Hey Google, smartprice THIS!

Posted by stuart as , , , , , , ,

As any adsense publisher who’s watched his CPC drop consistently over the last couple of months, and consequently earnings stay stable despite increasing impressions and CTR, I have one thing to say:

“Smartprice THIS!!”

As someone who also uses Google’s Adwords advertising program, but not a user of conversion tracking, I’m a bit confused as to how smartpricing can possibly be good for anyone other than dodgy advertisers.

If I understand correctly, Adwords advertisers tell google: “Hey goog’, this adsense site is giving me crap conversions, I only want to pay $0.10 a click, even though the going rate is a buck”

Google says: “No worries mate, sounds good to us - we’ll take $0.05, and give the sucker Adsense publisher $0.05″

Surely this will cause the ass to drop out of the contextual advertising market eventually? I’m not going to keep trying to produce quality content if advertisers get to tell Google how good their conversions are.

Bring on the international launch of YPN and MSN’s contextual ad program - it will be interesting to see what happens to smartpricing when there’s some competition in the market.

Google can’t continue to court Adwords advertisers whilst screwing down the payouts to Adsense publishers when there’s competition for both advertisers and publishers. They won’t have many advertisers banging down the doors if all the content providers are switching platforms.

OMFG AdsEnse is teH RoX0rZZzzz!!!11111

Posted by stuart as , , , ,

For those of us who don’t make our living from Adsense, we tend to look at Adsense as the ultimate MMORPG.

It’s got everything you could ever want in an online game - suspense, intrigue, strategy, creative thinking, research.

We tell ourselves that we hope to earn “just one dollar a day”, when we reach that target, it’s “enough to pay my monthly internet bill”, then “enough to pay for the weekly groceries”.

And on and on it goes.

We head straight for the PC when we get home from work - “just checking my Adsense account” we yell over our shoulder at our partner as they are left to lug the kids in the front door.

“Cool - I made $1.46 from six clicks” - your partner can’t understand what all the fuss is about. “Great - let me know when we’re millionaires” she says.

We spend an inordinate amount of time reading the Adsense blogs, checking out the latest WebmasterWorld forums, just to see if there’s another tip that we haven’t tried to increase our traffic or click-through rate.

We justify the fact that we spend so much time lovingly crafting our Adsense sites by telling ourselves that we just might hit the jackpot. We might stumble across the magic formula to Adsense riches. Our site might get Dugg, and a million visitors might swarm on our site, all of them will love it, bookmark it, come back often, and click our ads.

In reality, it’s a hobby, but a hobby that drops a cheque for $100 in our lap every couple of months, so it’s better than smoking crack.

The ultimate scraper site?

Posted by stuart as , , , ,

Anybody who frequents the Adsense section in the Webmasterworld forums will have come across the general derision and distain unleashed upon anybody discussing the production of scraper or MFA sites.

Just quickly - a scraper site is a site which takes someone else’s content, usually blog content via an RSS feed, incorporates it as the (sole) content for their site,and places some form of advertising on the page, hoping to make money from someone else’s work. An MFA site is simply a site where there is no real valuable content - just keyword-stacked copy to bring in Adsense ads.

Now I’ve been giving a bit of thought to how (other people, of course!) could automate this process as a way of supplementing their income. Then it struck me.

I use a Yahoo! News RSS feed on my Renal Unit website, to keep my visitors up to date on what’s making news in the world of kidney disease and transplantation. Put simply, it’s a (highly refined) search of the Yahoo! News archives, which the good folk at Yahoo! are kind enough to provide as an XML feed. This serves two purposes for me - 1) It provides fresh, useful content for my readers, and 2) It provides fresh search engine fodder. The SE’s think my page has new content on it every time they visit, so they come back regularly.

Now back to my idea. Firstly, before I have someone jump down my throat, I must say that I am not going to do this. I lack both the technical expertise, and the desire to use this technique.

But what if someone could do this:

1. Get hold of a list of the most searched for terms for the last week, by using something like Google Zeitgeist,
2. Automatically generate XML feeds from Yahoo! News based on those keywords
3. Drop those XML feeds into a template page, and auto generate meta tags, titles, and URL’s based on the keywords.
4. Greate a couple of hundred pages a day based on this process
5. Somehow link all these pages together
6. Rinse and repeat

After a couple of weeks, they’d have thousands of keyword rich, regularly updated, SEO’d pages of content, all linked together, all on topics which people were searching for.

Imagine the pollution - you’d only be held back by how much disk space you had available to you!!

Issues of branding and usability

Posted by stuart as , , , , , ,

After a recent slapping around the head with a wet lettuce leaf for using the default Wordpress theme on this blog, I’ve been giving a bit of thought to design and usability issues for some of my sites.

I’ve been spending a lot of time working on a series of Adsense tutorials lately, producing a new site for each tutorial.

The way it works it that there’s one “main” site, which has links to all the other tutorials, which are different designs, all hosted on separate sub-domains.

Anybody with a keen eye will realise that all of the sites linked to from the main site are actually slightly modified template pages from the Open Source Web Design project. As per my discussion linked to above, I’ve been concentrating more on trying to get the content right; making it useful and easy to understand, and get the SEO spot on, rather than worry about designing pages from scratch.
I’m starting to think that this might have been the wrong way to go. I’m wondering whether I need to move all the tutorials under the one banner, as I think that this would definitely make tracking traffic statistics much easier, and probably make tracking the Adsense performance a lot simpler as well.

Also, this would give me a better “branding” for the site, people would know which site they are at, and that if they like the information on one topic, chances are that there’s more good stuff on offer in the other tutorials.
I’ve had a bit of a fiddle with the Joomla content management system in the past, I think it might be time once more to have another look, I’m just a bit worried about losing some control of the SEO and Adsense ad placement which I have using static HTML pages.

Oh well, food for thought - thanks for the kick in the ass asceth!

Want to use my high ranking domain name for a year?

Posted by stuart as , , , , , ,

The competition’s back on!

Go to www.seemeonthe.net, read about it, then link me up.

The gist of the contest is that you link to seemeonthe.net, on April 1, 2007, a  winner is announced (chosen by a pre-determined formula shown on the website) who receives the following:

• Unrestricted use of the domain name for one year
• One years free web hosting*
• All the backlink and pagerank goodness generated by the competition
• Ability to use domain name for Google Adsense, affiliate program - whatever you choose
• After the twelve months prize has expired, the winner will retain a text link from the home page on this domain for the lifetime of the domain.

* Web hosting includes the following:

• 250Mb web space
• 10 Gb of file transfer per month
• Unlimited subdomains
• Fantastico script installer
• Full FTP access
• CPanel hosting management

Why am I doing this?

1) It seemed like a good idea at the time
2) I bet a mate I could get 1,000 backlinks to a site in a year without using linkfarms or link exchanges
So link away, and good luck!