then modified to make the Adsense block "blend" so that it looks like part of the "More Related Information".

Another way to deceive visitors into clicking Adsense ads is to disguise the ad block (usually an Adlinks unit) so that it looks like part of the website's navigation. Because this is so easy to do (even for novice webmasters), many publishers don't realize that they've contravened the Program Policies. Receiving the dreaded "Invalid Clicks" or "Account Suspended" email from Adsense quickly wakes them up, although by then it may be too late.

We'll close by looking at one final reason for being banned by Adsense - invalid clicks caused by others. 99% of people who post on forums asking for help after being banned by Adsense plead innocence. It's not my place to judge, but very often, I sense these people could do with a little more humility and maybe a lesson in manners. An important point to remember when you participate in online forums is that if you rub people the wrong way, they might just take it out on you where it hurts the most - your Adsense earnings. Many forums allow you to display your URL - and many people do so to get exposure - but they forget that this also tells the whole world your URL. If you are violating the Adsense Program Policies in any way, you can be sure that someone, somewhere, is going to report you to Google. And if they're more than annoyed with you, they're likely to click on your ads, knowing full well that if they do it often enough it can get you suspended or banned.

This last reason is why I always try to conduct myself properly online. Sure, you may think you can hide behind the pseudo-anonimity of the Internet by using nicknames, but if someone wants to track you down, they'll do it. It's a good thing for bloggers to remember this point too. I find it disturbing that many bloggers seem to think that it's "cool" to shoot straight from the hip. They use gruff language and 4 letter words (even if they are abbreviated). Being careless with your manners online can lead you to some serious click attacks. Keep this in mind.

How Not To Get Banned By Adsense - Part 1

Tags: Google Adsense, Adsense

• NOT clicking on your own ads.
• Encouraging visitors to click on your ads.
• Setting up ad blocks to look like it's part of a site's nagivation and/or content.

There are lots of grey-hat techniques that you can use but SHOULD NOT use to increase your click count. I won't delve into that simply because my intention is to help protect your Adsense account. Many people fail to realize that their Adsense account could potentially be a HUGE souce of income (even if it is a supplementary one) for years or even decades to come.

There's a thread going on right now at WebmasterWorld that deserves your attention if you are an Adsense Publisher. AdsenseAdvisor gives a couple of links that offer comprehensive information about :

Keeping your Adsense account in good standing
and
Frequently Asked Questions about disabled accounts

Another way to learn about keeping your Adsense account in good standing is to participate in Adsense Forums. A great forum where truly valuable help and guidance is given is at WebmasterWorld.

Here's another forum that I personally find a bit tacky. It's not as professionally moderated or conducted as WebmasterWorld, but I find lots of grey-hat techniques discussed there which helps keep me up to date about what NOT to do.

In any case, keeping your Adsense account in good standing is about using your common sense. If you feel something is going to get you into trouble, then don't do it! If you're not sure, ask before you do it!

How NOT To Get Banned By Adsense - Part 2

Tags: Google Adsense, Adsense

Given that Google is the defacto Search Engine and that thousands (if not millions of people) earn money through their Adsense program, I find the fact that I have (sort of) a million servers at my disposal very re-assuring. Then again, when I get paranoid, I start to think what a humongous mess it would be if all them servers somehow got hacked and went on the blink! Egads... how would I indulge in my favorite pastime - Adsense stats watching???

Tags: Google servers, Google Adsense, Google

Normal

Rounded

Very Rounded

If you've heard that Adsense works best without borders AND blended into your content, I'd like to suggest that you give borders a try. Used properly with the right color, they can really make your ads stand out and increase your CTR. Then again, it depends on whether you WANT your ads to stand out. I was a die-hard-no-border-blend freak once. It didn't matter if my CTR was the pits. It didn't matter if I was flushing page impressions down the drain, because the "experts said 'the best format is borderless blending'". Until one day when, looking at my pitiful CTR for a couple of pages, I decided to live on edge and add a border.

Whoa Nelly! CTR shot up. I let it be for a couple of days to make sure it wasn't one of those notorious Adsense blips. CTR remained consistent for pages with bordered ads. Then I removed the border again for one week and CTR crashed to pre-border days.

So am I advocating only border ads? NO. My ads with borders only work on one page and that page gives me very nice earnings everyday. It doesn't seem to work across the board. So the thing I can deduce from that and suggest to you is that too many factors go into how well an ad will perform on a given page. That means a border may work for some pages and stink on others. The only way is to give it a try - at least for a week. Less than that is too short a time to gauge the effectiveness of any change.

Okay, so give it a swing. The new Adsense ads with rounded corners may just be the thing to give your CTR a shot in the arm.

Tags: Adsense with rounded corners, New Adsense ad format, Adsense ads

I could have saved myself a lot of headache it I had put on turned on my eagle-eyes and checked the error. Apparently, someone in Googleplex left out a semicolon somewhere. Or, perhaps in the busy cyberspace traffic, it fell off. In any case, here's an example of what millions of people saw when they visited sites that were displaying Adsense :

Well, at least it shows that our esteemed associates in Googleland are not infallible. One of the things I dislike about coding in PHP and Javascript is the use of the semicolon. Forgetting your semi-colons can mean up to an hour of debugging your scripts, or as in this case, if you don't do any scripting, can mean a near heart attack.

So if you've been checking your Adsense stats and wondering why it seems a bit low yesterday, you know why now.

Tags: Google, Adsense,, debugging, Javascript,, Javascript, error

Adsense says that there is NO need to contact them everytime you make an accidental click :

I've been wondering why they'd make such a statement. Remember, Google is a BIG company and they don't do anything without reason. One "conspiracy theory" comes to my twisted mind :

Webmasters have been so careful NOT to click their own ads that they've developed a condition often referred to as "click-a-phobia". Not only do they not click on their own ads, they also find themselves avoiding ads on other sites. I've got to admit I'm like that. Consider this - if there are a million webmasters with this condition who are NOT clicking ANY ad (their own or someone else's) then that's potentially a million un-clicked ads everyday! Now imagine if the number of Adsense publishers grew to 10 million. And if only half of these developed click-a-phobia, that would mean 5 million un-clicked ads a day. Them's a whole lotta dough.

So, maybe Google realized click-a-phobia was costing them money, and they needed to tell webmasters to chill. If they can alay webmasters' fears of clicking their own ads, maybe they begin to reverse the effects of click-a-phobia which might just help them click on other ads too.

In any case, will I just let my next accidental click slide without informing Google? Heck NO! Like many other Adsense publishers, I'm a paranoid nut. I just don't trust Google to police tens of millions of clicks a day without letting through a percentage of errors. And I sure don't want to the in that small percentage of publishers that gets that dreaded "invalid clicks" email because they screwed up. So they next time I make an accidental click, I'm going to keep my nose clean, be a good boy and email them. I hope you will too.

Tags: google adsense, adsense, self-click, click fraud

The thread on this topic in Webmasterworld has grown to 33 pages and is still going strong and frankly, I'm amazed at what I read! Some arbitrage publishers make up to 70K a month from Adsense. I'm assuming here that this refers to net profit. I know of regular publishers who make 10K to 30K without arbitrage, but 70K? Woooooweee! That's more than most people make in a year and if you converted that to my country's currency, that would be a quarter of a million a month! Four months and you'd be a millionaire!

That got me thinking... maybe I'm doing this ALL wrong. I've always advocated white hat techniques and I believe in building my websites FOR my visitors - to find a need and to fill that need - and look to long term growth. But heck, when you read about someone making 70K a month, it made me wonder...

I WAS approached by an Adsense arbitrageur friend of mine some months back who offered to fund an Adwords account and use my main website as the landing page. Why? He said my content was good and funding an Adwords account (for arbitrage) for a site already filled with good content would actually save him a lot of time. He actually did the math for me and my eyes popped out. I have to tell you, for two days and two nights, I SERIOUSLY considered his proposal. Even after giving him his cut of the profits, I would still make 10 times MORE than what I was getting at that time. After all, when you consider how things change in cyberspace, Google Adsense could very well be passe as quickly as it became the darling of every web publisher. So why shouldn't I grab my share of the money pie quickly?

I turned down the offer. It wasn't an easy decision, although now it looks like it was the right decision. If I had gone ahead and went into click arbitrage, I'd probably be one of those whose accounts will be disabled come June 1. Yeah, I would had made lots of money in those few months, but remember, Google is disabling "accounts" NOT "websites". It isn't clear yet whether these folks will be able to appeal for re-inclusion in the future, but Google has not been known to allow re-inclusion for anyone who has been banned.

This whole thing reminds me about an everyday example - You're waiting patiently at the traffic light and along comes a hot-shot in his souped up hot-rod, thinks he owns the road, squeezes his way through to get to the front, then runs the red light. Yeah, he's "cool" until the light turns green and you drive ahead to see him getting a traffic ticket from the cops. Sweet justice.

So, I came close to shooting myself in the foot. Soon I will tell you how I didn't shoot myself in the foot, but how I did fall flat on my face!