Jaxon’s Review

Looks like its going to be a slow month this September. After three days, and going into the fourth day now, I only managed $0.05 or about 17 sen from the Google Adsense.

This can’t be good. But I don’t care-lah. Income should not be the prime blogging mover. Passion is.

On another note, I’ve managed to sell another text link ads on one of my blogs this month; so that makes for the disappointing start of September.

Now, the passive income from selling text links has increase by several dollars a month.

It’s a passive income in a sense that once a text link is sold, you will continue to receive the payment months after months without you ever doing anything. Sell enough text links and you are on autopilot.

That is if the link remain in your blog or if the sellers want it to remain on your blogs or if your blogs remain online.

But sad to say, that passive income is still small, although it already reaches a point that I can now rely on it to pay for the cost of a webhost and the several domain names I currently maintain. In other words, I’m breaking even.

One another note — this is the last one — I expect to start earning some dollar from my pet project this month, that is if I can maintain an average of a post a day on that blog. Traffic is building up there, definitely better than the traffic on my other blogs, including this one, when I first started them.

I’m just about to make another note but I’ll save it for another day…

Google, the Big G which I sometimes hate but could not live without — as it has become a sort of reason for the Internet to exist, and not the other way around — has recently made available its Keyword Tool that enables you and I to peek into just how many times certain keywords is searched on the Internet.

Get ideas

You enter the keyword, hit the button “get ideas” and then the tool will display the number of searches for the keywords and for a dozen other related words.

You can also enter your blog’s or website’s URL and Google will magically display the keywords — dozens of them — related to your site and the number of searches for each.

It also display competition among advertisers for the keywords.

Make money is a hot keyword

Below is the screenshot for some of the keywords Google has suggested for this blog, Jaxon’s Review.

As you can see “make money” is the most searched keyword in June, totalling 300,000, while “make money blogs” is the least searched.

What you can do with the keyword?

Those of you who are into Adword advertising, you know what to do with it. Those who don’t will still benefit from this “market intelligence” in that you can now use the keyword in your blog posts to drive in the traffic.

Keyword is also useful if you are running some form of campaign on your blog or if you have Adsense ads on it.

Traffic, traffic, traffic

This blog, of course, severly lacks traffic. So I won’t pretend to know anything about traffic. I know, however one of the reason for the lack of traffic here apart from this blog’s lack of focus and niche.

It’s the problem of insular blogging. I wanted the traffic but hadn’t done anything to network with the Internet world. Click here for your Google Keyword Tool.

A friend of mine emailed me about two weeks ago about the Adsense ads on his blog which he said had kept on displaying public service ads.

He asked me what was going on and how to make Google display real ads.

I had to tell him the truth that I don’t really know the reason. Perhaps, I said, it had something to do with ads placement.

I’m not sure if I’ve given him the right diagnostic but for those of you who want to give your Adsense ads some power-ups, here’s a YouTube clip which might be useful. Its 11 minutes 46 seconds but worth watching even if that would mean you will have to wait for sometime for the clip to load, especially if you have slow connection.

I hope with this new layout I’ve stayed close enough to the tips given. One thing I haven’t done is to display large ad block. Will experiment with that later.

What is the measure of Google’s financial success? A whopping US$2 million or about RM6.28 million an hour, according to an article in the New York Times titled “The Humans Behind the Google Money Machine.”

“Google runs a complex auction-based system that determines which ads will appear where, and in what order. Every time the team alters the formulas that select and rank ads, Mr. Fox can run a test and quickly see the effect of the changes on users, advertisers and Google’s revenue — which, in this year’s first quarter, came in at the rate of more than $2 million an hour,” the report says.

Mr. Fox in the report is Nicholas Fox, who is among Google’s small group of employees “who keep a watchful eye on the vital signs of one of the most successful and profitable businesses on the Internet.”

Ah, in that case, there’s still hope for the Adsense ads on this blog. No?

Of course, before anything else, let me say from the outset that those are not my Adsense income. I haven’t had any success story to tell yet although I am confident that if I work hard and smart enough, I will eventually be sharing my own stuff of legend.

I just thought that it might be useful to share the success stories of others, if only for my own benefit. Here’s what a 21-year-old Australian guy said about his Adsense income:

What did I do that made such amazing returns in such a short period of time? Simple – I got serious and started working hard and applying what I had learnt over the past two years.

How did I get serious?

Yeah, how on earth did he get serious?

I took a bit of a risk, bought a few books about AdSense, SEO and general website development and dropped down to part time uni and started dedicating more time to my websites.

I started writing articles that were on topics that people wanted to know about and topics that people were searching for, and I placed these articles into a highly optimized template that was just designed for these articles, then I went about building a few backlinks for these articles to help with the SEO.

I’d have periods of maybe a week where everyday I would sit down and write an article two, often three or four, and I’d just keep writing, sharing my knowledge, sharing my expertise.

Here’s how he made $800 a week from Adsense. One thing he won’t do though — he won’t share the URLs of those sites where he made the money “not really for any fear of duplication or anything (people can’t normally duplicate “expert knowledge”) but to be completely honest, people having my URL wouldn’t help them develop their own sites.”

The Aussies are quite good at making money online don’t you think so? Think Yaro, Think Darren.

“Wow” was the expression that crossed my mind when I saw on newspaper someone was reading about how Internet giant Google raking in 45 per cent jump in profit to USD$1.07 billion in its latest fiscal year.

Google achieve the profit on the back of surging advertising revenues, which jumped 57 per cent to USD$4.23 billion.

“We are very pleased with the impressive growth we experienced across our business,” said chief executive Eric Schmidt in a report by AFP.

“Our core search advertising business experienced continued momentum driven by growth in monetization and traffic, and we are creating a wider and deeper ads system through our focus on innovation, bringing more ad formats to our advertisers,” he said.

“Our efforts to offer more products and services in international markets as well as effectively grow our technology infrastructure and add to our deep talent base during the quarter helped to deliver growth by enabling Google to reach more users around the world.”

Google has consistently gained in the key area of Internet search against its main rivals, and as a result produced more revenues from its so-called paid search ads that are linked to search queries. [Source: AFP]

Here’s an interesting figure according to the report:

According to research group comScore, Google held a 57 percent share of US searches in September, compared with 23.7 percent for Yahoo. Google also has a large share of the global search market.

Google said 48 percent of its revenues came from outside the United States, compared with 44 percent a year ago. Britain accounted for 16 percent of Google revenues.

Several wows later, however, the reality sank in and I soon found myself having to deal with a very tough question — if Internet advertising is that huge, how come my Google ads gives only barely a dollar a month?

Tough question indeed.

Google has launched Adsense for mobile a few hours ago, allowing website publishers to place ads to sites that are configured for viewing on mobile phones. That’s the good news.

AdSense product marketing manager, Alex Kenin, said: “We’ve just launched AdSense for Mobile, which can help you expand your online content to new platforms”.

“If you have a Web site optimized for mobile browsers, or are interested in creating one, you can start monetizing your mobile site by accessing a growing number of our mobile advertisers,” he said in a post on Inside Adsense blog.

How to customise Adsense for Mobile

You can customise Adsense for mobile by signing in to your Adsense account, select Adsense Setup and click on Adsense for mobile and from there you just need to follow the instructions.

Now for the not so good news:

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