Not Even Close to the UPS Club

It's time for a change!

[PFOnline]

I don't know, to be honest, I get a little jealous when I hear people talking about being in the UPS club.

I was hoping maybe we could start a thread that has tips from those in the UPS club.

What do you think are the main reasons behind your success?

Large amount of visitors?
High paying keywords?

Anything you do that you think really helps that you feel like sharing?

[Noel]

the main reasons behind your success

Visitors

Not sure is you have seen my message about a flash site (http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum89/4379.htm), but if so... I'm getting about 25.000 to 30.000 visitors a day on that "stupid" flash site.. (beleve me. The site is nothing special, but people seem to like it)

Sinds I added AdSense on that page (I asked the AdSense team if it was okay) I'm doing good.. So good that if it will keep going like this I will make it in!.

Tha bad thing about the doing so good is that I can not sleep anymore, and when I do manage to get some sleep I have bad nightmares about my account beeing cancelled..

Anyway.. My reason behind the maybe/success is a small (200kb) flash animation.

So far so good.. Lets wait and see.. Only 27 day's to go..

Noel

[ScottM]

Someone very wise on this very forum said something like, "1% of your visitors will do anything you want them to" or something very similar.

So, it's a numbers game.

100 visitors = at least one click
1000 vistors = at least 10 clicks
and so on.

From there it's just about the numbers...

From my own observations, I have to agree.

Also:

I think the viral capability of a humorous/funny mpg or flash presentation is vastly underestimated, as the previous poster has intimated.

(ScottM goes off looking for some inspiration...cats...cats are always funny aren't they?)

:>)

[PFOnline]

True, and very interesting...

Just curious, was your flash animation poltical related?

I'm wondering if I'm thinking of the same one... that George W. Bush one...

(That's the only flash movie thing I've seen on the news)

[Noel]

Just curious, was your flash animation poltical related?

No nothing like that..

Noel

[ogletree]

AS makes a lot of money easily. I for one am not using them again. My sites got hand banned from the SERPS right after I got my first Fed Ex check. I miss the big checks I just don't want to get banned again. The trick to adsense is to have a title that gets people to come to your site and have a site that really does not help much for what they are looking for. If they type in "tempature in Atlanta" and your site gives that to them they close their browser and move on. The AS ads need to be more interesting than your site. I never had CTR of less than 15%. My goal is to have a site that gets traffic from se's. Then send that traffic to adwords advertisers. Most of the time my site shows up for obscure terms that return terrible results in G and no ads or off topic ads. They come to my site and they get the perfect ads. I think I was doing G a favor. They lost that source of revenue. Now affiliates get that traffic. My adsense account is still valid and I have had them review my sites and approve them. AS is not very picky. G search on the other hand decides to be picky every once in a while.

[howiejs]

Do you feel that your high adsense earnings caused your sites to be penalized by Google in the SERPS?

[Palehorse]

Someone very wise on this very forum said something like, "1% of your visitors will do anything you want them to" or something very similar.

Imagine what the .01% would do then? hehe ;o

My reason for the massive amount of visitors is establishment since the mid 90s. Daily updating and good public relations help.

Also it is a extremely popular topic that I rule. ;)

[Broadway]

Clearly a large number of visitors and fairly high paying keywords is important, but don't overlook optimization of your Adsense ads. Optimization generated a 30% increase in my Adsense income, essentially overnight (or actually as fast as I could re-code all of my site's pages). I'm sure an increase like that could easily put some sites into the UPS club level.

[howiejs]

Broadway - please define "optimization of your Adsense ads"

Positioning of ads?
change of specific format?
colors?

[Broadway]

Howiejs,
Adsense sent me one of those "Adsense tips" booklets several months ago (the same info found in the booklet is also on the Adsense website). At first I was somewhat insulted but then I read the tips and tested and implemented them.

For my site (I just happen to run sky scrapers because they fit the format of my pages) it was a matter of positioning the Adsense ads more towards the center of the page's text. Making the Adsense use of text colors similar to my page's text color scheme. Getting rid of the Adsense border and making its background the same color as my page's.

The increase in revenue because of these changes was instant. It was so startling to me that I thought I had a fraudulent clicks issue and contacted Adsense about it. They checked into things and said no fraud was detected and congradulations on making the changes.

[taps]

We started our page five years ago with almost no income. Since we have a huge variety of topics no ad-customer wanted out site as platform for their ads. They wanted a clear target group.

With Adsense anything has changed. The variety is a big advantage and we have really a good revenue.

In the last years without adsense we used our spare time to fill the site with good content and to build up a good position in Google's SERPS.

However: I will never give up my regular job because I know that anything might be over within hours. We try hard to stay within all TOS but you never know what could happen.

And sometimes you even kick yourself out of google -- that happened two years ago when I attached Session-IDs to our URLs. Very, very bad idea.

I love Google and Adsense. It brings almost enough to pay mine and my associate's food and housing. But I will never rely on that and keep my job. That's the best remedy for Adsense-Sleeplessness. :-)

[Macro]

KiSS. Really. Forget about SERPS, forget about impressions, forget about messing with colour/positions/ (once you've found your ideal), forget about rising or falling figures, forget about fraudulent clicks (just don't click yourself), forget about the weather in South Dakota. Forget about banning and unbanning advertisers for testing purposes, forget about running tracking scripts, forget about CTR, EPC, JCBs - it's really about the ABCs: Quality content, regularly adding quality content and... that's it.

If you can't add good quality content fast enough - buy it. If you can't get authors to provide quality content overnight - buy sites that already have it. That's it.

[Broadway]

To this same point: My site is successful and AdSense is a very large part of that. The bottom line however is that my site is successful because it is a quality site. Adsense makes it easy for me to profit from my site but even without AdSense my site will be sucessful and profitable. Yes it will be harder, yes it will be more of a hassel, and yes it probably won't be as profitable, but it will be sucessful because I find that content really does prove to be king.

[chicagohh]

ogletree,

How far did they dig when they did the hand edit? Did they whack only the sites with AS code - or did they go for the entire support network?

[MikeNoLastName]

>Getting rid of the Adsense border and making its
>background the same color as my page's.

Broadway,
Did the booklet ACTUALLY say it was ok or recommended to "get rid" of the border by making it the same color as the background or am I misunderstanding what you typed?

According to their policy:

"the ad colors must be such that any ad elements, including text and URL, are visible."

Wouldn't this include the border? Is the border considered an ad element? On the other hand they apparently don't require the BACKGROUND to be visible - so I guess it's just yet another one of those vague GAd statements. I'm hoping it IS true - I've recently discovered it can work wonders in the right situations for CTR.

[Broadway]

Mike,
Look at this thread:
[webmasterworld.com...]

message #16.

Evidently a few people wrote Adsense specifically about this point and got the ok.

I know it's biting the hand that feeds me but as upstanding as the Adsense program is they don't seem to mind when there is a little confusion involved. Since I employ these techniques I guess I am a guilty party too.

Adsense encourages us to place ads in the center of the page. The center of the page is where one would expect a webmaster to place the most important information, thus implying to the visitor that these ads have significance in the sense that they are valuable links (which they may or may not be).

I also question why the url does not show in the leaderboard format. When I plaster a leader board across my page it makes the links look even more like organic links which are a part of my site and a source of valuable information as opposed to the advertisements that they are.

[MikeNoLastName]

Wow, you're right, that's pretty cool. I noticed the leaderbar (bug?) too and thought I had done it by accident at first.

Combined with the other thread I recently had clarified:
[webmasterworld.com...]

that can open up some pretty interesting potential new options.

I still stand by my theory more and more each day that given enough time and page traffic G zeros in on terms based on user clicks improves the content matching and thus the CTR.