A common mistake made by bloggers and website authors is the rush to make money. Everyone who reads about making money with their blog, gets all excited and tries to hurry deep into the world of making money online, without thinking about the disadvantages of monetizing a site. We all know that a website covered in adverts is not appealing and often results in a snappy decision to try the next website in the queue. There are many things to take into consideration before placing adverts on your website, and I will mention a few below.

Directory Submission - Submitting your blog/website to an online directory is a great way to get inward links, and increase your traffic. The more directories you submit your website to, the higher your page rank will be. This said, many directories have a huge bias against accepting website strewn with adverts. If you start getting denied by directories, you will grow a bad name for your site, and this will influence your traffic heavily.

Reader Base - One of the best times to start monetizing a site, is when you already have a large reader base, of which many of the visitors and returners, which means that these people are interested in the content you are sharing, and will most probably not be put off by a few adverts placed carefully around the website. If you introduce adverts too soon, many readers will not remain loyal to your site, and rather look for another similar site, with less adverts.

Positioning - Before you can start placing adverts around and about on your website, it is important to have a look and see where the best placing will be. People follow trends, and there are certain areas which are signified with certain things. For example, most people recognise the header image of a site at the top left of the page, and similarily, most readers recognise a menu on the left hand side of the page. This is the same for adverts. You do want your adverts to be seen, but don’t want them placed in the same places as all websites, rather have a look at what your readers are most interested in, and place the adverts carefully around these areas, as this will increase your chances of click throughs. Placing adverts inbetween menu areas works really well, or placing adverts inline (within the content) is another successful method. (more…)

Today I am going to show you a pretty decent way to make some extra cash, or to at least increase your website traffic.

Everyone has used a screensaver, and there are plenty of people who still do. A screen saver is not just a collection of pretty picture moving around on your screen, they actually do play a role in saving your screen! Screen savers are one of the easiest ways to attract people to your website. When a screen saver is made, you are able to put a footer message, for example, on the screen saver, perhaps saying, “Created by Webtrepreneur.co.za”.

Before we start making a screen saver, we need to things:

• Screensaver creation software
• Stock photographs

A program which I have used to create screensavers is called Saver Forge. It is freeware, and is downloadable here. The download is small, and the program installs in a few seconds, and allows you to create a screen saver in a few minutes. Stock photographs - A stock photograph is a photograph with no royalties, which basically means that the photographer took the photograph and has not claimed it as his own property, and is therefore legal to use and distribute how you wish. Finding websites which offer free stock photos is not a simple task, so I have included a few links below for you to start with:

• http://www.free-photographs.net/index.html
• http://www.istockphoto.com/index.php
• http://freestockphotos.com/
• http://www.freeimages.co.uk/

There are actually plenty of resources online, which offer free stock photographs, you just need to spend some time googling for them. But for now, just take a look at the ones I have listed above.

I am not going to go into explaining how to create a screensaver with Saver Forge, as the process is extremely easy, and once you have installed it, I don’t think you will have any problems, of you do, leave me a comment here, and I will help you out. Below are two screen savers I made, which you may download and look at if you want an example:

• Ferrari Screensaver
• Audi Screensaver

Right, let’s talk a little more about monetizing these screen savers. This is where things will get a little more technical, but if you can take your time reading through this, I’m sure you will be able to follow.

There are a number of affiliate companies online, which pay for installations, one easy example, which most of us know by now is Google Toolbar. Each time someone clicks your referal link and installs the toolbar, Google pays you out a referal fee. What does this have to do with a screensaver? Well, read this next paragraph and hopefully feel inspired.

When you create a screensaver, you can compile it into an install file, which is effectively an .exe file. Most people know that an .exe file cannot be edited, even with some fancy software you will struggle. So, what we want to do, is rename this screensaver.exe file to perhaps images.db. Now we need to create something to link us between installing software and installing the screensaver, so what we are going to do is create a batch file. At this point we will have three files:

1. Images.db - the actual screensaver.exe file renamed
2. Tempfiles.db - this is actually an .exe file to install the google toolbar, for example.
3. Screensaver.bat - the linking file, which can be renamed to .exe as far as I know.

The batch file will contain commands to rename Images.db to screensaver.exe, and rename Tempfiles.db to googleinstall.exe and then run both of these programs at the same time. We will first execute the screensaver.exe file, which will ask the user if he/she would like to install the screensaver, and then it will run the googleinstall program, which will ask the user if he/she would like to install Google Toolbar. I’m sure that you can now put two and two together and successfully arrive at the beauty of this idea. You can get information on the various commands required for the batch file here or here.

Once you have created the three files above, you will need to zip them up together, and then distribute however you choose to do so. Perhaps on freeware websites, perhaps on your own website, or even via email to your friends. Beware of install programs which install spyware or adware, you don’t want people downloading your screensaver and finding out that they suddenly have spyware running on their computers, as this is just not fair!

Give it a bash, perhaps you will land up with some nice extra revenue, and if you use your mind here, I’m sure you can think of many other ways of incorporating interesting things into your screensaver install file. *hint* launching a website while they are installing, leading them to your website, which contains Google Adsense or other information

The Webtrepreneur wishes you luck!

It’s extremely popular to display adverts at the bottom of posts on a blog. The reader reads the blog posting, arrives at the end of the post, and the first thing he/she sees is an advert. If you have optimized your website correctly, the chances are that your advert will suite the topic just blogged about, and this will increase your chances of receiving a click from the user. What happens if you would like to rotate the adverts, so that you are not just displaying Google Adsense, for example, at the bottom of every post?

This is tricky, and I have not seen too many solutions around, so I decided to code my own solution to this problem. Below I will paste some of my code, along with the best description I can put together. I use PHP in this example.

Alright, now that the code is there, I can start explaining. It looks rather odd and tricky, but really it isn’t, especially if you have any knowledge of PHP. This little code snippet handles two different affiliate programs, and displays them randomly under your blog posts. I hope my explanation above was helpful, it is not easy explaining code so that everyone will follow.

Copy and paste the above code into notepad, and save the file as randomad.php. Once you have done this, all that is left, is placing it on your website, which will be done with this code:

<?php include(’randomad.php’); ?>

If you are a wordpress user, here are the steps to place this code correctly, so random adverts appear under each post:

1. Login to WP-Admin
2. Click Presentation
3. Click Theme Editor
4. Click Main Index Template, on the right of the screen
5. This is where things get tricky, now you need to look for the end of your posts code. Normally you would see something about comments or links to technorati or permalinks, you would place the code under that. Each theme is different so it is hard for me to tell you exactly where it goes. A common occurance is this..

</div>
<?php endwhile; endif; ?>

Which you should be able to find in the Main Index Template, if you see this then place the <?php include(’randomad.php’); ?> line of code right above the <.div>, like this..

<?php include(’randomad.php’);?>
</div>
<?php endwhile; endif; ?>

6. Save the changes by clicking “Update File”, and go back to your website and refresh, wallah.

If you have any questions about implementing this, please feel free to contact The Webtrepreneur! Best of luck!

Alright, we have setup an account, and we have created adsense adverts, now we need to take a look at what channels are.

When you login to your Google Adsense account, you will see a tab labeled “Adsense Setup”, which I mentioned in creating adsense adverts, click this tab. This will bring you so a screen which looks rather complicated, not to worry, it’s not too tricky.

If you look at the image along side, you will see two numbers: 1 and 2. Our first step is to click on “URL channels”, labeled with a 1. Then proceed to click “Add new URL channels”, which is labeled with a 2. When you click this, it will display a text area. The specific instructions are on the located on the right, but all that is really required is that you type in the domain name, leaving out the http://www so if I wanted to add a channel for http://www.webtrepreneur.co.za, I would type in webtrepreneur.co.za only. Once you have typed in the domain of choice, click the “Add Chanel” button, and you will see the domain appear in the list above.

For those of you who have many websites, you can add each one to the list. Why would you do this? Well, basically, what channels do is allow you to track your Adsense revenue across all your websites, so you can monitor and see which websites are bringing in the most revenue. If you only have one website, what you can do is setup channels for different areas, for example, if you have wordpress installed on your website, you can track Adsense on your main page, as well as different pages you have adsense on. E.g. webtrepreneur.co.za/index.php and webtrepreneur.co.za/comments.php - this will allow me to see whether I generate more revenue from adverts on my main page or on my comments page. Knowing this will allow you to place adverts to maximize your revenue.

If you now return back to your main page, by clicking the “Reports” tab at the top of the screen, you will see “AdSense for Content” about a 1/3 down your screen, and along side this, you will see a clickable link “top channels”. When you click this link it will list all your channels, and give you a breakdown of each one, I have placed an example on the side, of my channels.

You can get more information here.