Archive for March, 2009

As a precursor to my Adsense bootcamps, I thought it might be a good idea and also a bit of fun to challenge you to take up your own challenge to create a brand new site and get it up to $10 a day within 2 months. You can follow my methods or use your own, you have free reign over what you do and the challenges are ongoing. What I mean by that is that there is no stipulated start and end time, you decide when you want to start it but when you do, you have 2 months to get the site earning $10 a day from adsense.

Even though the challenge is to get a site from zero to $10 a day in 2 months, winners of the free lifetime bootcamp membership will be judged on how impressed I am by their efforts. I will pick 5 winners altogether and they will be chosen at various times over the coming year.

Right, It’s your turn now to take up the gauntlet and challenge yourself! I am starting a section on my 100 bucks challenge forum called “The Adsense Mini Challenge” in there I would like you to post progress of your own Adsense mini challenge. Just start a new thread with “Your Name – Your Chosen Niche” in the subject line, in my case I would have written “Stephen Crooks – European Cruises”.

It is very important that you read and follow the rules I have posted in the mini challenge forum post and any posting of adsense stats that are not allowed will be removed for your own safety really. However, you are ultimately responsible for what you post and I strongly urge you to read Adsense TOS again to be really familiar with what you are allowed to report. Also, try not to share URLS of your sites with each other for your own safety again.

When you report on your mini challenge in the forum, you have free reign to post as often and as much as you like but always remember I can spot bulls**t a mile off and I will only be awarding membership places to people I feel are putting in the most effort and reporting that as clearly and eloquently as possible. If you can demonstrate in words how much effort you are putting in and offer proof if possible then you stand a chance of winning.

Above all though, I want you to have a lot of fun with this and also start earning some bucks!

Okay, I will cut to the chase my challenge to make $100 a day from Adsense from just 1 blog is about to end on March 31st and I am sorry to say I have failed to reach the $100 a day I had set out to reach when I began the challenge.

So how much am I earning in Adsense of the back of my European cruise blog? Well, it is now averaging $20 a day which is well short of my target for the 3 months. I am experiencing some very mixed feelings regarding this challenge, on the one hand I am feeling slightly angry and sad that I never reached the target but on the other hand I feel greatly appreciative to everyone of you that has shown me how inspired you have been from following my challenge. I can’t begin to express how humble I feel to you all for all the great support and interest you have shown.

When I began the challenge, I thought it might get a bit of interest and a few people following it but I am completely and utterly staggered at how popular it all became. A lot of you have asked what is going to happen when the challenge finally finishes? Rest assured, the challenge may be over but my quest to reach $100 a day from this 1 blog continues until I get there. I will pursue it in a much more relaxed fashion of course and it now gives me a chance to catch up on all the other projects that I have placed on the backburner.

For all those people that have purchased my “Cash Cow Guide to Adsense Wealth” and all future customers of the guide, I will shortly write an additional report that details the challenge and where it went well and where it failed. Also all customers will receive updates to the cash cow guide when I write it.

So the challenge failed to reach $100 a day in 3 months which like I say, is hugely disappointing but it is averaging $20 a day virtually on auto pilot now. That is $608 a month or $7300 a year, that is money that I wasn’t earning before the challenge began. The income from this 1 blog currently would pay for an average mortgage.. I just want to point out the power of building sites in the manner that I have described. YOU have the power to achieve this and more, trust me, you CAN do it and you WILL.

Adsense Bootcamp Membership

Membership Goal

To get all members to set an income goal from Adsense and give them all the resources, information and tools needed to get there.

Membership Framework

The membership will be split between 3 modules.

Module 1 – Newbies
Module 2 – Intermediate
Module 3 – Advanced

Members can sign up to whatever level they feel comfortable with and I will detail what each module will be about so you can be assured that you sign up at the correct level for your current level. To give you an idea, the newbies module will be for people who are fresh to Internet Marketing and have heard about Adsense but know nothing about it or any other marketing topics. The Intermediate module will be for people who know about Adsense and maybe have a few sites up but are earning next to nothing from it. The Advanced level is for people who have a good grounding in Internet Marketing already but would like to vastly improve their Adsense income.

Whatever module you choose the core principles will be the same. This will not be like the usual memberships which provide a bunch of learning materials and just let you get on with it. This membership will require that you complete a set of monthly tasks aimed to get you directly toward your income goals as soon as possible. In fact it will be almost mandatory that you complete the tasks to remain a member. Your success is the core reason I want this to work because, your success will mean the membership is working which means I can roll it out to more and more people on the back of that success.

Each module will include PDF’s, videos and a private forum. Each month, I will provide new wordpress themes and HTML templates, PLR content, niche research and keywords that will make for great Adsense sites plus more stuff yet to be disclosed.

The pricing structure for the membership will be very affordable, and will vary according to the module, Newbies will be cheaper than advanced obviously. I hope to open the doors toward the end of April.

I have recieved many emails and comments from various people asking me if there were any good alternatives to Adsense. A lot of the people asking have either had their adsense accounts banned for whatever reason or their applications turned down.

I am not talking about affiliate marketing or any other Internet marketing strategies in this case. I am discussing advertiser networks that offer similar services to Adsense.

Thankfully there are quite a few good alternatives to Adsense and in this first post in the series I offer a review of Adbrite’s publisher service.

Adbrite

I like adbrite very much, their service is a bit more relaxed with regard to their terms and conditions than Adsense. For example you can place ads on sites about gambling as well as the normal stuff. However, they don’t accept sites related to adult themes. Just like adsense they do not tolerate sites that are made for ads or any type of gimmicks and incentivising.

Adbrite pays their publishers after 60 days have passed since the click on the ad. They then will payout on the 10th of every month. Basically this means you have to wait initially for 60 days from the first click before you get paid and only if it meets your minimum check amount. Unlike Adsense they also only offer payment by check currently.

Adbrite works by setting up zones on your site which will be filled by ads. Adbrite can either place these ads automatically, or you the publisher can approve or reject ads accordingley. This is the major difference between Adbrite and Adsense, with Adsense you cannot approve the ads on your site, although to fair you can reject certain URLS from publishing ads on your site. They also offer some pretty neat “in-context” ads that generate ads when you hover your mouse over certain keywords.

Earnings from Adbrite are pretty comparable to Adsense generally speaking and I also see similar click through rates also.

Signing up for a publisher account is fairly painless and is usually set up for you very quickly.

So it’s day 77 of the challenge and whilst I am resigned now to the fact I won’t reach my $100 a day from the European cruise blog by March 31st I am seeing small increases overall in income every day. This is partly due to the small increases in traffic every day but largely due to some ever improving CPC stats.. I would love to be able to see if this is due to advertisers doing placements or whether it some sort of trust issue from google.

I am speculating but it is something I notice with all my adsense sites, the CPC usually starts lower than what I would hope to expect for the niche but gradually improves as the site begins to age. It could be that smart pricing applies to all new sites and they have to earn the trust from google by converting regularly for the advertisers before they start giving you the better paying ads.. Anyway, I am now seeing above average CPC which is having a positive effect on my adsense income, I am now regularly hitting 20% of my target. Here are my latest AWstats for the blog, the slight downturn in traffic for the 13th and 14th was due to some server problems again..

The promotion keeps going and it is starting to show in the rankings for my main keywords.. Interestingly my main keyword phrase “European Cruises” is seeing my blog indexed around position 60 now in the US listings which is a big rise in rankings from below 300 a couple of weeks ago. It is still to low in the rankings to see any real traffic yet but at least it is going in the right direction and I am hopeful it will make the first page soon. However, in the UK listings it is still indexed between 350 and 400 for some reason.

I am also starting to get some link requests which is always a sure sign that other webmasters are starting to view my blog as a bit of an authority and I am not talking about the normal spammy type requests but genuine requests from relevant sites, one of which even offered money to place a context link in one of my articles back to their site.

Some of you may or may not be aware that the Adsense team has recently updated their requirements for adsense publishers to include extra information in their privacy policies.

It is all to do with the use of the “DoubleClick Dart Cookie” that Adsense places on users computers when they visit your site. This cookie in essence tells the Adsense team how the visitor interacts with the advertiser’s website once they have clicked on an ad on your site. The idea being that google can then get a better idea of what each visitor to your site who clicks an adsense ad is interested in. They can then use this information to display more relevant ads to that visitor in future.

The implications for us as webmasters is that we now have to tell our visitors via our privacy policy that we are using 3rd party advertising companies to serve ads on our websites and that they can use information gleaned from the visitors visits to other websites to serve ads to them. You must also provide a link to more information about this and how they can opt out of it if they want.

There is a great resource recommended by Julia Anderson on the warrior forum for creating a privacy policy tailored to your own needs, take a look at http://www.freeprivacypolicy.com/ so thanks to Julia for that link.

We all have until April 8th 2009 to make the necessary changes, they don’t say what will happen if we don’t but I suggest you do make these changes.

Sorry it has been a while since my last update but my attention recently has been distracted by some personal issues which I have had to attend to. Although I haven’t been able to put much work into my cruise blog over the past week I am still seeing some steady but slow improvements in both traffic and income. I thought for a change it would be good to show you my google analytics visitor graph for the european cruise blog..

This graph shows an overview of the amount of visitors ranging from early February through to today. As you can see this demonstrates the slow but steady rate at which my visitor count is rising.

The screenshot above shows various visitor statistics relating to average page views, time on site, etc..

As for my adsense income from the blog, well I am still averaging around 15% of my target still per day and some days seeing more and some days less.

It is becoming clear that I probably won’t make a hundred bucks a day by March 31st but I hope that the growth rate of my visitors above demonstrates to you that one day I will be earning that. All I have to do is ensure that the growth rate continues.

With just 27 days left of the challenge I feel like I am in one of those dreams where you are running as fast as you can but moving really slowly. I am running out of time here to get to my $100 a day by March 31st and I need an adrenaline injection quick..

I have absolutely no doubt whatsoever that I can get this blog up to $100 a day, it will get there for sure but I fear it may take a bit longer though. This isn’t me throwing in the towel by the way, this is just me being realistic and honest.

So back to the latest traffic stats..

As you can see, my visitor count is pretty constant at around 180 visitors, around 70% of them being unique visitors. Even though I am now indexed for most of my main target keywords, they are still very low in Googles index to actually get any traffic yet.

The best way to get this blog the adrenaline injection it needs is to just keep going with the backlinking from quality, authority sites in Google using my target keywords as anchor text.

Over the coming week I am going to write emails to as many authority webmasters in the cruise niche as possible and see if I can get some link exchanges and maybe if they are willing some one way links. I will also hopefully get the rest of my articles finished, published and a lot of them sent to article directories like Ezine for publishing. I will also look into getting a mini network of blogs on various free resources like blogger, google pages etc with articles including links back to the main European Cruise blog.

As for the performance of Adsense, well CPC is actually a bit more consistently higher than before, maybe advsertisers are starting to throw some money at this again. It could also be possible that my blog is getting some adwords placement targetting which could be the reason for the improvement. The end result is that I am around 12% of the way to my goal and yesterday it was nearer 20%.. A long way to go.