Step-by-step guide to Make Money with Google AdSense
Google AdSense (GA) is a great contextual advertising program that allows you to run ads on your blog / website / YouTube videos / Search, get paid when when visitors click on them or view. The ads are generated from businesses that use Google's AdWords program.
+ The Google AdSense program has several great advantages including:
It's free to join.
Eligibility requirements are easy, which means you can monetize your website or blog even when it's new.
Google pays monthly (if you meet the $100 threshold) by direct deposit.
You can run ads on several websites from one AdSense account.
There are options to run ads on mobile devices and RSS feeds.
You can easily add it to your YouTube and Blogger accounts.
There are a variety of ad options and several you can customize to fit the look and feel of your site.
+ With that said, there are a few drawbacks to AdSense as well:
Google can terminate your account in an instant, and it's not very forgiving if you break the rules.
Like all forms of online income, you need targeted traffic in order to make money.
When people click on an AdSense ad, you do make some money, but your visitor also leaves your site.
It doesn't necessarily pay more than other similar programs.
GA is a great monetization option, but it's not a get-rich-quick or make-money-doing-nothing option. Further, Google has a lot of rules that aren't always noticed upfront.
As a result, many website owners found out the hard way that they'd violated a Google policy, and have lost their account forever.
Google offers a variety of ad types to run on your website, including:
Video / Audio / Flash
Rich media ads include HTML, Flash or other interactive feature.
Text: Text ads use words, either as an Ad Unit (one offer) or a Link Unit, and come in a variety of sizes. You can customize the color of the box, text and link.
Images: Image ads are graphic ads. They come in a variety of sizes. You can choose an option that mixes both text and image ads.
AdSense for Search allows you to have a Google search box on your site. When a user enters a term and conducts a search, a search results page opens with AdSense ads. You can customize the color scheme of the search results page to harmonize with your web site.
Google pays monthly through direct deposit or check, but will not issue an AdSense payment until your earnings reach or exceed $100. If you don't earn $100 in one month, your earnings roll over and are added to the next month. Each time you reach the $100 threshold, Google will issue a payment on the next payment period. Through your AdSense account, you can see your current earnings, what ads are generating the most clicks, and more.
Making a significant amount of money with Google AdSense requires a plan. Here are tips for maximizing AdSense revenue:
Have great content your target market wants to read. Ultimately, money is made, whether through Google AdSense or other monetization methods, by providing valuable content and quality traffic to your blog or website.
Use honest, organic traffic building website promotion techniques, especially search engine optimization and article marketing.
Test ad types and placement to find the options that lead to the most income.
Read email from Google AdSense, especially if it's sending a warning about something it doesn't like on your site. Failure to deal with Google's complaints will lead to termination of the program.
Don't click on your own ads or ask others to click on them. Incentivizing clicks, buying Pay Per Click (P.P.C) space, or using a program designed to drive traffic to Google AdSense pages are against the rules. Remember, Google isn't very forgiving about breaking the rules, so be sure to adhere to them.
Dealing with Competitors' or Questionable Advertisements
If you offer products or services on your website, you may find that some ads Google delivers come from your competitors. Another issue that can occur is ads that may not be completely legitimate or they might offend your market.
To prevent these offers from showing up on your site, Google AdSense allows you to block up to 200 URLs from appearing on your site.
The challenge of this is two-fold.
You don't know what ads are running on your site until you see them there. Plus, with each page load, and depending on the visitors browsing history, the ad may not show up again or it might appear in a different spot.
Since you can't click on your own links (to the get the URL), you need to be careful about obtaining the URL to block. The best way to get the link so you can block it in AdSense is to right click the link, select "Copy Link Address," and paste it into a document or text editor (i.e. Notepad). The Google URL is really long, but you're looking for the section that identifies the advertiser. Copy that link, and paste into your AdSense blocked ads account.
Other Programs Besides AdSense
There are many ad network programs similar to AdSense, such as Media.net and InfoLinks. Some might require a traffic threshold, so you'd need to wait until your site established before being accepted. Most have similar rules to Google, such as a limit to the number of the network's ads per page (usually 3) and termination for clicking your own ads. In most cases, you can run different ad networks on your site without violating terms of service, but you'll want to read the rules of each network before doing it. Further, you want to avoid your site becoming so overwhelmed with ads that your readers can't find the content.
If you are an author or product vendor, affiliate accounts are one easy way to generate site traffic, SEO quality, and a nice java fund. Though most people don’t make millions off their affiliate proceeds, the amount of work it takes to implement affiliate links is minimal compared to the potential long-term profit in other areas. Affiliate accounts are available through various companies, depending on your industry. The application process will be similar to the steps for setting up an Amazon affiliate account, as follows…
If you already have an Amazon account, enter your user e-mail and password, or if not, use whatever e-mail address you prefer and select “I am a new customer.” Click “Sign in using our secure server.”
STEP 4:
If you are a new customer, enter your personal details as requested. Verify your name and address when finished. As the main contact for the account, select “The payee listed above.” Click “Next: Your Website Profile.”
Note your Amazon affiliate ID, user e-mail and password in a secure location. Specify your payment method. Click “Get Started Now” to begin using Amazon affiliates for link building and other helpful services.
>> Amazon Affiliate Marketing Tutorial (for beginners) Million Dollar Niches
Merch by Amazon is an on demand t-shirt printing service. It allows you to create and list t-shirt designs right on Amazon – for free. Gone are the days of ordering t-shirts in bulk, shipping them to Amazon using their Fulfillment by Amazon (FBA) service, and waiting to see if they even sell.
Merch by Amazon is a Print-on-Demand service originally started for game developers to design merchandise for their fans, what they probably didn’t expect was that online marketers, and people interested in designing clothes, would jump on the train and make shirts for the market rather than their fans.
What Amazon Merch allows you to do is list t-shirts on the biggest online retailer in the United States, without any upfront costs or administration work. It’s really easy to get started, and if you can design yourself, there is no startup cost involved at all.
Why is this the biggest opportunity you'll ever stumble across?
According to PowerReviews study, 38% of shoppers said their shopping journey started on Amazon, versus 35% started the journey on Google. This just goes to show the power of selling your shirts on Amazon, they are the leading online-retailer and is constantly experimenting to achieve better conversion rates and make the customer happier (with top-notch customer support and return policies). And according to SimilarWeb, receives 2.65B visitors per month, that's 86 million visitors per day! The organic reach on a product on Amazon is great, and if you end up ranking your shirts high for the right keywords, you'll have a shirt making you passive income while you can scale your operations by making more shirts.
The thing about online businesses is that they can often be scaled much easier than offline businesses. Let's imagine you run an "offline store", you can only attract so many people to that store since scaling up the number of employees won't impact growing the number of customers. Surely, you can do some advertising, but the limit is still there. With online businesses, however, let's take Merch by Amazon as an example, you can hire more and more people and that actually increases the number of customers (and the amount of money you'll make).
I know that people are successfully advertising their shirts to attract customers, but since our store is located on the busiest shopping street on the web, it's not a must. You can simply open up more stores, on that same shopping street at the cost of just the design!
How to get started with Merch by Amazon ?
Get a Merch by Amazon account
Research keywords and designs that already sell
Use the idea of the selling designs, and make the design unique/better
If you don't know how to do any of these steps or want some help in it, here's the full version.
Step 1. Get a Merch by Amazon account
For the rest of you, start by visiting the Merch homepage here: https://merch.amazon.com/landing
This is rather simple, but as the approval time can be up to 10 months (their application process have updated since I wrote this, now it can be within days of applying!), it's not something you will get instantly. Apply to Merch by Amazon, and wait. Many are thinking of buying a Merch by Amazon account, I'd not recommend that since it is a high risk that you're being scammed. If you already have an Amazon Merch account that has been approved, a huge congratulations to you - we can now move on to the next step!
Psst... even if you're waiting for the Merch by Amazon approval, you can still continue on. If you're prepared when you finally get approved with a lot of shirts in your backpack you'll be ahead of the others that get approved at the same time. Use the waiting time to learn how to design shirts, or to nail down how to research shirts, and you'll be an expert by the time you're approved (and can make a lot of money directly).
What many do wrong in my opinion when they start is that they make shirts that nobody is interested in. If you want to be successful, you'll have to do research before designing your shirt. It's the basics; supply and demand, if you're missing the demand, you've already lost. The research process is the most important part of your success.
So, how do we do it? I'm using Merch Informer personally, and it is the only keyword research tool for Merch by Amazon out there (and there is no need for another tool since it got everything you'll ever need!). If you've made websites you know how important the keyword research is in the success of your site. The same goes for t-shirts. With Merch Informer you can easily insert a keyword in their tool and be shown every shirt (that was made with Merch by Amazon) that is related to that keyword.
The picture shows the results writing "Fishing" in Merch Informer Product Search tool.
In this example, I put in "fishing" and got shown the top 100 best-selling shirts related to fishing. After that you'll be shown the best seller rank (BSR), price, title, and bulletpoints and an estimate how many sales it each shirt gets. This is something you can do yourself on Amazon, but it'll take way more time since you need to visit 100 separate listings and analyze each of them separately. The time you save using Merch Informer is easily worth $20/month!
Once you've found a design that sells well you'll have to figure out how to differentiate your listing from others. There are a few different things to do here:
Designing a better design is one option in which you can differentiate yourself. Let's say that the best selling shirt is a text-only shirt, even though these often can perform very well, they are not as good looking as a design that includes some objects (such as a hook or a fish if we use the "fishing" example again). You can blow your competitors out of the water by making a bad-ass design. The problem with this is that most of us aren't bad-ass designers, nor do we want to pay high-end to get a bad-ass design made. For us, the next alternative might be better.
We can use the price-point to attract customers looking for cheap shirts. See the price your competitor's price themselves and lower it slightly. The balance here is to find a good price point where you don't need to sell thousands of shirts per month to make $100, but at the same time not scare away potential customers with too high of a price. It's a fine line, and you'll have to figure out what type of audience you want to target. If you can combine bad-ass designs, with the perfect price that drives the most buyers you're going to blow your competitors out of the water. I'll write a guide how I price my shirts by analyzing the profit made in this article, it'll help you make the most profit - not necessarily the most sales. In example, I rather have 10 sales at $5 profit each ($50 total profit) than 100 shirts sold at $0.39 ($39 total profit).
Keywords
After that, it's important to find keywords that you can include in your listing. This can also be done in Merch Informer with their "Keyword Finder" (oh, this for sure must sound like a sales page for Merch Informer, doesn't it? I promise you, it's not). Include the keywords in your bullets and in the title as natural as possible, keyword spamming won't work for that long since that's forbidden on Amazon Merch. I'll go through that in the 4th step in this guide.
Step 3. Make the design
This point is either done by you or if you want to outsource it to someone. Merch Informer has written a guide on how to outsource your work and that's what I've been using personally to hire people at $5 per design. It's important that you're improving the design somehow, and not exactly copy what someone else has done. That is stealing. What you want to aim for is improve and offer something better. If you're hiring a designer, make sure he/she is not copying someone by taking clip arts from Google or something like that.
I absolutely love when my designer's work are a bit off or they've missed a spot or so, that means that they have made it themselves. Then you can be sure that you'll get original work and not be hit by a takedown later on. I've noticed that if your design really stands out among the other shirts, you can receive a higher click-through rate and get more sales even if you rank lower than other shirts. This just goes to show that a design that truly stands out is the optimal choice, and that's what you should aim for.
Merch by Amazon Template
The Amazon Merch team have made some template files for you to design on, so that you can see how it looks. The dimensions are 15" width x 18" height at 300ppi, sRGD and having a file under 25mb to upload if you want to do it yourself. Anyhow, here are the links to the respective Merch by Amazon template:
Now, the all the groundwork is done, now that you have made the all the legwork now you need to combine everything into the listing. First things first, click "Create" in the dashboard, then "Upload" and select the file you want to upload.
Psst: Save the designs in a cloud-based storage such as Drive or Dropbox so that you easily can access them later on, from anywhere. Also, name them in numbers, or by title, to make it easy to search for them later on).
Upload the image
Once you've uploaded the image, an awesomely good looking black box in my example, you can decide if you want the design on the front or the back (or both), and then simply click "Save selection and continue".
Color, type and price selection
Here you can select T-Shirt type, the colors you want on the shirt (max 5 colors, choose them wisely), for whom you want to offer the shirt to (don't exclude any if you don't sell women-only clothes like "I'm having a baby" shirts or inappropiate clothes for kids). After that we have to decide what price point we want to choose for our shirt - as I think my black box is outstanding good, I want to price my shirt at $49,99. Some like to price their shirts at $11,99 to make sure they get sales on it (as Amazon removes a shirt if you haven't gotten a sale in 90 days), while some price their shirts relatively high in the beginning. Make sure you follow the market rather than your own feelings about your baby (your design). You can always raise/lower the price later on and experiment to find the "best" price point.
Optimizing your listing (adding keywords)
Now, after we've selected the price, colors, and type of shirt, it is time to make sure people find our awesome black box design. The way we do that is by including the keywords you found doing the keyword research phase in the title, bullets and brand name. I like to start by putting what the shirt says/is in the title, then the general keyword i.e. "Black Box T-Shirt - Funny Box Shirt". Here are the bullets, or as Amazon calls them "Key product features", I've written for my awesome shirt:
This black box shirt is a perfect shirt for your black box meeting with your other black box homies. Celebrate black box day with this awesome black box t-shirt!
This black box tee is designed to be fitted. For a looser fit, please order a size up.
That last description is a good one to include if you run out of ideas, but also to avoid negative reviews based on the sizing. This is what the most negative reviews are based on, and therefore it can be good to make people aware of this prior to their purchase. The brand name can be related to your main keywords such, I like to make the brand name plural. Let's say "Black Box Shirts" or "Funny Soccer Shirts" as an example. Remember to include the word t-shirt, shirt and tee somewhere as that are some terms people are searching for. Usually, you don't need to write out the exact match keyword to rank high for another keyword, so even mentioning "With this tee, you can show how much you love black boxes" can help you rank for "Black box tee". Personally, I leave the product descriptions empty as there seems to be zero impact on the rankings based on what you write there.
Now that we've optimized our shirt properly so that the potential buyers easily can find it no matter what they are searching for, it's time to publish this masterpiece! You do that by selecting "Sell - public on Amazon" and click "Publish".
Step 6. Profit
And that's really it! Now you've published your first shirt on Amazon and is ready to rock n' roll! Wait and see the profit roll in. If it doesn't sell within 1-2 months, try lowering the price. I usually just move on if the price change doesn't make a difference. Your goal is to have a lot of shirts that sell, and if one doesn't even sell at $11,99, it is not worthy of a spot in your account in my opinion.
Merch by Amazon FAQs:
How do I see if a phrase is copyrighted?
You can easily do that by visiting the United States Patent and Trademark Office website or Trademarkia.com which is a bit more user-friendly in my opinion.Insert the saying you'll put on the shirt. Never use brand names. It's that easy. Make sure to do this before you design the shirt since it'll suck if you already have designed a shirt and need to scrap it because of this. <
How does the current tier structure work?
The first tier you get placed in is Tier 10, that means that you have 10 design spots in your account. Once you've sold 10 shirts you get tiered up to Tier 25. And it goes on like that. I'm in Tier 8000, which means I can upload 8000 designs on my account. Once I've sold 16 000 shirts, and I am closer to hitting the limit of the current tier I'll be tiered up. This doesn't always happen directly, so don't worry. Some people claim that they tier up on Mondays and Fridays, but I am not sure about that since I haven't been tiered up in a year or so. But that's what people usually say in Facebook groups.
Are there any Merch by Amazon forums?
Amazon has their own forum here where some Merch by Amazon users are writing. But the most used ones are Facebook groups such as Chris Green's Merch Life with almost 60,000 members! It's also much easier to be active on Facebook since people are more used to writing on Facebook than Amazon developers forum. Even though there are a lot of "Whatchu think of my design?" posts in the Facebook group you can find some pretty valuable information there every now and then.
I hope that guide to Merch by Amazon have shred some light on what Merch by Amazon is, how to get started using it and a few frequently asked questions I get quite often. The FAQs section is dynamic and you can therefore submit your own questions and I'll make sure to answer them.
Guide to quality hosting registration at Hawk Host
Hawk Host is one of the quality hosting providers to use at guidetommo.com. Hosting here supports Memcached free technology, greatly speeding up the website. Today I will record the registration steps at this provider, quite simple.
With the exception of 10GB of limited space, Hawk Host hosting packages are not limited to capacity, bandwidth, domain names. In addition, the provider also regularly offers discount coupons up to 40% for hosting packages.
- Hawk Host will ask you to select the domain name for the hosting package, select option 3 - I will use my existing domain and update my nameservers, then enter your domain name and click Use.
- In the next step, you need to select the time to register the hosting package, select datacenter (default will be the first location if you do not choose).
The registration period should be 12 months or more, so use the new Hawk Host discount coupon to save a lot.
For Hawk Host, if you need you can send ticket request moving hosting between different locations, for example from Los Angeles to Singapore ... please. Or switch between servers in the same datacenter.
Click Continue to continue to the Review & Checkout page.
- On the review page, you can easily edit the information of hosting if necessary, just click Edit. At this point, remember to add coupon in the Apply Promo Code box and click Validate Code to save money.
The hosting package we are registering is Primary Shared Hosting, currently, Hawk Host is offering coupon 40% off the first bill for this package. But if you use long-term should use coupon discount 30% lifetime to be extended with preferential price. Get discount code here.
Hit Checkout to reach the billing page.
- On the payment page, it is necessary to complete personal information, set a password and choose payment method.
Choose payment by Paypal, just select Paypal, click Complete Order and then will be sent to PayPal login page to make payment.
If you choose to pay by Visa / Master Card, click Credit Card, fill in the card information and click Complete Order.
If there is no problem, you will receive an email notification and hosting account information. Very simple and fast? laugh
Hope this article can help you during the hosting registration process at Hawk Host. If you have any problems, leave a comment below for instructions.