What a nice little suprise this was! You can now view your adsense account with good old British pounds. Read more here.
The option to change over to my local currency was presented as a special message on the first page. I am not sure where the option can be found otherwise. This is good news as I can now have a better idea of how much clicks are really worth to me.
Good work Google, note that this feature is being rolled out to other countries in the EU and you should be able to view your adsense earnings in Euros if that is your local currency.
I am getting close to finalising the code for my first release of the e107 all-in-one affiliate plugin! A big part of this will be the ability to insert adsense into various areas of e107 that you can't easily do so already without altering theme code. Of course you are able to use any adunit you like, the plugin simply has a text area where you can paste in your preferred contextual advert code.
Adsense 101
I have been using adsense successfully on a number of sites, I enjoy the simplicity of setting up the unit and letting the automatic contextual matching do the rest. I also like that there is a steady income from the units, and if you take the time to set up a long term sustainable website built on the principles of solid content, community and accepted marketing practices then you should see a steady daily income for many years to come.
Here are some tips and best practice advice learnt from my own experience:
Pick carefully who you show adverts to. With this adsense plugin I allow the ability to set a user class to control who sees the adverts. In the future I may create a greater level of control that will give you the chance to control who sees which unit, but for now the security settings cover all the units. This is important because, for example in a forum, you might find that regular visitors quickly become blind to the adverts. Why should this bother you? Because if the adverts are shown many times and no one is clicking through, Google will potentially penalise for you for not being relevant. So you might find that you actually get paid less for each click.
Experiments normally show that big units convert better. Google themselves suggest using the large square unit which can carry up to four text ads or a large picture. The bigger they are the more likely your visitor will notice them and if your site is attracting the right people and showing relevant adverts then you should see some clicks.
Adsense is not just a numbers game. I have made profitable adsense based sites with very low traffic numbers. As I have said above, the secret is to make sure the traffic you do get is highly focused on the topic of your website. The way to do this is ensure Google knows how to rank you appropriately in their search engine, there are plenty of tips on this matter around the web, how about this SEO guide to the basics. Of course if you do manage to make a million adsense impressions a day then that's great too!
Effective Adsense Strategy
The secret to good adsense revenue is having good quality traffic coming to your site, traffic that is genuinely interested in your subject and is more likely to therefore be interested in your adverts. These people not only click through more often but they are more likely to be good potential customers for the sponsor of the adverts. Everyone is a winner!
Make your adverts visible and ensure you put them on the right pages, if the ads hit the right spot then hopefully you will make some money from them.
The Adsense Plugin
Coming soon, subscribe to our RSS feed to be the first to hear about it! I have big plans for this plugin, having reviewed other affiliate plugins for Wordpress and other lesser CMS systems I have seen that people are willing to pay maybe 10, 50 or even up to 100 pounds for a plugin that can help monetise their CMS. So I hope this free one will be of great use to people out there and also help attract people over to e107!
If you want to see the adunits on this site, at the time of writing, you can see them be heading over to the forum or the news pages. You need to log out first if you are logged in!
Regular readers will be aware that Hubpages is the subject of my current experimentation. It is clear that after just a week the secret of success is perseverance! Which, to be honest, is the one thing that is missing from many of us playing this game.
Small steps Unfortunately Google's T&Cs forbid the sharing of detailed earning information but here is a censored pic of the first week. To be honest I wan't really expecting any clicks but this is encouraging to see so quickly:
It is my view that the thing that separates the successful affiliate marketers from the work at home wannabes is often simply the ability to stick at it. I will be putting up almost 100 of these hubs whether I see instant success or not, and I hope in the long run it pays off. If nothing else the back links I create should have long term value.
Experiment Goal 1 So to ensure that I give this a fair go, I am going to set up 10 Hubpages a week every week for the next month. They will be aimed at micro niches which I think I will be able to rank well with relatively little effort. My profile already has a quality score of 90 which means that my article's links are now followed (they are "nofollow" until you get a quality score over 75). Don't let this put you off because I found my quality rating rose slowly each day and with only my first 5 hubs (which weren't particularly amazing) I passed that mark easily.
Article marketing has several attractions:
You can get well respected links back to your core sites - this is the big draw and ultimately my reason for this experimentation
You can get some passing traffic from the article to your site. In reality this is less likely to be a core source of clicks but with a good conversion rate on your site, sometimes even small volumes make a massive difference
Some systems will share revenue or allow affiliate links in your articles, I am not sure how well this will do but I look forward to reporting back
Head back in a weeks time to see how I get on! If you want to give it a go yourself, sign up!
I have long been aware that article marketing sites are a potential good source of backlinks, if you are new to this concept then it goes a little like this:
The HubPages site is slightly different in that it allows you to share in any revenue or ads shown on the site, so not only can you channel people into your own site but if they convert before they get there you still some cash. Now I have mixed feelings about these sites, I resent working hard, producing content only for the site owner to benefit from your work, why not just host the article yourself?
Well for good reason, HubPages already gets a fair amount of traffic and is well liked by Google, more so than other article marketing sites it seems. For now at least - this is sure to change one day! However strict controls on the HubPages site ensure that standards are kept high. You need to achieve a specific quality rating before your links count, spammy pointless articles won't get far at all. The quality does seem higher than other similar sites for sure.
How good is Hubpages.com?
Over the next few weeks I intend to add two to three articles every day and will report back my findings. I will be seeing how easy it is to get the necessary hubpage quality score to get "followed" links, seeing if this has any impact on how the sites I link to rank and whether I can actually make anything directly from the articles. If you want to follow along then head over to HubPages and sign up today, let us know how you get on!
I am getting closer to a first release and am doing some testing of the completed plugin here on this site. The plugin now has its own landing page, check it out here: e107 affiliate plugin.
Here's hoping this is the first step towards making e107 a credible CMS choice for affiliate marketers out there on the net. Given that a lot of these plugins for Wordpress and Joomla are commercial, a good free one could actually help "sell" the CMS. It is a long way off having the "all-in-one" functionality that I am aiming for but it is something I will be working at slowly.
Depending on the progress of e107 0.8 I may accelerate the effort but for now it will be focused on activities that will support my own sites. The reality is that e107 needs to get its SEO act together for the next release if it is to attract the fussy search engine obsessed community of affiliates. I don't think this is impossible though!
In the mean time I look forward to gathering ideas and feedback from anyone out there.
Re: Tags from Class Restricted Forums OK, so I have just created this tag in my admin only area:http://www.sammynetbook.com/tag-abc123.htm... Posted by jezza101 01 Jul : 20:46
Re: Tags from Class Restricted Forums sorry, yeah i was kind just outputting the train of thought in my head!Yes you are right though, so ... Posted by jezza101 01 Jul : 20:31
Re: Tags from Class Restricted Forums So, if I read correctly, although any words, from even class restricted forums, can appear in the cl... Posted by migs 29 Jun : 22:31
Re: Tags from Class Restricted Forums The tag itself doesn't have a concept of class. So any words could potentially appear in the cloud.I... Posted by jezza101 29 Jun : 21:10
Latest Comments
[news] Hubpages: The First Week Posted by jezza101 on 01 Jul : 17:13 Cool, well good luck with it! I am now on a a rating >90 - it doesn't seem to take much, just a bit ...
[news] Hubpages: The First Week Posted by Simon_Paul on 30 Jun : 23:48 I've just signed up to HubPages and think I'll join your experimentNot got many pageviews, and only ...
[news] SEO e107 Page Header Tip Paying Off Posted by jezza101 on 22 Jun : 22:11 Sounds good SecretR, I know with people like you working on things e107 is in safe hands :)
[news] SEO e107 Page Header Tip Paying Off Posted by SecretR on 22 Jun : 20:31 I hope you wont need it - news and custom pages will be the most powerful e107 PLUGINS ever. Of cour ...
