I just read a report on this guy who is about to make USD $1 million in Google AdSense income next year and he recommends:

1. Taking out the border of your ads
2. Make the links the same colour of your web site’s link colour

As you can see I have changed links in my AdSense ads to orange to match my site’s design. I have already removed the default border colours by making it look the same as the background colour of my page.

Other tips I have read about are:

1. Display a picture beside your ads to make people focus on your picture, which in turn makes them look at your ads and hope they will click on your ads more than usual.
2. Make the background colour of your ads the same as the background colour of your web page
3. Simply make your ads look like they are part of your page and not like ads.
4. Use the 336×280 large rectange ad. I have personally tested it on my site Oasis Fanatic and these ads get the highest click through rates than the other ads i have.

I personally use phpAdsNew to manage all my Google AdSense and other banner networks on all my sites. I just have to stick 1 piece of Javascript code on all my web sites and update it from my 1 installation of phpAdsNew.

Categories: Google AdSense | 5 Comments »

My friend introduced me to Studio Traffic a few weeks ago and I thought it was a scam. I have joined "paid emails" and "paid surveys" and I only got pennies to show for it after a year. So I assumed Studio Traffic was one of them.

After some investigation, I realised Studio Traffic can make you a lot money. Here’s how it works in a nutshell:

You make 1% commission per day of the amount of money you have in your account. You get $10 in your account when you sign up. What that means is you earn $0.10 per day or $3.00 per month with $10 in your account. You may choose to deposit money into your account to make more money. There is a maximum of $15000 per account. Do the math, 1% of $15000 per day is $150 per day or $4500 per month.

Let’s get real… Not everyone has $15000 to put into their accounts. So what can you do? Well you can do a bit of affiliate program marketing and get 10% of your sub-affiliates’ upgrade money.

Here’s how it works…. You get 10% whenever your sub-affiliates deposit money into their Studio Traffic accounts. That is passive, recurring money for you as long as they keep adding money into their account.

Here’s my take on Studio Traffic. Its much better than putting money in the bank. With 1% "interest" per day or about 30% "interest" per month, I get a lot more money than letting it sit in my normal bank account. Hell! The banks don’t pay as much even if I put my money in a fixed deposit account!

There is a catch! Your upgrade amount lasts for 1 year only. For example if you deposit $100 today, it will expire exactly 1 year from now and that $100 will be deducted from your account. Again if you do some math, the 1st 3 months of your initial deposit will not bring you profits. After 3 months, you will most likely break even and start making profits.

StudioTraffic pays you every month and you may choose to withdraw your earnings or add them into your account to "compound" your earnings. Here’s an example of compounding your earnings:

1. June: I just joined Studio Traffic and I deposit $990 in my account.
2. July: $1000 x 1% x 30 days = $300 in commissions. I add $300 back into my account.
3. August: $1300 x 1% x 30 days = $390 in commissions. I add $390 back into my account.
4. September: $1690 x 1% x 30 days = $507 in commissions. I add $507 back into my account.
5. October: $2197 x 1% x 30 days = $659.10 in commissions. I now have $2197 in my account at the beginning of October and got back my $990 initial deposit. Everything I make from here onwards is pure profit for me.

I hope you get what I am trying to say. You will get back your money after 3 months if you compound it or 4 months if you choose not to compound your earnings.

I am still skeptical but not cynical. I am doing more research on this StudioTraffic program. I shared it with my family and almost all of them are eager to join because it is so easy to leave your computer on and let your browser surf through the network of web sites and get paid.

Here are some of my concerns I have:

1. What if Studio Traffic closes down? Will I lose all my money?
2. Where is the Studio Traffic office? Are they run by good people? Why can’t I see any "real faces" and "real office addresses" on their web site?
3. Why must I use Studio Pay to receive my money and why does it take so long to get my account verified?

I am asking Studio Traffic the same questions above through their help desk and it would be interesting to see their answers to them.

In the meantime, you might want to check out Studio Traffic to see what the fuss it all about at http://www.StudioTraffic.com.

Categories: Affiliate Program Marketing | 28 Comments »

I’ve been shopping around looking for link exchange sites where webmasters can meet up to exchange links. So far I have found and registered for the following sites:

1. http://www.linkmetro.com/index.php - The best one of the lot in my opinion
2. http://www.linkpartners.com/index.html - Submit one site at a time. Each site uses different password
3. http://value-exchange.sitesell.com/ - Didn’t get confirmation email for 2 different email addresses… Don’t know why
4. http://www.linkexchanged.com/directory.cfm
5. http://link2me.com/index.cgi
6. http://www.123exchangelinks.com/index.htm
7. http://www.infowizards.com/
8. http://www.linkalizer.com/
9. http://www.linkmarket.net/
10. http://www.link-exchange.ws/index.htm
11. http://www.links-pal.com/add-your-website.html - PR5 web sites only!
12. http://gotlinks.com/

I have updated the link section of my blog. I realised I can’t just sit around and wait for people to come to my blog, add a link to my blog and submit their link request to me. It would be better if I go out and look for link partners.

A good way to do that would be to join the sites above. To be honest, I haven’t really been looking for partners but by putting my sites there, I have received over 300 emails requesting my to exchange links with them. Most of them are JUNK! They don’t seem to care who they are linking with and most of the link requests do not have anything in common with my web site at all.

I’m getting a feel for this link exchange thing and I plan to outsource it as soon as possible. Its like a customer service job you know? I could spend all day exchanging links and that would take me away from more important things I need to do.

Categories: Blog Updates, Search Engine Optimization | 2 Comments »

I created 2 AdSense sites last week, 2 AdSense sites this week and I am on course to build my 3rd one for the week tomorrow. It takes me about 5 hours to build 1 AdSense site but I am improving my productivity by using the same WordPress configuration for all the sites. My AdSense sites all use the WordPress blog with the same plugins and “hacks”.

At the end of August, I sat down and came up with a plan to create 20 AdSense sites in September. Why did I plan to do that? A huge chunk of profits from my Google AdWords campaigns are now gone. I have not recovered from the latest Google AdWords changes and I fear I might not be able to make money promoting affiliate programs with Google AdWords in the near future due to the high costs of advertisting. I used to have 5 consistent affiliate programs pumping money into my bank account but today I have only 1 consistent affiliate program and 2 inconsistent ones and 2 totally destroyed sources of income. Needless to say I am not in a very good position now.

I am hoping my 20 new AdSense sites will start to make an average of $30 per month per site starting from October. I estimate I need about 1 month to get them profitable so I have to start now to reap the rewards next month.

I have been experimenting with a few ways of building AdSense sites. I read about these ideas at blogs and forums…

1. WordPress blog + software generated directory pages
2. WordPress blog + RSS feed content
3. WordPress blog + articles directory
4. WordPress blog + Amazon store pages

I have decided to use a WordPress blog for ALL my future AdSense sites. I am testing every conceivable way of building these sites to see which one works better for me. I just completed a “type 4″ + “type 2″ AdSense site. I used RSS feeds to grab content to display the latest news on my web site’s topic and created an Amazon store directory. The Amazon store also uses XML Web Service from Amazon.com to grab related products and builds search engine friendly HTML pages. I instantly have over 100 pages of content created with the Amazon store builder script.

My AdSense sites are almost 100% automated. I can get the latest news via automated posts to my blog from RSS feed news items. The Amazon stores are updated automatically whenever there are new items available at Amazon.com. Unfortunately there is 1 thing that I cannot automate at the moment and that is exchanging links with other related sites!

Rick Butts claims to have found a way to automate link exchanges at RealityLinking.com. I don’t really understand what he was trying to say in the MP3 because he was so vague and secretive about it. I am skeptical but I signed up for their “tests”.

I know there are web sites I can join that can automate the exchanging of links by paying a monthly fee and pasting some HTML code to my web site. I need to do some research on these services. There are other services like LinkMetro.com that you can join to exchange links with other webmasters but they are not automated.

There is absolutely no way for me to spend my time manually exchaning links for each one of my sites. It is just too tedious! I can live with building my AdSense sites at the moment but I can’t waste my time exchanging links all day long. I need to OUTSOURCE it! The cool thing is whenever I have a problem, there is always a way to solve it. I received an email invitation to Mike Filsaime’s Outsource Secrets. You may go there and download a free MP3 and transcript of a discussion about outsoucing by Mike Filsaime and Carlos Garcia. It was just what I need at the moment to free up my time to do other things.

I have also been educating myself on “white hat” search engine optimization tips on how to optimize my web page’s “on page factors” with 3-4 of my target keywords I want to rank at the top 10 positions in Google. I put those keywords in the “title”, “h1″, “alt”, “h2″, “beginning and end of the page” etc. “Off page factors” would include getting links to my web site and having my most important target keyword in the “anchor text” of my incoming links. I learnt all this from the free lessons I got from the SEO Elite newsletter. SEO Elite is definitely a must have software on my “wishlist”. I find the free lessons at SEO Elite really easy to understand. I used to find the all the search engine optimization stuff really boring and confusing but Brad Callen makes it look easy and practical to use.

I learnt a huge lesson after building about 5 AdSense sites. You just can’t throw the “SEO principles” out of the window when you crank out “junk sites” with page generation software like Traffic Equalizer. I was stupid enough to believe in the hype that I could crank out “junk sites”, blog and ping them and wait for “idiots” to visit my ugly and disorganized web sites and click on my Google AdSense ads to make me rich after watching the AdSense Mastery videos. People are not stupid when they see sites like that. They know its crap and I know it. I don’t even have the cheek to ask someone else for a link exchange for my “junk sites”. If my sites don’t have incoming links, it would be hard for them to rank high in the search engines to get any useful traffic to my site. My latest web sites are much better. I have decided to scrap the use of page generation software for now.

Categories: Google AdSense, Search Engine Optimization | 8 Comments »

Thanks to Tom for pointing this out to me!

I usually turn of the blog listings cos I don’t want people to stumble on my junk pages. The blog will still be on the internet even if its off the listings.

At the settings page is says “A Public blog appears in your Blogger Profile. If you select “No” we will not show your blog anywhere on Blogger.com, but it will still be available on the Internet.”.

After reading:

http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=778&query=BlogMetaData%20&topic=0&type=f
http://help.blogger.com/bin/answer.py?answer=56

I now know that if I turn off the listing settings, Blogger will add the no follow meta tags in my page.

Therefore, do not turn off the public listing settings and you will not have the no follow meta tags and the search engine spiders will not be blocked from visiting the outbound links on your blog.

Categories: Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »

This is a follow up to my previous post about the Blog and Ping Solution. I have been testing this on 2 of my web sites that have been struggling to get their page indexed in the past 1 month or so. I have witnessed a significant increase in the number of pages of both web sites after deleting the <$BlogMetaData$> tag in my BlogSpot.com blog. The results are nothing mind blowing but its a good start with Yahoo.com

InternetMarketingGuy.com Indexed Pages - 6 September 2005

Google - 54
MSN - 47
Yahoo - 134

Site #2 Indexed Pages - 6 September 2005

Google - 1
MSN - 89
Yahoo - 74

I can’t tell you the URL of the 2nd site. I  "left it to die" since it had only 1 page indexed before I did this blog and ping change. Now it looks more alive than before. Now I solved the indexing problem, I need to see if it brings me more traffic.

Categories: Search Engine Optimization | 1 Comment »

Somehow, the old blog home page got displayed instead of the WordPress blog. I got it fixed now. I really don’t know how that happened.

Categories: Blog Updates | No Comments »