Things have been really busy in the Webtrepreneur’s life recently, and finding time to write articles is not the tricky part, it’s finding content which is full of information, and won’t waste you time that is hard! I don’t believe is writing useless content just to keep the blog posts rolling.

I have seen a massive increase in traffic over at Blogvertise, which is great to see, the ‘Whose pixels rock‘ section has seen some good changes too, which is always interesting to watch. For those of you who are using the service, may I ask that you please add a link from your website to Blogvertise, this not only increases the popularity of the website, but also brings you potential traffic, and creates traffic for others. Blogging, and the art of increasing ones traffic is a group effort, support others and they will support you, it’s as simple as that. You can find our banners here, take a look please. I will post the latest top pixel list sometime over the next week or so.

I was taking a look at all the affiliate networks earlier this morning, and have a little bit of information on each one. I noticed on Bidvertiser that they now have a service which you may use to drive traffic to your eBay adverts. The service looks rather useful to me, I took some time to read about it, and decided that I would paste 6 points here for you:

1. Browse our directory of participating sites and use our keyword tool to find the ones that are appropriate for your eBay item(s).

2. Choose your geographical targeting, to only show your ads to users from specific locations.

3. Set your max bid and budget.

4. Choose any of your eBay Items.

5. Your ad is created automaticaly.

6. Your ad runs on the sites you have selected.

Sign up for Bidvertiser now!

Google Adsense update from the Inside Adsense blog:

“We’re now requiring AdSense publishers to comply with the spirit of our Page Quality Guidelines. If you’re an AdWords advertiser, you might already be familiar with these guidelines, which are intended to provide a better experience for users, advertisers, and publishers alike. If you use any kind of online advertising, know that these guidelines encourage publishers to, among other things, create sites with simple navigation and substantial, useful content.

This new policy requirement doesn’t mean that you can’t use online advertising; it simply means that if you do, you need to be sure that the way you advertise meets with the guidelines, whether it’s through AdWords or through any other advertising program. However you advertise your site, it can always benefit from significant and relevant content, clear navigation, and the other points in our quality guidelines.

The other noteworthy update: now you can place up to three link units on a page. As we’ve noted in the past, link units are a great way to provide relevant, user-friendly ads in hard-to-fit locations on your site. With the new opportunity to place three link units — and the plethora of link unit formats — we hope you’ll find great ways of incorporating this unique ad format on your site.”

As the days go on, I find myself moving more and more away from Adsense, and taking on a lot of Traffic Synergy’s advert campaigns. I have watched my stats very closely, and have noticed that I am starting to make more money with Traffic Synergy than any other affiliate network I am involved with. To new publishers, PPC (pay per click) campaigns are always the most appealing, as you see revenue right from the beginning, but why not take some time, and be patient and use there CPA (cost per action) campaigns. There are several campaigns, which can generate you a huge amount of money! Hint: Travel Campaigns!!

Right, so that’s the update for now. I am going to do my best to start putting up content more often again, and hopefully source some useful information!

For those of you who are Adsense fans, I am sure you have figured out what an annoyance it is to have to login to you Google Adsense account continually to follow your earnings. Especially if you are testing out new waters, and need to follow your revenue constantly! So today I bring you a wonderful Mozilla Firefox Adsense Plugin, which runs in the statusbar of Firefox.

The plugin has a number of customizable settings, allowing you to choose what exactly you would like displayed, be it clicks, daily revenue, CTR, CPM, impressions, and a couple other things. The plugin updates every 20minutes, keeping you up to date with your earnings and adsense workings, or can also be triggered to update with a mouse click. You do not have to display your daily earnings, you can display our earnings for a week, month, total, etc. which means that you can watch from a broader perspective as well if you choose to do so.

I have found one of the most interesting parts to this plugin, is that once you are used to using it, you can start tracking time against the most clicks, and learn what time of the day most people are viewing your website, and when most of the clicks take a place. All in all, it’s a wonderful plugin, you should take a look!

Link to plugin on Mozilla
Direct Download Here

If I had to take an educated guess about which affiliate network is most popular with publishers, it would have to be Google Adsense. I feel that I would be safe in saying that around 8/10 publishers use Adsense on their websites, and perhaps 7/10 people stick with Adsense and only Adsense across their websites. Amogst all the affiliate options available, the wide spread of knowledge and information on Adsense is far greater than any other, and this would be a big contributing factor to its popularity - not to mention that it is a Google service.

When it comes to Adsense, there is always lots of talk with regards to the topic of which colours to use; Should the adverts blend in with the website, or should they stick out? Most people will say that they need to blend with the website, which I don’t disagree with, but at the same time, this is basically a kind of trickery, is it not? This morning I surfed around various niche market websites looking for Adsense blocks, and it got me thinking. If you are running a niche website, which has a very tight topic, why would you want to hide your adverts? Of course, people normally stay away from adverts, but on a niche website, your content will revolve around one set topic, and therefore Adsense blocks will relate to your topic, and the chances are that your readers would actually be interested in seeing the adverts. Not every advert leads to a website which requires people to buy something, many adverts lead to websites with useful information. This being said, why not change the colours of your Adsense blocks to stand out slightly? I don’t mean change them to flaming red backgrounds with yellow fonts on a blue, white and gray website, but perhaps put a bright border around the block - this will make it stand out slightly, but not too much.

Google offers three different techniques on their website, which they feel work most successfully. Before we look at these three techniques, there is a useful table, which can be followed:

1. To blend, make the background and borders of your ads the same color as the background of your page where the ad is placed. If your site has a white background and you don’t want to spend a lot of time choosing ad colors, we recommend using our pre-designed Open Air palette.
2. To complement, use colors that already exist on your site, but don’t match the background and borders exactly where the ads are placed.
3. To contrast, choose colors that stand out against the background of your site. Contrasting is recommended only for sites with dark background, so we suggest using a palette with white background, white borders, and blue titles.

It is important to note whether the people on your website are returning readers or just visitors. This will play a role on your click through chances. If your visitor base consists mostly of returning readers, the chances are that your readers will become blind to your adverts. This will decrease your advert click throughs, and you will need to deal with this to keep your revenues up, there are two techniques to handle this:

1. Change the placement of your advert blocks
2. Change the colour of your adverts

Both of these points are self explanitory, but I have something useful for those of you interested in changing your colours. To reduce reader blindness, Google allows up to 4 colour variations when it comes to adverts. This means that there is code, which you can use, which will randomize the colours of your adverts, each time your website is loaded, without you having to do it manually. I will paste an example below, for you to see what I mean.

google_color_border = [”628098″,”628098″,”000000″,”000000″];
google_color_link = [”000000″,”BBB90C”,”BBB90C”,”628098″];
google_color_url = [”000000″,”628098″,”000000″,”000000″];
google_color_text = [”628098″,”628098″,”000000″,”000000″];

(more…)

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.