I’m beginning to see a general decrease in the amount of money that I make per click. Earlier in January on several sites I was making $.50-1.50 per click and now I am getting many more clicks, but they are worth pennies. Today I even had a $.01 click for a keyword that used to bring in a lot more.

This is something that it might be a good idea to keep an eye on. If this trend continues then YPN might become a much more appealing choice.

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Adsense has a very nice reporting page. You can do lots of things with it, and get all the stats you could ever want. But it just doesn’t do channels very well. I know that I have a channel for all my sites. Yet my total impressions are always more than the sum of my channels. Sometimes I even get CPM payments of a couple of cents from who knows where. Well this morning I got a $1.24 click (The highest click that I’ve ever received) from somewhere other than one of the sites that I have a channel set up for.

My solution is that Google should automatically set up temporary url channels for everywhere that your ad code is displayed, and then you have the chance to decide whether to make it permanent. This way you always know where these mysterious clicks and impressions are coming from.

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If you’re anything like me then you are thoroughly addicted to forums. You are constantly joining them sometimes you say for days, sometimes you stay for years (my longest is 2 years as of today). The thing that most forums have in comon is that they don’t pay you to generate content for them. Most are very happy just sit back and roll in the dough. But there are some revenue sharing forums out there that you can both learn a lot from, and get paid to post.
The concept is called revenue sharing whereby you enter your adsense publisher id and then your ads are shown half of the time when someone reads a thread that you’ve started. There are three webmaster forums that I know of that do this

To participate you generally have to have a minimum number of posts and you must of course have an adsense account. Earning don’t normally accumulate, but some of them, DigitalPoint in particular, have such a high CPM that even if your ads aren’t clicked you can still make money.

Bottom Line: If you’re going to post on a forum, you might as well get paid for it even if it is really more of a nice gesture than a way to make a lot of money.

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I’ve got big plans for me this year. There are three things that I see that will make me much more successful.

SEO

To be honest I’ve never put much stock in search engine optimization. I’ve never really learned anything about it; only doing partial hack jobs from various articles that I’ve read from various places on the web. As a result I’ve never recieved much traffic from any of the search engines. This year I need to learn both the basics and some advanced techniques so that I too can be in the running for search engine traffic.

Graphics

I have very little creative talent so it won’t come as any surprise to you that I am very bad at graphics. I have learned from a desktop publishing class that I am taking that I can be creative and come up with good products if I take the time and I know how to use the right tools. So this year I resolve to become proficient at graphic design so that I don’t have to hire designers.

Web Programming

I must confess that I know no web programming languages. The only programming language that I have experience with is Java and Java is too ungainly to be used for web development. The only good thing about learning Java from a webmaster’s perspective is that it has taught me to read code so even without knowing how to generate custom code, I have learned to edit, copy, and mimic code to find ways for it to work. So this year I plan to learn and utilize 4 languages: PHP, MySQL, CSS, and XHTML.

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In order to monetize my sites I will initially use a combination of three ad networks.

Google Adsense
The first that I will use, and the one that I plan to use the most is Google Adsense. Adsense is recognized as a market leader. They pay very well depending on the topic and since they have so many advertisers they almost always completely fill your inventory. Plus, they are always rolling out new features. Adsense is definitely one you should check out.
Yahoo Publisher Network
YPN is currently in beta. They are accepting applications as part of the beta, but only from the US. YPN has highly customizable ads, but they don’t have as many and they aren’t as targeted as Google Adsense. Still, it is worth it to sign up and wait for them to be truely competitive.
Chitika eMiniMalls
I’ll use Chitika very limitedly. They have a unique approach and they pay very well per click, but they only pay for clicks originating from the US which makes them just a little bit less desireable than Google or Yahoo, however since they can be used with either if you turn off the contextual mode Chitika can work as a very good supplemental income source if you get a lot of US traffic. The greatest benefit I see coming from Chitika is that they will pay via paypal with only a $10 payout level.

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