Nice to see that Google has lifted it’s restriction on publishers showing other contextual adverts on the same page as Adsense adverts. Their remaining restriction is that you try not to emulate Adense’s look and feel, though how they think they’ve got the monopoly on Link and Description I’m not to sure. Still, it opens it up for publishers to use more than one contextual ad provider on each page, thus spreading their income from each page to two or more sources.

I suspect this will encourage other ad providers to develop contextual ads where they haven’t already done so because publishers will be able to show both their primary Adsense contextual ads and contextual ads from other providers too. Most people will use Adsense firstly because it can be so damn profitable. One always suspects though that Google will not have been completely altruistic in lifting this restriction and that there is an as yet undisclosed purpose for it. Isn’t there always?

Looking forward to Shoemaker’s show on webmasterradio.fm this week about monetizing forums and social networking sites. I’ve dabbled with adsense and some affiliate stuff on forums but never really explored it fully. From what I’ve read on DP, forums can be a tricky way to earn much money unless you run a huge one.

New year resolutions come and go, and I try never to make one after a few glasses of wine on hogmanay. Of course there are the usual ones like gotta lose a few pounds, gonna exercise more, gonna tidy my office and get rid of all the CD’s and manuals for software that only runs on windows 3.1.
Now that we’re two weeks into the year, I feel safe enough to proclaim that 2006 will be the year I really try to make a serious income from publishing online. Up to now I’ve dabbled with it and it’s brought a nice little bonus cheque each month. This year though I want to turn that into a large bonus every month. It’s possible too. I already have around 10 websites showing adsense. They are built and ticking over nicely. Some of the sites I run are blogs, some are standard information sites. All bring in a little income every month.
So how am I going to do this? Well according to those people who are making hundreds of dollars every day from adsense, the key is to build lots of content. Every page you write has the potential to bring in more visitors from search engines. More visitors mean more clicks, means more income. It’s that simple. Content brings visitors brings clicks. My aim for now is to add 10 pages per (working) day across my sites. That’s 200 new pages every month. It doesn’t sound hard, but if I do manage to keep it up, it should double my adsense income in just 6 months (based on the number of pages I have published across all my sites at present). If I manage to keep the pace up and stick to my 10 page/day goal, I will post my success here. If I don’t I’ll never mention it again, until next new year that is!

It would appear Google have been sending out Christmas Pressies to their Adsense publishers again this year. I really hope they send me one. I know it’s completely geeky but I want some Google branded stuff on my desk. I wonder if I should send them a clock with my name on it. Perhaps just a Christmas card will suffice.

Definitely one of my favourite bloggers, and to many people THE blog guru, Darren Rowse is running a poll at problogger.net to see how much money you earned from Adsense last month. As you would expect, results up to now show a lot of people in the lower income brackets, but it’s interesting to see a few readers in the thousands of dollars earning regions. If these guys are reading problogger.net for more tips and hints then you can be sure there’s something there for everyone. Quite apart from reading the advice on problogger, many people can also get inspiration from the way Darren’s other blogs are run – with the constant flow of great content on all of them, it’s no wonder so many people (including myself) look to Darren for inspiration.

I am a Google Adsense publisher. I show Adsense ad’s on a number of my websites and make a few bucks out of it every month. That makes me part of the Google Content Network
I am also an Adwords Advertiser occasionally.
So, as an advertiser, do I ever let my ad’s be shown on the content network? Not a chance.
Why not? There are far too many scraped sites and clone sites just existing to make a buck out of adsense and not existing to bring valuable content to the internet. Until Google has a human editor verify every site that displays adsense, then my adwords ads will stay on the search network only. I’m sick of doing google searches and finding results belonging to scraper sites and spam blogs with legitimate adwords adverts on them. If the people who placed those ad’s realized where they were being shown, do you think they’d be particularly happy about it. Just the association of seeing your ad on a crap site could be enough to deter a customer from buying from you. So come on Google, when are you going to start approving every site that shows Adsense and give your Adwords customers enough piece of mind to turn their content network ads back on?

I see today that Google Adsense has started showing an Advertise on this Site link on their adverts. I don’t mind it on a blog like this, but on some of my other sites I sell advertising and placements separately so I’m going to have to figure out if I can de-register from this particular feature in Adsense. It looks a bit crap too, especially when you blend adverts to be as inoffensive as possible. Hopefully Google Adsense are just testing this feature and it will go away before it inflicts itself on every site that displays Adsense adverts.
I’ll be watching this thread on digitalpoint to see what other Adsense publishers are saying about it.