If you have niche sites that are not getting much traffic it can be tempting to try to boost the traffic by stumbling, digging or adding your post or site to social network sites. However if you are monetising with Google adsense be careful. Google pays you for traffic that not only clicks on the adds but that converts. Not all the people who click on ads are going to buy of course but Google knows what proportion to expect to convert if the traffic is targeted.
That means that traffic coming to your site needs to be already looking to purchase something. You get this kind of traffic from the search engines. If someone is looking for an answer to their problems they will use a search engine to find it - they won’t use stumbleupon or blogcatalog! Stumblers and diggers are surfing, hopping from one site to the next. If they do happen to click on an ad they are very unlikely to buy anything. At least this kind of traffic is not too likely to actually click an ad. A lot of social traffic can lead to Adsense smart pricing
Quote from Googles Adsense Blog (my bolding)
The best way to ensure you benefit from AdSense is to create compelling content for interested users. This also means driving targeted traffic to your site — advertisers don’t gain as much ROI when paying for generic clicks as they do for quality clicks that come from interest in your content. Good content usually equals a good experience for user plus advertiser, which can be much more valuable than CTR. (ROI return on investment - CTR click through rate)
So Google wants targeted traffic. That means traffic from search engines that comes to your site with a purpose in mind. It is also important to have relevant content on your site to trigger relevant ads. This is easier with a niche site and you can tweak the ads appearing by making sure the relevant keywords are in your post titles and content. Use one post per page unless all your posts target the same keywords especially on the home page. Mixed posts targeting different keywords will only confuse the Google bot and lead to irrelevant ads which won’t do you any good.
How do you know if you’ve been smart priced?
All the sites in your account are affected not just the offending site and the cost per click (CPC) will go down to cents. If you see a sharp drop in CPC you could be smart priced. The good news is that if you remove ads from the problem site your CPC should return to normal in about a week or so as soon as Googlebot has reindexed your site. It may be difficult to find the offending site especially if you have more than one that is causing the problem. The CTR is an indication that the traffic is not targeted for the ads but itself is not a problem - you could have a low CTR but high conversion so use it as an indication not a proof that you may be smart priced.
Griz has lots more information at How to Get Traffic to your Website or Blog
It is vitally important if you want to rank well on Google that you know how to get backlinks to your site, posts and pages. Not just any backlinks but relevant backlinks. A backlink from a completely unrelated page won’t do you much good but a backlink from a highly relevant page, even if that page has a low page rank (PR), will help you rise in the SERPS. There are, of course, lots of ways to get backlinks but I’d like to describe two ways I use.
Article Marketing
To get relevant backlinks write an article and include a link to your site with your keywords as the anchor text in the resource box. I’ve been using article marketing with great success. I was using isnare but they have become so slow that I recently signed up with Article Marketer and am pleased with the service. All my articles have been distributed in, at the most, 2 working days and they also check the article for any errors in formatting for things that editors may not like.
ConnectContent
ConnectContent is run by RT Cunningham who has a blog at Untwisted Vortex. This is a great service! It costs just $12 a month. The idea is to form a network of people who can exchange relevant links in posts and pages. You can only get as many links as you give (weighted for PR). It works best if you have a wide range of different types of sites as you can’t be guranteed that there will be someone with a site relevant to yours and you may not get links for all your sites. If you just have one or two sites it won’t work very well and you should probably wait until you have more sites but if you want to know how to get back links check it out!.
As I can no longer use eBay to make money I have been concentrating on using adsense. I’ve put adsense on the eBay sites and I’m making between $900 and $1000 a month from these. However I did not optimize these ads so the CPC (cost per click) I am getting on some of the sites is very low. The reason for this post is to introduce a new site by Griz Make Money with Adsense which has so much useful information that you really don’t need to go anywhere else to learn how to make money online. Griz is an advocate of using free platforms such as Blogger and in making the blogs ugly so that people take one look, think this can’t be very good, and back out, often enough by clicking on the ads to make some money.
Have a look at his site, you will learn a lot as Griz, not only knows what he is talking about but has the knack of writing in a very clear way. Make sure you read the comments, especially Griz’s answers as there is so much information in these.
I have learned so much from this site and his other site How to Make Money Online for Beginners that I want to share this with you all.
On Dec 14th I received an email part of which is below:
“During a recent review, we found that your account is related to a previously banned account. Your account has been terminated and 100% of your pending commissions will be reversed.”
I have never has another account with EBPN and certainly have not been banned for any reason. I had over $2000 in that account that I earned honestly and with a lot of hard work. My earnings had really started to increase and I had high quality traffic for every period.
For those who don’t know eBay gives you a quality score based on ‘who knows what parameters’ and has dumped affiliates in the past for sending too low quality traffic.
I am not the only one who has received this email and all say that they do not have any other accounts. Today looking at eBay’s forum I see another round of bannings for the same spurious reason. I find it very suspicious that people are being dumped just before pay day. See the thread “your account is related to a previously banned account”
In the email it said “If you believe you have been linked to a banned account in error, please reply to eBayPartnerNetwork-Quality@ebay.com with your account information and a detailed description of how you are driving traffic to the eBay site. ”
Despite 4 emails to this address giving them the details they asked for I have had NO reply. Not even a form letter to say they have received them. This is how they treat honest, hard working affiliates that have been sending them, traffic for over a year?
I can no longer recommend either using BANS or being an affiliate of eBay as there is just too much likelihood of perfectly honest, hardworking affiliates being dumped and losing hard earned money through no fault of theirs.
It’s now 4 months since I started using the keyword sniping technique outlined by Court ( he has since withdrawn his keyword sniping posts read this for an explanation As it turns out content is king)
I want to tell you that for me it has been very, very successful. 4 of my sites are on page 1 of Google for 2 keywords (many at positions 2-3 - I haven’t achieved a 1 yet!) My visitors has jumped up this month so those sites are getting around 150 visitors a day each. These are niche sites so I am not expecting 100’s of visitors! My earnings this month have jumped from $600 in September to $750 last month to nearly $2000 so far in November, the majority of it coming from the keyword sniping sites.
For most of the sites I haven’t added any more to the original 10 posts and 2 articles that I distributed. One site made in August is still not receiving many visitors and the keywords are still way down in SERP’s. It may need more time or I may go back to it and write some more content and articles. I have had no time this week to do anything but move sites!
I am continuing to build sites using the keyword sniping technique making sure I add lots of original content and distributing original articles. It takes time for the sites to climb in SERP’s, it won’t happen overnight but I can assure you it will happen so have patience.
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