Adsense and Real Estate Web Sites; An Additional Source of Revenue

Adsense is a simple concept! The publisher or the realtor (that's you) inserts a java script into their website. And each time the page is accessed, the java script will pull advertisements from the Adsense program.

The ads that are targeted will be related to the content that is contained on the web page serving the ad. If a visitor clicks on an advertisement, you, as the webmaster serving the ad, will earn a portion of the money that the advertiser is paying the search engine for the click.

Inspiring Facts

Fact number 1: Kids in high school are making thousands of dollars every month with Adsense.

Fact number 2: Housewives, retirees, mom and dads, who are just staying at home and have never made a dime on the internet have created full-time incomes by simply placing Adsense ads on their web site or blog.

What his goes to show is that anyone, any age or gender can become money generating Adsense publishers...period!

When you accumulate $100.00 in earnings, Google Adsense will send you a Personal Identification Number (PIN) to the payment address you supplied when you signed up. This is just another security precaution that Adsense has in place to protect their publishers.

Once you've been mailed a PIN number, your account payments will be on hold until the PIN is entered in your account. You can still have access to your account and earn money; you just won't be paid until the PIN is entered. If it hasn't been entered within 1 year, your account will be disabled.

To enter your PIN after you receive it in the mail, log into your Google Adsense account. Click on the My Account tab, then click on edit. Update the appropriate field and click submit changes. It would also be a good time to check your contact information and make sure it is correct. You're now well on your way to receiving your first Google Adsense check.

What Are URL Channels and How to Organize Them

URL Channels allow you to view detailed information about the performance of your Adsense for Content pages.

Suppose you have two blogs, one about writing and the other about jogging. It might be interesting and profitable to track which one is getting more clicks.

Log in to your Adsense account and click on Adsense for Content. Scroll down until you see Channels and click on manage channels. You may need to scroll up when the next page loads. Under Manage URL Channels you would type writing and click on Create New Channel.

You will immediately see writing in the Active URL Channels dialogue box. Now type in jogging in the same channel text box and again click on Create New Channel. You now have two channels and you will be able to track your progress on each channel.

You can view channel reports from the Advanced Report page under the Reports tab. Choose Adsense for Content, choose the date range and then select the Channels Data radio button.

Choose any number of active channels by holding down the CTRL key. Next click on Display Report. It's as easy as that.

Summarily, there's no magic involved in generating AdSense income. Instead, it's a simple concept that is easy to implement. All it takes to succeed is a little time and effort, like most other things that are worthwhile.

About the Author:
Lanard Perry shows Realtors how to Average 1 or More Listings a Week. Find out how at Farming Expired Listings and Real Estate Marketing Talk.
Article Submitted On: January 19, 2007
Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/

Does Pay-Per-Click have a future?

Reading the Google hit piece that appeared in Barron's this week got me thinking about the whole pay-per-click model. Pay-per-click (PPC) has been around for more a decade, and while Google has made some positive changes to it, it's showing its age.

If you think of the Internet advertising process as a series of actions, it would go like this:

Impression -> Click -> Action

Back in the old days the metric was CPM (cost per thousand), and advertisers paid per impression (getting the ad on the screen). CPM favored the publisher over the advertiser, as the publisher's responsibility ended at the first part of the process. DoubleClick, an early ad serving company, came up with their DART system to match the right advertiser with the right screen in order to maximize the return on CPM.

PPC moved the metric forward in the process, measuring success (and payment) based not on how many times the ad was served, but how many times it was actually clicked. When most people think of PPC they think of Adsense, Google's contextual advertising engine. But PPC is employed in banner advertising, on big ad farms like Doubleclick and other companies, and in some affiliate programs, though the number seems to be waning.

The latest incarnation of search engine based PPC (thanks to Google), works like this: you select keywords that you think people will use to search for stuff related to what you sell. For example, if you sell pretzel dough you might want to advertise under pretzels or making pretzels or something along those lines. Selecting keywords is way beyond the scope of this article, but there are plenty of companies out there that make a living helping you pick keywords. Anyway, you then bid on those keywords and your ad is shown on the page with the search results.

With Adsense Google moved the context from the search engine results page to your web site content. It reads your site and decides what keywords to use to display advertising on your site, just as it would with a Google search.

For affiliate programs it's a little different, but the concept is the same. You choose the ads (or pay someone a piece of the action to choose the ads for you), and they get displayed on your pages. Rather than selecting the keywords explicitly, you are selecting the ads based on what you (or your agent) thinks people who have chosen to read your content may have an interest in seeing.

When someone clicks on the ad, you get paid. It's that simple.

For Adsense, appearing first on the list makes all the difference. A study suggests that being the #1 choice increases your chance of being clicked by up to 40%, because a lot of people don't look past the first entry (I always check the first few). The difference in bids between the first position and second position could be staggering. For example, 1900 people searched Google for the word tax yesterday. The top spot in Adsense would have cost you $25.12. Positions 2 and 3 drop to $6.96, and 4 and 5 would have cost you $4.24.

My experience with Adsense tells me that in this case the first position would probably pay Google close to $10.

As the publisher, this is a home run. Every time the person clicks I get a $5 bill. God, what a country!

As the advertiser, $10 to get the person in the door seems like a lot of money to me. If I'm selling a high margin item (like maybe tax software or one of those quickie tax loans), it seems like it may be okay.

But I still have to get them to buy. Conversion rates (getting the person to take some action once they've clicked on the ad and gone to your site) vary wildly, but I always use 1.5 - 3% of those who click on an ad. That means that 97 - 98.5% of the people who click on the ad do not buy. Let's use 2% as an example. That means that for all the five dollar bills flying into the publisher's pocket, only about 2 people out of every hundred will buy anything. So for every $1000 I spend I get 20 sales. That means that every sale costs me $50. Your results will vary, of course, depending on how targeted your keywords are and your industry and offer. Get the conversion up to 5%, for example, and you will be down to $20 per sale, which is a little better. I am designing a what-if tool to help with this, and I'll post it when it's ready.

One of the reasons for low conversion is probably click fraud. If an unscrupulous person wants to make money in PPC, all he needs to do is find a bunch of people (or computers) to click on the ads on his website continually, and he'll reap the rewards.

Barron's believes that the smart money is getting out of PPC. They cite FTD as an example:

Flower giant FTD Group (FTD) recently complained about the high price of search advertising. "During the Christmas season, certain online search engine costs increased significantly over the prior year, and as such we made the decision not to pursue the resulting high-cost order volume," said Michael Soenen, chief executive officer.

First off, let me just say that as an advertising exec I pitched FTD, and they didn't strike me as the brightest bulbs in the chandelier. That being said, it's easy to see why FTD wants out. Being #1 or #2 in the keyword Flowers around Valentine's Day would have cost between $6.25 and $10.00. There were 100,000 searches on the days close to VD on that keyword, and 11,500 on Flowers Delivered, which would have cost between $5.03 and $6.72.

Some simple arithmetic shows me that FTD nets about $6.20 per transaction across its network. So the transaction is either a wash or a loss. FTD is the number 1 ad on Google for their keywords, so I guess they decided to eat that first transaction, counting on continuity to save them. According to Barron's this isn't going to work either:

One industry executive noted that the lifetime value of a customer acquired through Google for his/her business had approached zero. Oops. So much for that theory.

So the answer seems to be that the big guys are getting out. Using the flowers example, though, the top 5 ads are FTD, ProFlowers, Hallmark, 1-800-Flowers and Teleflora. So I guess it's going to happen over time.

So where is the future? According to the inventor of pay-per-click himself, Bill Gross (formerly of GoTo.com), the future is in pay-per-action, which moves the metric down to the final part of the Internet advertising transaction, where we think it belongs. There's a terrific article on Seochat.com that has more information on this.

Pay-per-action is simple...both parties have a stake in the outcome of the click, whether that is a sale, a lead, or even an instant telephone call (more on that in part 2). We think this is going to be the next big thing, and it's already happening.

About the Author:
Matt DeAngelis runs Affiliate Blog.
Matt is the former Chief Technology Officer of Modem Media, a pioneer in the Internet ad space. As a foot soldier in the Internet revolution, Matt devised the technology behind ad campaigns and online presence for a good portion of the Fortune 100, including AT&T, GE, John Hancock, Delta Airlines, Compaq, GM and many more.
Article Source: http://www.articles2k.com

The Basics of Making Money with Blogs And AdSense

Google AdSense is undoubtedly the most popular Pay Per Click (PPC) program in the industry today. By enrolling your site under the said program, AdSense will display a series of ads on your pages. You stand to earn every time a visitor of your clicks on these ads.

They don’t have to buy anything, mind you. They just have to click on the ads and nothing more. These ads are by no means random. They are contextually relevant, meaning, they are assigned based on their relevancy to the subject of your site.

Could a blog substitute for regular sites when it comes to making money through AdSense? Yes people, blogs can also be provide an additional income stream through AdSense! In some aspects, a blog is a more efficient tool for this purpose.

There are people online today making six figures per month from Adsense alone. Unbelievable but true!

There are three determinative factors for the success of a site enrolled under the AdSense program.

1. The Cost Per Click (CPC) that is carried by the ads assigned to your site.

2. The number of page impressions, or simply put, the amount of traffic that passes through your site. If you garner a lot of page impressions, you have a better chance of acquiring a lot of clicks.

3. The Click Through Rate (CTR), which is the number of clicks your ads get per the number of visitors that visit your pages. The higher your CTR, the more you stand to earn.

CPCs are a given. If you’re dead set on a subject for your blog, then you will just be attracting a certain group of ads. But if you wish to make a blog for the primary goal of making money online, then you have to choose the right keywords before everything else.

Basically, your blog will be assigned certain ads based on the keywords prevalent in its entries. There are some keywords that will attract ads that pay high, and there are those that will attract ads that pay low. The trick is in finding the high paying keywords around which you will create your blog.

Here are some tips that will help you find those keywords with relative ease:

* Create an account at www.adwords.google.com . Adwords, of course, is the advertising partner of AdSense. When you become a member, you could take a peek at how much the going rates are for certain keywords.

* Visit www.adsensearena.com . This is one of the very few sites that give information about high paying keywords for free. It would rather be kept a secret by those who discovered it, so keep it quiet;-).

The number of your page impressions really depends on the traffic that you can generate for your blog. Blogs would have an easier time with this because, as we’ve previously discussed in past lessons, search engines love them. But of course, this is not set in stone. If your competitors, for example, are also using the blogging strategy, then you’re all in equal footing.

To get the edge, do try David Pankhurst’s special report on How To Conquer Your Niche With Wordpress. David will share some absolutely mind blowing techniques that will tremendously boost your blog’s page rank through a simple manipulation of the Wordpress software. Check out his report at http://www.malkeenan.com/top10tricks.

Increasing your CTR is an entire subfield in itself! There are a plethora of strategies dedicated for this purpose. We have discussed some of these tactics in my newsletter, as well as my own blog at http://www.malkeenan.com/blog . These include the choice of ad design, the placement of the ads, and the colors to be used, among other things. I’m telling you, increasing your CTR has become a science of sorts in recent months!

In the next article, I will discuss some really advanced strategies that will blow you away.

Copyright 2005 Mal Keenan

About the author:
Mal Keenan
Get Your Hands on My FREE and Exclusive 7 Day Blogging Report by Sending and Blank Email to mailto: freeblogreport@getresponse.com In this Report I Reveal All The Secrets for Creating and Running A Successful Online Blog, Including Blogging to Niche Markets.
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