Is there any money left?

Useful products and services, from Beach Web Design Shop.

Having adventured enough with Google AdSense for a while, I took some time out to reorganise my affiliate shop. When I was going through my business startup programme and organising my website and computing equipment, I looked for affiliate programmes for companies and products that were useful and good value. The shop is a collection of these recommended products.

It was originally one long page that was linked from my holding page and was quite slow to load, so I’ve now reorganised it into separate pages, grouped into product types:

• Recommended books, to be expanded in future with more reviews
• Broadband, internet connection equipment and web hosting services
• Recommended computer equipment and upgrades for home based offices
• Recommended internet security products and information links for home based offices
• Phones and handheld devices
• Useful products for small businesses and startups
• Digital Photography

Hopefully these more specialised pages will be easier to find and use, not to mention much quicker to load.

The main page now features current special offers, but only those with adverts in 125×125 or 120×120 formats.

Many of the affiliate programmes keep sending me special offers and discount codes, so I will aim to make more of this with special offer pages in future.

In which I try out advertising somewhere less out of the way.

Not surprisingly, placing the adverts on a few out of the way pages that were only obscurely linked from my home page (if that!) meant that they were not loaded and viewed very often (ie there were not many ‘page impressions’, let alone ‘clicks’). Here’s a typical day (see the tumbleweed blowing through):

I thought to try it out properly I should put the ads on some more popular pages. After all, I’ve seen messages from people who only used to make $900 a month from AdSense until they followed certain methods they’d be happy to share, and now they make over $15,000!

As luck would have it, I had submitted a couple of websites to a peer reviewed directory called Hedir, a site which I know receives a constant stream of submissions. I discovered it is possible for users to add their Google AdSense publisher IDs to their Hedir user profiles. (See ‘Hedir Review: Community Rewards’).

What this means is that whenever I review a website submitted to Hedir or post a message in their forums the web page runs a Javascript program so that a certain percentage of the time the Google ads belong to my publisher ID and the rest of the time they belong to the Hedir owners or developers. This seems like a clever idea. Having seen that hundreds of websites are submitted to Hedir all the time, I was sure this idea would be a winner.

AdSense also provides a feature called ‘channels’ which allows you to track which pages are loaded and which ads are clicked. So I added my publisher ID and an AdSense channel ID to my Hedir user profile, reviewed about 50 websites and posted some entries into the forums. Then I checked in with Google AdSense every day for the next few weeks to see what was going on.

Here’s how the figures break down for February, my first month with Google AdSense:

Woo hoo! I made $0.13 ! It turns out that was a click from my Valentine’s Day poem. So I’m up there with Hallmark, making a profit from Valentine’s Day.

And here’s the break down for the first half of March, when I was away for 10 days so presumably not loading my own website as much:

Looks like the Hedir pages are not viewed as much as I expected. People seem happy to submit their sites but most can’t be bothered to review anyone else’s. Also, apparently people don’t click on ads much. But although I haven’t made any money from it yet, I like the idea and I’ve learned a lot more about web design from reviewing all these websites and seeing other people’s comments about them. And who knows, the pages will probably be around for a while so I could make some money from it yet.

In which I try out artificially intelligent pay-per-click advertising
After my initial experiments with affiliate marketing, pay per click advertising seemed like the next logical step. The basic setup is this: you sign up for Google AdSense or something similar (address at the top of the page), use their online advert design process to create snippets of Javascript code, and then paste this code unaltered into the appropriate part of your web page. The code then loads when your web page does, and Google’s server processes the other text on your web page and/or website and selects relevant adverts to display in the colours and layout you have chosen. You’re not allowed to click on your own adverts, but if someone else does you make a small amount of money. So millions of people click on the ads and you make an effortless fortune. Right? Well, so far I’ve found the system works apart from the last part.

The first thing I was interested in was how the adverts were chosen to be relevant. Would it depend more on the content of the page, or the website as a whole? I also didn’t want Google ads for my competitors appearing on my home page, although I did see the appeal of taking some of their money if I was booked up anyway. So I tested out the ad selection process by setting up my first Google ads on a mix of obscure and slightly odd pages to see what they came up with.

Check out how the ads appear on:

• my privacy policy
• my ethical policy
• my copyright / credits page
• my legal document templates

Next I tried:

• my ‘Under Construction’ page, with free photos of diggers.
• Then I discovered this was probably against their ‘no error pages’ rule, so I moved it to my Construction Page Hall of Fame

Then I thought of some types of work I was too booked up for at the moment:

• Content Management Systems
• Database Websites
• Internet Business Cards

While keeping an eye on the Google forums and looking at how Google AdSense is used on the net, I discovered several gimmicky pages along the lines of Find Your Hobbit Name that were designed to keep people reloading and presumably seeing new ads that they might click on. So I wrote this one:

• Random Valentine’s Day Poem

How romantic.
I even tried it on a ‘Lorem ipsum’ page, before realising that would be against AdSense policies by placing them on a page with ‘content primarily in an unsupported language’. For the record, they were mostly about beach resorts, for obvious reasons, and temp agencies, probably because of the ‘tempor’ word fragment.