Account Deactivated

It’s been a little more than a month since my Adsense account was disabled, and I’m not “Feeling Lucky”. I’m just now starting to slowly recover lost revenue from my websites. The past six months my Adsense earnings were slowly growing to the point where I was getting checks regularly. It wasn’t a lot of money but it was steady and I depended on it for hosting costs and the costs of buying and renewing my domains.

A month before my account was disabled, an article from one of my sites went viral through a bookmarking site and the resulting traffic spike was so big it actually crashed my hosts servers and shut down the website for a day. The residual traffic for the next 30 days increased my Adsense earnings almost 500 percent for that month. I was excited to be finally be making enough money that I could re-invest back into the sites and have some extra to pay off bills, but when the end of the month came I received this email instead of a check.

Hello,

After reviewing our records, we’ve determined that your AdSense account poses a risk of generating invalid activity. Because we have a responsibility to protect our AdWords advertisers from inflated costs due to invalid activity, we’ve found it necessary to disable your AdSense account. Your outstanding balance and Google’s share of the revenue will
both be fully refunded back to the affected advertisers.

Please understand that we need to take such steps to maintain the effectiveness of Google’s advertising system, particularly the advertiser-publisher relationship. We understand the inconvenience that this may cause you, and we thank you in advance for your understanding and cooperation.

If you have any questions or concerns about the actions we’ve taken, how you can appeal this decision, or invalid activity in general, you can find more information by visiting

http://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?answer=57153.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

Ouch, not only is my account disabled but ALL unpaid earnings from the previous months is going to be revoked as well. The email included a link to the Google Adsense appeals form. I thought for sure that I was going to be able to explain what happened and since I was sure that I had not done anything wrong it shouldn’t be much trouble to get my account turned back on.

Appeal……Schmappeal

I filled out the appeal form and waited for the response. The form said it could take about a week to hear back, so while I was waiting I started doing some research on other accounts that have been disabled. The more I read the less confident I began to feel. The basic sentiments in the online community are that if your Adsense account gets disabled, you’re screwed. “You will never get it back because appeals at Google are handled by robots that are set to auto-decline.”

Through alot of forum reading and going through all of Googles helpdesk articles I realized that Google expects you to be proactive to prevent accounts from being disabled. If you receive large increases in legitimate traffic that would look out of the ordinary from a robots perspective then YOU must go to Google yourself and inform them to prevent the machines from shutting you down.

Seven days later the results of the appeal came in.

Thank you for your appeal. We appreciate the additional information you’ve provided, as well as your continued interest in the AdSense program. However, after thoroughly re-reviewing your account data and taking your
feedback into consideration, our specialists have confirmed that we’re unable to reinstate your AdSense account.

This was a pretty crushing feeling at first. I realized how foolish it was to let such a draconian and non-transparent company like Google have such a large influence over my earnings. The reason why I had stuck with Google so long is that its simple, requires no real effort on my part, and pays out the highest in terms of PPC ads. They’re the biggest and best PPC ad service available today. However there is no transparency, the whole experience with them felt very inhuman and automated. Without Adsense I felt like I might as well shut down, pack up my things and go home.

I was unable to figure out what I did wrong, and with no warnings and no second chances I’m not able to try and fix it or work harder. If Google’s systems gave out warnings then I might have been able to be a better employee for them. Instead I got shut down and they left me completely in the dark.

Finding Alternative Revenue Sources

My first instinct was to find a replacement for the pay-per-click ad placements I had already optimized to work with Google Adsense. I went and signed up for Adbrite Exchange and Chitika Premium and inserted them into the spots where Adsense ads had been hoping to see some comparable earnings.

PPC Ads

The first thing I noticed with the Adbrite network was that many of the ads being served at first were way too loud and intrusive. They all looked like something if you clicked would give your computer a virus. This was very bothersome, but over time more advertisers on the network approved my website and more ads began showing on the sites. After a few weeks passed I checked to see how the new Adbrite ads were stacking up vs. Google. I wasn’t very pleased, even though I was still receiving several clicks on the ads the CPC (Cost Per Click) was dramatically lower. The Google ads being served on my sites were averaging $0.75-1.15 per click and now the Adbrite ads were only hitting for $0.05-0.15 per click. It was very disappointing and realized that without Google the PPC model wasn’t going to be a viable option for me anymore.

What I’ve learned about Chitika Ads is that some websites have alot of success while others fail horribly. The key thing to keep in mind is that Chitika serves mainly product related ads so websites with product reviews do very well, but other sites struggle getting a good conversion rate. Since most of my sites are not product related, Chitika wasn’t going to b a good replacement for Google Adsense. However Chitika does have a publisher referral program, so you can create revenue by sending other publishers to them.

Affiliate Marketing

I’ve had much more success using affiliate marketing in the place of PPC ads. Direct affiliate sales is much more labor intensive, finding the right products to promote and figuring out what your audience wants, but the payouts have been much higher than using simple PPC ads.

I chose Commision Junction to be the primary affiliate network I use. It took a while to find the which advertisers will convert well on my sites, but now I am actually making more with affiliate sales than I did before using only Google Adsense.

Current Top 3 affiliates on this site are:

#1 – Host Gator Hosting
#2 – Go Daddy
#3 – Groupon Deals

I’ve had an account with Amazon Associates as a secondary income to Adsense for several years to directly sell products to people that I think are useful or related a story I’m writing. Certain products convert better than others on Amazon but one thing I learned since I’ve been using Amazon is to learn to pick products that are higher in price. Amazon only pays out about 5-7% commission and for a few years I was only placing links to books in my articles. No matter how many products converted the commission was always just a few cents. However when I got away from books and started looking at bigger ticket items like computer hardware, and tools my earnings got much better.

Text-Link Ads

Income from affiliate sales is much more irregular than PPC ad revenue so I wanted to find something steady to supplement income on the site. I’ve always thought that text link were unsightly on websites when I was browsing, but I wanted to try it out for a while and see how it worked. There are several different text-link ad companies, however Kontera serves the highest quality of ads. Kontera also has an affiliate program where earn 10% for whatever your referrals make for up to one year.

If your Adsense account has been disabled for any reason then its probably too late to do anything. I recommend just signing up with the ad networks I mentioned and moving on from PPC.

If you are using Adsense currently and you haven’t been banned yet. Then you should take a moment and preemptively read Google Adsense Disabled FAQ as well as take a moment to re-read the Google TOS

Blogging is no more a mere hobby; it has become a full-time profession for many bloggers, including myself. Today I will share my journey as a blogger and how it helps me to earn a full-time income blissfully working from anywhere I like.

How it started

I had been working on diverse flavors of the Internet right from my college days. I used to earn a part-time income as a student by designing websites, and later I joined a multinational company as Information security engineer.
Corporate Work life is demanding and it never gave me any space to continue with my regular design and development hobby vocation. I was earning a decent income from my day job, but I failed to enjoy the work due to towering work pressure and deadlines.

I had a website that I registered early in the year of 2002 and used to receive web designing gigs from it. I don’t exactly remember when, but I transformed the website into a blog mainly to save the tutorials and code snippets as it could serve as a reference on the web for me to access from anywhere. This is how my blog was born.

The power of a web log

It began to become a routine that I stored all my new learning from the few web-based projects that I used to do on to the blog as a reference. Gradually I started observing that there were others who were interested in what I was writing as well.

Over time, I was overwhelmed by the response I was receiving from what I built for my personal use. This is when I thought, “Why not transform the blog into a webmaster community?”

I increased the frequency of updating quality unique tutorials and tips that I learned the hard way. Within a period of six months of an organized blogging approach, my traffic ranks were soaring. This was the power of the SEO-friendly advantage the WordPress system.

Taking it seriously

Within nine or ten months of blogging, I had already begun researching and learning a lot on the WordPress system, SEO, and internet marketing for improving my blog, and simultaneously shared that information on my blog as well.

The response I was receiving from my blog visitors, their comments, and traffic was the biggest source of enthusiasm and encouragement. I have developed many websites for myself and my clients, but never received this much consistent traffic ever! I had to take this seriously—and I did.

The flow of dollars

Now it was already a year and a half when I seriously started learning and implementing monetization of my blog traffic. I was under an impression that Google Adsense was the only method to monetize my blog content and traffic.

By that time, I was earning five or six dollars a day from the blog traffic, and that looked good for me. Approximately US$200 of additional income was great for me at that time. Gradually I started to explore and read more about monetization strategies, and I found affiliate marketing!

An earnings increase

Even though it is true that passion for blogging is the primary requirement for successful blogging, your earning from a blog will be a substantial fuel to your blogging journey.

Soon, along with my regular blogging efforts, I started to promote and review the best products on the Web. It is very critical that you only recommend what you have tried and tested: an honest review will certainly get your more fans and followers.

Gradually, I started to discover the power of affiliate marketing. And eventually, a single sale was fetching me more money I used to earn from half a month’s AdSense income. So gradually I started to write more quality articles and was doing in-post product recommendations.

Balancing job and blogging

It was already more than a year through my serious blogging effort. I used to return from my office each day and write one article for my blog. I’d also dedicate one hour to SEO and SMO tasks. On the weekends, I used to work four or five hours a day on content and keyword research.

By now, both my blog’s income and traffic were steadily growing, and when I started to earn around 70% of my regular job’s income, I started to think about blogging full-time.

The big decision

I was really enjoying the fact that my blog was becoming popular—the strongest proof of that was the fact that lots of people started involving themselves in discussions on my blog, and posting comments. I hate spam comments, so it was a pleasure to answer real people—and this was another form of encouragement.

After almost one and a half years of dedicated blogging, I was now earning more income than my day job and I started seriously thinking of making the leap to full-time blogging. At that point of time in India, US$1000 was my salary from my day job, and it used to be a pretty good income. But I was earning around US$1500 from blogging, and that played on my mind.

I didn’t want to make a foolish decision in hurry, so I thought I’d continue the same way and observe my income for three months. If it was consistent, I’d quit my job.

The next three months was a bit like a case study, and my blog came out victorious. I was consistently earning more than US$2000 for all the three months. So I took the decision and gave up my job to become a pro blogger.

Should you quit?

My story might inspire you, but I personally don’t want to encourage you to quit your hard-earned job unless you test yourself to earn at least double your day-job income. Becoming a pro blogger is a big decision and you might not want to be proved wrong.

The first month working full-time as a pro blogger was very exciting. I had all the freedom to do all that I wanted to, go anywhere, and—the best part—blog from any location.

I made sure that my work hours, earnings, plans, and strategies were accountable. I noted down every activity and progressed in a very systematic manner without losing sight of my goals.

The earnings steadily increased, and the first month after I quit my job, I analyzed my performance. Here are few findings:

• I almost worked the double amount of hours on my blog than I did before.
• My earnings from writing, blogging, and reviews touched US$3000 per month.
• I was enjoying traveling and spending time with my family.
• I had loads of plans for the next month.

If you don’t have a blog, or you have a low-traffic blog, don’t even think of quitting your job. It’s a huge risk. Be practical and put in lot of hard work on your blog to craft unique content that provides high value to your users.

Evaluate, measure your success, and prove yourself. When you are sure you’re ready to jump, make the big decision to become a full-time blogger … and you might just enjoy your work like never before!

Joshu Thomas is a full-time blogger writing on how to make money online blogging and runs a successful webmaster community.

Many “online jobs” promising quick riches and little effort are really scams. While the tasks below won’t make you rich, they can earn you a little pocket money on the side—and these days that can make a big difference.

Most of these online money making opportunities only require you have a computer, a decent internet connection, and some sort of marketable skill (or the ability to provide valuable consumer insight to marketers). You’ll be operating as a free agent and can choose when, where, and how much to participate.

Sound too good to be true? It’s not, because as mentioned earlier, you won’t likely be able to quit your day job with any of these programs, which typically pay way less than regular part-time gigs. But if you’re a student, insomniac, or just someone who wants an occasional cash boost without the commitment required by a typical job, these are some of the best tasks you can do online in your spare time.

Also beware: because specialized skills aren’t always required, you do have to be wary of scams. Before you sign up to become a virtual focus group participant, paid survey taker, mystery shopper or any online worker, keep in mind this important rule of thumb: you should never have to pay to work. Also, read the fine print.

That out of the way, here are a few sources of legitimate online single-task jobs:

Research Study/Survey Participant: Harvard Business School Computer Lab for Experimental Research (CLER): Participate in research studies at Harvard Business School and you can earn $15 to $40 or more per on-site study (in Cambridge, MA) or do one of their occasional online studies, which typically take less than 15 minutes to complete and usually compensate you with a $5 electronic gift certificate. The studies ask you about decisions you would make in various business-related disciplines, such as economics and psychology. Additional options: Lightspeed Consumer Panel, Pinecone Research, SurveySpot.

Focus Group Participant: 20|20 Panel: Since 1986, 20|20 Research has been providing companies with qualitative research from focus groups. Recent calls for focus group participants include: an online study of cell phones usage that pays $60 (adults 18-44) and an online study of household products purchases that pays $150 (adults 25-65). Additional options: Focus Forward, Hagen Sinclair, AlphaBuzz.

Artificial Artificial Intelligence: Amazon Mechanical Turk: Yeah, that’s a weird title. As a Mechanical Turk Worker (or MTurk), you complete odd jobs like looking up companies’ hours of operation, checking translations, coming up with ideas for marketing projects, and so on. The pay can be extremely low — a couple of cents even — but the tasks can usually be done quickly and some tasks pay more. Additional option: ShortTask.

User Tester: UserTesting.com: Get $10 for visiting a website and providing live, honest feedback about it. Your reactions as you traipse the site are recorded by UserTesting’s software. Additional option: uTest.

Tech Support Expert: FixYa.com: Put your knowledge to good use at FixYa and earn $2 to $6 for answering a posted question, $6 to $10 for helping someone in chat, $10-$15 if you do it by phone, or a variable amount for written tips and how-to’s. Additional options: Support Space, JustAnswer.

Blogger: Commission Junction: If you maintain a blog already, you can monetize it by inserting advertising links or affiliate links from Commission Junction, LinkShare, Chitika, Dev Hub,Smorty, and, of course, Google AdSense. There’s no set amount you can make (and no guarantee you’ll make anything at all), but if you write often and get a decent following, you can generate some nice supplemental income.

You’ve been blogging now for a few years and despite the ego rush of seeing your hits soar, you’re left wondering whats the point or rather how do you finally make some cash off all that hard work.

In the beginning it can be tough when you’re not earning from your blog, but there are lots of options when it comes to monetization.

6 Ways to Make Money From Your Blog

First Choose your topic and start generating traffic. Focus your blog, blogs that make money usually target a specific market and audience. Be passionate about your subject and generate as much traffic as you can. If you’re obsessed with your topic then others will be as well.

Tip: dont expect to get rich from your blog (at least not right away)

Some blogs report up to 40,000 dollars a month in earnings, but unless you have millions of visitors already then don’t expect to quit your day job yet.

1. Sell PPC Advertising Space

The best Pay Per Click advertising network today is Google Adsense. They will place relevant ads directly onto your pages based on the keywords and topics your write about. If your reader clicks on the link then you get paid.

Exactly how much depends on your traffic and the topic you are writing about.

Tip: This method is easy but you don’t get to choose which advertisers show ads and how much they pay you.

2. Sell Dedicated Ad Space

Some networks like BlogAds will allow you to directly contact an advertisers and sell them your space.

Tip: this method puts you in control, but you might make poor choices about advertisers and prices.

3. Write Paid Reviews

Sites like Pay Per Post will match your blog with people who are looking for paid reviews. You can earn money by writing paid reviews.

Tip: stay credible, be honest and don’t post too many paid reviews.

Be careful because if you overdo it, you can lose readers and traffic.

4. Sell Your Own Merchandise

If you have developed your own brand name or slogans that have become popular then you can find people who will buy your products. Company’s like Zazzle and Cafepress will manufacture and ship products for you and give you a commission on each sale.

5. Sell Affiliate Products

The most popular affiliate program is with Amazon. You can embed items from amazons marketplace directly into your website and earn commissions off of each sale. This method works very well if your blog is centered around a certain product.

Tip: affiliate sales are the best route for newer blogs

6. Take Donations

Sometimes this is called e-begging, but you can use paypal to ask your readers for donations

Alot of people ask ” How can I make money” but aren’t willing to invest either time or money. Those people should quite frankly quit. Because they are never going to have success and probably don’t have the intelligence or desire to make it work.

The process IS easy, but I didn’t say instant.

To do so, you use a little understood the power of Leverage.

You think Rome was built in a day? No. But it DID grow and your business can grow to too.

You get there by leveraging more than just MONEY. Sure, reinvesting is great but a lot of you have little money now. So first you need to get some.

You need to leverage what you HAVE in the most effective way possible. That is your time, and your brain.

Step 1 – Pick A Market or “Niche”

It doesn’t matter which one, just pick something you are interested in. Here are a few examples:

• Health and Wellness
• Wealth
• Relationships
• Pets
• Weight loss
• Debt problems
• Foreclosure issues
• Making money online

With your chosen category go to Clickbank. Find the highest gravity product.

Next, go to Quantcast.com and enter your chosen products web address to find out your targets demographics. Age, sex, location, frequently visited sites. Write this information down.

After that, look up 10 forums on your niche. Write down what they desire, what they are looking for.

These are called HOT BUTTONS. This is what will make you SELL.

Finally, go look at your chosen products sales page. Line up the hot buttons with your target demographic.

Step 2 – The Squeeze

Build “Opt-in” Bait for a squeeze page. Find out what your market wants and create a short little product for them to download. This is “bait” to get them to opt-in. A free 20 page report works well.

Now make the squeeze page. Put the benefits to your product on your squeeze page in bullet points. Line those up with your target markets needs. (You discovered these in step one).

Then, on the thank you page, put a review of the product you chose to promote. Video reviews work well. Then offer a bonus for buying through your link.

Finally, write up 10 emails to follow up with them. Offer them solid content and inside that content, put your affiliate link. Switch up straight promotions with content.

For those that purchase, get them on your “buyers list”. Those that don’t, wait 10 days then offer them another affiliate product. You’ll pick up more buyers this way.

Step 3 – Traffic

We built up our opt-in bait and squeeze page, with thank you page testimonial review. Now it is time to get the TRAFFIC. And this is where the magic happens. I used this SINGLE technique and I got 1000 subscribers in just a few days.

At that time, I got lucky. REAL lucky. I was clueless to what I was doing. But not anymore.

Here is the strategy:

First find people with medium to large email lists already.

Search for 10 affiliates already established in your niche. Approach them with a reasonable offer. If they need article writing, graphic design work, copywriting, preferably something they HATE doing. (link building, etc.) and offer to work for them in these areas.

“Why do all that for them when I’m building their business and not mine?

How they PAY YOU is with their email list. They send out a broadcast or two advertising your website.

This can result in hundreds or thousands being added to your list in a VERY short time.

For me, it was a little over 1000 subscribers, 314 dollars in IMMEDIATE income, and 2 to 3k a month from there on out. Just from this SINGLE TRANSACTION.

Step 4 – Ad Swaps

Now you should go find 10 more affiliates inside your niche and offer them Ad Swaps.

This is where you basically trade lists. You can safely do this with your list 2 times a month…and in doing so double or triple the size of your list VERY fast.

So, lets say you got 500 subscribers with the first JV deal. You then do 6 swaps over 3 months, that should grow your list to 2k pretty fast.

To give you some metric’s that should be 2000 a month in affiliate commissions.

Next we kick it into overdrive.

Step 5 – Outsourcing

Hire a content writer and submitter from the Philippines. The are many advantages to the Philippines, they have amazing english skills and good work ethic, plus very loyal. Also, it’s only about 300 to 600 a month. Easy for you, now that you’re earning 2k a month.

You are going to get them to write and submit articles for you. Train them well (how to do so is beyond the scope of this “mini course”, info is out there if you look)

They’ll start driving DIRECT traffic to your site without you lifting a finger. This allows you to CONTINUE to build relationships and do more JV ad swaps.

By now, a few months has passed and you should have about 3 to 4 thousand on your list…this is where it gets exciting!

People who search by clicking the button on Google’s homepage are fifty percent more likely to go on to click an ad than people who search by any other Google means, according to online Ad Network Chitika. The study, which looked at just over 11 million impressions, shines a light on the possibility and importance of being able to predict web users’ activity.

When comparing the different types of traffic that come through their advertising network, the researchers at Chitika compared the different types of Google traffic – people who click on the “Google Search” button, people who search by hitting the enter key, people who search from browser toolbars, etc. While the overall clickthrough rate for the entire Google-searching sample was 0.95%, the people who searched by clicking on the search button at Google.com clicked ads at a 1.56% rate, over half again higher.

But the question becomes, why such a high disparity? Why are people who type in their query and hit enter so much less likely to click on an ad than someone who performs a search differently through the same website?

“Sophistication is my guess,” says Rand Fishkin, SEO guru and CEO of SEOMoz.org. ”Hitting enter means you’re not moving your hands away from the keyboard and likely indicates a more tech-savvy (and hence, click-sensitive) individual.”

So it appears that advertising click rates are inversely proportional to the “tech-savviness” of the people receiving the ads. By defining a user’s tech-savviness, it’s possible that ad networks going forward will be able to target better and better, driving revenue for websites while showing less ads.

Chitika Ad Network

Devhub is a free web hosting and web page creation platform. It provides PPC ads and CPA ads for, but allows for full control by the user. Devhub pages are also compatible with Google Adsense and other affiliate programs.

“ As a novice in web development………….I was able to use the DevHub publishing platform to turn my barren domains into a network of high-quality, fully functional websites.
- DevHub Reviews

“ The average site at DevHub is earning between $1.80 to $3.20 a month. That seems like a strong number…
- Andy DomainNameWire.com

Devhub give you all the tools you need to build complicated websites with no prior knowledge of web development or coding needed. The simple drag and drop interface makes designing hub pages intuitive and simple.

Best Things About Devhub :

• Revenue Sharing
• Compatible with Adsense and Other Programs
• Free Hosting
• Easy to use, but not watered down
• Friend Referral Program
• Great Analysis Tools
• Compatible with Google Analytics

Watch this tutorial to get started now:

Click Here then follow along with the video to set up your first hub page and start earning money right away.

You’ll know that you’ve hit the jackpot when they contact you. According to YouTube’s post on the news, “To determine whether a particular video is eligible for monetization, we look at factors like the number of views, the video’s virality and compliance with the YouTube Terms of Service. If your video is eligible for monetization, you will receive an email and see an “Enable Revenue Sharing” message next to your video on the watch page, as well as in other places in your account.”

After you’ve enabled revenue sharing, YouTube will sell ads opposite your video and pay you via Google Adsense on a monthly basis. The only bad news associated with today’s announcement – individual video partnerships are US-only for the time being.

One man “Michael Bucklely” has been earning a six-figure income from his viral videos since the first implemented the YouTube Partner Program

So if you have a blog and you are using YouTube to promote it, here is a great reason to step up your game and really put the effort into your videos. Not only will it benefit your blog or website, but you might end up earning a nice chunk of change from them.

There are several different ways to earn an income from the comfort of your home using the internet and not all of them involve using a blog. However there are at least 7 ways a blog can generate income for you.

“It can pay for your bills. It works for everyone. There’s no secret and you’ll just really need to know how to get started and which blogging method you want to follow.”

1. The “Flagship” or Big Blog Route – Where you focus all your energy on one single blog and try to build a huge readership and lots of traffic

2. The “Pay per Post” or Get Paid to Blog Route - Set up several small blogs and get paid by sponsors to review/promote their products.

3. The Automated Blogging or Splog Route - This blog automatically pulls content from others RSS feeds to create content for your blog.

4. The Text Link Selling Blog Route - Earn income through selling text links to websites and businesses.

5. The Made-for-Adsense or Made-for-Affiliate-Program Route - Here you set up a blog with one idea in mind. Sell your product, whatever it may be.

6. The Blog Network or Contract Blogging Route - Join a blog network and get paid to create content for other people.

7. The Blog-as-Marketing or Branding Route - Create your own business and promote yourself through your blog.

For more detailed information about these 7 strategies visit Dosh Dosh.

Yesterday The Consumerist wrote an article titled “No you can’t get rich via twitter.” Seems like lately there are twittertisements around every corner. However I’m pretty sure that some of those people are actually making the money they say they are. Probably just not they way they make it look.

If you want to know how people really get rich using twitter, just send me your credit card number and sign up for the email list FREE TODAY ONLY. Don’t miss out on this once in a lifetime opportunity.

Have any of you had luck making money using twitter?? Let us know in the comments.