3 Kinds Of Successful Adsense Sites? At Least ProductCritic Is One

Eric Giguere (the author of a couple Adsense books that I haven't read yet), has a post up on his Make Easy Money With Google And Adsense blog entitled "The 3 Kinds Of Successful Adsense Sites".

In summary, the three types he lists are:

1. The Experience Site - a site that describes your personal experience with something.
   
2. The Clarification Site - a site to better explain a topic.
   
3. The Compilation Site - a site that organizes information and links to relevant websites.
   

ProductCritic is definitely the third type of site that Eric lists. To quote his post,

"The best compilation sites have lots of links to other sites. They're not afraid of external linking, and they're all the more useful because of it. It may seem counterproductive because each link out is one more chance of losing the visitor (and hence any potential ad clicks) but it’s the links that make the site valuable to the visitor in the first place and that draw in the traffic."

I can't believe how well Eric describes our philosophy for ProductCritic (even though he's probably never visited the site). Although we are making some money from Adsense and from Chitika ads, we're actually more focused on making ProductCritic the best consumer electronics review summary site that we can. After all, we created it because we wanted a site like that for ourselves! We're not worried about losing visitors to other links...that's why they're supposed to visit the site in the first place.

Remember, you can make the site more useful for everyone by letting us know of reviews that we've missed or products that we don't have review summaries for yet.

Don't Get Scammed By Online Camera Stores

We've posted about being scammed by online camera stores in the past but yesterday we received an e-mail from a visitor of our digital camera reviews warning us about an experience with one of the worst online camera "stores", bestpricecameras.com.

I just wanted to warn your readers of a "supplier" of digital cameras that I regard to to be highly suspect: bestpricecameras.com
I found that they had the best price advertised anywhere for a new Canon Rebel xti 400d and for the lens, a 17 to 40mm L. All for around $960+/-. Sounds too good to be true? That's because it is. Please post this on your website so that others do not suffer the strange tactics of this company. I cannot imagine what they hope to obtain from their methods.

I ordered the camera and lens (which I suspect will be of outstanding quality). After waiting a couple of weeks, I called them and they said it was on back order and that I should receive it within a week. After 2 more weeks, I called them again and got some surly jerk who mumbled something about "Chinese" or something and hung up on me. I called back and finally got a salesperson who was honest enough to tell me that they did not even have a distributor for the camera. Why were they selling something they could not even supply? Don't know.

Maybe they hoped people would just let their order ride and forget about it? I didn't. At least they had not run my card so I cancelled the order, bit the bullet and paid the extra 30% and ordered it through Amazon.com, and got it a week later. Forget thinking that high-class equipment will come to you for cheap prices; it ain't gonna happen, and something bad may result. Go with a responsible business that is known and trusted. For me, that's Amazon. Oh yeah, Bestpricecameras.com can kiss my grits.

Please, please, please keep in mind the old adage, "if it's looks too good to be true, it probably is". These scammers prey on people who really, really want the camera but don't want to pay the price. If everyone else is selling the camera at about the same price but you suddenly find it for $200 cheaper, don't let your desire for a good deal overcome your common sense. Some online store in Brooklyn will NOT have it $200 cheaper than Amazon.

At ProductCritic's main site, we are constantly looking at the individual ads being shown in our Google Ads box. We block out any ads from stores that have a history of scamming people so that they never show up on ProductCritic. If you run a site, you should do the same and do your part in helping to curb the scamming of innocent people, and more importantly, the visitors to your site.

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Don't Get Scammed From Online Camera Stores

The Wise Bread blog has a post entry titled "DO NOT buy a digital camera online until you read this". The post is a detailed account of exactly what happened when he tried to purchase a digital camera from one of the most notorious online camera stores, Bestpricecameras.com.

The usual way these Brooklyn-based online camera stores scam you is the simple Bait-and-Switch tactic. They lure you to make a purchase by showing cameras that are well below the prices you see elsewhere (as much as half as much). That's the bait. Then, once you place an order, you'll get a call or an e-mail saying that your order is backordered or you find out it's for the camera body only (no battery, manual, box, or anything else) and you'll get pressured to purchase a bunch of different stuff (or a different model of camera).

In a previous post, I talk about how I look for these scam stores advertising on ProductCritic via Google Adwords. The only way to ensure that the visitors on your site don't go to one of these scam stores is to block those ads from your site.

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Google's Doing Something About MFA Sites. Finally!

As I've written about before, I hate MFA sites! They are such huge leeches on the Internet but I certainly can't blame them for taking advantage of a legal, money-making opportunity.

Given my hatred for MFA sites, I was ecstatic to hear on Monday that Google has sent email out to MFA publishers that their accounts will be disabled starting June 1. This is great news. Although Jen from Jensense.com stated that both MFA publishers and arbitrage publishers are getting their accounts disabled, Shoemoney has a video blog post refuting the news that arbitrage publishers are getting disabled.

I don't mind arbitrage publishers (that's where you buy ads for a low price and get people to visit a site where you hope they click other ads that get you a higher payment than you paid to get the click) because it's a legitimate strategy in many traditional markets (not just online ads). Although part of MFA sites strategy is arbitrage, the fact that they have absolutely zero value (they don't even try to put up some useful content) makes me really hate them.

I can't believe it's actually taken this long for Google to do this (what happened to "Don't Be Evil"?) but at least it's finally happening. This won't completely get rid of MFA sites (since they'll just switch to Yahoo or Microsoft ads) it hopefully will put a big dent in them.....I'm getting tired of continually banning them from ProductCritic.

Don't Let Scammers Hijack Your Site

In a previous post, I talked about getting rid of MFA sites. I just dislike the thought of a visitor to ProductCritic wanting to read digital camera reviews and clicking on an ad they think they want more information about only to reach a "made for adsense" site that just leeches clicks from ProductCritic visitors who are looking for genuinely helpful information.

But, blocking MFA sites isn't enough. In the niche that ProductCritic sits in, many of the adsense ads shown are from sites selling cameras and camera supplies. Unfortunately, there are quite a few instances of these camera stores running scams of various sorts. Some of these scams (and how to avoid them) are described very well by Photo.net and Bob Atkins.

I don't like the idea of some scam store using ProductCritic as a vehicle for scamming innocent visitors to our site. So, while it takes some extra effort, I pay attention to the ads that are being displayed on ProductCritic and, in addition to looking for MFA sites, when I see an ad for a store, I look it up on ResellerRatings. If it has a bad score and has a lot of negative comments, I add that site to our Adsense "Competitive Ad Filter" list so that the scam store's ad never shows up on ProductCritic again.

I hate the thought of these scammers hijacking the visitors of ProductCritic and someone potentially getting ripped off because of a visit to ProductCritic. This blog states it correctly...it's about reputation and brand. It takes extra effort to be this diligent but it's the right thing to do.

Google Adsense Optimization Team

Logging into ProductCritic's Adsense account today, I saw a new section called "Recent Messages" with a message from the "Optimization Team". Given that the date of the message was April 1, I almost thought that it was going to be some sort of April Fool's joke.

Looks like Google automatically reviewed ProductCritic and here's the help they are providing:

"You may be filtering ads that monetize well on your site".

When I dig deeper, it says that I am filtering ads and that if I filter less ads, I could increase my revenue. That's all well and good but unlike Google, I hate Made-For-Ads sites. I don't want visitors to ProductCritic to click on them and basically waste their time. I really don't care that it could "increase my revenue" if I didn't filter them.

If more and more sites actually filtered these Made-For-Ads sites, would they start to disappear? Probably not but we're going to do our part to make the Internet a little bit better.

I Have A Lot More To Learn About Adsblacklist

So I've been using AdsBlackList for a little while now. Actually, more to the point, I've been putting MFA (Made For Ads) sites on my Google Adsense Competitive Ad Filter list and just using AdsBlackList to keep track of all the MFA sites I see on ProductCritic.

I've read a few blog posts and related comments about it not working or reducing overall revenue. I'm not sure I've seen a reduction in revenue yet (still too early to tell) but I might try an experiment in the second week of March to see what happens when I remove the sites on the Ad Filter list.

Still, I'm debating with myself because my main purpose for putting those sites on the list is not just for increasing revenue (since some posts say that Google already puts in the highest paying ads automatically since that's the best for Google...which makes sense). My main purpose for putting the sites on my filter list is that I hate MFA sites and everything they stand for and I think that I'm doing a disservice to people visiting ProductCritic if they click on an Ad and it takes them to a completely useless site for them. I know, as a visitor of many sites myself, that if I exit a site, I'd sure like to go somewhere that is also as useful as the site I just came from. Why would I want anything that creates a bad user experience? I think the quality of the sites that advertise on your site reflect on the quality of your site overall (even subconsiously) to a visitor.

Anyways, I'm going to run my experiment in a couple weeks. If I actually get more revenue by removing the MFA sites, I have a bigger dilemma....but I think I already know what I'm going to choose either way.

What would you do if you found that MFA sites brought you more revenue but reflected lower quality on your site?

Block Your Ads. Get Better Stats.

As part of the added value of ProductCritic over other review aggregator competitors, we add reviews and products manually (instead of using a spider or bot to scrape review sites). We believe that the quality of review summaries, the overall coverage on a product, and the summary review scores (and therefore, resulting ProductCritic Score) are much higher than with automatic scraping.

On any normal day of working on ProductCritic, I probably reload the page 20-30 times depending on how many products and reviews I'm adding. This has a negative affect on the stats that you see on Google Adsense and Analytics because your pageviews are added to the total thus giving you inaccurate statistics. Since I'm such a stats addict, I wanted to remove my own pageviews of the site.

Since I use Firefox, I installed the Adblock add-in. It's a great add-in for blocking all ads or specifically chosen ones. I actually don't block ads from other sites because I want to see what ads other sites, blogs, and competitors are displaying. As long as you enable your filters correctly, the Add-in works great because I can choose specifically just to block my own Adsense or Chitika ads but still see those ads that are located on other sites. Furthermore, it is very easy to enable/disable the blocking of ads just by right-clicking the "Adblock" link located at the bottom right of the browser window (which allows me to easily see the ads on ProductCritic if I want to).

Once you install Adblock, you will need to add filters. Here is what you need to add to your filters in order to block Google Adsense and Chitika ads:

google_ad_client="pub-XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX"
http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/ads?client=ca-pub-XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX*
ch_client="productcritic";
http://mm.chitika.net/minimall?*&client=productcritic*

*Note that you'll need to replace the bolded parts above with your own client number or text. Don't forget to keep the "*" that's at the end of some of those lines as they act as a wildcard (which tells the filter that you don't care what is after that text).

So far, it's been working great for me as my Adsense and Chitika stats for Page CTR and Page eCPM are much more accurate (since my own pageviews are not watering down the results).

Finally, an added bonus of blocking your own ads is that you don't accidentally click on your ads (which can get you kicked out of the Adsense program by Google). Overall, a fantastic add-in and another reason to use Firefox as your default browser.

Kill Bad Ads From Your Site And Increase Your Revenue

I can't stand all those Made For Ads (MFA) sites that are all over the internet. You know the ones I mean. They are sites that have nothing on them but more ads. These sites are absolutely content free and add nothing to the Internet community. They are the cockroaches...wait, leeches is better, of the Internet. I don't even want to link to one of them here because I can't stand giving them any more attention then they deserve.

Don't you hate it when you look at your Adsense stats and see clicks that pay you less than 10 cents? Sometimes, you'll get clicks that pay you 1 cent! I've learned that many of these clicks come from ads that are actually MFA sites. You only get a certain number of people clicking on an ad in a certain day and you definitely don't want that click wasted on an ad that pays 1 cent!

So, what can you do about them? First, you need to find them. Maybe there's an easier method to do this but I do this manually. I reload my page (at ProductCritic) and view the Adsense ads that are displayed. While some of them are quite obviously real sites (not MFA) like sonystyle.com and nytimes.com, you will also see some sites that you may be suspicious of. I open up a separate browser tab and type that link into the address box (NEVER click on your own ads) to double-check that my suspicions are correct.

For ProductCritic, because it is a review aggregator site for digital cameras, camcorders, and cell phones, I seem to get lots of ads that look very relevant to the content but are actually MFA. An example of one of these sites (check it out if you want but don't click on an ad), is digital-slr.info. Sounds relevant to cameras, right? Nope, it's a horrible, waste-of-time, Made For Ads site. The people who run these sites buy up a ton of domain names, stick on a template (most of them look identical) and then just load the page with ads. Once one of your visitors reaches that site, what's the most natural way for them to exit it....click an ad! After all, there's nothing else to do on those sites.

My sense is that these MFA sites pay low prices per click for long tail keywords, hope to get some visitors to their sites (which they set up for next to nothing) and then get paid a lot more for ads on their site. This is called "Adsense Arbitrage" and I'd write a post about it but there's plenty of good posts already like this one.

Now that you've found one of these sites showing ads on your site, what do you do? Login to your Adsense account, and click the tab entitled "Adsense Setup". Then click on the link marked "Competitive Ad Filter". Enter the url of the site (you don't need the "http://" or the "www.") into the Content Filter box provided. For the above example, I'd add in "digital-slr.info" and then click "Save Changes". Now in about 12-24 hours, ads for this site will no longer be displayed on your site.

One additional step that everyone should take is to help out the community. Head on over to AdsBlackList.com and set up and account. Submit the URL of the MFA site that you just found and after approval of 4 other readers (who confirm that it is indeed a MFA site), it will be added to their blacklist. Blacklists from AdsBlackList can be automatically generated for you to add to your Adsense Content Filter.

How's my success been so far? Well, since I started doing this, I've had zero clicks that have been low paying (e.g. 10 cents or less). Every day, I watch new ones pop up on ProductCritic and need to add them to my content filter on Adsense. It takes some diligence but I believe it is well worth it. First, you get benefits because you are increasing the quality of the contextual advertising on your site and you are not "wasting" your site's ad clicks. Second, the visitors of your site don't get transferred to one of these MFA sites and when they actually click on an ad, they are more likely to find what they are really after.

Too bad Adsense Content Filter only allows 200 URL's. I'm sure I'll find more than 200 MFA's to block from advertising on ProductCritic. Try it out yourself and let me know how it works for you!

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Yahoo Challenging Google Adwords

PC World has an article about Yahoo's revamped Sponsored Search. I haven't tried Google Adwords yet as I'm still trying to figure out what keywords I'd use for ProductCritic. Since Yahoo only has 22% of the US search market vs. Google's 63%, you might be able to buy keywords for cheaper with Yahoo's Sponsored Search. Since you can't use Adsense and Yahoo ads together on the same site (even if they don't appear on the same page), I'm sticking with Adsense until I have a much better sense of what's working and what isn't.

One of the tools I'm using to determine the best keywords is HitTail. I'll provide more details in a followup post detailing some of the tools and sites I'm using the manage this blog and the main ProductCritic site.

Interview With SEO Book Author Aaron Wall

Jonathan Leger has a great blog dedicated to Adsense, SEO (Search Engine Optimization), and Internet Marketing. Yesterday, he conducted an online group Question & Answer session with Aaron Walls, the SEO expert and author of the popular SEO Book.

If you joined Jonathan's list, you would have received an announcement about when the Q&A session was taking place and how to participate. I did not get a chance to do that. Fortunately, Jonathan, who continually impresses me with his professionalism and blog smarts, has posted a transcript of the session.

If you are at all interested in SEO, Adsense, or how to start an online career, I highly suggest you go to Jonathan's blog and read the transcript.

Blog I Never Heard Of Makes $1400 a Month? I Have Hope!

Before I started doing this, I always thought that you had to be one of those hugely popular blogs (like TechCrunch) to make even decent money. I ran across this post from a blog called American Desi Notes discussing his earnings from Adsense and some strategies that worked for him (like using the 336x280 ad sizes).

So far, for ProductCritic, because we've just started, earnings are small but we've definitely had some success with Chitika (probably because the ads are so targeted to the content).

I think that the blog author has a great point in this quote:

Most new AdSense publishers are demoralized by the low clicks and low traffic that they recieve. The one thing that new publishers has a hard time doing is being patient. A web site will not get millions of hits over night.

So, for all you new bloggers, keep going! Keep writing great content and people like me will subscribe to your blog in our reader. I guarantee it. I'm only hoping people find this blog (and the main ProductCritic site) interesting and also subscribe.

Actively Pointing People At Google Referrals

Chaos Laboratory has a post up about how and why Google wants site publishers to actively promote the Google Referral ads. While it is against Google's Terms of Service (TOS) to promote the clicking of Adsense ads on the site (or to even draw attention to them with images or a "click here" pointer, this is completely different for Google Referrals.

Although I can see how this would help the click-throughs of Google Referral ads on your site, I can't help but think that doing this and the other suggestion by Google of "devoting a write-up on the usefulness of the product" goes completely against the reason one should create a site or a blog. People want to read your thoughts and content...not play the game of trying to avoid the ads on your site or not knowing what are actually ads.

This isn't the reason why I decided to remove Google Referrals from my site so if you use Google Referrals, you might find some useful info in the Chaos Laboratory post.

Google Referrals - I've Decided Against Them

In our constant attempt at optimizing the ads on ProductCritic, I tried Google Referrals for a few days. Google Referrals are those ads you see that give you advice to "download Firefox for better browsing" or "download the Google Pack". When a visitor to your site clicks on that ad and actually downloads and installs the application, you get a referral fee.

After having the ads on ProductCritic for a few days (they were located on the left column under the Amazon ad), I decided to pull them. Although, in the three days that they were up, ProductCritic did not get any referral fees from them, that's not why I took them down. The main reason I took them down is that I thought they just made the left column look too crowded and took too much away from the overall clean feel of the site.

This is an important lesson. Don't just put ads all over your blog or your site at all costs as too many ads can distract from the main reason people are visiting your site....for the content! It's not worth it to distract people from your content just so you can make a few extra bucks.

Faking Context Sensitive Chitika Ads

As you may have seen on the main site, we have added Chitika ads in combination with the Google Adsense ads that were already on the site. Like I mentioned in a previous post, if you use Adsense, you are not allowed to have other ads on your site that are context sensitive (i.e. what is displayed in the ad is deduced automatically from the ad provider spidering the page).

We like the Chitika ads because they are dynamic (roll over them and the tabs change) but in addition to the ProductCritic Score, I keep getting asked to add the price of a product. While we have thought about doing that, it will still take awhile before we can add that functionality to the site. Instead, Chitika can help people who want that info (and help us at the same time).

To make it useful though, we needed to ensure that the Chitika ad was relevant to the product page. Since we already know what product we are displaying, it's as easy as adding a line like this to the Chitika script:

var ch_queries = new Array( "Canon A640" );

This tells the Chitika ad to use "Canon A640" as the keyword. This works great on the site and maintains our Terms of Service (TOS) with Google Adsense because we're the ones who are telling Chitika what product to put in the ad vs. Chitika determine that contextually.

Adding Chitika Ads - Pretty Simple!

Google Adsense has one major restriction in their Terms of Service (TOS) that you must honor if you are going to use them. While you are allowed to have other ads on your pages alongside Adsense ads, you are not allowed to use other contextual ads. That is, ad networks that determine what ads to show depending on what they perceive as the content of the page.

On ProductCritic, we have small Amazon affiliate ad on the left panel that is directly targeted to the product review being displayed. That is allowed under the Adsense TOS because we set the appropriate Amazon ASIN for that product (the ad itself doesn't figure out what product to show just by looking at the page).

We had always planned to add Chitika ads to the site as it fits with the products and allows us to provide prices without having to create a whole pricing engine...especially since many other sites already do that well. Chitika ads also fit with the core purpose of ProductCritic in that it helps people make the smartest and most informative decisions (on both quality and pricing) before making a purchase.

Finally, Chitika ads adhere to the Adsense TOS because they are not context sensitive. The Chitika scripts are very easy to understand though so it's quite easy for us (via Ruby code) to assign the right product category and product to the Chitika ad script so that the correct product shows up on each page.

I'll write a post in the future about how the new Chitika ads are working on the site.

Starting Out Like ProductCritic? Read John Chow!

While there are quite a few blogs that I read to learn as much as I can about SEO and what works for an internet site now, one of my favorites is John Chow dot Com. Recently, he offered readers the chance to get a free linkback if you reviewed his blog. Although this isn't technically a "paid post", I am hoping that John adds this review to his list and we get a linkback from his blog which ranks high on Technorati (#1341). This helps raise the Google and Technorati rank of ProductCriticBlog and will hopefully lead to more readers (which will hopefully drive traffic to our main site).

Who Is This John Chow Guy?
You can read about him on his blog but I know that he lives in Vancouver (like me) so maybe at some point we'll get a chance to meet as he does seem like a genuinely nice guy. Also like me, his "real" job is not running his blog but running The TechZone which is a very popular hardware news site (over 200K page views per day) that he started in 1999.

What's Good?
I've been reading his blog ever since I found it on digg and then later read a great post he made about being banned from digg as spam. "Wow", I thought, "how do you get banned from digg?" This was especially interesting to me given that many of his posts are genuinely useful. Here are some key reasons why I like the blog:

• Great posts regarding his experience and knowledge in making it in the dot com business. Making money online is the strength and the "hook" for the blog. He's willing and ready to teach others.
• Very clear and concise writing. The blog is very easy to read and digest.
• Very regular, high quality posts.
• John is very responsive to his readers. He regularly comments on the comments left on his posts.
  

What's Not So Good?
Like I mentioned previously, the "hook" for his blog is about making it in the dot com business. I believe that most of his readers are coming for that (I know I am). So, what do I think that he could improve on his blog?

• He combines personal posts with "dot com" posts. As an example, he makes posts about Dine Out Vancouver (which if you live in Vancouver like I do, you'll know what he's talking about) but many of his readers will simply not care. In another post, he posts pictures of his Pho dinner with his friends.
  
• Although John is obviously successful in monetizing his blog, I believe that he has too many ads in both quantity and type. On his blog, you almost have to battle to navigate through the ads from Google adsense, feedburner, Dealtime, and IntelliTXT (the ones I hate the most).
  

Despite what I think he could improve, he's obviously doing something right in monetizing the blog so what do I know? Anyways, I definitely enjoy reading his blog. If you're starting a blog or a site, do yourself a favor and subscribe to his blog.

I'm Already A Stats Addict

As part of starting up a new site, you need to get all your metrics in place early. ProductCritic currently uses stats gathering tools:

• Google Analytics
• Google Adsense
• Google Webmaster Tools

Even though the site hasn't officially launched, I'm still checking the metrics quite regularly to see the affects that the implementation of various strategies or link sites have on visits. Since we haven't really even officially launched to friends and family, we can tell that most of the current visits to both ProductCritic and this blog are either from people stumbling onto the sites or are our own clicks.

Besides ensuring that we are being spidered from the big search engines and all posts on this blog are being pinged by Weblogs or Technorati, I saw a new site called Tag A Cloud that allows you to create a tag for your site and some keywords as a link to your site. Almost immediately, I saw referring links from Tag A Cloud. For interests sake, the tag I added to that site for ProductCritic is "stuffyouwanttobuy".

I'm looking forward to seeing how ProductCritic grows over the year. The problem with being addicted to seeing the web stats is that they'll become even more addicting once there's some growth to the visits and (hopefully) to this blog.

One thing we've learned that we'd like to pass on is to get your site on Google's Webmaster Tools as early as possible and upload a sitemap. It takes quite a while for Google to crawl your site when you first start out (ProductCritic hasn't been crawled since October).