Promote your site - Social Networking sites

Income-From Adsense has put together a list of over 50 social networking and bookmarking sites and some advice and tips about using social networking and bookmarking sites to promote you own website or blog.

You can download this free PDF list of social networking sites and you are free to distribute the report to others or make it available on your own site or blog as long as you don't alter the free report in any way.

This free report will help you improve you Adsense earnings by driving more traffic to your site using Social networking sites.

Free Social networking sites report and list

Right click and choose "Save target as.." if you want to save the free report for later use.

How many Adsense Ads on a page?

Google has a fairly clear policy about how many Ad units you can have on each page but people sometimes still get a little confused about what is allowed so here are Googles guidelines with a brief comentary.
Remember though - before you go slapping up the maximum number of ads, link units , search boxes and referral units on your page - think. Think what this will mean for the visitor to your site. What will the site look like to them? Will all the adverts produce a poor experience for them. It is more important to get the experience right for your user than to squeeze in every last drop of advertising space.

"Up to three ad units may be displayed on each page. "
This means you can have up to three ad units on each page.

"A maximum of two Google AdSense for search boxes may be placed on a page. "
Again this is fairly clear - two search boxes.

"Up to three link units may also be placed on each page. "
Remember that this is in addition to the three ad units that you are allowed.

"Up to three referral units may be displayed on a page, in addition to the ad units, search boxes, and link units specified above. "
Again this should be fairly clear.

Remember that you cant display Google ads or Google search boxes in a pop-up, pop-under, or in an email.

Page Impressions and Click Through

If you are new to Adsense it can be confusing at first trying to understand all the different terms that are used to describe things. It also takes time to understand what are the important things that you should be checking. In this post I want to say a little about page Page impressions and Click Through rate.

Whether you are just relying on your adsense reports to monitor your traffic or also using some form of logging software you will want to know about page impressions. This tells you how many times the page with your adsense ads has been loaded. Easy eh?

Now remember that each visitor may read one page or a few so you will also want to know how many unique visitors you have had. And if you know the number of page loads and the number of unique visitors then you know on average how many pages each visitor is reading. This helps you to understand if visitors are interested enough to explore your site looking for more information.

Click through rate tells you what percentage of your visitors clicked through on your ads. This is a very important measurement.

Consider two different sites lets call them Site A and Site B. I will make these examples simple to illustrate my point.

Site A - this site gets 1000 page impressions a week and has a click through rate of 1%
How many clicks do they get? 10 clicks.

Site B - this site gets 100 page impressions a week and has a click through rate of 10%
How many clicks? 10 clicks.

Now if both sites are earning roughly the same money per click then both sites earn the same amount of money but site B is earning this with only 10% of the page traffic!

Of course what you really want is to have site A's page impressions and site B's CRT! That would give you 100 clicks and ten times the earnings ( assuming you were earning the same per click.)

So keep an eye on your click through rate. use some of the advice on this site and make sure you have good relevant content. In later posts I will discuss what strategies you can use it improve your CTR.

Notes: New Adsense users often get overly concerned about variation in their CTR ( Click through rate) and in the CPM ( cost per thousand impressions) figures. It may be helpful to clarify a few points about this to save you some sleepless nights.

CTR
Variations in the CTR are quite normal. In particular the lower your number page impressions the more wildly your click through rate will vary from day to day. This is largely due to random fluctuations and is not a cause for concern. As you gain more visitors and more page impressions your click through rate will still vary but probably not over as great a range. If you are getting a CTR of 10 - 15% over a period of time this is a good result. A CTR less than this may indicate that you still have room to better optimize and target your site. But remember - dont make this judgment on the CTR for a day or two - measure it over at least a week AND with a reasonable number of page impressions.

CPM
The Cost per thousand impressions is another figure that new users get more worried about than is necessary. This is a guide figure only and gives an estimate of the payment per thousand impressions. It too can vary over time. Concentrate on the quality and targeting of your content and don't fret about this figure. Some of the Ads that Google serves you will be site targeted and will pay you by CPM. The earnings per page impression tend to be very low and for small numbers of page impressions the earnings are so small that they don't show up on your Adsense report. Don't worry though - they are being credited to you and will show up as additional small amounts on your earnings.

In summary - Pay attention to CTR over time because for most Adsense users Ad clicks will be your main source of earnings. Pay attention to the way you construct your content and make sure you optimize it. Make sure you optimize your ad placement , types and visualisation.

Adsense and Adwords Content Placement Reports

As an Adsense publisher it is important that you keep up to date with Adwords developments. Why? Because any development that effects the way advertisers target their adverts can potentially have a significant influence on you income from Adsense.

Google recently announced that it was moving out of Beta testing to implement new Content Placement Reports for Advertisers. In this post we will look at what the content placement reports provide for Adwords advertisers and how this impacts on your Adsense efforts and your Adsense income.

Googles official AdWords Blog gave the low down on new Content placement reports. Googles announcement states that the new content placement reports;

enables advertisers to see the exact sites on the Google content network where their ads appear. Placement Performance reports also provide site-by-site performance metrics – including domain, URL, impression, click, conversion and cost data – as well as aggregated metrics for traffic generated from AdSense for domain sites. With these reports, advertisers have much more insight into their contextually targeted advertising spend and are able to leverage the information to more effectively optimize their campaigns and meet their objectives

This of course means that advertisers can use the site targeting feature to get more exposure from sites that are performing well for their adverts . Conversely they can also use site exclusion to reduce or stop their ad exposure in those domains or URLs which are giving them poor quality traffic.

At the moment these reports are only being made available to Adwords advertisers in the US but according to Google they will be available in other places in the coming weeks.

The new Content Placement Reports don't yet put advertisers fully in control because as has been noted in some discussion forums there are still problems sometimes when Adwords advertisers try to exclude some sites.

Nevertheless it is clear what direction things are moving in. Advertisers will start to have increasingly detailed information about the performance of their ads site by site and increasingly detailed control over where their ads are shown.

So how does this effect you as an Adsense publisher. Well if you want particular advertisers to remain committed to advertising on your site in the future you will need to think not only about how your content relates to the adverts but also whether users clicking through those Ads are likely to convert for the advertisers. Don't forget that for the advertisers the issue starts at the point the user clicks through to them it is conversions that really count for the advertiser whereas for the publisher the concern has mainly been about click through.

Now you cant control what users do after they click through from your Ads but you should at least be aware that the pattern of Ads which are shown on your site might be effected in the future by advertisers who are monitoring how those click throughs convert for them

Up Selling Adsense

Up-selling is a marketing technique where the seller tries to sell you extra and often more costly items where have already made or are considering making a purchase. The "extras" which are sold in this way are often closely related to the product that you are already purchasing or have already purchased.

It is worth thinking about some non-internet examples of this before considering how you can you this technique in your own activities.

Have you ever purchased a Digital Camera or other electronic item and been sold an insurance policy to cover it? There is usually an element of up-selling in this. Or you buy a car and the salesman smoothly talks you into buying all those additional extras that you hadn't realised you wanted? Up-selling again. Or you decide to purchase a book on Amazon about say internet marketing and end up also buying DVD's or other items when you notice adverts for them. Consider yourself up-sold.

This technique is very effective and can be applied to websites using Google’s AdSense program. The technique of Upselling works best when the additional items or products are related to the initial products in some way – in other words they fill the same, or similar customer need that the first product did. Blockbuster up-sells rental customers by offering new and previously owned videos for sale. It groups videos and posts signs saying “if you liked this video, you’ll like this video” encouraging additional rentals.

If you simply slap AdSense ads on your website without thought you may be missing significant profits. You should identify the most expensive keywords that correlate with your existing keywords an dthe Theme of your site. Then create additional web pages or posts with quality content written around these more expensive keywords.

When vistors come to your site re your cenrtral keywords/search term,s they will also find information relating to more exppensive keywords. Those that follow these pages and click on Adwords ads on those pages will earn a higher return per click for you and you have upsold!

Obviously this is not going to be done without some effort - but I didnt promise you that you could make earnings without some work!