What is Google AdSense?

What is Google AdSense?

Interested in making money with Google?

Here's your complete guide to getting started along with some info on how to maximize your earnings, why some accounts are disabled and even alternatives to AdSense.

I'll even recommend what I believe is the best kind of theme to use for AdSense.

If you want to jump to the various sections, use the table of contents on the right.

What is Google AdSense?

AdSense is a nice way to monetize your traffic, and very easy to implement. It's one of my top earners and has been since 2003.

Google.com earns most of its revenue by allowing other website owners to advertise on their search results pages.

All this is managed through a program they call AdWords (pay per click marketing).

You see these ads displayed above the free/organic results and along the right side of the page on Google.com.

These are called Sponsored Results, and the advertisers are paying a certain amount of money per click for these ads.

It's an auction-based system that allows advertisers to compete for those spots. Whomever has the highest bid and most "quality" ad, gets the top spot and so forth.

Now you can earn a share of the revenue that Google earns from AdWords by displaying these same text or image ads on your site. When someone clicks, you earn roughly 68% of the click and Google gets the rest.

This program is called AdSense.

It's a great program that can help you drive additional income to your website -- especially if it's mostly content based.

So if you are one of those people that doesn't like the idea of paying for a site, this is an excellent way to earn your money back and then some.

Please make sure you read this entire article. AdSense is not a get-rich-quick scheme and it takes a lot of work to make money. Don't think that just because you join, you are guaranteed to make big money.

Digital Marketing VS Internet Marketing – What is the latest trend?

Digital Marketing

Digital marketing is a broad term that describes a set of marketing processes that utilize all available digital channels to promote a product or service or build a digital brand.  Digital marketing has come to succeed traditional marketing and the transition from paper and newspaper ads to Facebook and PPC campaigns.

The channels that make up digital marketing include: Web sites, Social media platforms, Banner placement, email marketing, mobile marketing, SEO, pay per click campaigns, Web TV, SMS, billboards and anything else with a digital foundation.

Internet Marketing

Internet marketing components

Internet marketing is a subset of digital marketing. It is in fact the most important component since the majority of digital marketing activities fall within the boundaries of Internet marketing. We will see below how digital marketing budgets are spent and their relationship with Internet marketing.

Best tool for SEO?

I use a number of tools to build organic traffic to my websites but this one is my favorite keyword tool. I use it for SEO, keyword research and rank tracking.

Finding profitable keywords you can actually rank has never been easier

Click here

The major channels of Internet Marketing are:

Web site – Either a personal website or a corporate website or even a personal blog hosted on a shared platform (like WordPress or Tumblr). For many campaigns a website is the starting point and the destination i.e. you run a digital marketing campaign to promote a website (starting point) with the purpose of getting more visitors (destination).

Search Marketing (SEM) – Search Marketing is the basis of Internet Marketing and consists of two important activities, SEO and PSA. There is a lot of confusion about these terms that’s why I wrote separate posts explaining the difference:

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) VS Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

SEO VS Pay Per Click (PPC)?

In a nutshell:

SEO has to do with optimization techniques for the purpose of achieving higher rankings in Search engines. It has two major components: On Page SEO and Off Page SEO.

Paid Search Advertising (PSA) is about getting visitors by placing ads on search engines. The most popular approach is the Pay Per Click (PPC) and the most well-known tool is Google Adwords which lets you advertise on the Google and partner network.

So search marketing has to do with promotion methods related to Search Engines.

Social Media Marketing – Social media marketing is another component of Internet marketing and one that is gaining a lot of attention the last couple of years. Millions of users spend a considerable amount of their on-line time on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, Instagram, Pinterest, YouTube, LinkedIn and on other SM platforms and this fact alerted digital marketers to take SM seriously and make it a part of the digital marketing campaigns.

Content Marketing – In the past when we talked about SEO we essentially meant link building but this trend has changed since 2011 and content marketing has become the new SEO. This simply means that good content has become again the foundation of SEO and it is through content that you will build a better Internet presence and not through cheap link building techniques.

Email Marketing – Email is not dead but on the contrary it is one of the most important tools in every digital marketing campaign. Despite the influence of social media, email is still the most efficient way to convert visitors or readers into customers.

In terms of marketing, email marketing is the process of gathering email addresses from people interested in your products or services for the purpose of sending them newsletters or offers.

Mobile Marketing – More and more users use their mobile phones to search the web, engage on social media, or find products or services to buy. In fact it is estimated that 30% of the traffic coming to a website is from mobile (this holds true for my websites as well, check your Google analytics reports and you will be surprised).

Mobile marketing is about creating content or ads that is viewable and suitable for a mobile device. For example: websites should have mobile friendly versions and an advertisement shown on a mobile device may take into account the location of the device and show the nearest shops that sell the particular product.

Banner Advertising – You can find banners in almost all web properties i.e. websites, mobile websites, mobile apps, search engines, newsletters, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube etc. Digital marketers try to promote their products or services through different types of banners (static, text, animated, images, videos, clever banners) in different platforms.

What’s the latest trend? Where does the money go?

Perhaps the best way to understand what is the latest trend in the digital marketing industry is to find out how big companies allocate their marketing budgets. This is exactly what Gartner did in a latest report with title Digital Marketing Spending Report, 2013.

The findings of this report are very interesting and they show without a doubt that the majority of digital marketing budgets is spend on Internet marketing components.

In particular the most important findings are:

Marketing budgets represent 10% of total company revenues and this is expected to grow by 6% in 2013

Digital marketing represents ¼ of overall marketing spend

50% of digital marketing activities are outsourced (if you are thinking to outsource, make sure that you do it correctly without spending a fortune)

The most important digital marketing activities are: Web presence (website), Social media marketing and digital advertising

Top digital marketing investments will be made on ecommerce, social media marketing, content creation and mobile marketing.

Conclusion

It is important to understand that Internet Marketing is a subset of digital marketing and not something different. When we talk about digital marketing in essence we mean Internet marketing plus SMS, WebTV and digital advertising.

It is clear that companies are starting to appreciate the importance of social media as a marketing tool and there is also a clear turn to content and mobile marketing.

What is the difference between SEO and PPC?

The main difference between Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Pay Per Click (PPC) is that traffic coming from SEO (organic) is free while traffic generated from PPC is not free (as the name implies you have to pay a cost per click).  This is also the reason why you may sometimes see the terms organic search engine listings and paid search engine listings (or Paid Search Advertising – PSA).

Both SEO and PPC are part of Search Engine Marketing (SEM) which is one of the tools you can use as part of your overall Internet Marketing campaign.

I will try to explain the other major differences between the two by using the following parameters: position in search results, cost, traffic potential, conversion and ease of use.

Organic Traffic vs. Paid Search Advertising

Position in Search Results

As you can see from the screenshot above you can expect to find PPC Ads above the organic results and on the sidebar.  Where exactly your ad will appear depends on a number of factors (i.e. the keywords you are targeting, keywords in your ad copy, keywords in your landing page and many more) but it’s either on top, on the sidebar or below the organic results.

Organic results can only appear in the middle of the page. Whether your listing will appear in the top positions or first pages this depends on how optimized your web site is both in terms of on-site and off-site SEO.

SEO: You can get first page positions if your web site is optimized for search engines

PPC: You can get your ad on the first page by paying a higher cost per click (CPC)

Cost

I have mentioned above that SEO traffic is free and PPC is paid and while this is absolutely true, you should understand that it needs a lot of effort and hard work to get free traffic from search engines. The competition is high for almost every keyword you can search and you really need to have a high quality web site and a great SEO plan to get one of the top 5 positions. There are no shortcuts despite what some “SEO” companies are trying to sell you.  If you are not familiar how search engines work or don’t know anything about SEO then the best way to get search engine traffic is to hire a SEO expert to do the work you.

On the other hand, Pay Per Click cost depends on a number of other factors. If we take for example the cost per click of advertising with the most popular PPC system, Google Adwords, then it depends on the popularity of the keyword, on the number of advertisers who want to use the particular keyword, the number of related web sites that have ad positions for the particular keyword and many more. If it sounds a bit complicated then it probably is despite the efforts made by Google to make the whole system easier to use.

The good news with PPC is that you only pay for the clicks your ad receives and not for the views. In addition, you can determine in advance your daily budget and pay no more than that and you can calculate an estimate of what is the average cost per click for the keywords you want to target. As you can see from the screenshot below the Google Keyword tool (which is part of Google Adwords) gives you an estimate for the CPC (cost per click) for each keyword.

SEO: Cost of SEO is indirect. You cannot pay to get to the first page but you may have to pay for SEO services if you cannot do SEO yourself.

PPC:  You pay only when people click on your ad.  You can use the Google keyword tool to calculate how much you can pay.

Traffic potential

Which method can bring more traffic to your web site, SEO or PPC? SEO (organic traffic) is more than PPC traffic so if you can manage to rank your web site for the keywords you want, you will get much more traffic than paying for those keywords. This is because when you are in one of the top 5 positions (according to statistics the majority of search traffic visits one of the top 5 web sites) you can expect to have a continuous flow of traffic 24×7 without having to pay anything (the actual volume of traffic depends on how popular a keyword is).

So, if you compare traffic and cost of first page positions for SEO traffic and PPC traffic, organic traffic is better. There are some studies suggesting that PPC ads get more clicks than organic but this also translates to a bigger cost.

If on the other hand it is very difficult to get first page positions for a keyword then paying for traffic may be your only option since second and third page positions will probably bring 0 or very little traffic.

SEO: Organic traffic is continuous as long as you are ranking in one of the top positions.

PPC: PPC ads can get more clicks but this means that you pay more.

Conversion

Which visitor is more likely to convert (i.e. make a purchase, register to a newsletter and in general response to call for action), someone coming from PPC Ads or from organic search? If your ads are highly targeted and optimized then a visitor from PPC is more likely to convert than a visitor coming from search.

The reason is that a web page can rank for different keywords (other than those initially intended) so the search visitor may not be looking exactly for the content (or product) presented in the particular page. On the other hand if you run a successful PPC campaign then you will only get clicks from visitors who are interested 100% in your content or products.

SEO: SEO traffic is better than other forms of traffic (i.e. social media) but in terms of conversion is not as good as PPC traffic.

PPC: Highly optimized keywords will generate more conversions but will cost more

Ease of use

Neither SEO nor PPC is easy to do if you don’t have the necessary knowledge and experience.  SEO is a process that takes a lot of time and effort. It may take months or even years to rank for specific terms or not rank at all!

On the hand, in order to get some good results with PPC and Adwords you either have to take a course or hire a PPC expert to help you or you will lose a few hundred dollars before you understand how it works.

The bottom line: PPC first and then SEO

The bottom line is that you need to use both PPC and SEO as part of your Internet Marketing campaign. PPC can bring you faster results so you can run a PPC campaign and test which keywords convert better and then try with SEO to rank for those keywords.

Use PPC when you have a high converting product and use SEO when you have a limited budget to spend on advertising.

SEO may take time but the results are (under some conditions) long lasting while with PPC when you stop paying for clicks, traffic will also stop.

What to look for when hiring an SEO company?

Everybody wants to take advantage of search engine traffic because it is widely known that traffic from search engines has a lot more value than traffic from any other sources. The question is how do you get visitors from search engines? 

There are only 3 answers to this question:

You SEO optimize your web site, rank higher and get more traffic

You buy search engine traffic through paid search advertising (think Google Adwords)

You hire an SEO company to do the work for you

Although our goal with this web site is to give you tips and advice so that you can SEO your web site without further help, there are cases where hiring an experienced SEO firm is the best way to go.

Why hire an SEO company?

Hiring a good SEO company can give you a number of advantages which go beyond getting more visitors to your web site. In particular small businesses or enterprises can benefit from hiring an SEO:

Save time, money and resources – Use your time and resources wisely, let them deal with your business and let the experts do SEO.  To get results with SEO you need to have good knowledge of how search engines work and this is something to be gained from experience, education and specialization.

Understand your customers better – One of the good things on the Internet is that everything is measurable.  Your SEO experts can give you a lot of information about your customer, their needs and behaviour.

Explore new markets – Search engines are not the only source of traffic. With the help of Internet Marketers you can explore new markets and business opportunities.

Internet Marketing strategy – You need to have a complete Internet Marketing strategy which goes beyond Search marketing. A good SEO company will create your strategy and action plan so that you don’t miss on any business opportunity.

Create a user-friendly web site – One of the benefits of SEO is that it increases the usability of a web site. A user friendly web site can generate more sales or potential customers.

What to look for in a good and Reliable SEO firm?

One of the dangers of having an open worldwide market like the Internet is the presence of scammers and the SEO industry is no exception to the rule. Unfortunately if you search to find an SEO consultancy company on the Internet, you will also find many fake companies or ‘SEO’ experts that can do more harm to your web site than good.

The following tips can help you find and hire a good and reliable SEO company:

Too good to be true promises – This is a general rule on the Internet. When something is too good to be true then it is probably a fake. If a company promises first page rankings on Google for very competitive keywords by purchasing a bunch of links or an SEO package then save your money and stay away. To get high rankings you need a lot of time and effort and it is not just about links.

Case studies or success stories – Everyone can claim to be an SEO. What distinguishes those who really know SEO from scammers is their history and background. Ask your to be SEO company to give you examples of their SEO work including reports that show increase in traffic from search engines. Look at the examples and do a couple of searches in Google about the particular web site. Can you find them in the Search results in the spots they claim? When did they start work on the particular web site and how competitive is the niche?

Experience in the industry – As I mentioned above, SEO is a fast changing industry and to be able to cope with the changes and stay in synch with the latest developments you need true experts that have the necessary knowledge and experience. When did the company registered, where are they located, what is their experience? These are some of the questions you should ask them before making a decision.

White hat practices – One of the problems faced by many companies who hire fake SEO companies is the fact that those companies are using black hat practices to achieve rankings. While the results may be encouraging at the beginning, very soon the web sites are punished and disappear from the search results. What is important is the SEO Company to use only white hat methods and more importantly you should ask them to give you a report of what exactly they will do on your web property.

SEO is not just about SEO – As weird as this may sound a reliable SEO company will not only deal with search marketing but will create a complete Internet Marketing plan taking advantage of all possible markets available on the Internet today.

Who is behind the company? 

 – The nature of this business gives you the opportunity to work with the clients using the Internet without having to do on-site visits. This does not mean that you shouldn’t know with whom you are talking. Who is the owner and employees of the company? Is the company respected in the industry? How can you contact them?

Deliverables – What are the exact deliverables of their engagement? Will they provide you with monthly reports showing progress? Do they define a starting point, milestones and specific goals in their agreement? When do they consider a campaign successful?

Your business can benefit from a trusted SEO firm

The point here is that you should hire a company that has a vision about your internet presence. Paying someone to optimize your web site but without having any real gains (i.e new customers, new leads, new sales, new contacts etc) is as good as nothing. A successful SEO campaign usually spans over a number of months and it is certainly not a one time or static process.

The good news though is that a reliable SEO company can open new horizons for your business or web site and all you have to do is choose wisely.

What is the difference between SEO and SEM?

The difference between SEO and SEM is simply that Search Engine Optimization is part of Search engine marketing or Search marketing as it is widely known. Both processes aim in increasing visibility in search engines. SEO is about optimizing the web property to get better rankings in the search results while SEM goes beyond SEO. It involves other methods as well which can get you more search engine visitors like PPC advertising.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

I have explained before what is SEO and why is it important and I have also outlined what in my opinion are the most important SEO tips. For the purpose of doing a comparison between SEO and SEM I will re-state the definition of SEO so that it is clear for everybody what the difference between the two is.

What is SEO?

SEO is the process of optimizing your web site for the purpose of getting free traffic from search engines. An optimized web site is more easily understood by Search engine crawlers, so there are more chances of ranking higher in SERPS.

On-Site and Off-site SEO

There are 2 main pillars of SEO, what is called on-site SEO and off-site SEO. On-Site SEO are rules you can apply on your web site or blog so that it’s more search engine friendly. For example you need to use proper titles, good descriptions, well formatted URLs, correct use of H1, H2 and images and many more. You can read my version of the 15 on-site seo tips for beginners to get a good idea of how you can optimize your web site for search engines.

Off-site SEO refers to the process of getting votes from other web sites for the purpose of increasing your web site’s trust in the eyes of search engines. For beginners this may be confusing but try to think about it like a ranking system where the web site who has the most votes ranks higher. Votes in our case are links coming from other web sites to your site. That is also the reason why off-site SEO is referring to as link building.

To avoid any misunderstandings it’s not only a matter of how many links you have pointing to your website but also from where these links are coming and a number of other factors I am not going to cover now.

Search Engine Marketing (SEM)

Search Engine Marketing is over and above SEO but it’s only a subset of your overall Internet Marketing Strategy. The diagram below shows the relationship between Internet Marketing, SEM and SEO. As you can see there are many more ways to increase your web site’s traffic besides SEM and SEO.

What is SEM?

So, SEM is the marketing process with a goal of getting more visibility in search engines either by getting more free traffic (SEO) or paid traffic (Paid search advertising).

Through paid search advertising you essentially buy advertising space in the search engine results. So instead of trying to rank higher and get free traffic you pay to appear in front of the searches.

The most well-known advertising agency for PSA is Google Adwords. Through Google adwords you can get your ads appear in the Google search results and you pay only for the clicks on your ads. This is also the reason why the whole process is called Pay-per-click or PPC. Bing and Yahoo have a similar system but it not so successful and widely known as Adwords.

Importance of SEM Traffic

SEM traffic is considered the most important source of Internet traffic because it is targeted. It is widely accepted that people use the search engines to find a solution to a problem, an answer to their question or to learn how to do something. So when searches click on a web site from the search results or click on an ad, they are more likely to convert. The relevancy of the displayed web sites and ads makes SEM traffic more valuable than any of the other sources. Facebook and twitter are trying to optimize their advertising platforms to utilize targeted traffic but still traffic coming directly from search engines has a better ROI.

What should I write in my blog and how to choose post titles?

When choosing what to write in your blog (topic, article titles, content etc.) it is important to understand 2 basic concepts:

First is that content is the most important success factor of any web site or blog so this is where you should spend most of your time and second you should realize that you are not alone and so you don’t only have to create excellent content but you also have to compete with other web sites that create good content as well. I will explain below why this is important and what you can do to minimize your competition.

What should I write about?

In my seo tips for beginners article I have explained what is consider good quality content but for the purpose of this article I will go one step further and explain how to distinguish your content from the competition which is essentially the answer to the question: what should I write about so that it stands out.

Before to start writing you next blog post ask yourself these questions:

What would be the topic of my post?

Will my post answer a question or solve a problem?

What others are writing about the particular topic?

How can I differentiate my content from existing posts and make it better?

Once you have the above questions answered your next step is to decide on the actual blog post title, write the post, publish it and promote it.

Best tool for SEO?

I use a number of tools to build organic traffic to my websites but this one is my favorite keyword tool. I use it for SEO, keyword research and rank tracking.

Finding profitable keywords you can actually rank has never been easier

Click here

How to choose your blog post titles?

The blog post title is important for 3 main reasons:

A good title will attract more readers and social media attention

A good title is essential for SEO purposes

Blog titles should help both readers and search engines understand what the post is all about. Google has recently released a one-page cheat sheet stressing the importance of page titles for SEO purposes so it is not something you should neglect for any reason.

So, you know what will be the topic and type of your post and the next step is to choose the actual blog post title. This is where the Google keyword tool comes into rescue.

How to use the Google keyword tool for choosing your blog post titles?

The Google keyword tool among many other useful features gives you 2 pieces of information that are important when choosing blog titles: The number of exact searches per keyword and the competition level for that keyword. I will use these 2 in the example below to help you understand how to choose blog titles that have less competition and thus increase your chances of ranking higher for that term.

Let’s look at the following real example:

What would be the topic of my post? Weight loss

Will my post answer a question or solve a problem? Yes, my intention is to explain to my readers how to lose weight

What others are writing about the particular topic? Searching “how to lose weight” “how to lose weight fast” “weight loss” “I want to lose weight” “how to lose pounds” brings a number of results from trusted web sites and my chances of ranking for these terms are minimum to zero

How can I differentiate my content and make it better? I want to take a step-by-step approach to weight loss and explain how to calculate the weight you should lose and how to create your plan

Notice in the above table that I added the note “my chances of ranking for these terms are minimum to zero”. This is important and what this means is that even if I write a super article with the title “how to lose weight” (or any of the above titles) I will probably never be able to rank in the first positions because there are already trusted web sites in the first page and I need to give Google many concrete and powerful reasons to give me a good ranking.

In reality this is unlikely to happen so this is where I go to the keyword tool.

How to choose post titles using the keyword tool

The first things I do are set the location to ALL Countries and the Match Types to Exact.

Next I start searching for keywords. Continuing with the example above I started searching with the phrase “how to lose pounds”.

From the results what I am interested at the moment is the Competition column and the Global monthly searches column. In particular I am looking for Low competition long trail keyword ideas with some monthly searches. Of course the more monthly searches a keyword have the better, but don’t forget that what is displayed there is only an indication and I have found many times keywords to bring much more traffic than the estimate given here. Also the lower the numbers, the greater are the chances for the estimates to be inaccurate.

Back to our example, fortunately for the term I choose there are many low competition keyword ideas that can satisfy my needs as outlined in the table above.

I did search for the other terms as well but without spending too much time I decided that a keyword that has low competition and a good amount of global monthly searches and fits my topics subject and purpose is “how to lose 15 pounds”.

keyword-research-tool-600

To cut a long story short and also convince that this methodology works you can search Google for the above term and you will see my article on page 1, position 1.

blog-post-titles-in-search

You can also see below a screenshot from Google Analytics showing that in a period of one month the particular page has brought in twice the traffic estimated by the keyword tool.

google-analytics

So, to summarize this post it is important to remember that:

You don’t only have to create good content but you also have to select your blog titles carefully after doing a keyword analysis using the keyword tool and a competition analysis by searching for those terms on Google.

By selecting blog titles with low competition you increase the changes of ranking higher

Choose your blog topic first, find the title and then write the content

Once published make sure that you promote your blog post in the best possible way

Include keywords in your blog post titles but don’t overdo it (see my example above and notice the title I have selected which contains the keywords I want to rank for).

Don’t follow the above procedure for all your blog posts. Choose in advance which blog posts to optimize with the above method but also make sure that you have non-optimized posts in your web site/blog as well.