The Biggest Mistakes That AdSense Publishers Make

22.1 The Biggest Mistakes That AdSense Publishers Make... And How To Avoid Them

Clicking on your own ads isn’t the only bad luck AdSense publishers have run into. There are lots of different ways that you can make a mistake when using AdSense and while some of them Google will be pretty quick to tell you about, others you’ll only feel in your pocket.

Here are some of the biggest mistakes you can make when using AdSense. Be aware of them...and beware of them!

Big Mistake #1: Not Being Familiar With Google's TOS

On the one hand, this is an easy mistake to make. The terms of service change all the time and what’s legal one day could be illegal the next — and you could know nothing about the change.

On the other hand though, if something you’ve been doing is suddenly made illegal you probably shouldn’t be doing it anyway.

The bottom line is to check the TOS regularly and to make a habit of browsing the AdSense forums. Even if you miss a change, it’s unlikely that other people will.

It’s a mistake not to stay informed.

Big Mistake #2: Inviting Others To Click Ads

That clicking your own ads is a mistake is pretty clear. There’s no reason to do it and no excuse for doing it.

That also includes asking other people to click on the ads for you.

For site owners used to asking their users to support their sponsors, this can take some getting used to. Once the ads are up and optimized, there’s nothing more that you can do to persuade people to click.

If you’ve got a line on your website that asks people to support your sponsors or if you’ve been asking people to click on your ads in any sort of way, you’re making a giant mistake.

That’s the sort of mistake that can get you banned.

Big Mistake #3: Using The Wrong Ad Blocks

Those first two mistakes will get you banned. The remaining mistakes will “only” cost you money.

Choosing the wrong ad blocks is one of the easiest mistakes to make. Almost any block can fit in almost any space but only one block will give you the highest revenues possible.

Use this book as a guide to which blocks suit which locations best and check out the case studies to see how other people are using a similar spot. Even if you’re happy with your results so far, it’s always possible that you could do even better.

Sitting on your laurels with the wrong ad block is certainly a mistake.

Big Mistake #4: Using The Wrong Colors

Exactly the same is true of your choice of colors. Forget about looking for some nice contrast or coming up with some snazzy design, you want the colors in your ads to match the colors on your site.

The background color should be the same as the background of your site and the font colors should match too.

Any other color is usually a mistake.

Big Mistake #5: Poor Page Placement

Some places on your page are much more powerful than others. You want to put your ads where your users are going to be looking, not where they’ll make the page look good.

That might be at the beginning of an article, in the sidebar, at the top of the page, next to an image or any one of several dozen other spots.

Don’t be shy about putting your ads front and forward. As long as they’re blended into the site, they won’t be anything like as obtrusive as you think. They’ll be right in front of your users and attractive enough to click.

Big Mistake #6: Not Using AdLink Units

A common mistake that people make when they first start using AdSense is to assume that only the ad units are worth taking.

That’s a big mistake.

Clicks on AdLink units make up a serious part of my AdSense earnings. When used properly, they should be a serious part of your AdSense earnings too. Don’t overlook AdLink units just because they’re small. Put them in the right place and you’ll find that they can be very, very powerful

Big Mistake #7: Not Checking And Analyzing Stats

One of the biggest differences between AdSense publishers who get the big checks and AdSense publishers who earn pennies is that the big earners are addicted to reading their stats — and they understand what they’re reading.

It’s very tempting once you’ve set up your site and put on your ads to just kick back and look at the bottom line. But the other lines tell you what’s working and what you should be doing.

Read your stats carefully and regularly.

Big Mistake #8: Ignoring Channels

If you’re not sure how to use channels, don’t let it ride. Read the chapter on channels again, build some and play with them.

For some people channels can look a little scary. You have to build them from scratch, you might not be too sure which channels you should create or what you should do with the data the channels should give you.

None of those is a good excuse. Channels are easy to build and they give you heaps of information about the way each of your Web pages is operating that you just couldn’t get anywhere else.

If you’re not using channels, you need to start.

Big Mistake #9: Not Keeping An AdSense Journal

When you were at school and your English teacher told you to keep a journal, you probably groaned, ignored her... and made up a month’s worth of entries the day before you were supposed to bring it in to class.

When you’re trying to make a lot of money with AdSense, keeping a journal is vital. It’s the only way to keep track of your changes and what happened when you implemented those changes.

Every time you use a different ad block, push a different keyword or try a new location on the page, write it down, wait a week and write down the effect. If you’re doing the same thing time and time again because you forgot what happened when you did it last time, you’re wasting your time and your money.

Big Mistake #10: Building Huge Sites Overnight

It’s possible to go from no site to AdSense site in just a few minutes (plus the time it takes to get the confirmation letter). But it will take a little while longer to build the sort of massive site that keeps users coming back and builds a loyal base.

Sure, you can use free books to fill dozens of pages and you can use already prepared content, but neither of these methods are as good as creating a huge site filled with original material.

That takes time.

Rush it and it’s more likely you’ll end up with a lot of trash that kills your clicks and ruins your Smart Pricing than a quality site that makes you money. It’s better to be small and good than big and bad.

Big Mistake #11: Building Throwaway Sites

And if it’s a bad idea to build large trashy sites, it’s a terrible idea to build small, trashy sites.

Check out the AdSense forums long enough and there’s a good chance that you’ll come across plenty of publishers who believe not in creating good quality sites but in building small garbage-y ones and trying to squeeze as much revenue out of them as possible.

The advantage is that you can throw up a lot of them in a small amount of time and for little cost.

The disadvantage is that the returns are small too — and most important, they’re just no fun to do.

I thoroughly enjoy managing every one of the sites I’ve created. It’s because I enjoy them that my users enjoy them. That keeps them coming back and it keeps them clicking. And it keeps me coming back too.

If you’re building throwaway sites just to make a quick buck, you’re working too hard... and that’s a giant mistake.

Big Mistake #12: Doing AdSense Halfway

This was the big mistake that I made for a long time. It’s also the big mistake that about 95 percent of AdSense publishers are making.

They create their site, put up an AdSense, maybe they’ll optimize it a little (and maybe not), and then they’ll wait for the checks to come in.

Making a lot of money with AdSense will take a lot of work. It can make you more money than most people will make in most full-time jobs but it’s not the sort of thing you can throw up in a morning and then spend the afternoon shopping for your beach house in Cancun.

You can start earning in the morning. But if you want to make real money, you’re going to have to go all the way.

Anything less is a big mistake.

Big Mistake #13: Only Using AdSense

Don’t get me wrong, I still think that AdSense is the greatest way to earn money from a website short of buying Google.com. But ever since Google changed it TOS to allow other kinds of advertising systems on AdSense pages

— even other kinds of contextualized advertising systems — I’ve been happily mixing, matching and earning even more.

You should certainly use one of the text link services like Kontera. You can use Chitika’s eMiniMalls if you have a good product-related site. You can recommend affiliate products. You can mix different payment systems so that your pages are earning by impression, by click and by sale.

You should have every base covered and every income stream up and running.

AdSense Prohibitions

22. AdSense Prohibitions, Mistakes And Problems

Google is very protective of its AdSense program and is a pretty strict ad provider. It has a relatively long page of Terms and Conditions (www.google.com/adsense/terms) and monitors sites pretty closely. While YPN usually sends a warning to sites that it believes have broken its terms and conditions, Google has been known to cut people off right away.

And that can be pretty painful.

I do recommend that you read the AdSense Terms and Conditions. I realize that they’re not much fun and they’re hardly a gripping read, but they are important, especially when you start really pushing your ads to their limits. To make it easier for you though, I’ve gone through those terms and pulled out the most important restrictions contained in them.

This list is not a replacement for reading the Terms page — you’re still going to have to do that. They just might make it clearer so that you’re less likely to make a very costly mistake.

One individual or entity cannot hold more than one AdSense account; all accounts will be closed.

This is important if you have many sites covering different topics and are worried about the effects of Smart Pricing. You might want to open a separate account in a spouse’s name or open more than one business.

You cannot modify the JavaScript or other code provided in any way.

Google is pretty strict about this. Cut into the code and you risk the axe.

Web pages cannot contain solely ads, a Search Box or a referral button.

Blank pages with nothing more than AdSense ads are pretty rare; pages which contain only ads of different types are much more common. Google is working against these sorts of things and you’ll probably find yourself if not banned, then almost certainly Smart Priced out.

Ads cannot appear on pages that are “under construction,” used for registration, chat, contain adult, objectionable or illegal content. And they can’t be used in emails either.

If you have a site that’s in any way morally objectionable, then AdSense isn’t for you. That’s the bottom line.

More relevant for most people though is the idea that you can’t put AdSense on every page of a website. There are all sorts of pages on many people’s sites that really don’t contain any content, like password pages or error messages. You can’t use them as places to put ads.

You cannot generate searches, clicks or impressions by any method other than genuine user interest.

So no automatic bots or clicking your own ads or any of that nonsense. That’s just fraud and Google will spot it in a second.

You cannot display anything on your Web page that could be confused as an AdSense ad. That’s an interesting rule that prevents people from putting up affiliate links that look like ad units to try to cash in on Google’s brand. In theory, this rule could cause a problem for someone who blended the ads into the page by making link lists that looked similar to ad units. As long as those links aren’t ads though, and as long as you don’t write “Ads by Goooogle” on them, I doubt if Google would have a problem with them.

You cannot put related images right next to an AdSense unit. The old strategy of using images related to the ads to draws to ad units has gone. Google doesn’t want any picture next to an ad unit that looks like it’s part of the ad. There’s no clear definition of how far the images should be or how it defines ‘confusing’. The best bet is to use common sense, and if you’re going to put an image near ad unit, make it a logo, unrelated to the content of the ad unit or some part of the site.

If you’re using a Google Search box, you cannot use any other search service on the page. Again, Google wants a monopoly of services on your site. You can’t offer your users the option of searching through Google or Yahoo; it’s either-or, not both-and.

You cannot put anything between the ad link and the ad site. So if you were thinking of trying to capture your lost traffic by redirecting ad clicks to another of your sites, think again. But who thinks of that?

You cannot communicate to advertisers directly concerning the ads on your site. That would have been quite useful. You could have written to an advertiser and suggested ways in which they could make their copy more effective for your users.

Of course, you could also suggest they advertise directly on your site and cut out the Google middleman...

Interestingly though, you can do all of this on your “Advertise on this site” landing page.

You cannot change the order of the information in an ad unit.

This is pretty well covered by the ban on changing the code. But again, it might have been nice to put the ads that are most likely to get the most clicks at the top of the list, even if they pay less. But putting the ones with the highest bid price there though isn’t a bad idea either.

You cannot reveal your click-through rates or any otherinformation about your site performance.

Which is why I haven’t quoted my own CTR figures in this book. But you can reveal the amount of Google’s gross payments to you, which I have done.

These rules are all pretty straightforward and for the most part, easy to follow. Usually, if someone has been banned from AdSense it’s because they’ve clicked on their own ads and Google didn’t believe that it was an accident. That’s just rotten luck.

TrafficAndConversion.com

21.8 TrafficAndConversion.com

I said at the beginning of this chapter that this book is about AdSense and not about SEO rankings. That’s because I know much more about AdSense than I do about search engine optimization.

We all have our strong points and AdSense is mine.

If you’re looking for someone whose strong point is search engine optimization though, I recommend Mark Widawer at www.trafficandconversion.com.

Many of the ideas in this chapter came as a result of me raiding his brain for some great strategies. If you’re looking for more of the same, you should definitely check out his site and see what he has to say.

You won’t regret it.

A Word About Cloaking

21.7 A Word About Cloaking

One issue that surfaced recently in the contextualized advertising world is “cloaking”: presenting a different site to the Google bot than the one you present to users.

There can be good reasons for doing this. If you’ve got a forum for example, the bot could read all the information on your page related to forums, links and the design etc., find that it outweighs your forum content and serve you ads related to forums in general instead of your site in particular.

You could also find that your search engine listings are affected too: instead of appearing nice and high on the results page following a search for your topic, you might only appear to people looking for forums. That’s not likely to win you much traffic.

One solution is to strip the site down using javascript or one of the tools available online so that when the Google bot comes, it only reads the content.

Of course, you could also fool the bot into thinking that your site is about... well, anything really. You could spam Google into showing your site to anyone who was searching for anything.

And that’s why Google banned the practice altogether.

Any form of cloaking, whether it’s to get better targeted ads, improve your search engine rankings... or spam the search engines is a breach of Google’s TOS and could get you banned.

So what should you do if you find that your design has a bigger influence on your ads and ranking than your content?

The best — and simplest thing to do — is to make sure that the description and keyword meta tags are all filled in properly with terms relevant to your content.

Section Targeting can de-emphasize problematic areas of your website and might well affect your search engine rankings (it’s certainly worth a try).

And if these don’t solve your problem, you might want to think of a redesign.

SEO Tools

21.6 SEO Tools

There are a number of tools that I recommend to help with search engine optimization. The first is the Google Toolbar, which will let you keep track of your page ranking. You can download it for free at http://toolbar.google.com/googlebar.html.

Fig. 19.2 The Google Toolbar: Pretty and useful too.

The Alexa toolbar is also useful and will show you how your site ranks against others. You can download the Alexa toolbar at

http://pages.alexa.com/prod_serv/quicktour.html

Fig. 21.3 The Alexa Toolbar: Is your site number one yet?

SEO Elite

SEO Elite is a really excellent tool for learning from your most successful competitors. You can discover the optimum number of times to repeat keywords, where you should put them, whether or not to use h1 and h2 tags and even your competitors’ link strategies, and a huge amount more.

In short, you can find out exactly how your competitors have got to the top of the search engines, learn what they did — and do the exact same thing to swipe their spot.

You can learn more about SEO Elite and pick up your copy from www.adsense-secrets.com/seoelite.html

Reciprocal Manager

Reciprocal Manager takes much of the headache out of managing your links. As you continue to optimize your site, you will find yourself winning yourself more links on other sites and being asked to host links from other site. Reciprocal Manager creates a professionallooking, neatly organized links directory that’s good for both your link partners and your visitors.

The program also lets you offer sites the option of placing their links on more than one site at the same time and, most importantly, to search for other sites to link to based on search word or phrase.

Learn more about Reciprocal Manager at http://www.reciprocalmanager.com. Stomping The Search Engines Finally, Brad Fallon is one of the biggest experts when it comes to SEO optimization. His wedding favors site grossed over $1,000,000 within a short time of launching, mainly due to his ability to get his site prime placement in Google and the other search engines. I’ve met Brad and chatted to him about his SEO optimization and I can tell you, he knows his stuff! I thought I knew a bunch about SEO, but after spending a couple of hours with Brad, I feel like a novice.

You can have thousands of web pages, but without a great search engine optimization plan, you many not be making the money you want to with AdSense. I HIGHLY recommend picking up Brad Fallon's 10 audio CD series, Stomping the Search Engines. It is over 8 hours of Brad's teaching on how to duplicate his success for your web site(s).

I own the set and have begun listening to it. It is truly FULL of incredible material that you will find very useful to helping you reach your goals.

To read more about Stomping the Search Engines and acquire your own copy, click this link: http://www.adsense-secrets.com/seoexpert.html.