Google to introduce GCash?

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A little birdie whispered in pimpmypagerank’s shell-like ear today that Google may be about to introduce “GCash”

A startling addition to the internet giants stable of online services, GCash will operate as an online credit card without the card, similar to online payment services such as Paypal and the like, with one significant difference:

Google hopes to leverage their large base of AdSense account holders, allowing them to spend their AdSense account balance to make purchases.

AdSense is Google’s contextual online advertising service, allowing small and large web publishers alike to monetize their online content.

One of the largest complaints of AdSense account holders to date has been the inability to access funds in their accounts until their balance has reached US$100, under the new scheme, account holders will be able to use whatever funds they have in their account to make online purchases. A use for this service might be to pay for web hosting, or small payments for other online services, such as subscriptions to online content sites.

Sources inside Google suggest that Google are also about to finally link their AdSense and AdWords services, Giving AdWords publishers the ability to use funds in their AdSense accounts to pay for their AdWords advertising, by a direct deposit from their AdSense account using their GCash identity.

This is seen as a move to placate the large numbers of publishers producing AdSense Arbitrage Sites (ASS), which have, according to our source, become a priority inside Google. “We’re making so much money from Made For AdSense sites it’s not funny”, our source said. “We’re making it a real priority to look after these publishers, we figure that this is the way of the future”

Click through rate, traffic, google love, and disappointing adsense results again

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After reading an interesting discussion on Mark’s blog about click through rates, my rates have jumped dramatically in the last two days - close to 10% with an eCPM over all my sites of over $13 for the last three days! This is the result of me doing absolutely buggerall to my sites, maybe there is a god after all!
Maybe his goal of a 10% CTR is actually acheivable! Now I just need to get some traffic.

Speaking of traffic, a new blog of mine, luxurious-stuff.com seems to have somehow garnered some google love, even though it’s not even three weeks old. I’m starting to think that there’s a whole lot more randomness in the google ranking system than anyone’s prepared to let on. Link popularity checker is showing 2 links in MSN, and none in Yahoo and Google. which is wierd, because the site ranks first page in google for two product keywords (which I wasn’t expecting!)

As I said in a previous post, over the last month or so, I’ve spent some time creating mini-sites, waiting to see which ones get picked up by the search engines. Looks like I may be on to a winner with this one, so I’ll spend the next few days adding content to it, and see where it takes me.
Moving along - I’m getting sick to death of one and two cent clicks. I think I’m going to have to spend more time tinkering with the competitive ad filter, and possibly reduce the number of ads I’m showing on some pages.

June looks like being even worse than last month by a considerable amount, as far as adsense income goes. I’m not particularly fussed for two reasons: I’m seeing more pages indexed by the search engines, and I know I have a reasonable amount of content still waiting to be indexed. I’m sure that things will start to pick up soon. I’ve seen an increase in CTR over the last couple of days, as I said above, and assuming that the increase in search engine love continues, we should start to see some better results.

Off to write content!

Onwards and upwards

Smart Pricing my life

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Imagine if we could smart-price areas of our lives other than our AdWords accounts.

If the biggest online company on the planet can get away with it, why can’t I? I’m thinking that I’d like to smartprice my web-host:

“Sorry Resellerzoom, I didn’t quite make as much as I was hoping from my online pursuits this month, so I’m thinking that I’m only going to pay you $3, instead of the $4.95 you’d like to charge me”

Or “Sorry mydomain.com, this domain I bought for $8.95 for a website which I thought was a really good idea at the time hasn’t really panned out as I’d hoped, OK if I just pay you $4 and we call it squares?”

Or what about other areas of my life: “Sorry mr. Baker, that loaf of bread you sold me for $2 went stale before I got the chance to eat it all, OK if I just give you $1.20?”

Makes for interesting thinking….

Five more profitable things I could be doing than AdSense

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Looking at my AdSense stats this morning upon getting up at 4am to watch Australia whip Croatia (here’s hoping!) to move into the last 16 in the World Cup, a thought occured to me.

I love the internet, I love my PC, I love my G3 Powerbook, I love my HP IPAQ 1950 PDA, hell, I even love my old Mac Plus I’ve never quite got around to throwing out. But really, if you took away all these things, would I be better or worse off?

From a financial standpoint, obviously, if I hadn’t bought all these “toys”, I’d be much better off, but I have to ask myself why a dollar earned using these tools is so much more valuable than a dollar earned in the “real world”

For arguments sake, if I find a dollar under the cushions of the couch, I drop it in my pocket and forget about it, whereas if I get a dollar from four clicks on my AdSense ads, I’m just about ready to throw a party. I’m getting a bit tired of begging for pennies.
Taking things a step further, I thought I’d discuss the top five things you could be doing to make more money than I do with AdSense:

1) Visit all your cousins, aunts, uncles etc, and ask if you could borrow a dollar. The great thing about this is that the amount is small enough that they’re going to be too embarassed to ask you to re-pay the money: free money is good money!

2) Similar to the above; visit the local shopping mall, and ask strangers if they will give you a dollar for bus-fare home. This might be dangerous, but from a dignity standpoint, I believe it’s roughly on a par with begging for clicks on an AdSense site.

3) Visit friends and family, take a seat in the lounge-room, fake a coughing fit, and ask for a glass of water. When the friend or family member leaves the room, quickly check under the cushions of the lounge for small change. Just don’t get caught!

4) Go to work early, and check all your co-workers drawers before they arrive. Most people will have a few coins in their drawer, change from the Coke machine etc. Just don’t get greedy. Take a dollar or so, but not enough for them to notice.

5) Raid your kids money-box. Again, don’t get greedy, but kids usually have heaps of small coin. I know my three year old collects all the loose coin in the house, and most of it finds its way into his money-box. He must have about $50 in there by now. He’s not going to notice the odd dollar going missing.

When will Adsense buy me a MacBook?

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Not much happening around here the last couple of weeks. My one page of content a day for my AdSense sites promise has died in the ass, as I’ve been bed-ridden for the last seven days with a nasty case of pnuemonia. (Damnit - why couldn’t I be sick next week when Wimbledon’s on the TV?!?!?)
It is nice, though, to drag my sorry ass out of bed to sit in front of the computer, and see that the AdSense income is still trickling in.

It looks like I’ll actually go backwards with my AdSense income again this month, which doesn’t really bother me that much, as I’m going to leave all the money in my AdSense account until I have enough to spend it on something worthwhile.

I’m still a long way away, though, from my aim of the good folk at Google buying me a shiny new macbook

AdSense is the only way I’m going to get my hands on one of these suckers. My G3 laptop is looking a little long in the tooth these days, and as I seem to be spending more and more time lying in bed at home, a hospital bed, or a dialysis chair creating content for the AdSense sites, I might as well do it in style!