Money Schemes - Learn How To Make Money Online

I’ve been hunting high and low for any information on this and can find nothing. It looks like Google Analytics is broken at the moment and has been for the last few days. A couple of the problems I’m experiencing:-

1. Visitor graph on the dashboard is not including the last/current day
2. Goal reporting is all over the place, selecting today’s date seems to bring up yesterdays goals
3. Visitor numbers vary wildly between what the graphs show and what the site usage stats report

I’ve taken a screen grab of the first problem, if you look closely you can see that I’ve selected a date range from March the 9th to March the 12th. When I hover my cursor over the last day on the graph it only shows data up until the 11th. The strange thing is if you only select a date range from the 11th to the 11th it highlights and shows data from the 10th, something is seriously screwed.

I was wondering if maybe some sort of daylight saving has been implemented stateside that has caused some problems, computers hate dates! I rely so heavily on the stats for all my websites that even little things like this can end up costing me money/ me missing an opportunity.

I’ve just this moment gone to sign into my Kontera account and a few things have changed. Least importantly there is a new sign in form (this always catches me out because I rely so much on Firefox to remember my passwords). Once you have trawled through your old e-mails to find your password the next thing you’re faced with is some new terms & conditions. Seeing as how the changes were publisher requests and not advertiser requests I took the usual assumption that all was fine and agreed!

This is where you get to the meat of the Kontera updates, the reporting. The very simplistic date range and website reports have now been greatly expanded. First of all you’re given a 1 week summary up until the last confirmed days earnings (that’s still normally 1 day behind real time). Even better you now get a monthly graph allowing you to see how your earnings fluctuate day by day, this is a great addition, I’d certainly never realised how much my earnings with Kontera fluctuate.

Under detailed reports you are faced with just about the same options as what the old Kontera offered. Pick a date range and then decide if you want to see for all websites or just one. Not that interesting really. It’s the last 2 report options that have been offered that will really help you to make more money with Kontera. The keyword report will show you which words/phrases are getting the most clicks for whatever website you choose. In that past this has always been left to guess work but now you know what people are clicking on you can think about altering your content to suite. I’m sure above the fold is just as important with Kontera in text advertising as the more traditional ad blocks. Lastly there is the URL report, this does pretty much the same as the keyword report but instead tells you which URLs on your website get the most clicks. By combining the information from these last 2 reports you really do have a much better chance of making even more money with Kontera.

Kontera has always been one of my favourite ad networks, not only do they pay very well but to date I’ve found that implementing them on a website that already contains adverts doesn’t affect your other revenues. If you haven’t already I’d recommend you give Kontera a go.

When I first started this blog one of my main aims was to achive some sort of ranking for perhaps what is one of the most popular 3 word search phrases on the internet today “make money online”. I even went to the trouble of securing a keyword targeted domain name. The problem with blogging though is that so much of what you will write will not be keyword specific and my success was not exactly startling, I did break the top 30 mark for several months and received some nice traffic for the phrase but not the huge quantities of traffic I really wanted. In the end I decided to forget about my primary keywords and just blog!

I do like my stats and have a routine that I follow for checking Google Analytics, one of those checks is to see what searches are bringing people and how long they stay. Part of being successful on the internet is the ability to adapt and it is those stats that have brought about a few changes. I noticed that a search for money making schemes was starting to bring more visitors than anything make money online related. Money making schemes was not one of my phrases that I’d ever mentioned but through links from other websites this blog was ranking well so I decided to push it and see what happened. I’m ranked number 9 on Google at the moment but it will be interesting to see how the on-the-page changes I’ve made affect that ranking, I’m noticing that my search traffic is going up and up all the time.

It just goes to show that checking your keyword stats might give you some ideas for phrases that you’d never normally consider targeting.

This is something I don’t do enough, going through the stats to find out where the majority of my visitors come from. When it comes to making money from your website this data can actually be some of the most important. Some pay-per-click programs will only pay your for North American clicks (WidgetBucks for example) so if you’re not getting a high percentage of that type of traffic then is it worth using them? A hell of a lot of affiliate deals that you’ll find on the various networks are also geo sensitive, you might think you’re advertising one thing but the majority of your visitors are seeing something totally different.

Perhaps one of the most important examples of this to me is being an e-bay affiliate. E-bay has a deal with Commission Junction to manage their affiliates but depending on which Commission Junction you sign up at will depend on which e-bay you are promoting. If your traffic is quite diverse then it’s a nightmare and not worth using them at all, lets face it a UK customer is very unlikely to buy something from the US e-bay etc I have a US and UK affiliate account but I only use them on websites where over 80% of all the traffic is from one location.

When it comes to checking I swear by Google Analytics, mainly because it’s free but also because it once wasn’t and so you can fully appreciate the time and effort that has been put into it’s development. If you’re running a WordPress blog and don’t want to have to check a full on stats package then something like FireStats can be a life saver, besides it’s worth it just for the little flags that appear next to your commentators!

From now on this is going to be the official home of the Adsense-Alert utility I developed. In brief all it does is sit on your desktop notification area updating itself every 20 minutes with how much Adsense money you’ve made so far today. Checking Adsense earnings was something that used to take up waaayyy too much of my day so this was my way around that whole logging in etc etc process.

I installed the free trial of the AsRep adsense reporting script a couple of years ago, within 2 hours I’d upgraded to the full software. What AsRep does is allow you to track your Adsense variables in real time and with a lot more detail. Want to know what search phrases are generating clicks? Or how about what referring domain works best with what colour combination? AsRep basically provides you with all the information that Adsense should and in real time. Installation couldn’t be easier, the actual script takes 5 minutes to setup for anybody with any experience of installing things like WordPress. To actually track your Adsense all you have to do is copy the tracking code to your pages with Adsense on, it’s also worth spending a couple of minutes putting in descriptions for your custom channels. AsRep even has the ability to cut out dodgy clicks by limiting click-troughs from the same IP. The only thing that I think is missing is the ability to report on how much money you are making, because AsRep is not tied into Google’s system it can’t show your earnings, then again that’s not really the point of the program (if you’re looking for an easy to use Adsense Earnings popup check out Adsense Alert). What AsRep can do is help you pinpoint what is and isn’t working, what keywords are the most clickable plus much more.

ps The BIG downside of AsRep is that their affiliate program isn’t active, DOH!!!!

There’s a huge contest going on at the moment, John Chow and ShowMoney are going head to head in a month long challenge to see who can increase their RSS subscribers the most. Of course this is a clever peice of marketing, if either one of them attempted this same stunt on their own then if would never be half as effective (and for us bloggers the prizes they are dishing out wouldn’t be as good either). At the moment it looks like Chow has it with some amazing jumps in the last few days, hundreds at a time. What does seem strange is that both contestants have started adopting similar approaches, to get people who already subscribe to subscribe via as many different methods as possible. But why should this matter?

The truth is it doesn’t, unless you are somebody who takes notice of the RSS count when deciding a price. You see the RSS count is one very significant way in which bloggers set their advertising rates and services like ReviewMe and pay-Per-Post decide on a fair price. What John Chow and ShowMoney are effectively doing is saying I’ve got so many thousands of RSS subscribers but the truth is that after this competition they may end up with a huge amount of duplicate subscribers, affecting the number of eyes your advert on their feed is shown before. It amazes me how so many of the factors that advertisers deem important are so easy to fix, what is to stop me auto setting up a few thousands e-mail accounts and bumping my or anybody else’s RSS count? Even better why not pay a few dollars and have it done for me in Asia. The RSS subscriber count is no more reliable than Alexa which can be cheated by something as simple as leaving an auto-refresher running.

At the end of the contest both John Chow and ShoeMoney are going to have a way of justifying increased ad prices and for that reason it has worked very well, whether I’d want to be one of those advertisers or not is a very different question.

Sounds like a scam doesn’t it? It’s not though, it’s just a very simple tactic I discovered by accident that I’ve now applied to a number of my content pages. It was something that literally did double my Adsense earnings overnight and what’s best, it was something that happened totally by accident.

When Less Content Is More Adsense

It started of when I wrote an article about cold sores and potential cures. I’d just got back from a family holiday to Alcudia in Majorca and was suffering from the worst outbreak of cold sores in my life. I was feeling pretty rubbish, my mouth was killing me and I had to update a website that had been ignored for several weeks. The only thing I could think of writing about was my cold sores and if anybody knew any cures. Of course to make the article slightly more useful I went through all the methods I use to prevent them, old wives tales and more importantly linked to the best resource I could find on the internet. As was my way at the time I put an Adsense channel on the page and forgot about it. Two months later whilst going through some Adsense earnings I could see that my Cold Sore channel was doing ok, about $100 from a single page over 2 months. Cool. Seeing as how it was such a good start I decided that I’d keep an eye on that channel as part of my daily checks for a little while.

About a week later something strange started to happen. The earnings from that page went from $1-$2 a day to more like $5. The amount of traffic hadn’t changed, I couldn’t figure out what was going on. It was then that I ran a link check and found out that the cold sore authority page I had been linking to had been taken down. I don’t know why but the whole website had just gone. But why would that affect my earnings? My guess was that people were finding my page through Google (it was ranked in the top 3 for cold sore cures), in the past they were jumping of to the authority site finding their answers and being happy. Without that link working they were now using my page as a jumping of point for Adsense ads. That’s certainly what the CTR seemed to indicate. As a further experiment I decided to remove some more of the content from that page, just enough to not give any definite answers but still make the page useful. The result was almost instant, from $5 a day to over $8 a day. Eventually as the content became stale the page fell down the rankings and the Adsense income from that page dried up, but whilst it lasted it was a great discovery.

In finding this out I then applied the same technique to several other content pages. I had lots of pages ranked very highly for many phrases. Once a page was established in the rankings it was very easy to just remove a couple of the outbound links and even re-word the page ever so-slightly to make it less of a definite answer to what people were searching for. On every page I tried this I noticed a significant increase in Adsense earnings. It’s a technique I still apply to this day on many of my content websites and it’s still working. The key is to rank your page first and then re-adjust your content for Adsense.