Hearty Surprise

Did you notice the ‘Referral’ feature of Google Adsense. That is the new money making baby from Google. This works like the existing content ads but with  more power to pick the ads or category of ads to be displayed on our site and lesser restriction in TOS. There are products in the market already such as Auction Ads that displays ads based on the product/keyword we choose. The referral concept is not entirely new to google. The Firefox with google toolbar is already one such product. Now it has been extended to many non google products.

How is it different from the Content Ad ?

1. With Referral  we can pick to display specific product or category of product whereas content ads are shown based on the content/keywords identified on the website and we have no control on the ads. How many times you have noticed unrelated ads in our site and google says the ads will be more targeted as our site matures. Atleast this saves face by not listing unrelated ads.
2. Google Referral Ads are based on Pay Per Action whereas the content ads are pay per click and pay per impression advertising ie the payment is based on valid clicks and impressions on the ads shown.

Can you identify the Referral from the Adsense Content ad?

Though it resembles the regular ads in size, structure, and content, the message  “Referral Ads by Google”  distinguishes it from the standard  “Ads by Google”.  For example the ad on the right panel is a google referral product.

Expected Benefits

1. Show targetted advertisements based exactly on our site content or our selection.
2. Earning potential increases due to more relevant ads.
3. With our selection of keywords we gain to display products to be included to the list in the future
4. You can track the earning from product referrals through online reports and modify your product listing.

Conclusion 

Referral ads seem to have a higher chance to earn more since we can blend it with our site content.As of now selected adsense publishers are invited to participate in this program and little information is available to see the success trend. 

I am still in the beginning stage and have no concrete results to show.Did anyone notice a significant increase in earning after implementing Google Referral ads. Why not share your experience with us and drop a comment?

Tags: Google Product Referral , Online Earning, advertisements

Popularity: 19% [?]

You just completed a good post for your blog , published it and hope people will trace your article and follow your blog. Furthur more you wish to attract more crowd to increase the page rank and make some money from blog.  Do you think you have done enough to rope in the crowd ?  Not at all, read on to find one simple free method to advertise your blog.

Consider 2 people A, B publishing a book. Person A put the book in a store and waited for people to take notice. Person B put the book in store and started announcing it to the world through various modes. Who do think would have started making sales ?  Definitely person B who made an effort to reach the crowd and was heard. ‘Ping’  blogging does an equivalent of what person B does in the cyber world.  

Before we discuss more on Ping blogging we will have a short intro on ‘Ping’ . Ping is a small utilty which was written  overnight in Dec 1983 by a smart guy named Mike Muuss to troubleshoot an odd network problem. That night never in his wildest imagination he would have thought of receiving a ‘Lifetime Achievement Award’  ten years later for developing an utility used globally by most of the operating systems to test if a server or machine is reachable and how long it takes to reach it.

Ping Blogging

The ping servers collect information about blogs that have added fresh content pass this to to other internet services. How does the ping servers know that you have added a content to your blog? There are 2 methods

1. Manually - if you ‘ping’ to the ping server 

2. Automatically- by the blog authoring tool.

Most blog authoring tools gives you a provision to maintain list of servers to be pingned everytime you publish a new post. This is an automatic announcement to the world.

The blog seach engines and aggregators like technorati , feedburner and yahoo takes note and passes the list to the subscribers who wish to know about the availability of new content. These aggregators have a large userbase and this gives us the opportunity to reach the mass in an instant. The more services you are able to ping , the more exposure you get. By announcing to the world loud about our content we not only bring genuine crowd but also curious onlookers.

Ping Services

There are tens and hundreds of services collecting this list and it is difficult to ping each and every one. How about a single service that can help us to ping all the servers. That is where ping services such as ‘ping-o-matic’ and ‘pingoat’ comes in. They let us reach multiple services in one shot.

For example pin-o-matic pings  the following : Weblogs.com ,Weblogalot.com ,Technorati, Feed Burner,My Yahoo!, PubSub.com, Blogdigger, Moreover

‘Pingoat’ has a bigger list and also it can ping servers in non-english services and special services too.

I bet you will wisely choose to pick multiple fruits in one throw rather than aiming at each fruit seperately. Don’t be afraid to ping and use ping services to let the world know what you have in store. Note: While we can get some crowd to step into our blog, it is up to us to retain them by constantly providing good content, or else they will be just one time visitors.

Do you know/ use any ping services. Why not drop a note ?

Popularity: 12% [?]