The trials and tribulations of making money on the internet.

Posts tagged "adsense"
General Information

Google Adsense Banner Test

by Tom on Dec 8, 2010 • No Comments

Recently a couple of my sites have been getting large amounts of traffic every month, but that wasn’t translating into adsense clicks so I decided to play around with location and size of the multiple banners on the sites. I’ve always tried to go the route of making the ads look like they are a part of the site design as opposed to looking like ads. This is fairly easy to do with the text link blocks, but a little harder to do with the actual banner size advertisements.

What I found in testing is that while the 300 x 250 banner above the fold on the upper right side of the screen did “ok”, the 728 x 90 ad boxes at the top of the page between the menu header and the content have been drawing more clicks than any other ad I’ve put on the sites. Most of the 728 banners have been image only ads (not text) because text in that area of the site just looks funny to me. Either way it seems to be working for the time being. I’ve gone from getting 1-2 clicks a day on these sites to getting between 12-20 a day. In the case of these sites, this is a huge increase in clicks which equates to a fairly big jump in revenue. Obviously it’s still not a lot of clicks, but it’s definitely an improvement over what they were doing in the past so I’m not going to complain.

Affiliate Programs / General Information

Breaking Records!

by Tom on May 28, 2008 • 2 Comments

My previous record for a single day was back in February and it was around $185 or so over 2-3 sites (I can’t remember for sure). I was extremely happy when this happened, I’ve only been doing this stuff since last Fall and to hit almost $200 in one day already I was amazed.  This was achieved through a combination of affiliate programs over a few sites. I can’t give away all of my secrets/niches so I won’t tell you which ones, but most of the programs came from Commission Junction, Linkshare and one other affiliate network.

So after that day I figured I would drop back down to my normal daily range which is usually between $10-50 per day, but I was pleasantly surprised when the next couple days all averaged over $100 per day. So things were going well for a while and then, as I knew they would, things dropped back down to around the normal range.

So fast forward to last week while I’m on vacation. I had internet access and was updating my other sites while I was gone and it turns out one of those updates hit big! I made over $200 in one day, a new record for me! The actual number was around $203.xx and it was all from 1 of my sites!  I was ecstatic, especially since I wasn’t even doing “full”updates since I was on vacation, but either way it paid off. So now I had a new goal to reach, breaking $203 in a day, and it only took a week to do.

Yesterday currently stands as my most profitable day yet. I pulled in $215.xx in a single day on a single site! And it could even be more since Commission Junctions reporting is a little delayed I still don’t have the numbers from them. So overall, yesterday was a good day and when I have a good day it always makes me wonder how much I could be making if I spent more than an hour or so every morning updating the sites.

So with that in mind, I plan to try to update this site a lot more in the future and hopefully the things we write here will help you make some money on the internet as well. It’s not as hard as everyone thinks, but it’s also not a get rich quick scheme. It takes time to start building up money and figuring out what is working and what isn’t, which is why we’re here. We’ll try things out and let you know how they work so you don’t have to waste the time.

Affiliate Programs / General Information / PPC / SEO

Best Day So Far

by Tom on Feb 15, 2008 • No Comments

I just wanted to make a post about my best day so far, which was yesterday. Most of the money was made on one site, which was started at the end of December. I think I found a pretty good, unsaturated niche with a lot of potential for making money. It has only been averaging around 500-1000 hits a day, but I’m offering something that people will come back for daily, which is what you want to do. If you can gain loyal visitors that will continue to come back and use your site, then you’ll have that steady income for awhile. Now yesterday was in no way a ground breaking number, but being the best single day I’ve had so far.

For all of my sites I only spent about $8 on advertising through adwords and msn adcenter yesterday and profited ~$140. In one day for only about an hours worth of work updating all the sites in the morning isn’t bad. Hopefully this number will continue to grow and I can monetize this new site a little better to maybe pull a little more cash out of it, but I’ll keep everyone updated.

General Information / Link Sales

Adbrite – In Addition To or A Replacement For Adsense

by Tom on Feb 13, 2008 • No Comments


If you’re just getting into this internet money making game you probably have an idea of what Google Adsense is. It’s those ads you see on millions of pages throughout the world wide web. They base what ads they show on the content of your site. So if you’re writing about flying fish or other sea life, you are going to end up with ads about sea life on your site. This gives the readers a reason to click. It would make no sense to show ads about midget wrestling on a site about fish would it? well I guess it depends on what the midgets are doing with fish, but usually that’s not the case.

So what is Adbrite? Adbrite is also a company that does the same kinds of ads that Google Adsense does plus a lot more. They will display text ads based on the content of your website as well as try to sell banner space via their marketplace for you. So it’s similar to text-link-ads which I wrote about the other day, only with banners. But that isn’t all they offer. Unlike adsense you can also do inline advertising with Adbrite. Inline ads are ads that appear as links within your content, but usually they appear with a double underline and when rolled over a small advertisement comes up and when someone clicks that, you get paid. Again this is all done automatically by Adbrite by placing a small piece of code on your site.

Another cool feature that I use a lot on my sites is InVideo and BritePics. What these do is take a video or picture that you have designated and allows you to put an ad right in the video or image. It doesn’t really interfere with the object you attach it to, it displays the ad in a drop down at the top that disappears after about 3 seconds. So it’s non-intrusive and doesn’t get in the way of the actual video/picture. Here is an example of a working ad using BritePic. It’s a picture of two midgets playing golf with the advertisements setup for the keywords, midget and golf.

So as you can see the ad appears just above the image for a few seconds then disappears. It can be brought back if you roll over the little menu at the top. I’ve also embedded the optional menu bar from adbrite at the bottom which allows your readers to embed the same image on their site. You can also set images up to be clickable in order to resize, it’s all very simple.

So if you don’t want to use Adsense for whatever reason, maybe Adsense denied you because of the content of your site, or something like that. Or you just want to try some of these other cool ways of advertising while still using Adsense, then give Adbrite a try.

General Information

Getting Started Part 1

by Michael on Feb 9, 2008 • No Comments

So, you found your way to IG somehow, you started reading some of our articles and now you are saying to yourself…how do I get started? Well the first thing you have to do is pick a niche. Now, this sounds signifigantly easier than it actually is. What you are gunning for here is an under-saturated area that you are confident you know enough about to actually drive traffic to a worthwhile site. Unless you are just reposting 100% Ebay links, which in theory works too, but is not what we are talking about for the sake of this article.. Anyways, pick something. Anything. For the sake of this article we are going to pick used guitars. So, say I want to hawk some used guitars via Ebay, generate some coin on adsense and try and create a foothold for myself on the internet. Now, you need a domain. A .com works best for obvious reasons, but if you cant find anything that ends it .com it is alright to use .net, .org and .info. I’d stay away from .biz because people are going to assume its a business. After that, you are going to want to install WordPress, or any other blogging/CMS software you want. Next you are going to want to sign up for Google’s Adsense, which will give you a few cents everytime someone clicks on one of their links. Shopping Ads is also a nice and easy place to get some Ebay auctions on your website without too much work. If you are interested in a more indepth program, you can sign up for Commision Junction, which is, for the most part, the status quo for this type of stuff. After you get all of this stuff set up, you are almost ready to go! All you need now is some content. Part 2 of Getting Started will be all about writing valuable and engaging content and keeping people coming back to your site. Check back soon for the second part of the article, where we will talk all about your website on guitars.

General Information

Where Should I Place My Ads?

by Tom on Feb 8, 2008 • No Comments

If you’ve ever asked yourself that question, I’m here to try to answer that for you with a little help from Google. Google has done a great job of doing this work for you, they have a nice “heat map” of what areas of a webpage perform the best with advertisements. But keep in mind different things will work for different sites. Personally I have found that on a blog where a lot of people comment I have good luck placing a 250×250 ad right below the article on the article landing page (not the homepage). So the ad is placed between the end of the article and the comment box. This works well if you get a lot of comments as people will finish the article and be right there to click on your ad. Just make sure those ads pertain to what the site is about or people won’t even look twice.

I have also read that the upper left hand section of a page is what is looked at most. This is usually where a company or website’s logo is found, but if that is the most looked at part of the site I say put an ad up there or at least put an ad underneath your logo. Nothing too big and obtrusive though, it will just push people away.

Take a look at the “heat map” that Google provides.

google heat map

This shows that the best placement for ads is directly above the content on the webpage, in the middle. The darker the orange box the better the placement for ads. So as you can see ads that are placed above the “fold” (what the user sees before having to scroll down) usually perform a lot better than ads placed towards the bottom of the page. And the obvious emphasis is on the left had side of the page, so this is where you should focus your highest paying ads to if you’re using an affiliate program and if you’re using adsense, just put the code over there somewhere.

As I mentioned above this may not be the best placement for ALL sites, so make sure you experiment with where your ads are placed on a page and find out what works best for you. Most of the publisher programs like adsense, have the ability to track specific ad units that you place on your page, so make sure you utilize those to determine exactly which ads are getting you the most clicks so you don’t change something that was doing well.

General Information

A Little Taste For Next To Nothing

by Tom on Feb 8, 2008 • No Comments

For my first post on the Internet Gangsters I wanted to tell the story of how I got my first taste of internet riches/pennies. It started with the epic failure of my “I’ll sell your crap on ebay for you” venture. I thought I had a decent domain, my cousin had his own hosting servers and was able to host it for free so right out of the bag I was only $8 in the hole for the domain, not bad at all. So time to setup the website and honestly I don’t even know why I needed a website, but I thought I’d get customers over the internet. So to start I put up a splash screen saying “Coming Soon, We’ll Sell Your Stuff on eBay!” accompanied by a horrible logo (it was meant to be temporary). Well the internet brought me no clients, but then again the site sat with a “Coming Soon…” banner for the entire time. I did sell a few things for family friends after telling a few people that I was going to try to do this, but that turned out to be more of a pain in the ass than it was worth. So that ventured died out quickly, but the site itself did not.

I still had this great domain just sitting around doing nothing so I started to think about other ways I could make money and that’s when I discovered adsense. Google adsense is a great way to monetize your sites as it views your site context and bases the ads it shows on what you are writing about. That way the ads are relevant to what is being posted on your site and therefore more appealing to viewers. Nobody wants to come to a site about Dogs and be shown ads about the latest perscription pills, they want to be shown ads about Dogs and things related to dogs. So I signed up for adsense, but didn’t really know what to do with it, so I started reading. And looking back at what I did, I do not recommend doing it, yes it can work, but I don’t think google likes it and it’s hard to keep people coming back after they know what you’re doing. So what I found from my searching was a way to make a page that was basically all articles that were taken from free article sites on the web and just reposted on my site. The trick to making the adsense ads work was making the links to these free articles, look like adsense ads. Now it sounded like a good idea at the beginning, but at the time a lot of people were doing the same thing and with the same articles that I got (since I was lazy and just copied another site). So search engine traffic barely existed since all my content was the same as a million other sites out there and by spamming (the only way I could get visits) those people weren’t coming back. I did make a few bucks though, which gave me the itch to do something more with this.

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