ScottMW.com

Just a quick update. Recently, a friend of mine checked the Google Pagerank score of BlogFlare.com and told me it had been ranked a 5/10! This is excellent news.

I am concerned though; for a few days there, BlogFlare was down due to some DNS issues. But it’s back up now, and with a vengeance! In fact, today BlogFlare reached 200 blogs — a new record!

For now, I’m watching the site carefully and thinking of new ways to fine-tune the algorithm that generates the statistics. Right now, the update for all of the stats in the database takes well over five minutes every hour. That number will not improve unless I do something about it.

I have a hunch that the best solution is to upgrade to MySQL 5.0 and convert the algorithm to a server-side Stored Procedure that will execute every hour. This would drastically decrease execution time, I believe.

There’s only one way to find out.

Just a little update on my status as an affiliate marketer.

In my last post, ClickBank Experiment With A Little Help From A Friend, I discussed my recent ClickBank earnings. To your left, you can see that my sales have significantly increased on the average over the last few days. In fact, I’ve made more over the last few days than the rest of my time at ClickBank in its entirety. Not bad, huh?

Remember, I started affiliate marketing on about January 15th, so this is no small thing that I’m already jumping up into the multiple-hundred dollar range so quickly. I’ve gotta tell you though, it is exciting to see your stats climb over the day.

Each time I get a new sale, I get to tell my wife and that makes her day a little bit brighter.

The cool part of this recent increase is that it is due to three major things:

1. I have landing pages for each product – This significantly lowers how much you have to pay per click for each keyword, especially on Google AdWords.
2. I meticulously go over my keywords to make sure they fit whatever I’m selling – This way, I’m not wasting my money on clicks from less interested shoppers. The more I advertise to people actually *searching* for what I have to sell, the higher the chances are that I will sell that product.

Of course, I’m learning as I go and I’m taking a LOT of notes along the way. Since this business is beginning to look very lucrative, I want to make sure I can reproduce success. This will also help me to put together a package for other people to have the same success that I’m having!

This is the other side of ClickBank; you can also market your own products and other people can sell them for you. It’s just a really good idea to have a product that actually works! That way your product will grow in popularity and you’ll have a solid income base for quite a while. Welcome to the new world, my friends.

Instead of salesmen going to people, people are coming to the salesmen. How crazy is this? Now, salesmen aren’t hired to sell a particular product. They get to sell whatever they feel good selling! It’s very revolutionary, if you think about it. You might not be able to tell but I’m loving this.

I’ll get more into ClickBank sales once I actually begin to sell products on there. For now, I’ll stick to giving you guys updates on my affiliate status and giving tips and tricks for getting the same results! So that’s it for now, I’ll write more later.

Good luck with your money!

-Scott

On around the 15th of this month, I had the pleasure of meeting a successful online marketer and he helped me to start joining the affiliate marketing playground with ClickBank.

He had gone out of his way to private message me in regard to a post I had left in a DigitalPoint forum regarding my $5000/mo goal by August, so I was kind of wary at first but I quickly learned he knew what he was talking about.

The coolest part about this guy is that he’s only 17 years old and he makes more than I’ve ever made working at a real job. Needless to say, I’m impressed.
I must admit that it’s a humbling experience to take the advice of someone younger, but I’m finding that it’s worthwhile. Apparently, wisdom doesn’t always happen with age but more so with the balls to actually take risks.

Personally, I’m not very good at taking risks. I don’t like losing money and I definitely don’t like failing, but as someone smart once said, “Success cannot be obtained without failure, for we are to experience the drought to appreciate the abundance.”

Truer words were never spoken, in my opinion. Ever since my main source of online-income was drained of visitors back in early 2006, my AdSense inflow of money has severely waned. As far as AdSense is concerned, I am certainly experiencing the drought my friends.

But fear not! AdSense is not the only way to make money on the internet, and after having the actual experience of making less than $5 per day happen, I dare say that you should never rely on one source. This is also known as not putting all of your eggs in one basket.

So with the help of my new-found friend, I was urged to start affiliate marketing. He gave me a few pointers here and there about where I should advertise, how I should do it and what I should advertise for and within the same day, I’d already made my first sale on ClickBank.

You can’t imagine how stoked I was to see actual immediate results from putting a little bit of advertising money to work for me. So I started up a few more advertising campaigns, and I’ve made a few sales for several days thereafter (see above image).

Now if you pay attention to the above image, you’ll notice that my earnings have been very sparse. In fact, for a couple of days I haven’t made any sales and I’ve still been spending money on advertising. This is part of the risk-taking experience that I do not like. It’s called The Waiting Game and I’m terrible at it.

I don’t like checking my ClickBank account and seeing no sales; it’s aggravating, in all honesty. But guess what outweighs that aggravation tenfold? That’s right– seeing a sale pop up before my very eyes. That is a truly exhilarating experience that I recommend you try for yourself.

Of course, I can’t give away the trade secrets that my friend has blessed me with but I will tell you a few things that might help with making money (at least, sparsely) with ClickBank:

• Research the product you’re marketing thoroughly – I am still researching the few products I have been marketing and I still have a long way to go to make consistent sales daily, but it’s a crucial part of the process. Sales won’t just come to you, so you have to find out everything you can about the product you’re selling and then, go a bit deeper for that edge.
• Use Landing Pages Vs. Direct Linking – For my first few sales, I used my affiliate link as the URL for the ads I was placing. Turns out, this raises the price of the keywords you use for some services (like AdWords) and might lose you a lot of sales. Using a web page to inform visitors about the product you’re pushing gives you several great edges. A couple being– the ability to track statistics as well as the ability to market several similar products on one page.
• Choose products with high gravity – ‘High gravity’ is a term used on ClickBank to signify a product that other people are already heavily marketing, but it is also a great indication that a product sells well. So use this term to your advantage when searching for your niche to advertise.

There is much more detail I could go into that I’m learning on a daily basis, but I do believe I will save the rest for later and perhaps the best for a product of my own! After all, the best product really does help people and make their lives better, so why not?

As far as risk goes, I plan to increase my daily budget to twice what it is right now as an experiment. Hopefully I can increase the click-thru rates to my landing pages and therefore, create a higher number of sales. This is a very tricky business, but once mastered can lead to a lot of passively earned income.

I will keep you posted with updates, but for now– good luck with your money making ventures on the web.

- Scott

Having been an avid AdSense user over the past few years, naturally I’ve looked for different ways to get the most out of the program as I’ve grown accustomed to the many ways of WordPress. Each time you think you’ve run out of ways to utilize AdSense or AdSense statistics on your blog, out comes another bad-ass plugin.

So here are the top five I’ve used in a concise list.

1. AdSense Deluxe – This has been, by far, the most useful plugin I’ve ever used as far as AdSense is concerned (thus its placement on this list). If you want to place AdSense ads in your blog posts but you’ve been getting screwed up results, try this bad boy. You can do so from a nice little control panel. Want to make global changes to a specific ad set? No problem, edit it from the panel! Want to see how the ads will look on your blog? No problem, use the preview tool!
2. AdSense Widget for WordPress Sidebar – Now this plugin requires the WordPress Sidebar plugin but makes adding AdSense ad blocks to WordPress a peice of cake. Not only is it easy to install, but it’s also very customizable — colors, size and h2 tags are all modifiable.
3. AdSense Sharing Revenue & Earnings System – Because I also use WordPress Mu to host bloggers with a friend of mine (www.zeroblogs.com), it is excellent to have a plugin that handles revenue sharing for all users. Although I did have to modify the plugin myself to make it partner-friendly, it made the actual revenue sharing portion a breeze. If you want to do AdSense sharing on a WordPress Mu site of your own, I highly recommend this plugin.
4. Author AdSense – Here is a similar plugin to the AdSense Sharing Revenue & Earnings System. You can do basically the same thing with this plugin, except the interface is a bit different. It works as it says it does though, so I felt it mention-worthy.
5. Google AdSense Earnings – For those of you who use WordPress but don’t have FireFox and can’t use the awesome and fantastic Adsense Notifier add-on — you’re in luck. The plugin allows you to put your username and password in for Google AdSense and get your current statistics. Not only that, but you can also display your stats to the public! Be careful, don’t display too much or Google will end you.

JenSense confirmed it, and I read it on ProBlogger. You can now run other contextual ad services on the same page as your Google AdSense ads, so long as they don’t resemble the AdSense ads and both services allow it:

I followed up with Google on the situation, to find out of the removal of the clause would mean that competitor’s ads would be allowed on the same page as AdSense, provided they didn’t resemble or mimic AdSense ads, and that the AdSense terms would eventually be updated to reflect this policy change. And the answer is yes!

Unfortunately, the YPN network is still not allowing other services to run ads on the same page:

Update: I spoke with Yahoo Publisher Network on this issue, and they say that as of today, page level exclusivity still exists. This means you still cannot run YPN on the same page as another contextual ad network. However, they will listen to publisher feedback on this issue and take it into consideration for future YPN terms updates.

Now personally, I don’t think you should ever have too many ads on a given web page. Three or four ads are plenty and, depending on how you’ve blended them into your design, still have the ability to look tasteful. It’s when you throw in even more ads and different networks that it becomes more annoying to look at.

What I do recommend is testing a few services at once to see which end up bringing back good revenues. For me, I will always stick with AdSense as it is not only easy to use but it has also paid me well.

AdSense gives you the option to display or not to display the “Advertise on this site” text that is shown on all of your AdSense ads. In this article, you will learn what it is for and how to disable it.

The “Advertise on this site” link on your Google ads is part of the Onsite Advertiser Sign-Up program. Using this link, advertisers can set up an ad campaign on AdWords that will target its ads directly to your site and only your site. Here is the description from the Google AdSense Help Center:

Onsite Advertiser Sign-up is an extension of Google site targeting that makes it easier for advertisers to bid on your site.

When you use Onsite Advertiser Sign-up, your ad units will display an ‘Advertise on this site’ link that takes advertisers to an informational landing page with details about your site and the Google AdWords advertising program. Advertisers who sign up through this page will be guided to create an ad targeted specifically to your site, and only your site. When more advertisers create and target ads to your site, you’ll benefit from the competition as it drives your potential earnings up.

You can customize the landing page advertisers see with the logo, color scheme, and site description of your choice, to provide advertisers with the best idea of what your site’s all about. For instructions, see our entry on How do I customize my Onsite Advertiser Sign-up page?

You do not get paid a referral fee for sign-ups as a result of people using this link, so there’s no benefit there. The benefit is in having people advertise directly on your website. So as it might be helpful, it can also be a pain if you do not WANT the text there in the first place. Here’s how to remove it:

1. Sign in to your Google AdSense account.
2. Click on the My Account tab.
3. Scroll down to find the Onsite Advertiser Sign-Up section. Click edit.
4. On the Onsite Advertiser Sign-Up page, uncheck the box next to Include me in Onsite Advertiser Sign-Up.
5. Click Save Changes at the bottom of the page.

That’s all there is to it! In a few days, the text will disappear and you will be one step closer to being an AdSense guru!

As you may have realized by now, I like to throw a lot of relevant keywords into my posts. You’ll notice them highlighted in bold randomly throughout the text. Ever wonder why? Well, it’s because I know that AdSense will pay me more if I use the right keywords.

Google AdSense relies on keywords throughout your document as a part of its algorithm for displaying contextual ads. Words in bold are typically given more weight in this decision, therefore I bold them. If, for instance, you wanted to talk about ducks on your website, I would advise you to bold keywords like the following:

• Duck
• Donald Duck
• Duck Unlimited
• Duck Hunting
• Anaheim Duck
• Mighty Duck
• Rubber Duck
• Horny Duck
• Daffy Duck
• Howard the Duck

You might laugh, but it’s true. How do I know this? Because, according to Overture, these are the most searched-on keywords for the term ‘duck.’ So later on when people begin to search for my article, not only wil will my posts come up more often but my ads will be more relevant when they do.

“But where did you get those Overture keywords?”

Simple. I downloaded a piece of software from Softnik Technologies called Good Keywords and any time I want to look up a keyword for its possible inclusion or highlighting, I use the “Keyword Suggestions” feature and up comes a list of relevant keywords (left image).

It will even show you the amount of times each term is searched for per month. This is an excellent feature, and one people usually pay money for. Thank you Overture.

But wait, there’s more. You didn’t think I would stop with one method, did you? The next method I use to generate decent keywords is to use the AdWords Keyword Tool. If you’re familiar with AdWords, great. Otherwise, use the link at the bottom of this page to get yourself an AdWords account.

Now once inside AdWords, find the Keywords Tool under Campaign Management > Tools. Now you can perform a search on your desired keyword. When searching, make sure the “use synonyms” checkbox is checked and you have “Cost and ad position estimates” selected in the dropdown. Next, put $100 in the “Calculate Estimates using Max CPC” box. Perform your search.

When the keywords come up, sort them by “Estimated Avg. CPC.” Now you can see what people are paying for the top positions on Google searches, and therefore what will most likely lead to higher payouts from the ads on your websites. In addition, I also recommend searching by “Global search volume trends” to see which ads pay higher in which months. I recommend playing around with it to get the best results.

Another outstanding service I use to determine where to best PLACE my ads is CrazyEgg.com. With this service, you just place a bit of javascript code at the bottom of whatever web page(s) you want to track and it will not only keep track of your hits but also your clicks. In order to better track your clicks, CrazyEgg implemented an amazing tool called the Heatmap (displayed below). With this tool, you can see which areas are really hot (white hot) and which are colder (blue hot).

This is a recent example from my Adsense-Fire.com tracking. Notice the top right area where the tabs are. Placing an ad in this area is a fantastic idea as people are more likely to see the ad right below the tabs, since it is such a high-traffic click area. Similarly, it would be a smart idea to place an ad under the logo (top left) or in the vicinity of the Mailing List area.

It’s always better to track your clicks over a larger span of time or clicks, like say .. one month or 1000 clicks. With CrazyEgg, you can do it either way and you will be able to more accurately see where the white hot areas are.

For now, I hope that helps you get the better paying keywords for your content. There will be more tips on this later. Good luck!

- Scott

Just thought I’d let all of you AdSensers know that Google AdSense’s program policies have changed. You can click here to read the new policy, or take a look at the sections that will most likely affect you here.

Referrals

This one I felt was pretty cool and should help a lot of people out.

Up to two referral units from each referral product or offering may be displayed on a page, in addition to the ad units, search boxes, and link units specified above.

Competitive Ads & Services

I feel this is a necessary clarification, as some people wonder whether they may even have other ads on the same pages as their AdSense ads. You can! Just make sure those ads are in no way mistakable as an AdSense ad or you’re in violation of the terms, buddy.

“Competitive Ads and Services In order to prevent user confusion, we do not permit Google ads or search boxes to be published on websites that also contain other ads or services formatted to use the same layout and colors as the Google ads or search boxes on that site. Although you may sell ads directly on your site, it is your responsibility to ensure these ads cannot be confused with Google ads.”

Read more on this here.

Quick post here!

According to Inside AdSense, a Google blog, Google has added a new Spanish forum to its listings! Click here to read Bienvenido to Spanish Help Forum.

Here’s a clipping from the article:

Need help with implementing your ads or optimizing your ad placement? Maybe another publisher halfway around the globe has an answer for you. There’s also a Google representative called ‘AdSensePro’ who will occasionally contribute posts. Whether you’re new to AdSense or a seasoned veteran, you’re welcome to ask for advice and share your experiences in the Help Forums. They’re also available in Chinese, English, French, German, Japanese, and Portuguese.

So there you have it, AdSense help in many different languages!

- Scott

Making money with AdSense is all about three things: traffic, content and stickiness. You need traffic so people can see your ads, obviously. Content must be worth looking at in order for people to want to see it, so make sure that’s interesting. Stickiness is a term I like to use to describe the difficulty from leaving a website — the higher the difficulty to leave, the stickier a website is.

Before I dive into my methods for boosting traffic to your website- if you’re honestly driven to make more money, you should check out these AdSense videos by Michael Cheney (click for link). He gives you a step by step way to generate a bunch of money in a relatively short amount of time, so check that out.

Traffic

Now obviously getting traffic to your website is never easy unless you’re already well-established on the internet. For those who are new or even moderately new to the web, getting website exposure is difficult. You do have options though. You can advertise on a PPC (Pay Per Click) network, you can start up a mailing list, put the word out on forums, do a press release, leave comments on blogs, hold a contest and tons of other things. Let’s discuss a few of these methods.

The easiest way to get traffic is to advertise on a PPC service .. that is, if you have the money. Depending on your niche, you may have to spend anywhere from $5 to $10/day to make this effective. If you aren’t making more than you’re advertising, it’s obviously not going to work out in the long-run. What you can do is advertise for a set amount of time, say– a month. And in that time you will have established a nice base of users if you use the Stickiness techniques described below.

It’s important that when using a PPC service, you concentrate on getting the most VALID click-thrus to your site. It’s not all about volume. Yeah, you could have a million visitors that you pay to go to your website but if your website is all about power tools and you get a million techno geeks, those views are almost worthless.

What’s great about services like Google AdWords is that it uses contextual advertising to attempt to display your ads in the most relevant context. When using AdWords, for instance, you can specify whether you want ads to show up in Google Searches and/or on content pages where AdSense ads are displayed. You can specify the location you want the ads to show up in based on country, region and city. This is especially important because AdSense pays less for views that are from outside the United States. Yes, you read that right. This is why I recommend targeting your ads to US traffic.

On top of this, you can specify all the keywords you’d like your ad to show up for. Keep in mind though, when using keywords- the more popular the keyword, the more competition there is for that spot and therefore the more you’ll have to pay per click to even show UP for that search or keyword. This is not only why I recommend finding keywords that don’t require a large per-click cost ($0.06 – $0.19) but also why you should use at least 200 keywords for each campaign you start. This will increase your chances of getting displayed and also, listed. Oh yes– and the more you pay per click, obviously, the more often your and more prominently your ad will be displayed.

Mailing lists are another way of generating traffic, and also stickiness but we’ll go into that later. You should *always* have a mailing list sign-up sheet on your website or blog, for five reasons:

1. There is always going to be a handful, if not more, who are interested in what you’re talking about!
2. These people are willing to get your e-mails and therefore, you aren’t SPAMMING them!
3. Many of these people will end up returning to your website on a fairly regular basis.
4. You can let them know about other things you’re working on and therefore, cut down on your advertising costs.
5. You can put affiliate links in your e-mails for products you’ve created or tried and earn even more money!

So mailing lists are quite obviously a huge boon to a webmaster and you should take advantage of them as soon as possible. A great mailing list service I recommend is Aweber. What’s great about this service is that they allow you to do scheduled mailings, time-released mailings (E.G. once someone signs up, you can give them a 3-day course or a 5-day course on something) and of course you can do regular announcements. There are free services available as well, but in my experience they don’t offer nearly the same benefits.

When sending out mailings, make sure you don’t do it too often. Once per day is even pushing it, but people will put up with it most of the time, especially if the information is helpful. Of course, you can do whatever you want with your mailing list but I recommend that you always provide a helpful service to those people receiving the letter. This way you’ll keep your audience, you’ll be helping people and your list will most likely grow just by word of mouth. One more word of caution– if you’re using mailing lists for product releases, make sure to send the e-mail out about 10-20 minutes before, as mailing lists use queues.
Speaking of word of mouth, when was the last time you used a forum to promote your website? I’m not talking about spamming (I never spam, I hate it)! I’m talking about asking other people to review your website, posting in relevant forums about your service, helping other people and offering your website as a helpful resource to help them get what they’re after, etc. In fact, I just started a forum here on Adsense Fire- click here to visit the Adsense Fire Forums. Another great forum site, if you haven’t heard, is DigitalPoint.com’s forums.

The trick is putting your links in your signature as well. Make sure to follow the guidelines of the forum. For instance, if only 2 links are allowed in your signature, don’t put 3 in or you’ll get banned and all your posts will get deleted.

Be careful, when spending your precious time in forums, to make sure they don’t put the infamous rel=”nofollow” in your hyperlinks. This will cause Google to ignore your link when it is indexing the forums; however, it is still a valuable way to get people to visit your website, so it’s up to you.

Another great tool for promotion is a press release. There are tons of paid press release resources available but not many free ones that are worth much. One service that does both is PR Leap and here are some of their free services:

• Scheduled press release submission
• Search-friendly press release formatting
• Press release localization by ZIP code, city and state
• Spam protection on your email address
• Statistics: page views and search engine pick ups

So you can see the value in such a service. Not only do they provide you with a decent amount of traffic but also statistics, email protection and the whole lot. When you actually do a press release, make sure you do it correctly the first time so that it is accepted. You can view these 10 tips for getting your press release approved the first time.

Moving on, let’s talk about leaving comments on other people’s blogs. Like posting threads and responses in forums, typically you may leave links to your website in your comments on blogs (make sure to only leave one!). The bad news is that some blogs will put the nofollow attribute into your hyperlinks, so watch out for that. But again, all links are good links and you will most likely get some traffic inflow.

To increase your chances of getting people to visit your links from comments you leave, make sure to leave quality feedback on posts. This most often includes your opinion or some good feedback on the subject, so just make sure you think it through. People appreciate that and will be attracted to things that you generate.

If you own a blog yourself, sometimes you can leave what is called a Trackback on other people’s blog. This happens when you are writing an article about, or in response to another blogger’s post. You can place their hyperlink in the trackback section and when you post, it will appear as a comment on their blog. This is also a handy way of getting traffic your way.

Now when I first launched BlogFlare.com, I tried to think of a dynamite way to get traffic to the website but if you know me, you know I like to keep things honest and helpful. This is why I made a Traffic-based Contest. The idea behind the contest was that it would help BlogFlare while at the same time helping to increase traffic to other blogs. The person with the most unique hits at the end of the contest was the winner, and I paid him $50. Small change, right?

Well, not everyone has $50 to throw around but I felt it was a great advertisement. In the future, there will be more contests but the trick is letting people know that there is even a contest going on. So use the above techniques to your advantage when creating a contest and it should work wonders. You just have to worry about keeping track of your winning participants! You can read more about contests in the DigitalPoint forums by clicking here.

Of course there are many other ways of driving traffic to your site, and incidentally I have written a free eBook on those ways. Feel free to download it here.
All of these things are wonderful ways to get traffic to your website and I tell you about them only after personal experience. The trouble is that none of them will work without the right content, so let’s talk about that next.

Content

Most people say that content is king when it comes to AdSense, and they’re right. But if content is king, then your web traffic is a god (see how much you mean to me?). In order to appease the gods of traffic, we must provide them with quality content that is not only helpful but also rich in relevant keywords and information. At this point, you should ask yourself a rather difficult (for some) question: can I write good? If you answered “yes” to that question, then you should not be writing because it was bad grammar! You should be able to write WELL!

I’m mostly kidding, but the ability to write is not a gift bestowed upon all of us. When we’ve come to the acceptance phase of our denial, it’s time to pay someone else to write our heavy content for us. But wait– this doesn’t apply only to our actual content but to the structure and design of our website as well. It’s always best to have professionals build what you don’t know how to do. So keep that in mind on your internet journey!

If you have writing difficulty, you can pay $5 and have someone write a decent article for you if you’d like. Then, you can alter what they give you and fill it with keywords that pertain to your website’s topic. It’s a beautiful system. You can use www.rentacoder.com or www.elance.com for this purpose.
Additionally, if you are paying someone to design your website for you, make sure they include a place for your ads. Ad placement is a huge factor in determining your success with Google AdSense so also make sure that the placements will catch the eye of an oncoming visitor.

Now if you are good at writing excellent content, make sure you know *what* should go into your content. You should fill your text with keywords so that AdSense can more easily display contextual ads, and so that search engines can increase your ranking for those keywords when people search for them.

Also, and I can’t stress this enough, you should optimize your website for search engines. I know you’ve heard this a million times, but it’s more than worth it to do so. Pay someone if you have to or do a Google search on the subject. Just get it done and you will be glad you did.

Make sure your title pages reflect the context that is inside the content of the web page. Blogs will typically do this automatically, so it’s mostly important to do manually on your typical website. Another great way to drive traffic to your site via search engines is to pick titles that people actually search for. The title of this post, for instance, is one of the top searches on Google. Not bad, eh?

Stickiness

Stickiness – the art of keeping people occupied on your website. That’s my definition, feel free to quote me! You want to keep people occupied on your website because the longer someone is on your website, the more likely that user will see an ad they like and visit it! It’s a no-brainer.
When practicing the art of stickiness, you must keep in mind that annoying things suck. What I mean by that is, don’t put those annoying ads on your site that say “kill the mouse and win the ipod” or “shoot your hunting buddy and win a presidency.” No, these are annoyances that should die. When keeping people occupied on your website, you should always focus on lifting people up- that means helping or providing them a way to become better somehow or make better decisions.

The ability to post comments on a website is a great sticky feature, especially if it’s not a blog or a forum. Having a chat that loads over your page is also a great technique– a great way to do this automatically is to use a service like Gabbly. Gabbly will load a chat window over your website so people can still browse the internet while they chat.

Having a forum on your website is a great way to keep people occupied as well. This allows them to correspond and interact with each other. You can my previous post on AdSense optimization techniques for forums. Anything that gets updated frequently will keep users coming back, even if it’s not something they can interact with.

The best way to keep users occupied, in my opinion, is to have some kind of social interaction though. So focus on adding social interactivity to your website somehow, be it through comments, forums, chat or a ratings system, it will ultimately increase your CTR with AdSense.

Conclusion

There are, of course, additional ways to make money with AdSense. These will be discussed in upcoming articles, but hopefully this has given you some perspective of what it takes to earn residual income with AdSense. You must always keep in mind that, like anything else that is good, building a steady inflow of money takes time as it takes time to build traffic and a sturdy readership. Just keep that content updated and keep putting out the word. Building it isn’t all it takes to make them come these days. Unfortunately, you’ve also got to sell it.

That’s all for now.

Again, if you’re serious about making money, check out Michael Cheney’s AdSense videos (click for link) and there are even more techniques you can use.

- Scott