The Big Adsventure

The big number in web2.0 seems to be 43. There are a lot of sites with lists that contain 43 items. There is 43 Blogs, 43 things to do in this
life, 43 people you want to meet and even a blog about nothing
but 43.

Today a brand new site has been launched: 43Ads This new link selling website has a front page with, you’ve guessed it: 43 links. Anyone who has a little bit of cash to spend can get a link on the site and you will stay on there until other people, with more cash to spare, have pushed you off. But being pushed off of the page is not a loss, because you get your money back plus a little profit on top of that!

Rob Benwell has written an e-book on how to make money using blogs. His method does not require posting a lot to get enough visitors to the blog itself, but rather using several blogs to drive traffic to an affiliate site. Robs book, Blogging to the Bank is full of interesting thoughts on how to drive traffic to a website using blogs.

It all sounds very logical and running a blog directory myself, I notice a lot of submissions to the directory of these exact type of blogs lately. I don’t want these type of blogs in my directory and only approve the ones that are real blogs, but there are tons of directories that will accept these sites and let you build traffic to them.

Olaf just passed the magical mark of rank 100,000 at technorati. Looks like the blogotition is over and I lost big time…

Well actually I am the biggest winner if you look at the details, sure I’m only ranked at position 220,000 and a bit, but considering our starting positions my blog has gained the most (almost 900,000) so I lost $10 to this bet, but got my blog noticed I think!

Here’s a cool concept: buy a link and the price doubles, now if someone else buys for the new price, you get your money back (but you get to keep your link) On the next round you get the same amount you paid again, so you just doubled your money. This is Advertising 2.0 at mmmzr.

The only problem is that the price of the links go up unbelievably fast and will soon hit a point where people will probably not buy anymore. Not a real problem for me though, I’ve doubled my money and actually gotten quite a few visitors from the site!

First there was site-search, that you can add to your website, to let visitors search your site by using the Google search-engine. This great feature will save you a lot of time, writing a search function for your website.

But what if you want your visitors to be able to find information on other sites as well? Now there is Google co-op which will search all sites you have added to the search-engine. You can now create your own search-engine that is specialized on a certain topic and it will not show all the MFA sites in the results.

What’s even cooler is that you can make a little money with your own search-engine by adding your AdSense code to the result pages!

The Google Webmaster Tools have been enhanced with some great new features. You can now see graphs of Googlebots activity on your website. The graphs show you how many pages the bot read and how many kilobytes of data it downloaded from your site and the average time it took the bot to read the site.

If you see that the bot is using too much of your bandwidth, you can tell it to slow down on your site. If you want more visits from the Googlebot, simply tell it to crawl faster…

Another nice addition is the link counter on the Google Sitemap. For each sitemap you submit you can see how many links the map contains. If you are creating the sitemaps on autopilot, this is a nice feature to check if big G has received what you expected it to receive.

If you’ve been looking for ways to make more money with AdSense you’ve probably come across Michael Cheney’s AdSense Videos. Michael Cheney is one of the top internet marketing gurus around and after being in this business for over 10 years, he makes close to $20K a month just with AdSense!

In his AdSense Videos Michael shares his AdSense strategy and secrets with us. His videos are easy to understand and a lot more fun to watch than reading one of the many AdSense e-books out there.

The AdSense custom channels tracking has been taken to the next level, you can now add more than one custom channel to a single ad unit. With this change you can create better performance statistics for your ads. You could for instance create two custom channels to track the ads displayed in the top of your page and the ones displayed in your side menu, while this type of custom channel use has been available for a long time, you can now also add a second custom channel to your ads so you can track the difference in clicks on different ad colors you are using on the same ad blocks on your site.

Up until now you had to create a custom channel for each ad unit on each page to be able to get a detailed ad performance overview. The multiple custom channel usage lets you create overlapping groups of ads, this will eliminate the need of downloading your AdSense reports and using a different application to create your detailed stats.

Trying to get the most out of the AdSense program I’m often checking my earnings, which can take up some time. Looking for a better way I found a cool Firefox extension today that displays your AdSense earnings right in your browser window: AdSense Notifier
So whenever you’re surfing the web you can see your earnings and with a single click you will be taken to your AdSense account so you can have a look at the details.