Turning clicks into cash

DARREN Rowse is an accidental entrepreneur. The Melbourne-based lay preacher has earned more than $700,000 from internet advertising since 2003 simply by working out what people want to read on the internet.

Now he runs the B5Media Network of 320 bloggers with co-founders Shai Coggins from Adelaide and Jeremy Wright from Toronto after 18 months ago raising $US2 million in venture capital.

Mr Rowse was an internet amateur when he started blogging in 2002 after a friend sent a link to a blog in an email.

"That first experience of a blog showed me how powerful the medium was at giving individuals voices and helping them form communities around particular topics. I started my first blog that very day.''

But he didn't realise the commercial potential until 2003 when travelling to Morocco and Spain.

He posted holiday snaps and a review of his new digital camera on a blog. Nobody looked at his pictures. But they read his camera review in their hundreds.

Digital Photography School was born, a name that ranks well in the search engine optimisation (SEO) stakes, which means it is easy to find with a Google search.

As his website traffic increased to the tens of thousands a week, Mr Rowse also discovered Google Adsense.

Adsense, like similar programs run by Yahoo, pays websites for displaying advertising procured by Google.

Google maintains the ads and pays the owner of the website based on the number of times that users click on them.

Advertisers bid in a Google-run auction for key words such as "digital photography'' and their ads are matched to websites that mention those words.

Typically between 1 and 2 per cent of visitors click on the ads, which pay from a few tens of cents to a few dollars per click.

Mr Rowse's talent is writing content that is engaging enough to attract a massive audience and loyal community, while using the correct key words to attract the most relevant advertising for his audience.

"I just thought it was a hobby and maybe I could make it break even and that anything beyond that is a bonus,'' he says.

Soon he was earning nearly $10,000 a month and, in the past five years, has earned more than $700,000 from advertising.

"I always had this entrepreneurial spirit, I guess,'' Mr Rowse says. "But this was a complete fluke. But once I saw it beginning to happen, the entrepreneurial spirit kicked in.''

As a spin-off from Digital Photography, Mr Rowse started Problogger, a blog about making money from blogging. Each day 15,000 to 17,000 people visit Problogger.

Large advertisers look for a critical mass in audience before they adopt a particular media property.

According to Matthew Crook, managing director of digital media buyer Emitch Melbourne, advertisers will go as low as an audience of 50,000 to 100,000 unique website visitors each month.

He says depending on the audience engagement, an advertiser will pay from $10 to $100 per thousand people. The average cost to reach 1000 people across all media in Australia is about $20.

Increasingly, Mr Crook says clients use advertising products from the major online networks such as NineMSN and News Digital that track each website visitor to each sale and pay accordingly.

Mr Rowse also uses a similar kind of advertisement, known as affiliate advertising, which pays upwards of $50 to sign up a person to a service.

In fact, Mr Rowse has established his own affiliate advertising for his course, Six Figure Blogging, which pays 25 per cent of the $320 course fee or $US80 to affiliates.

Mr Rowse's audience, like that of many web entrepreneurs in Australia, is global, but he sees a local potential.

"I have one little digital camera site which is on a 'dotau' (domain) and that gets a tonne of Google Australia traffic. It just strikes me how much less competition there is, particularly for search engine traffic in Australia. Obviously, the total audience is smaller. But if you can be a big fish in a small pond you can do very well.''

Traffic tips

- Traffic builds over time, which is why early blog adopters usually have more than new ones.

- Search optimisation helps build traffic, from the name of a blog to the words used in posts and tags.

- If you build a community and trust with your audience, you can make a lot of money from affiliate sales.

- There is less clutter of websites in Australia than in the US and potential to build internet properties with the .au domain.

- Give visitors the option to save posts to social bookmarking sites. They can multiply traffic.

Google Crawls Stations, Tells Broadcasters 'TV Ads' Makes Good AdSense

SO FAR, ADVERTISERS INTERESTED IN Google's foray into TV ad brokering have been able to participate only if invited. But a top company executive said Thursday that could change "very soon."

When it does, Google's platform will presumably allow marketers to log into a Google-managed interface and place a buy for a national cable spot without much gate-keeping.

The "invitation-only" test phase for Google TV Ads--where vetted advertisers purchase inventory on networks offered by Dish Network--would then morph into what Google refers to as "general availability."

Michael Steib, the head of Google's TV Ads, declined to cite a time frame for the shift. But he said Google's testing "has been successful in proving the concept" behind the automated TV Ads system, and the challenge now is to expand and "scale" it. Steib spoke Thursday at the Television Bureau of Advertising's annual marketing conference.

During the test or beta phase, advertisers using the service range from HP to the smaller FragranceNet.com. The latter had never used TV before.

And Google is hoping the service will prompt more FragranceNet.coms-- an advertiser who has had success with Google's AdWords--to experiment with TV for the first time. "We believe not nearly enough people are advertising on television today," Steib said.

Through Google's Ad Creation Marketplace, a small advertiser with no TV creative can have a spot crafted by a Google-vetted producer. "We would like to see the barriers to entry to TV advertising go away," Steib said.

Google TV Ads allows advertisers to bid on inventory on 90-plus networks offered by the Dish Network satellite service, as well as a group of channels carried by a small California cable operator. The advertisers benefit from set-top-box data that gives them insight into the performance of their spots. The feedback can then be used to make changes to a campaign in near real-time--whether it be by network or daypart, in search of better targeting.

The day before Thursday's TVB conference, another Google executive, Dan Gertsacov, spoke at an industry gathering held by Carat, where he unveiled a new wrinkle in the Google TV Ads system that allows perhaps even greater targeting. Advertisers can now search for programming based on keywords and then buy time on related content. So, for example, Apple could search by the term "music downloads" and receive a list of related content where it may wish to slot ads in.

Both Steib and Gertsacov spoke about Google TV Ads' ability to offer insight into how a campaign functions simultaneously on TV and online. Steib mentioned the potential for gauging what transpires online--with site visits and transactions--soon after a TV spot runs.

Steib's TVB appearance came before a room of sales executives for local TV stations, many of whom were curious whether Google's online system could turn their inventory into a commodity or even threaten their jobs or their staffs'. But he spoke with a measured, olive branch-tone, saying Google doesn't believe its system nullifies any need for a sales force. In fact, he said he believes it can help stations clear hard-to-sell or run-of-the-mill inventory--perhaps at higher prices than believed possible--while helping sales executives spend more time crafting complex, higher-priced deals and less effort on administrative duties.

"We think that this is a system that fixes a lot of that stuff," he said.

It could also expand a stations' potential advertiser base, he suggested.

Regarding the potential for a station to gain better pricing for remnant inventory as advertisers toss bids its way, he said, "We think that that could be additive."

Google's TV group is not believed to have any direct Dish Network-style sales relationship with individual local stations. But more broadly, the Hearst-Argyle station group has a deal where its sales force sells AdWords in its local markets and gains a portion of revenues. And it has a revenue-sharing partnership with Google's YouTube, where it distributes video from its stations. Steib suggested station groups might be interested in pursuing similar arrangements.

TVB President Chris Rohrs, who invited Steib to offer an update on Google's TV initiatives at the conference, said he would be eager for a station to link with Google on a test involving set-top data. "I would hope that would happen, because those are the learnings we need to have," he said.

6 Tips To Improve Your Adsense Income

If webmasters want to monetize their websites, the great way to do it is through Adsense. There are lots of webmasters struggling hard to earn some good money a day through their sites. But then some of the “geniuses” of them are enjoying hundreds of dollars a day from Adsense ads on their websites. What makes these webmasters different from the other kind is that they are different and they think out of the box.

The ones who have been there and done it have quite some useful tips to help those who would want to venture into this field. Some of these tips have boosted quite a lot of earnings in the past and is continuously doing so.

Here are 6 proven ways on how best to improve your Adsense earnings.

1. Concentrating on one format of Adsense ad. The one format that worked well for the majority is the Large Rectangle (336X280). This same format have the tendency to result in higher CTR, or the click-through rates. Why choose this format out of the many you can use? Basically because the ads will look like normal web links, and people, being used to clicking on them, click these types of links. They may or may not know they are clicking on your Adsense but as long as there are clicks, then it will all be for your advantage.

2. Create a custom palette for your ads. Choose a color that will go well with the background of your site. If your site has a white background, try to use white as the color of your ad border and background. The idea to patterning the colors is to make the Adsense look like it is part of the web pages. Again, This will result to more clicks from people visiting your site.

3. Remove the Adsense from the bottom pages of your site and put them at the top. Do not try to hide your Adsense. Put them in the place where people can see them quickly. You will be amazed how the difference between Adsense locations can make when you see your earnings.

4. Maintain links to relevant websites. If you think some sites are better off than the others, put your ads there and try to maintaining and managing them. If there is already lots of Adsense put into that certain site, put yours on top of all of them. That way visitor will see your ads first upon browsing into that site.

5. Try to automate the insertion of your Adsense code into the webpages using SSI (or server side included). Ask your web administrator if your server supports SSI or not. How do you do it? Just save your Adsense code in a text file, save it as “adsense text”, and upload it to the root directory of the web server. Then using SSI, call the code on other pages. This tip is a time saver especially for those who are using automatic page generators to generate pages on their website.

6. The last and probably the least painful tip, is to get some software that will creat Adsense pages for you. You can get some quality programs these days that will actually create good quality Adsense pages on the fly. The program will run you through all of the steps needed to put together your Adsense pages in a well structured and search engine optimised way. It will even make sure that you are using the right keywords for the best results.

These are some of the tips that have worked well for some who want to generate hundreds and even thousands on their websites. It is important to know though that ads are displayed because it fits the interest of the people viewing them. So focusing on a specific topic should be your primary purpose because the displays will be especially targeted on a topic that persons will be viewing already.

Note also that there are many other Adsense sharing the same topic as you. It is best to think of making a good ad that will be somewhat different and unique than the ones already done. Every clickthrough that visitors make is a point for you so make every click count by making your Adsense something that people will definitely click on.

Tips given by those who have boosted their earnings are just guidelines they want to share with others. If they have somehow worked wonders to some, maybe it can work wonders for you too. Try them out into your ads and see the result it will bring.

If others have done it, there is nothing wrong trying it out for yourself.