Sunday, July 13, 2008

Improving your CTR for Google adsense

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Clickthrough rate (CTR)
The number of ad clicks divided by the number of impressions for the page of ads that appears when a link unit is clicked.

I read constantly about how most people don’t “make a lot of money with google.” I hear quotes” my CTR (click thru rate) is low and “how do I improve my CTR.” When I visit the site and I have to look all over the page to discover the ad, that is a problem. Here are three solutions and its simple “Google adsense 101.” The first method to increasing CTR is maximum units allowed. Google AdSense program policies allow you to place up to three ad units and three link units on any page. That’s right 6 units. When I scan a page and can barely find one ad unit that’s an indicator of major money problems. Use the maximum allowed units to increase CTR.

That was the easy solution; the second method is a little tricky. Ad unit placement. The ads need to be high profile. The top banner need to be that a “top banner” you should use 728 x 90 leader board. Second use two vertical 160 x 600 wide skyscrapers stacked on top of each on a long page or to the left and right of an article on a short page. The link units are a very useful tool for your web user looking for info and should be used accordingly. A horizontal unit below the tool bar is the top used unit reported by most website owners. The unit is small and does not interfere with the article and the unit will contain the info the reader may be interested in. If the content is great the unit will interest the web visitor and the unit will be utilized. The other units can be placed below the skyscraper or embedded in the article or at the end of the article.

The third method for increasing CTR is ad color recognition. Ad color also affects CTR. Choose the appropriate colors for maximum CTR. I prefer the standard color. I try not to blend or change any of the colors. I feel that most web users respect Google ads and use them to find info if they are interested. This recognition has helped the advertisers spending their hard earned money come to trust Google. Other web owners want to change or blend the ads. Fool around and see which colors work for you.

If you follow these 3 steps your CTR will increase dramatically and revenue will sky rocket.

Make Money Online With Google

To make money online is easy with Google adsense. There is no get rich quick or retire in 30 days plan with making money on the internet. The plan is simple…..Write about content you love whether its cars, dogs or airplanes and you will make money. How much money depends on several factors. The amount of traffic your website receives affects the amount of pay. The rate the web traffic click the ads will vary the amount paid. With Google you are interested in long term pay. As your website site matures and content is added the website will grow and produce a world of wealth. If you stay excited about a topic the content pages will ad up along with the revenue. Think of your website as real-estate, actually a vast plantation in the middle of a resort. Each page is like a rental house. As the plantation develops and matures with content (houses), the revenue will increase. Your website is the same way. The more pages you have the more opportunities you have at producing money. In conclusion write about what you love and add content often and you will make money.

Make Money Online with eBay

People often ask me “How do you make money online with eBay”. It simple “buy low and sell high with yard sales”. That’s right buy low. Make up some business cards and start hitting the yard sales. Try to find items that are extremely cheap and unique at little or no cost. An original Atari, sports collectibles, Grandmothers hand sewn quilt or silver flatware are a few items that will move on eBay. When you make your purchase hand out a business card and state you will haul off what does not sale at no charge to them. This is the best way to get items for free. Remember you need to” buy low” and free is as low as it gets. The listing price of all items should be at set at cost or less. If you pay a quarter at a yard sale list the item at zero. You want to mark up shipping $2.00 to $5.00 per item. If you purchase 100 items at a few yard sales you will make at least $200 dollars off of shipping. The selling price will be 100 % profit in your pocket. You can expect to make around $1,000 per week or more using this strategy. You can make money online with eBay, you just need to buy low and sell high.”

Youtube,Seo and Make Money Online

Youtube is a powerful tool in the make money online business. It does not matter if you are selling items direct, using affiliate programs or just want to drive traffic to your site, youtube can increase traffic and SERP. Think about the fact that Google owns youtube. If you own several companies or at least have a stake in a company; you are going to drive traffic between the two companies to increase revenue. Google is no different. Make youtube work for you. If you have a website about automobiles put together a video of a car you have a article on and then set it to music. If it’s cool you will drive traffic to your site. The second part that’s great about youtube video is the powerful keywords indexed. Google algorithms give more weight to keywords from youtube than from any other source. To brak it down simple, You will increase your rank in a Google search by publishing youtube videos.

Saturday, July 12, 2008

What Essential Tools You Need to Start Making Money on eBay

I have posted quite a lot of eBay articles here. These articles have covered most of the aspect of eBay business such as how to start an eBay business, improving eBay business performance, how to find high demand products in eBay and identifying profitable eBay niches.

However, I haven't talked about a basic but important topic of eBay selling, which is what are the tools needed to start and run an eBay business successfully. This article outlines some of the tools that you will required if you want to make money online by selling products on eBay.

Compute and Internet
The most basic tools that you need are obviously a computer with a fast speed Internet access. You probably possess them already. But you should make sure that your computer and internet connection are reliable for your eBay business.

Business Phone and Fax Line
Selling on eBay means that you will have to communicate with your buyers and send some documents. It is therefore crucial that you have your own business phone line and fax machine set up.

Business Cards
Business cards are also important to your eBay business. If you include your business card with the shipments, you'll make your customers feel that you are a professional seller. It also means that your customers have got your contact information. Whenever they want to buy anything from you again, they know how to contact you.

Initial Capital
Starting an eBay business doesn’t require a lot of money. But, you do need to have some start-up fund ($300 - $400). You'll need to purchase some of the tools discussed in this article.

Website as a Marketing Tool
Building a website will help make your eBay business grow faster. By creating a website with your own domain name, you can market your products to more potential buyers. The topic and content of your website should be directly relevant to what you are selling on eBay. With links to your eBay auctions and eBay store included to your content pages, you will direct your website visitors to your auctions to view the products your are selling. This will mean more people will view your auctions. The more exposure your auctions get, the more sales will probably generate.

Digital Camera
You definitely require a digital camera for taking photos of your physical products. eBay buyers generally want to see how the product looks like before placing a bid. So, you should include at least two product pictures for each auction. Good and quality photos that show different angle of your products can trigger the viewers' buying interest.

With these tools prepared and ready, you will be able to start and run your eBay business smoothly; and ensure that you wouldn’t face any eBay selling problem due to lacking of one or two essential business tools

Thursday, July 10, 2008

5 easy ways to make money online with Photoshop



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UPDATED: Added an extra tip!
This is the scenario: You are a skilled Photoshop artist, or perhaps you are a great photographer. If that’s not true, then you may be a cool designer or at least have some nice Photoshop tips or tricks that nobody knows. And you need money.
No matter what your skills are, if you are capable of creating something with a certain appeal with Photoshop or even other graphics application, there are many ways that you can turn that into money with certain ease.
In this article you won’t find any get-rich-quick tips. In fact, to quit your day job and make a living with this information may take you a long while. But, as with most in life, it depends on you. I will only show you what’s out there and make your startup a little easier.
Take into consideration that most of these tips do not require that you have a web site of your own, but with all the free services available, I believe that there is no excuse for not creating your own web site. Two interesting services are: Wordpress.com (free blog hosting) and Google pages (free web pages hosting).

Tip #1: Create Photoshop brushes or other goodies and sell them online.
Photoshop brushes are hot, hot, hot. Hotter than anything. Designers and artists are hungry for brushes. Photoshop brushes are total winners. Sadly there are a lot available on the web for free. The good news is that only your imagination is the limit. Take a look at what’s out there and create your own collection. Perhaps, instead of creating a collection of a million low quality brushes, you can create a good high resolution, high quality, brushes set or collection and sell them at your web site. Although textures, patterns, actions, and other Photoshop goodies are not that popular, you can always build a nice collection with those. Don’t worry if there is a lot of competition out there (and believe me there is), you simply have to offer a higher quality product than the rest and, most important of all, sell it better than the competition.
Once you have your product, you have to sell it. There are a lot of shareware and downloadable software payment processing services that will take care of all the payment process and also of the file hosting and delivery. Some of them even offer some exposure for your product and affiliate program solutions.
.: Payment processing services
» ShareIt and RegNow
Formerly independent companies, now both belong to Digital River’s network. These are among the most popular payment processing and software distribution providers. They host your application and provide marketing solutions too.
» PayPal
The most popular electronic payment processor. Since it is so popular, it increases the chances of an impulse purchase. Many people don’t consider their PayPal balance as money. They are more willing to spend money from their PayPal account than paying with a credit card.
» Payloadz and E-junkie
Both services offer a great load of options and features, some of them for free. I can’t talk much about E-junkie because I didn’t try them. But opening an account and submitting a file to PayLoadz is amazingly fast. They even have an ebay store.
Tip #2: Create your own gift store with your artwork
There are a lot of services where you can sell gifts (mugs, ebooks, t-shirts, calendars, you name it) with your own artwork or content on a print-on-demand basis. That’s the beauty of it. You don’t need to spend a lot of money building a stock base of products. In fact with these services you don’t need to spend ANY money. Just select the product you want, upload your content, select a few options, set your pricing and you are ready to go!
It is advisable to purchase some of your own items to check the quality of the output. Check following links to read more about these services: CafePress alternatives (talks about the alternatives to CafePress and the quality of these services). T-Shirt Forums (users share their experience in this T-Shirt design and marketing forum).
.: Print on demand services with e-store capabilities
» CafePress
» Zazzle
» Lulu
» 99 Dogs
» Print Mojo
» Printfection
» Spread Shirt
» Brandi Jasmine Art Links
This site hosts a large amount of CafePress help links and alternatives along with other art related links.
Tip #3: Participate on contests.
I call this an easy way to earn money only because it is easy to submit your artwork to contests. The problem is that in this case your artwork has to be the best. In some cases, it is not the best artwork the one that wins, but the best idea. Anyway, here’s a little list of contests sites that can give you some earnings or at list some cool prizes.
.: Art and design contests sites
» Worth1000
The mother of all Photoshop Contest sites. Worth1000 (a picture is WORTH a THOUSAND words, got it?) hosts some corporate contests with cash prizes.
» Photoshop Talent
Photoshop Talent members award you with points that are exchangeable for money. Not much money here, but if you are a regular submitter (and winner) you can make some. Prizes go for the winner and 2nd and 3rd place runner ups.
» Photoshop Contest
There are no money prizes here, but the prizes are cool. Graphics tablets, training Dvds, iPods, etc..
» Photoshoped up
No prizes here. You earn points but it is not clear if they will turn into prizes in the future. But if you are a car tuning freak, this is the place to go.
» Graphic Competitions
This site is a directory of worldwide graphics competitions.
» Site Point Design Contests
Site Point’s forum of design contests. Great prizes.
» Elance, Get a Freelancer and Freelancer Network
Not exactly contests sites. A project is posted and freelancers post their quotation and skills to win that project.

Make Money Online (Without Spending a Dime)

Making money online used to pretty much require you to have your own Web site, products to sell and some marketing savvy. But a new generation of dot-coms have arisen that will pay you for what you know and who you know without you having to be a web designer or a marketing genius.But it's hard to tell hype from the real deal. I did a search on "make money online" and "making money online", and much of the information out there is just promoting various infoproducts, mostly about Internet marketing. I see why people sometimes ask, "Is anyone making money online besides Internet marketing experts?"
So I put together a list of business opportunities with legitimate companies that:
Pay cash, not just points towards rewards or a chance to win moneyDon't require you to have your own Web domain or your own productsDon't involve any hard-sellingAren't just promoting more Internet marketingGive a good return on your time investmentIn the interest of objectivity, none of the links below are affiliate links, and none of them have paid or provided any other consideration for their presence here. These are legitimate companies with business models that allow you to get paid for a wide range of activities.Help friends find better jobs.
Sites like H3.com and JobThread connect employers with prospective employees, many of whom are already employed and not actively job-hunting, via networking - the people who know these qualified candidates. Rewards for referring a candidate who gets hired range from a few hundred dollars to as much as $5,000 - not chump change. This is a great way to break into the recruiting business with no overhead. JobThread is intriguing in that they can set up a job board for your site or your organization (you don't even have to have a web site) at no cost to you -- no merchant account required. You determine the posting fees and split the revenue with them.
Connect suppliers with buyers.
Referral fees are a common practice in business, but they haven't been used much in online networking sites because there was no way to track them. InnerSell provides that. Vendors set the referral fees they're willing to pay, then when a deal happens, you get 70% of the referral fee.
Provide business contact information.
One of the greatest challenges in sales is getting accurate contact information about prospective customers. A growing number of services have launched in the past couple of years to help address this, but most rely on members to maintain their own contact information. Jigsaw, on the other hand, pays members to help keep information up-to-date on the people they know, not just themselves, and pays them to do so ($1 for each unique new qualifying contact you put into the system). According to Jigsaw, in their first payout after launch, the top ten point-earns each received more than $750.
Become a semi-pro reporter.
Creative Reporter is a new program from Creative Weblogging that lets just about anyone become a paid reporter/blogger. They're looking for people to create original, but non-exclusive, blog posts / articles of 250-500 words on topics including parenting, celebrities, travel, mobile technology, and more. Pay is $10 per 1,000 page views on your posts (that's excellent pay for Web writing, although there's no telling how much traffic/money you'll actually get).

Easy way to earn money

In the early 0s Frenchmen Pierre Michaux and Pierre Lallement took bicycle design in a new direction by adding a mechanical crank drive with pedals on an enlarged front wheel. Several why-not-the-rear-wheel inventions followed the best known being the rod-driven velocipede by Scotsman Thomas McCall in . The French creation wrought of iron and wood developed into the penny-farthing more formally an ordinary bicycle featuring a tubular steel frame on which were mounted wire spoked wheels with solid rubber tires. These bicycles were not however for the faint hearted due to the very high seat and poor weight distribution.The subsequent dwarf ordinary addressed some of these faults by reducing the front wheel diameter and setting the seat further back necessitating the addition of gearing effected in a variety of ways to attain sufficient speed. However having to both pedal and steer via the front wheel remained a problem. Starleys nephew J. K. Starley J. H. Lawson and Shergold solved this problem by introducing the chain drive connecting the pedals held with the frame to the back wheel. These models were known as dwarf safeties or safety bicycles for their lower seat height and better weight distribution. StarleysRover is usually described as the first recognizably modern bicycle. Soon the seat tube was added creating the double-triangle diamond frame of the modern bike.New innovations increased comfort and ushered in a second bicycle craze the 0s Golden Age of Bicycles. InScotsman John Boyd Dunlop introduced the pneumatic tire which soon became universal. Soon after the rear freewheel was developed enabling the rider to coast. This refinement led to theinvention of coaster brakes. Derailleur gears and hand-operated cable-pull brakes were also developed during these years but were only slowly adopted by casual riders. By the turn of the century cycling clubs flourished on both sides of the Atlantic and touring and racing were soon extremely popular.Bicycles and horse buggies were the two mainstays of private transportation just prior to the automobile and the grading of smooth roads in the late th century was stimulated by the wide use of these devices.

Wednesday, July 9, 2008

How AdSense Works

Don't like to read a lot of text? Watch this 4-minute video on how AdSense works.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KJzwMfvj5Zc
And now for the text version of how AdSense works...
If you go to Google.com and do a search for almost any keyword phrase, you'll notice some "Sponsored Links" that appear on the right side of the screen that are relevant to the keywords you just searched for.
Website owners pay Google to display these ads and are charged a predetermined amount every time their ad gets clicked by a web surfer. With the AdSense program, you will display these same text ads on your site just like Google and get paid for it as well.
All you do is copy and paste some provided HTML code into your pages and Voila! the ads will show up. Every time an ad is clicked on your site, you will receive a certain percentage of what Google receives from the advertiser.
Once your account reaches $100, you'll receive a check in the mail.

How Google Matches the Ads to Your Site's Content

One of the main reasons this program is so successful is because the ads that are

displayed closely match the content of your website. This increases the chances that

someone will click on the ads.

Here's how Google accomplishes the content match...

"...We go beyond simple keyword matching to understand the context and content of web

pages. Based on an algorithm that includes such factors as keyword analysis, word

frequency, font size, and the overall link structure of the web, we know what a page is

about, and can precisely match Google ads to each page."

So let's say you have an information website about yoga. Once you join AdSense and paste

their ad code into your site, Google's technology will determine the topic of the pages

by scanning for keyword repeats, page title, etc.

If successful, you will see ads that relate to yoga displayed on your web pages. Of

course, the more related the ads are to your site's content, the better the click-thru.

Keep in mind, the ads may not be an exact match because it depends on the ads inside

Google's database. So instead of seeing yoga ads, you may see more generic ads like

exercise, healthy eating, etc. This is not a bad thing because these are topics your

visitors will likely be interested in as well.

Make Money With Google AdSense ?

What is AdSense?

Google.com earns

most of its revenue by allowing other website owners to advertise on their search result

pages. All this is managed through a program they call AdWords.

Now you can earn a share of the revenue that Google earns from AdWords by placing these

same text ads on your site. In other words, you're helping Google advertise and they pay

you a percentage of what they earn.

This program is called AdSense.

Every website owner should be involved in this. It's just too good of an opportunity to

pass up. Even if your site is just for information purposes, you can still participate

and make decent money with AdSense -- or at least enough to fund your website.

So if you are one of those people that don't like the idea of paying for a site, this is

an excellent way to earn your money back and then some.

Even if you earned as little as $10 in a month, it would more than likely cover some or

all of the costs for your web site. Perhaps you are simply looking for ways to add

additional revenue to your website, then it's perfect for that situation too.

This program is getting so popular, people are creating websites just to display the ads

and profit from Google's AdSense alone.

I don't usually like to use the term "easy money" because there really is no such thing.

You still have to create your own website and learn how to bring in traffic in order to

make good money with this program.

I certainly don't want to make it sound like you get something for doing absolutely

nothing. There's no such thing.

However, I've got to say that AdSense is probably the closest you'll ever come to fast

money on the Internet -- especially if you already have a website that gets a good amount

of traffic.

What's even better...the program is completely free. You can also use it on multiple

websites and there is no limit to the amount you can earn.

Why I Believe AdSense Works So Well

For years, website owners have tried to make money from their sites

by putting up banner ads in hopes of visitors clicking them. The

problem with banner ads is that the Internet audience is so immune to

them, people do not click on them anymore.

When's the last time you clicked a banner ad?

...Exactly!

Second, in order for the web site owner to earn money from that

banner ad, usually the web surfer that clicks has to purchase

something. With AdSense, your visitors just have to click the ads.

They don't have to purchase a single thing.

Third, most people that use banner ads do not do a good job of

matching the ads to the website's content so the click thru

percentages are dismal.

With Google's AdSense, not only are you displaying text ads,

(which tend to receive a much higher click-thru rate than banner

ads), but you are displaying contextual ads that match your website's

content....thanks to Google's advanced technology.

Lots of times people think the ads are part of your site's content so

they click because the information is relevant to your site. Whereas

with banner ads, they often have little relevance and people tend to

ignore them no matter how much they flash and fly across the page.

Make Free Money With Google

Have you received your check from Google?
If you own a business web-site you should be receiving a check from Google. Why not accept a check every month from Google by placing their ads on your site?
Google AdSense allows you to serve text-based Google AdWords on your web site, (ads are relevant to your web site subject) and receive a share of the pay-per-click payment. There are pay-outs of 50 cents or more per click being achieved through AdSense. It is simple to join and it's free.
Go to google.com/adsense and you should be serving Google AdWords usually within 24 hours.You can choose between either horizontal or skyscraper AdSense ads, and they also have a large variety of color schemes to choose from. After your site has been approved you will paste a code into your site and the text ads will appear. Always backup your site before you paste your code, as you may decide to change your AdSense location.
Google also is doing a good job of finding ads that are highly relevant to your site. They go beyond simple keyword matching to understand the context and contents of web pages. They are able to know what a page is about, and can precisely match Google ads to each page. Then they also give you the ability to block certain ads from appearing on your site if you choose.
So what are you waiting for?
It's Free and you get paid!