Guy Gets Kicked Off From Amazon. Loses $400.

Just read this really simple post about a guy who just got booted from Amazon's Affiliate program and lost out on the $400 in commissions that he had already accumulated.

Although ProductCritic participates in Amazon's Affiliate program, it is not a material part of the sites revenue. How unimportant is it? How about less than $20 in affiliate commissions so far this whole year!

I'm not sure why the revenue (and clicks) from Amazon is so low. To be fair, we have mainly put in Amazon links because they have a lot of good general information about each camera, camcorder, and cell phone and is a good place for our visitors to view the features of a product (but not necessarily the reviews).

Because we think the Amazon links are helpful for our visitors, we're going to keep the links available but I'm seriously thinking about using a different affiliate partner.

Anyone have any good ideas?

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.

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.

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?

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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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.