One of the most common questions asked by blog owners (and webmasters in general) is ‘What is the best Adsense placement for higher clickthroughs?’

If you’re displaying Adsense or any alternatives you need to discover the optimal placement that will get visitors clicking.

Thankfully, when searching for the best Adsense placement, you will find that Google themselves are extremely helpful… after all, it’s in their interests also that people click your ads since they receive 50%-80% of the overall revenue from those clicks. We don’t know exactly how much of course as they don’t divulge that information.

On the Adsense website you will find the two ‘heat maps’ that I have included below to help you discover what the best Adsense placement for your website is. The first one is a heat map for blogs. The second is a heat map for static websites that I have included for the benefit of visitors who have static sites.

Best Adsense placement for Blogs

The image below shows the best Adsense placement for optimal clickthroughs. From the experience of this blog the block I have at the top left of each post is the one that receives most clicks. Of course, I don’t have units below the post the compare to

Best Adsense placement for static websites

In the image below the best Adsense placement is indicated by the darker colors. Therefore, the dark orange spot is the best place to display your advertising blocks

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Without question, one of the best ways to make money online is to build a list of targetted prospects. Why??? Because these people have already proved that they are interested in what you have to offer by subscribing to your optin list.

Any professional internet marketer will confirm that the majority of their (sometimes huge) income is earned via list building. These are people that the marketer has built a relationship with. Helping them by providing quality content without expecting anything in return. Eventually, a trusting relationship is developed and subscribers actually become willing to the products promoted. You see, it’s much easier to sell to a person you have already fostered a relationship with. It’s kind of like calling previous customers compared to cold calling. Cold calling involves calling people who may or may not have any interest in what you are selling, many of them are actually irritated at receiving a sales call. Calling past customers means that they already know and trust you, so the story is completely different.

Consider this, how many times do you need to see an offer on the internet before you act on it? Did you know that most people must see an offer 4-7 times before they act on it? So how are you going to get your message in front of them that many times so that it is your offer that they act on? The answer is to build a list!

So how do you build a list?

Some people seem to think that all they need to do is say, ‘Hey, subscribe to my newsletter to receive information about whatever.’ Then they wonder why they don’t have any signups.

The best way to build a list and generate signups is to offer something with a high perceived value as an incentive to sign up. One of the most successful list building campaigns I ever ran was the time I added all subscribers into a draw to receive a free clip on mp3 player (not even an Ipod shuffle). The item cost me US$25 including postage… but for that price I received 500 subscribers in only 3 months. And because unsubscribing immediately forfeited the entry in the draw I had very few unsubscribe requests. Meanwhile, I was earning from that list by sending fortnightly newsletters and individual broadcasts promoting related products.

Other incentives you can offer when you want to build a list are; Free email courses, software programs that you have giveaway rights to, special reports, discount coupons or even a one of discount on a product you sell. Say for example you sell a software program for $37, you could offer a $10 discount to subscribers. If they are genuinely interested they will take the offer and the first autoresponder email they receive could include a link to a special page where they receive the product for $10 off. To reduce unsubscribe requests you can also send them a 10 part tutorial email course on how to use the program

While list building is relatively easy, when you build a list you need to be careful in your management of it. Make sure you only promote products that are appropriate to the list niche and do not inundate subscribers inboxes with promotional emails. One of the biggest mistakes online marketers make is constantly sending out promotional emails (4-5 per week) and promoting products that have nothing to do with their niche. This behaviour irritates subscribers and is the single largest cause of unsubscribe requests. So make sure you only promote products that are tightly targetted to the list a prospect has joined. And NEVER send out more than two emails per week. In fact, it is preferable to maintain one regular email per week. That way it is frequent enough for subscribers to remember who you are without being a nuisance. I generally aim for one message per week or fortnight with an occasional promotional message sent in between.

This doesn’t include automatically generated followup messages from an autoresponder. For example, if you have a 10 part email course it is perfectly acceptable to send one part every 2-3 days (so the whole course is delivered within 20-30 days).

Good luck with your list building efforts… Here is to having a profitable online business.

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For newbie internet marketers, the notion of creating a paypal buy now button can be extremely intimidating. I confess that it took me a VERY long time to make the attempt myself. I have to laugh now because my first attempt at ecommerce involved installing the ‘Opencart’ software through Simple Scripts in Cpanel. The installation and setup for that cart was vastly more complex than setting up a paypal button… Oh well, live and learn!

If your site is an online shopping mall then you would be best to use shoppingcart software. However, if you only sell a small range of products or individual items like downloadable information products then a paypal buy now button is perfect. Paypal buy now buttons are especially perfect for digital download products because once you set them up you will earn on autopilot. Just imagine waking up in the morning to discover you’ve sold ten $17 products during the night… and they’re already delivered! NICE!!! The best thing is that people TRUST paypal so using paypal buttons actually increases sales (especially if the payment section of your page contains a paypal logo and states that payments are via paypal and are therefore 100% secure).

Before you start, you will need a success or thank-you page for paypal to direct customers to after checkout completion. If you are selling information products this page could contain the download link. Alternatively, you could harvest the buyers email address and send the download link to them via email in which case your success page would contain an optin form. A good way to ensure that people stay on that list is to offer some kind of tutorial or bonus product that comes in instalments.

So how do you create a paypal buy now button?

You will notice that Paypal has the process set up in three steps; Button type and payment details, inventory tracking and customizing checkout pages. Just follow the step-by-step instructions below to make a paypal buy now button. After you have created your first buy now button you can create additional buttons using the ‘create similar button’ function.

1. Log in to paypal and click ‘Merchant Services’ and ‘buy now buttons’ as per the image below
2. Step 1: Creating Button type and payment details
• Specify the type of product you are selling. Choices include; Products, Services, Subscriptions/recurring billing, donations and gift vouchers. Once you have created your first paypal button you can click the ‘go to my saved buttons’ under this option to edit an existing button or create similar buttons. To create a similar button click the ‘action’ link beside the chosen button and select ‘create similar button’.
• Select whether you want an ‘add to cart’ button or a ‘buy now’ button. Add to cart buttons are for sites that offer multiple products whereas buy now buttons are for those that sell individual items.
• Specify the name of the product you are selling – Use something logical as this becomes the name the button is saved under for future reference. That way you will recognize it later. Under this option you can also add an item ID if you are selling physical products and want to use Paypal’s inventory management system to track your inventory
• Enter the item Price in the next field and which currency you want to receive payment in (eg. US dollars)
• Next you customize the appearance of your paypal buy now button and the options associated with it. You can add drop down menus for size, color or any other option. You can customize the appearance of the button. You can even specify your own button graphic.
• The next option is Postage. If you are selling a physical product that you can charge a flat postage rate on (i.e. small, lightweight items like CDs) then you can fill this field in to specify the postage rate. To activate this option you will need to go to myaccount>profile>selling preferences>postage calculations and check the ‘override postage methods per transaction’ box.
• The last option under this section is the type of Merchant identification you wish to use. You can use plain text where your email address is visible in the button code or you can select to use ‘secure merchant account ID’ which replaces the plain text email with a merchant number that only paypal can connect to your email address. Using this option stops spammers being able to harvest your email address so it’s a excellent option to choose.
3. Step 2: Inventory Tracking
• There are only a couple of options under this section. The first option is to save your buttons at paypal. This protects buttons from fraudulent changes (eg. switching your paypal account for someone elses), Saves buttons in your paypal profile. Allows you to easily create similar buttons and lets you edit buttons with paypal tools
• Inventory tracking for physical products – Allows you to specify item quantities and stop additional sales of sold out items
4. Step 3: Customizing checkout pages
• If you are selling physical products you can select to allow customers to update the order quantity under this section.
• You can also add a field to allow customers to leave special instructions.
• Request customer address if required for postage purposes
• Specify a URL to forward to in the event of order cancellation.
• Specify a URL to forward to after successful payment – As mentioned earlier, if you are selling downloadable products this page can contain your download link OR an optin form to harvest customer emails and send them the download link via email.
• Ebay power users can also add other variables
5. Finally – just click the ‘create button’ button and your paypal buy now button will be saved to your profile and you will be taken to a page containing the code to add to your webpage. You have two choices, either use the button or a link.

If you want to know how to increase conversion rates by up to 300% then check out The Conversion Kode!

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Unfortunately, one of the most common issues faced by internet marketers that seriously cuts into profits is the issue of unauthorized downloads from their download pages and download directories.

Just imagine your irritation when you discover that the $97 product that you have sold 50 times has actually been downloaded 78 times (all from different IP addresses)… that constitutes a loss of $2716… Yipes, that’s one heck of a loss!

And how did it happen?

Well, there are several ways it can happen.

1. Search engines indexing your download page and people finding it
2. People finding your download directory
3. Legitimate customers bookmarking your download page with online bookmarking services

I’ll deal with these one by one.

Search engines indexing your download page

Because search engines regularly crawl your site, if you add a download page they are going to find it. But how do you stop them from indexing that page? Aha, that’s actually simple… all you need is the little meta tag below added to the head section of your download page.

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>

This tag causes search engines to ignore your download page and not include it in their index. If it isn’t in their index then no unscrupulous rip-off artist can find it and download your products without authorization

People finding your download directory

Some unscrupulous people will visit an ecommerce site then add a simple /download or /downloads to the end of the URL and if the owner hasn’t been a little smart then the result will be a page containing hyperlinks directly to the downloadable files

The way to stop this is to add a simple index.htm or index.html file to the directory. Browsers automatically look for these files and load them if they are present. That way, if someone goes to the directory, whatever you have put on that page will appear rather than the directory contents… mine has a blank page. It’s probably also a good idea to name the directory something completely obscure, you could give the directory some completely screwy name like ad9cy45jm or whatever that no-one would ever guess would be a download directory. A combination of these two is probably a good idea just in case someone has a way of working around the index page.

Note that the index.html page works even with a directory inside a blog… for example, visit http://automatedblogpostingsoftware.com/downloads and a page with some stupid text intended as a joke will be generated… that is my index.html page (Note: This is NOT my download directory, it’s a complete decoy LOL)

Legitimate customers bookmarking your download page with online bookmarking services

This is the third way that unauthorised people can access your product downloads. Unfortunately, this is also the hardest one to combat. People are allowed to bookmark their download page and it’s a perfectly legitimate thing to do just in case something goes wrong with the first download.

To overcome this problem you need software that issues a temporary download link that is only active for a certain period of time or a certain number of downloads. One such software program is Smartdd (short for ‘smart digital download’). Click here for more info on SmartDD now!

I hope this post has helped you understand how unauthorized downloads occur and how to protect your products from the methods used… Here is to profitable online ventures!

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If you are serious about internet marketing, one of the most important decisions you need to make is whether to have a mailing list of subscribers that you can market your products and services to. I’m sure you’ve heard the expression The money is in the list! This is very true. Maintaining a list allows you to build a relationship with subscribers who are specifically interested in what you are offering.

Sure, you can rely on adwords or organic search visitors for your income, but the amount of effort required lowers your ROI (return on investment). It’s much better to maintain a list of subscribers who are interested in what you have to offer than to perform the online version of ‘cold calling’! That pre-existing relationship inspires trust and therefore increases the likelihood that those people will purchase your products and services.

So, you’ve made the smart decision that you need a mailing list! CONGRATULATIONS!!! How are you going to build and maintain that list? What autoresponder company or organisation will you trust your livelihood to? In the internet marketing arena there are only TWO autoresponder companies for serious marketers. Those two companies are Aweber and Getresponse.

Certainly you could use a free autoresponder service like freeautobot.com or one attached to your hosting account, but as the saying goes… You get what you pay for! Lack of features and reliability end up costing more than the potential earnings. Thankfully, Aweber and Getresponse both offer FREE trial versions for people who want to try before they buy!

So which service is the the most reliable email marketing service? Which one is the most affordable email marketing service?

The first of these questions is totally up for debate. As mentioned before, there are only two viable autoresponder services. Aweber is popular with professional internet marketers, they have the better reputation… just barely. Both services claim top notch email deliverability. These days however, you’ll notice an increasing number of marketers are using Getresponse email marketing services. Possibly because in the current economic climate people are tightening their belts and Getresponse offers the most affordable email marketing services. On July 6, 2009 Getresponse introduced a brand new interface and pricing structure along with some new and exciting features including the ability to create subscriber surveys. Check the table below for a cost comparison between the two services.

Note: The prices above are monthly subscription costs. Significant savings are available by subscribing for longer periods. For example a 12 month subscription with Aweber costs US$190 for up to 500 subscribers (save $38), GetResponse costs US$177 for 12 months for up to 500 subscribers (save $38). Once again, Getresponse has the upper hand on price since they allow you to pre-pay for up to 1 year for larger lists. Unlike Aweber who only allow you to pre-pay for up to 500 subscribers. Take a look at the table below for the yearly costs for each size list.

As you can see, using Getresponse for email marketing needs is considerably cheaper. For this reason I recommend Getresponse for less experienced marketers because… well, because personally I don’t believe in spending more money than I have to! Admittedly, Aweber is reputed to be the Rolls Royce of autoresponders… but why buy a Rolls Royce when a Chevy will do the job?

Ultimately, it is your choice which email marketing service you use. I hope this post has helped clarify the options available to you.

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