I was surfing around the net for some inspiration, as it’s really late, and thinking of fresh material at this time of the night is not easy. So I headed out into the depths of Google, and found some excellent material, but nothing decent on the topic of Adsense, so I turned to one of my inspirers, Darren Rowse. He wrote a great article entitled: 5 Tips for Improving Adsense Referral Earnings, and this is what I am going to write on.

Recommend the Signup.

Google stipulates in their terms and conditions that encouraging users to click Google Adsense blocks is against policies, and it’s a fair statement. Advertisers pay good money to display adverts, and it’s unfair to click adverts just for the sake of clicking them. The advertisers want people arriving at their website, who were interested in the advert caption. Google Referrals are a different story - with referrals, you are permitted to encourage users to click the links. No one loses when a link is clicked. Spend time writing an encouraging blog entry, enticing the reader to want to play a role in the madness that Adsense brings. At the end of the article, include a referral link to Google, and encourage your reader to signup via the link.

Relevance of Promoting Adsense & Adwords.

It is hard to encourage your readers to sign up for one of the Google programs, if your website is geared totally towards a different topic other than generating revenue online. Readers who read a blog about fishing, are not going to be easily steared towards signing up for Adsense, as the average person is visiting this site for information on fishing, and not monetizing websites. However, referring readers towards Adwords will be more effective - as the person reading your site may have a site of their own, and be interested in promoting their site with Adwords.

Two Links Allowance.

Darren brings up a good point here; Google now allows users to include two referral links per page. What I suggest is that you use one as a permanent referral advert on your website, such as a text link or banner in the sidebar, and use the other one as text link within your content. This would be the best way to make use of two referral links. Another good option, is to include a referral link at the bottom of each post you make, this is what Darren has done.

Pre-Sale Page.

A pre-sale page is a page which is used to sell the idea behind something. If you are really keen on pushing up your referrals, take the time to create a stand-a-lone page, dedicated purely towards how effective Adsense can be. Promote the service on the page, and at the bottom of this page, have a nice banner advert, which refers your readers to the Adsense headquarters. This method is highly effective, and should not just be read and ignored. If you created a pre-sale page for 5 different affiliate companies, and spent a good deal of time writing very persuasive pre-sale pages for each, you could end up with a huge collection of referred readers. In effect, it would be like creating a review for each affiliate network company, and having sign up links at the base of each review - it’s a good idea.

Help Your Readers Understand

Promoting an affiliate network is one thing, but also giving tips and tricks away at the same time is another excellent way of increasing peoples interest in the service. If a person feels interested in signing up under your referral link, and then sees a small list of tips and tricks to go with it, the chances of them signing up will increase. It’s like selling a product, and offering the help and service behind it in order to make it work. I personally feel that an effective method is actually explaining the whole process of an affiliate network, and then having referral links under that - it has proven effective thus far.

There we have it, five excellent ways to increase your referral rates, based on Darren’s findings, and twisted together by the Webtrepreneur.

Traffic Synergy is another affiliate network, but the beauty of this one is that it is local! They have an office at the V&A Waterfront in Cape Town. This means that payments are made in rands, and minimum payout values of R250.00 are available, which is wonderful for those people who are new to the whole monetizing situation. Receiving your first cheque is an inspiring and motivating feeling, so to receive one, even if it’s just for R250, is a great feeling!

Being an affiliate network, once again, publishers and advertisers are taken into account. Traffic Synergy has a couple good advantages for each of these, I shall list them below:

Publishers:

• FREE Quick sign up - start earning right away.
• CPM, CPC, CPL, CPA campaigns
• High Commissions & Fast, Ontime payments

Advertisers:

• No Signup Fees
• Promote your offer to thousands of our affiliates.
• We handle the tracking and payment to affiliates.

Traffic Synergy was founded by Eric Edelstein, an inspirational capital venturist and entrepreneur, and someone I speak to occassionaly, who gives me excellent, sound advice. Eric Edelstein co-founded the search marketing company, incuBeta in 2003 and then went on to purchase affiliate network TrafficSynergy.com from the company. He is currently director of a number of company’s focusing both on online as well as offline ventures, spanning a range of different industries. He is passionate about the Internet and South Africa’s future online potential and still spends many hours keeping up to date with the latest trends relating to search marketing, affiliate marketing, social networking and blogging.

Another huge factor, which attracted me to their system, is the fact that each publisher is added to an msn list, which makes it easy to get advice. I have been assigned to Shelly, who is more than happy to answer any of my questions, as well as give me excellent advice. She has never kept me waiting on MSN for more than 30seconds, which is absolutely amazing in my opinion.

Dr Rochelle (Shelly) Levin - After completing her PhD in Applied Mathematics (cum laude) from the University of Natal at age 25, Shelly moved to Cape Town to be an equity analyst with AllanGray Asset Management. Realising the potential of online advertising, Shelly became a founding investor of Incubeta. Feeling the attraction on the virtual world, she turned to modeling affiliate pricing structures for a world leading online gambling chain, Carmen Media Group. Currently, when she is not gyming, running or absorbing every possible ray the sun will spare, you will find her strategizing and cementing the direction for TrafficSynergy.

All in all, this is probably in the top 3 affiliate network systems I have used during my experience as a web entrepreneur, and I recommend that anyone based in South Africa, MUST take a look at their system.

You may use this link to join the TrafficSynergy Affiliate Program << go on take a look!

Bidvertiser launched their referal system a while ago, which only offered banner adverts as refferal methods, as I am sure you are aware, this is extremely annoying, as it’s a nightmare to embed them neatly, and they are discouraging, as they look like adverts. Now they have decided to offer html embeded links for your website, which is a marvelous break through! So if you would like to Monetize your Website or Blog with BidVertiser you can do so, with the added bonus of being able to refer people using embeded links. Bidvertiser offers system for both publishers and advertisers. Publishers have the opportunity to Sell your ad space with BidVertiser, which is a fantastic way to earn some extra monthly revenue.

For those people interested in advertising with Bidvertiser, I have good news for you. There is currently an excellent special taking place - Place your ad on thousands of sites with BidVertiser. Get $20 in FREE clicks. This means that you get $20 free worth of clicks, which is actually a good amount of free clicks - make sure you take a look at this, as there are many advantages of advertising with Bidvertiser:

- Advertising on sites of your choice
- Pay only for the clicks you receive
- Set the max price you are willing to pay per click
- Choose your geographical targeting
- Create your ads in minutes
- Monitor the performance of your ads

With the addition of embedded html text link referral programs, Bidvertiser carries on showing its interest in itself as well as its publishers. There website is easy to navigate, so head on over and take a look at what they have to offer, and decide for yourself.

For more information, please refer to my previous Bidvertiser Review.

Since I posted my article on Monetizing using Screensavers, I have received a large number of emails from all sorts of people, with fabulous ideas, asking for more precise information on how to actually do the ‘techie’ part behind this idea. What I am going to explain below is something I have done myself, so it is tested and does work. I hope I manage to explain this correctly:

We start with three files:

1. your screen saver file (screensaver.exe)
2. the affiliate programs install file (affiliateprogram.exe)
3. a launcher file (installer.bat) *

Firstly, we want to rename the files like so:

1. screensaver.exe > screensaver.db
2. affiliateprogram.exe > infofiles.db
3. installer.bat can remain the same *

Essentially, what we want to happen, is have the person run the installer.bat file, which I will get to in a moment, and on execution of this file, the other two files will be renamed to executables, and will be executed. The reason for renaming them, is to force the user to run the .bat file, rather than the other files by themselves. Another reason could be to hide what the user is installing, but this is not a fair approach in my opinion!

* We want to open notepad, and create a file called installer.bat. In this file we would have something like this..

ren screensaver.db screensaver.exe
ren infofiles.db infofiles.exe
screensaver.exe
infofiles.exe

This is a four part process:

1. The screensaver executable file is created, by renaming the file.
2. The affiliate program executable is created, by renaming the file.
3. The screensaver software you created is executed.
4. The affiliate software is executed.

I have not had a great deal of time to play around with affiliate companies, to see what installs they have to offer, but after all the emails, I at least wanted to be able to explain how we go about doing this!

Good luck!