Deal Book is reporting that Yahoo will run a trial of Google Adsense for Search on a small percentage of its search results. The move is reported to be an attempt at raising shareholder value and to allow Yahoo to demand more money from Microsoft with its bid for Yahoo.

Am I the only one who finds this weird? Yahoo has its one search platform and while it has not caught on in the industry like Google Adwords has it is a competitor to Adwords. I will admit that I don’t have a lot of experience with Yahoo Ads. I was accepted into the program early on and I ran it a little on a couple of sites, but the ads where not really relevant to the content on those sites so I removed it and put Adsense back on those sites. It appears really the main people this program has been able to attract and keep are those who have been removed from the Adsense program for what ever reason. Regardless of my lack of experience with Yahoo, this just seems like bad business. Why would they pump up revenue for a competitor. Perhaps decisions such as this are why they have put themselves in the position to be acquired in the first place. Maybe Yahoo should take Microsoft’s offer since it seems they don’t have the talent needed to run their own business.

I personally think this acquisition will help the marketers on the net, especially those of us who derive revenue from contextual based ads. Right now Google is the leader in this area and as a result are able to set the tone for the market. More competition in this area will possibly mean a higher cut of advertising revenue for the people who actually generate the revenue. Microsoft has not made a lot of progress with its ads program, but combining both what MS has and what little progress Yahoo has made, should require Google to offer more incentive to prevent publishers from jumping ship.

Of course there is also the chance the merger will allow Microsoft to regain some ground in this area. Microsoft has a habit of being late to the game with these types of items and then pulling out ahead and crushing the competition. With the additional eyeballs the Yahoo properties will give MS, they may be able to start their road to dominance on the net. Guess we’ll just need to wait and see what happens.

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This post was spurred by an email I received earlier today. I can monetize almost any niche. I’ve effectively monetized weight loss sites, golf sites, local community sites, and a host of others. I usually don’t talk about how much money on this blog, mainly because its no ones business but my own. And I’m not really going to now, but i will say I do okay from adsense on 65 different domains and a whole bunch of blogger blogs. Most of these I’ve set up a year ago and have not touched since other than to pay the hosting fees and an occasional domain name renewal.

Now you will hear a lot of people saying Adsense is dead and its not worth it, but I disagree. Adsense is very much alive and while I’m not earning Shoemoney Money, I do okay. Not enough to only have sites and still not work a day job, but I can guarantee its better than a lot of people do. Now a site like this I’m a total failure. Adsense won’t work well on a make money site. You can do okay with Clickbank products as an affiliate, but to tell the truth, I’ve never been a big fan of Clickbank. The main reason is most products on Clickbank are crap. Especially the make money eBooks. I could push them on you every few posts and chances are quite a few of you will buy one every now and then. But since I know they are crap, my conscious won’t allow me to push them. Guess that’s why I’m not earning a full time living from the net yet. I can’t just go after the almighty dollar without regard to whether it really helps any one or not. How do I know they are crap, because I bought a lot of them. You won’t find much more in most of the books than you will with a well crafted Google search. Besides if you where smart and looked in the right places most of these books and products are on the web for free. I won’t tell you how to find them out of respect for the people who create them, but they are indexed if you know how to use Google correctly. There might be a post somewhere in the archives that gives some Google searching tips. Also if you think like a black hatter you may could find them too.

Well back to Adsense, I’ve been spending a lot of time dropping Entrecards the last few days and I have seen quite a few placements that are not optimum or even close. Since I have not posted on Adsense in quite a while, I guess its time for one. Repeat after me, Adsense is a numbers game, Adsense is a Numbers game. Without the numbers you won’t make the bucks. Everyone chases the higher paying clicks. And while I don’t disregard clicks with higher payouts( health keywords can pay 3-6 bucks a click) I don’t worry as much about whether I optimize a site for 3 dollar keywords or 25 cent keywords. In the end they will both do well. Traffic is the main ingredient for doing well with Adsense. So that should be your main focus. A close second should be content.

Here are a few of my tips for Adsense placement and sites.

1. Use Wordpress for Adsense sites. Make sure you get all the best plugins and a decent theme that matches your niche. I won’t list the plugins as there are hundreds of lists around. Pay attention to SEO type plugins. See the main ingredient.
2. Place a banner Adsense ad before your last post. Sticky post is great for this . Match your theme’s colors and don’t have a border( In fact never have a border around an Adsense ad)
3. Use the more link in every post. At the end of your post template drop in a Medium or Large rectangle. You can set this up in your single.php and never worry about it. Or you can download the Adsense Deluxe plugin and use that. Make sure you set up a channel for each one. As you need to find out which format works the best for your content. You can also play around with a left side Wide Skyscraper, but test this as some niches do well with this and some do not. Adsense places the most expensive ads first, so you want the best ad in the most clicked location. Watch your channels and their CTR. Modify placement depending on where the visitor is more likely to click.
4. Do your homework. You need to optimize each post for certain keywords. I suggest getting a Wordtracker account to do this with, but you can use some free options. In my opinion the Wordtracker subscription is well worth the yearly subscription fee and it pays me back every year within a week of my purchase. You don’t need to spam the keywords all through your post. Just use them in the title, first paragraph and at the end of the post. Use synonyms of your words through out the rest of your post.
5. Write your posts. Don’t use a lot of PLR content. You can use it for filler, but not for the entire site. You want content that is good enough that someone will want to read it, but not good enough that they are totally satisfied. Leave them wanting more. Remember the rectangle after your post.
6. Write more posts. Start pinging when you get around 20 posts set up. Separate out the posts on different dates. If you want to put up all the posts at one time, then just back date them to earlier dates.
7. Wrote more posts– You need at least 100 posts on a word press blog before you start seeing any real traffic, so post more. Now this is where some people will disagree with me. Some people say set up Adsense sites with only a few pages, 15 -25 articles. Do this if you want, but your results will not be stellar and you will be left wanting more. Remember Adsense is a numbers game. The more people who see your ads the more you will earn. The more pages you have the more entry points into your site.
8. Write more posts. Start promoting. Install the Google Sitemap plugin and have it ping Google every time you post. Write more posts. Look at the social sites. Promote your stories to Social sites that seem to have similar topics as what your topic is. This is really important. It won’t do you any good to promote a health site on Digg, Find one that works for health type sites. I could tell you exactly where to spend your time on promoting this niche, but then you would be competing with me. I’ll give you the bucket, but I’m not going to pour the water for you.
9. Promote more. Find forums on your topic and contribute. Don’t spam the forums( this is the mistake so many people make) Learn the rules and contribute. Post a couple of topics of interest and answer other posts, Ad your sig link to every post. Do this for a couple of years. Hint, once you get enough posts on a forum on a broad niche, you cna change your sig to help with indexing a new site as well as bring you instant traffic. For example if you have 1000 posts in a forum about exercise, then you could very easily promote a site about yoga, or weight loss, or a whole bunch of other topics.
10. Don’t put Adsense on Make Money, Games, Forums, Tech type sites( this one is not absolute as some sub topics can do okay). People who visit these sites don’t click, no matter how blended you make the ads. All you will do is to get yourself smart priced and it will bring down your overall earnings on all your sites. For some people who do click, check out one of my earlier posts.

I regularly get CTR’s for 25-50% on most of my sites. The most important thing I’ve said here, if you want good content, but not great content. Build your traffic. Post in forums, social and bookmarking sites. Submit your feed to every directory you can find. If you do this religiously there is no way you will not start earning some decent money with Adsense. If you cheat and don’t work at it, you will say Adsense is dead too. Remember more ads is not always the answer. The only thing you definitely want more of is traffic and entry points.

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One of the blogs I read regularly is ReadWriteWeb. I mainly read this blog because the authors are usually way ahead of the bell curve when it comes to issues around the web. They published a story today talking about the coming privacy issues and war that they predict will occur as result of those issues. Well doh, This has been coming for a long time. Its just made headline news with the recent busting of companies such as Facebook and Sears doing some fairly interesting items with user’s data. Perhaps this type of stuff has been done all along its just that now they are getting caught.

As long as there is money to be made on the web( which will be forever) then people will try to gain a competitive advantage through the use of data. Imagine an advertising system where a visitor was instantly identified when they visited a site and data was analyzed on their past purchasing history. Then the site layout was modified dynamically to similar layouts of sites where you have made purchases previously. Or certain ads where shown to you for products you where likely to purchase based on what you purchased before.

It does not take a brain surgeon to figure it if one could figure it out that this would be some powerfully effective advertising and conversions would definitely increase.

Now we are not quite there yet, mainly because companies do not have enough data and the database apps are not efficient enough to find it quick enough for the billions and billions of records such a system would need to process to make correct decisions, but we may be before long.

With the advent of more high level programming languages for web applications such as Asp.Net and Web services, this type of application becomes more of a reality. How much would Advertiser’s pay to own such an application. Well its safe to say who ever builds it won’t have to work again nor will their children or their children’s children. Google, Microsoft, IBM, and definitely Facebook and Sears would be beating down your door begging for a meeting.

Well enough of my rambling, but this is some interesting food for thought. I may have to start working on picking up my programming skills a little more. Well a lot more because while I can envision such a system, I definitely am not qualified to write one. I would not even know how to start to develop the ERD for the database and I aced the database classes in college.

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