Posts tagged ‘Google’

AdSense Income Simplified by John Benjamin

AdSense Income Simplified – a book review

Why, oh why do people write a load of rubbish “teaching” people how to make money online? Yeah, don’t bother to answer that – it’s because the most profitable way to make money online is to teach people how to make money online. Thus every man and his dog wants to get in on the MMO game. This book is no exception.

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AdSense – 10 years on

It was probably entirely predictable that the 10th anniversary of AdSense should have caused a surge of interest among webmasters. Yesterday I received a few emails alerting me to new blog posts on the subject.

The first to come in was Ophelie Lechat’s Flippa newsletter. In it she mentioned that Flippa had carried out a survey of their users in May and found that 24% of their survey respondents claimed that their AdSense revenue had increased over the last year.

This didn’t seem to match the experience of most people I know, so I started a discussion about it on the Experienced People forum.

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Does your business need social media?

I have to admit that I was never a big fan of Facebook, Twitter and the rest of the social media.

Facebook seemed like a hangout for family and friends, not a conduit for business PR.

Twitter’s 140-character limit seemed too, well, limiting to make it useful. (I have to say that Stephen Fry’s much-trumpeted presence there put me off it a bit too. Yes, he’s very clever. But doesn’t he like to let you know it?)

LinkedIn used to be a useful if rather dull way of connecting with business acquaintances and building networks – a bit like FriendsReunited for the business world. But they’ve spoilt it in recent months by turning themselves into a sort of pinstripe Facebook.

As for Google+… well, everyone’s got a profile, but who actually spends time updating it?

A (slight) change of heart

That’s my view as it was about a month ago.

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How useful is Google+ for a small online business?

I have a Google+ account. Apparently everyone with a Google account has one. I never use mine and was curious to find out if anyone had ever used theirs to the benefit of their business. And so, I set out on a quest to find someone who could show they’d benefited from it, and explain how. I saddled up my Internet pony and trotted off to my usual haunts (some of them are behind paywalls) to see what people would say about it. I was asking a simple question.

Have you used G+ to benefit your online business?

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"Search history" cartoon by John Atkinson of Wrong Hands

Debunking some Google myths

As anyone trying to promote an online business knows, you need to build traffic. And the first thing most people think about for getting traffic is Google. If you can rank high in Google, it will bring you loads of free traffic. Right? Erm, well it’s sorta right in theory but it doesn’t make so much sense in practice. Let’s have a look at some myths.

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Long-Tail Keyword Strategy – some thoughts of a sceptic

Someone mentioned long-tail keyword strategy to me recently and I expressed scepticism as to whether it still worked these days. Quite reasonably, he asked me why I had that opinion, and “Er, just because that’s what I think” didn’t seem like a good enough answer. I had to justify my views somehow. Thus I spent the next few days reading everything up-to-date I could get my hands on about the subject, plus asking a lot of questions on various forums. Some of the discussions are behind paywalls so I can’t link to all my sources. Let’s see how I got on in my quest to discover if targeting the long tail is a good strategy or not in 2013.

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