A while ago, I covered BlueHatSEO’s blog post about an idea to earn $100 per day from promoting screen savers bundled with adware.  Earnersblog just put up a great post about how the author earned $200 per day promoting Casino affiliate programs with an ebook. He basically wrote an ebook about a roulette strategy and encouraged readers to try out the strategy by signing up for an online casino via affiliate links embedded in the book. He distributed the ebook via p2p sharing and ebay promotion.
I think the idea is worth consideration. I really like that:

• It is a unique idea. This is a different angle from the people who are selling ebooks and people pushing affiliate programs via websites.
• Great Promotion Technique. I find promotion of a new idea to often be the most time consuming part of a new venture. Using ebay is an excellent idea and you can tap into a huge resource of other people re-distributing the ebooks.
• It keeps on giving. After the initial investment of time writing the ebook and planting it within other ebook distribution packages, the ebook will continue to float around the web and earn money.

I am not sure if I will be writing any ebooks in the near future (maybe I will have my assistant in India write a first draft of one) but I am intrigued by the idea. It is always helpful to feed your mind fresh ideas like this.

I have come up with a new method which I hope will help me to become much more efficient at making money online. A few weeks ago, I signed up with a company called GetFriday to provide me with a personal assistant in India. To get things started, I signed up fro the 10 hours per month package For $95. The hourly price can go as low as $6.25/hour based on the number of hours in the package.
Shobana, my new assistant works from 9AM to 6 PM Pacific Time, and I can contact her via email or an 800 number. She has a college degree, and her English is very good. So far, I have had her work on a few task such as entering data from various websites into a spreadsheet for me. I used this information to populate the mysql databases for one of my sites. This is work that I would have done myself in the past. It is a huge help for me to be about outsource these manual tasks so that I can spend my time working on more important tasks.

Some of the jobs that I may give to my assistant are:

• Data collection. I have a few ideas for some databases that would be worthwhile to build.
• Approving term papers and essays. I have an old database of a few thousand papers where 30% of the papers are junk. I will have the assistant find the good papers and post them to my free essay site.
• Collecting royalty free images to build free screen savers. I am still kicking this idea around, but it may be a modified version of this screensaver monetization technique.
• Content Creation. I cannot see having her writing for Monetize Traffic, but Shobana may be very helpful writing basic content for some of my other properties.
• Research. I am sure I will be able to think of some topics that she can help me to research.

Hopefully, having an assistant will help me to get more done. I will keep you posted on my experiences.

Over the past few days, I have come across a few Adsense tips that are worth sharing:

• Using Images to Increase Adsense CTR - A user on digitalpoint forums quadrupled his Adsense CTR when he placed related images next to his Adsense ads. The thread gives an interesting view of the before and after layouts. In order for this to be in compliance with the Adsense terms of service, you have to have a border around the images or a line separating the images and the ads. I will not do try this on MonetizeTraffic, but I could see using it on some of my other sites.
• Adsense Tips Forum Thread - Another digitalpoint thread where members share some adsense tips. I really like this YPN optimized layout mentioned in the thread.
• Adsense Order Matters - A blog post from the Adsense team at Google where they explain that the first ad in the HTML code of your site receives the highest paying advertisements. Therefore, you should try to put the ad space with the highest click through rate first in the HTML of your site.
• Using the Competitive Ad Filter to Eliminate MFA Sites - A good post about how you can enter the URL of known Made For Adsense (MFA) sites into the Competitive Ad filter in Adsense to prevent the ads from being shown on your site. These ads are usually low paying ones where the landing page features a slew of other Adsense ads. Eliminating these from the ads served on your site should help to boost your earnings.

I am always on the look out for good Adsense tips and tricks. If you have some good ones, feel free to contact me at paul@monetizetraffic.com.

Update: The Adsense team recently put up a blog post clarifying their position on images next to ads. According to their post, it looks like they are strongly against placing images next to ads. They provide a number of examples of what is against policy, and they are even against images with a border between the image and the Adsense ads. This will pretty much kill the usefulness of some of the Adsense plugings that I wrote about in my Adsense Tips: Part II post .

Webmaster and bloggers will continue to innovate and push the limit around Adsense placement. Just be careful with images because Google has now clearly come out with their stance.

In the part one of How to Not Suck at SEO, I wrote about the first steps in my mission to improve the search engine ranking of my sites. I have been working on the steps that I outlined in the previous post (reading up on SEO, CSS redesign, different class C IP blocks), and I have thought of a few more steps that I will need to work on.

1. Search Engine Friendly URLs. Instead of having my urls look like madnotes.com/notes.php?z=1, the URLs will look like madnotes.com/hamlet-notes.php.  I have been resisting this for a while, but the keyword rich URLs will improve my search enigne results. You can check out this site for code to use mod_rewrite to the create search engine freindly URLs.

2. Google Sitemaps. Sitemaps allow you to provide Google a file of all of the content that you would like to have spidered. They help to make sure that Google is viewing all of your content, and Google provides information on crawling errors and search terms for your site. For this site, I use the sitemap plugin for wordpress to automatically make my sitemaps. For my other sites, I need to recreate my sitemaps and get everything working correctly. 

3. Paid Yahoo Inclusion. I found a relevant area of the Yahoo directory for one of my sites. I am thinking of ponying up the annual fee of $300 to get my site listed in the directory. The listing should help to drive traffic from Yahoo, and improve my pagerank because it will be a quality link from Yahoo.

4. Buying Paid Text Links. While doing some research on textlinkads.com the other day, I found a college newspaper site selling text links. The links were relatively expensive ($160/month), but the site has a page rank of 8 on a .edu domain, and it could deliver some very targeted traffic for one of my student resource sites. As time permits, I am going to look for some low cost text links for my sites.

I will track my SEO progress via this blog. Interestingly, I have noticed that even though Monetize Traffic is relatively new, the site ranks pretty for some google searches. As of the time of this entry, my site appears on the first page of results for the phrases “YPN review” (#1),  ”adbrite reivew” (#3), and “text link ads review” (#8). While traffic on these terms is not huge, it is a promising start for the site.

I have a three-step process for making changes to my sites. Although the process is very simple in theory, I have found that it helps to keep me focused.

1. Experiment. Even if you think that your site or blog is perfect, there are always new things that you can try. I have found that the short term hit in performance that you may see is more than worth it. For example, in the past few months I have tried running ads from Adsense, YPN, Adbrite, and Text Link Ads to see which perform the best. I learned something from each of these experiments. Some things you might want to experiment with are:

• Advertising Programs (contextual, pay per impression, affiliate, etc.)
• Ad placement and Size
• Related ebook sales
• Creative partnership or link exchanges

2. Track. Experimenting is great, but in order to know if you are headed in the right direction or aimlessly wandering, you need to be able to track your experiments. My method of tracking usually depends on the nature of the experiment. For my Adsense tests, I set up custom channels for each version of the ad that I would like to try, and then I will rotate the ads using PHP code. This can also be done with javacript.

To keep track of the days when I make the changes, I mark the days in my yahoo calendar. I learned to do this the hard way after being unable to remember when I started some of my experiments. To get a good idea of how the test is performing, I try to run each test for at least a week.

3. Optimize and Repeat. Once you have tracked your changes, you can alter your site based on your findings and repeat the process. Over time, a series of small changes can really add up into something big.
If you need some further inspiration, you can learn about how I used this process to boost my Adsense click through rate by 34%. Good luck with your experiments!

This is post is a part of the ProBlogger group writing project. I encourage you to check out all of the other great posts from around the web.

Jasmine, who used to work with at Kiwibox, recently launched Glamourite.com, a blog devoted to life in New York City. Along with 10 “Glamourites,” Jasmine chronicles nightlife in the big city. While I know very little about nightlife, I know about making money online. I recently gave Jasmine some suggestions to improve monetization on her site, and she graciously allowed me to post my ideas.
Monetization Ideas

• The adsense ads on the site have a gray border around them. I would alter the adsense code to make the border of the ads white, and therefore blend the ads into the site a lot more. From my experiences, this will significantly improve click through rates on the ads.
• To be more aggressive with the ads, I would use the adsense injection plugin for wordpress. It will randomly insert an Adsense box ad unit into one post on the page. Having ads this close to the content can generate some very good click through rates.
• I might also experiment with the adsense link unit ads that will show a search term instead of an actual ad. I have read that they can perform well. I would put them in place of the gevalia affiliate program on the right side bar.

Traffic Ideas

The site has a ton of interesting content, and I think it I think it would help to do more to expose visitors to additional content.

• I would using the related post plugin. After each post, the plugin will automatically provide links to related posts on the blog. It is a great way to get visitors deeper into the site.
• Post the 10 most popular posts up in the right or left sidebar to encourage visitors to explore the site.
• Generating traffic from other New York focused blogs would be great for Glamourite’s traffic. I would start a series of posts to highlight/review favorite nyc blogs or favorite posts in some of these blogs in order to drive some traffic their way and get their attention so that they eventually link to Glamourite.
• Setting up a myspace page and linking to it from the site would be a good idea. A lot of Glamourite’s target audience is probably on myspace, and it wouldn’t hurt to build up a friends list there.

Content/Partnership Ideas

• Every Thursday, I would have each of the glamourite ladies write a sentence or two about a weekend thing to do and then put it together in one post. This type of regularly scheduled content will help to build the audience and may help to garner linking attention from other sites.
• If the site becomes more events focused, I would syndicate RSS event listings from flavorpill, eventful, and upcoming and post them on the site. This would provide new fresh content with minimal work.
• For partnerships, I would start discussion with a club promotion site like clubplanet or velvetlist to work out a deal where one of the glamourites could attend one of their events per week and post about it and/or include it in the weekly things to do post mentioned above in exchange for some promotion.

The ideas above work on both the monetization and the traffic side of the site. These changes would boost key drives in the monetization framework that I have written about before, and should have a strong positive impact on the site.

I plan on doing more case studies in the future. If you would like your site to be reviewed, please email me at paul@monetizetraffic.com.

TechCrunch has a post that touches XuQa’s monetization strategy. The social networking site has developed a mini-economy centered on earning peanuts. One way that users can earn peanuts is to complete CPA offers.
While I was a part of Kiwibox, we made a big push to allow users to earn “KiwiPoints” by completing offers and surveys. I was amazed at how well targeted offers could perform. Another site with a great implementation of this strategy is NeoPets. They were one of the first big communities to do a great job monetizing users through CPA offers. I have heard from survey vendors that they can just unleash huge amounts of users to complete surveys in exchange for points.

From my time at Kiwibox, I have some experience launching programs to reward users for completing offers. If you are interested in getting some help with setting up a similar program on your site, you can contact me at paul@monetizetraffic.com.

As I mentioned in a previous post about AdSense blending, I mentioned that I have been doing some testing on one of my sites. Over the past few weeks, I ran four different versions of AdSense blending color schemes on my cliff notes site. I tested the color scheme that I have always run on the site (labeled Baseline in the table on the right) and three different color variations.

My goal was to increase the click through rate on the ads. The results are listed in the table on the right. The bottom color scheme increased the click through rates on my ads by 31%. While I expected some improvement, I did not anticipate getting this much lift from just altering the color scheme. I am particularly surprised by the difference between the fourth ad and the third ad. The gray text appeared to have a huge impact on click through rates. The gray text really helps to give the ads a different feel and blend them into the content of the site.

I still have a lot more experimenting to do, and I will continue to post my results on the site. As always, I would love to hear your AdSense optimization tips.