So, you’ve purchased and have been extremely happy with a certain marketers’ products and are ready and willing to continue to buy from that marketer. Makes sense. But it doesn’t mean, unfortunately, that you let your guard down and no longer do the right thing for yourself.

Read through the sales copy! Including the bonuses…

Here’s an example;

Adsense Secrets (thread in the Warrior Forum, you may need to subscribe) – Now, Joel is very well known and this is not meant to disparage him in any way. His long-term customers have already let him know what they think and he’s adapted positively. From his apology, he may even have fooled himself.

But, what happened was that some folks purchased Joels’ new Adsense Secrets book and neglected to notice, because they didn’t read diligently enough, in one of the bonuses, that there was a recurring subscription also being agreed to.

What no doubt raised the heat was that the book was only $9.97 and the subscription was $29.95 per month! Even a well-seasoned marketer, Kim Standerline, needed a warning email from a fellow marketer to become aware of the additional charge.

Forced Continuity? It appears that this is the term for this sales method, not a new term either, which was not well-received at all.

Post from: EveryJoe

Forced Continuity?

Good for you, bad for others? Interesting…

“If you have a mobile-compliant website that complies with our program policies, you’re welcome to participate in AdSense for mobile.”

Well, of course Darren would somehow be the first to let us know about Adsense for Mobile, followed by soooo many others including Duncan. Its the comments that have piqued my interest. Consider;

Kat: “For those of us on pay-by-the-byte services, it’s expensive enough to download a regular page, even with images turned off.”

Andrey: “Another issue is that screens of mobile devices have very small resolution, so small that many users immediately abandon the idea of using these devices for more or less practical things. Imagine what would happen if a part of this originally insufficient space is eaten by ads?”

Paul: “Maybe it’s just because I only get a limited number of GPRS Mb bundled with my contract, but when I’m using my phone to get information, the last thing I need is adverts of any kind.

They are a waste of bandwidth, and trying to persuade me whilst I’m on the move, to waste my time looking at a plug for a product is just a waste of everybody’s effort.”

Tom: “I had just decided a mobile website wasn’t really worth the trouble since quite a few mobile devices are coming out that do very well for browsing regular websites (and work just fine with regular Adsense ads).”

On the positive side;

Bert: “WOW! Great….Good news to all the publishers that ad sense is using mobile websites. This will be beneficial to all the money makers and its very easy to create mobile website and once we get this it will be very simple to set up ads.”

Lexx: “The next generation of adverts when they roll out on Google maps will not only be tolerated by mobile users it will be demanded. Cheers!”

“For the time being, publishers are welcome to add one ad unit to any mobile website that complies with our program policies.”

Post from: EveryJoe

Ads On The Move

Does anyone have “reliable figures available that put Google’s splog problem into perspective.”

Matt Mullenweg pointed to it – “Why Google is the service of choice for sploggers.”

Quoting Jonathan Bailey from Plagiarism Today (a darn good man) Michael Pollitt of The Guardian says: “Google, for better or worse, has its hand in every aspect of spam blogging. It finances them through AdSense, hosts them through Blogger and directs traffic to them via the search engine.”

There is, Bailey believes, some pain ahead for Google: “These sites do make Google money and are not going to be done away with without both spending money to stop them, and losing at least some business.”

Without figures from Google, how much pain there might be is frustratingly unknown. Other than Splogfighter’s monthly data, there are no reliable figures available that put Google’s splog problem into perspective. And that’s badly needed to help clear – or damn – the company’s name.

Anyone?

Post from: EveryJoe

Speaking Of Answers

I recently approached Alborz who runs a blog with car advice and told him I wanted to do a little experiment with his Google Adsense adverts. I told Alborz that I wanted him to change his Adsense link color to match his sites link color. At the time, Caradvice.com.au had the default blue that is standard with Adsense.

When Alborz makes a post on his blog which contains hyperlinks, you’ll see that the links are a brownish color. My advice was to take this brown color and insert it as the Adsense link color.

Pretty simple huh?

A few days ago Alborz informed me that while his traffic had risen 25% (nothing to do with what I did!), his daily Adsense earnings had doubled!

One must note that we did NOT;

• Add additional adverts
• Change the advert format
• Modify the advert positions

All I told him was to change the link color. Pretty cool eh?

If you would like help in increasing your click through rate (CTR), contact me and I’ll see what I can do. All advice I offer is free however you must agree that any findings/results may be posted here on WorkBoxers for all to see.

Post from: EveryJoe

Adsense Case Study – Caradvice.com.au

I will be advising in the following areas;

• Adsense placement
• Colors
• Blending
• Relevancy

The first case study will be a website that I have run for almost 2 years, a funny video web log.

Here is what my adsense looked like back in 2004.

Uggrrk. Ugly yes? Not blended, colors way off and just screams “I’M AN AD!”

Here’s what the current Adsense placement looks like. (Click for larger image)

Let’s sum up why this works better;

1) Link Unit at the top of the page, above the fold.
2) Vertical adsense bar on the right, alongside the content.
3) Adsense Link color matches my blog post link color
4) No borders, blends in with the content

Conclusion
I started with no knowledge of Adsense and my initial experiment was to think of adsense in a design way of thought. I matched the border color to my header image and the result was an advert that stood out like a sore thumb.

Over time I have learnt the secrets, match link color, blend blend and blend.

Oh and relevant, unique content helps too. If I have to tell someone what the “ultimate” tip is, its that content = the key to Adsense success.

Post from: EveryJoe

Adsense Case study – FunnyVids.us