March 15th, 2009 | 
Author: 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.
After just checking on my stats I noticed a few visitors arriving from google for a few of my main target keywords like “european cruises”. After getting a bit excited about this I checked on google and sure enough my blog has been indexed in google for my main keywords at last. Although it is indexed it is still very low in the rankings for those keywords but that is what usually happens.
I love it when stuff like this happens because it is almost like google finally agrees that your site is worthy of a place in it’s indexes for the prime keywords for that niche however low in the rankings that the site may be.
My job now is to keep going with the backlinking strategy of getting quality inbound links using my target keywords as anchor text. Traffic was up again yesterday and today looks like it is going to rise a bit more again. I won’t see real massive increases in traffic until I get onto page 1 of google for those keyword phrases I am targeting though..
So realistically to get to my $100 a day target from this blog by now I should be at least up to $50 a day and seeing around 1000 visitors a day also.. Unfortunately I am falling short of that by some margin, I could blame the recession, global warming or make a million other excuses but I won’t, this cruise market is a tough one to crack. I am not going to back down or bottle it or anything like that though, I am more determined than ever to get to my target!
Now the good news is that I have seen a slow increase in traffic over the past few days and this has been reflected in my adsense income. I am now hovering around 15% of my target income a day. It fluctuates wildly, some days its a lot more and some days a lot less but averages around 15%.
I am still waiting for the rest of my articles to get written and then I will post and promote like a madman over the next few weeks and then just hope that the mighty google see fit to rank me highly for all the big juicy keywords that I am targeting. They will do it eventually but whether they will do it before the end of this challenge, who knows?
I get a lot of comments and emails from various people asking why I have chosen to concentrate on Adsense with this challenge when I could probably make more money using the affiliate model instead.
Whilst it is definitely true to say that a lot of money can be made using the afilliate model, it is not true to say that it is a better model to use all the time over Adsense or even other ad networks come to that and here is why..
The thing is with Adsense is that it is all about getting targeted visitors looking at your content and it is NOT about trying to presell them with a big hyped up sales pitch. The beauty of Adsense is that you can actually write some decent, honest and informative content, you needn’t concern yourself with getting the sale at the end of it, your icome is very passive, you just need the click. The rewards when done properly are great with Adsense and that is why I choose to use this model.
Having said all that, I also use the affiliate model an awful lot and have made just as much income if not more from doing it. I don’t prefer one method over the other, it is all part of an income machine that will hopefully keep churning out the bucks! The main point I always make is “don’t put all your golden eggs in 1 basket”.. Diversify and earn an income from as many sources as possible and you will survive in this business. Adsense is a great model for both beginners and experienced Internet marketers and this is why it should become part of your arsenal.
Traffic is slowly getting better again after last weeks dip but I still need some massive improvements over the coming few weeks. Thankfully, I am starting to see some great CPC on some clicks and CTR has improved slightly which has boosted my income from the blog. I am still hovering between 5 and 15% of my target income.
Which begs the question, can I still reach my target income for the blog by March 31st? I am ever hopeful but I really am in the hands of the great google as to whether I get the rankings for my target keywords or not. currently I am not ranking for them and until I do, I won’t see the massive increases in traffic I need. Most of the search engine traffic is for long tail variations of my target keywords. Yahoo and MSN are also starting to send me more traffic as well now and I am also seeing a slight increase in traffic from ezine articles.
I am starting to post more articles now as I get them back from my freelance writer. The interesting thing now is that I have a much better idea from my stats of which articles are performing better so I tend to use those as ideas for new articles targeting similar keyword phrases in the hope that they will catch on as well.
Onward and upward and I really hope that I start to get some good traffic over the coming week from my main keyword targets..
Over the past few days I have been busy building up links to individual posts that are performing the best with regard to adsense. In other words, I checked my google analytics account to see which posts were visited the most and started a backlink campaign using my target keywords for those particular articles as the anchor text. I am careful not to use the same anchor text, I use a variety of keywords to avoid it looking unnatural.
So far I haven’t seen any more progress over the past week with regard to traffic and also my adsense income has dropped back a bit. This is not abnormal and under normal circumstances I would turn a blind eye as this is just a normal part of building a site. You got to take the ups with the downs.. Unfortunately, I don’t have the luxury of time with this challenge which has left me feeling a bit frustrated. Oh well, I just got to ride this out and keep doing what I know works!
I am still waiting for my new batch of articles to be written and then I will get to work posting them for my massive blitz over the next month. Anyway here are my latest traffic stats.
It is not often that I get excited about keyword tools but I have to make an exception with Micro niche finder from James J Jones. It is currently at version 4 and I purchased it recently and already have seen 2 updates so it is definitely a product built to last.
Anyway, I have created a video for you to see how I use it to uncover great adsense and affiliate niches. The video only touches on the functionality and I don’t even begin to show you how good it is at finding affiliate products to promote, google trends, LSI keywords e.t.c.. Take a look below and as a special gift to you I have included a link to a spreadsheet I compiled in 15 minutes containing category keywords and article keywords for the niche I uncover in the video. For anyone that uses these keywords, they will probably be able to create an adsense site capable of earning between $5 – $20 a day quite comfortably. This is just one tiny niche uncovered by micro niche finder so don’t worry there are thousands out there for you to find.
To download the list of keywords that I uncovered from using micro niche finder then please click the following link. Free Research Download!
To briefly explain, the spreadsheet contains the main theme, 5 categories/silos and the main keywords to use in your articles. Obviously you may need to create some better titles but just make sure you use those keyword phrases in those titles. If you need help with creating profit pulling wordpress blogs then check out my guide.
Click here to find out more about Micro Niche Finder.. 
When building your site that you want to use adsense on, the process revolves around getting highly ranked in the search engines for your target keywords. The reason being that you will get more visitors and more visitors equals more adsense clicks equals more income.. Fine, but it doesn’t end there.
A few years back, google in their wisdom decided to give advertisers the opportunity to regulate how much they want to bid for ads on the content network which had a massive effect on how much income adsense publishers suddenly made. Instead of $1 per click they were getting 5 cents per click. This lead to the spate of adsense is dead theories that circulated around the IM community.
Since then, google have evolved their content network mechanism for advertisers to the point now where they have massive flexibility as to where they can place their adverts on adsense sites. An advertiser can now bid on any page that has adsense on and either pay per 1000 impressions or per click. This is where it gets interesting for us adsense publishers.
The system that most advertisers are having great success with is to find the top adsense sites for their keywords and locate the actual page that is ranked highly and place an adwords ad directly on that page. Why is this good for us? Well, when we get our sites ranking highly for certain keywords they become very hot targets for advertisers who do placement targeting. When they become hot targets you will start to see massive increases in earnings per click.
This is why it is better to find the pages that are doing well on your site and get as many good backlinks using your target keywords as anchor text. So long as you have done your on page SEO right and understood how to create a good site for adsense then you will eventually hit the top spots for the best keywords. When than happens, you will see the both edges of the sword, high amounts of visitors and top advertisers placing ads on your site.