The use of competitive ad filters will allow you to block certain competitor’s ads from being displayed on your website pages. With Google you may enter 200 URL’s. Many webmasters feel there is no competition because they’re not AdWords advertisers, but they could be losing money due to Arbitragers and MFA sites.

Made for Arbitrage and AdSense

Made for AdSense is otherwise known as MFA.  There is rarely content in these sites, they are placed only to make money off of the Google AdSense ads. Some sites will only type up a header and the rest of the page is purely ads. You do not want to provide backlinks to these sites. These sites can affect your AdSense income. There is a very low CPC rate on these sites so they catch traffic as low cost as possible. When you check your AdSense invoice and find figures like 1-3 cent clicks, it is probably due to an MFA site. The following is an example of just how this works.

• MFA’s bid minimal amounts on keywords in your site
• The MFA ad shows up in your site
• A viewer clicks the MFA ad and you make a big 1-3 cents for the click
• The MFA site has only ads and to leave the reader clicks on one of their ads making the MFA site $1 and even more sometimes.
• This is enough that an MFA site can produce 50-500% return

This process is known as the PPC Arbitrage and will affect your income from AdSense. The user leaves unsatisfied and you loose a viewer. When a client comes to your site they expect to find more information when clicking on ads, they do not want to be stuck in the black hole of ad madness. Google can easily stop this from happening but choose to ignore it because they are making loads of money.  The fact is, whether a client is clicking an ad on your site or the site of an MFA Google gets paid! As long as this is happening, there will always be another Arbitrager making another MFA site to take away any profit that a legitimate site may otherwise be making.

The Competitive Ad filter application

If you use the Competitive Ad filter to block out the MFA sites on your pages, Google can put higher paying ads on your site.

To block ads, you need to place the URL of the destination or the display in your filter. The display URL is the one that is within the text in the ad.  Not all ads have this so you may need the destination URL to filter it properly.

To get the destination URL of an ad you can look at the link properties or use an AdSense preview tool. The preview tool is suggested by Google because it is simple to use, be sure you do not click the ad itself because then you will be in violation of the TOS for AdSense and you could be banned from using it.

An easy way to block the low paying CPC sites or the MFA’s is by using the Ads Black list. You will get a list of 50 MFA sites that you can filter and if you become a paying member you will be allowed the current limit of 200 that Google allows.

The Ads Black List is easy to use. All you need to do is enter your URL of your site and click the button “Get Black List” when they give you the list all you have to do is copy and paste each URL into your Competitive Ad Filter. If you implement this idea it can take up to 12 hours for the ads to start getting blocked there is one site among many you may want to block and that is tinyurl [dot] com because MFA sites frequently use this site to camouflage their URL’s.

Hopefully in the future Google will increase the limit for the Competitive Ad Filter but that is unlikely because of the amount of money they make off of these sites. If you use these tools to block some of the larger MFA Arbitragers, you will see an increase on your earnings from your AdSense. If more sites start using these simple steps we may be able to get the MFA’s to start increasing bids or close up shop, but it is not likely that will be done any time soon.

There are lots of webmasters struggling hard to earn some good money a day through their sites and get $0.001 Adsense CPC. But then some of the brilliance of them are enjoying hundreds of dollars a day from Adsense ads on their websites. Here are 7 Adsense tips you can follow and put in place to help you increase your monthly online earnings from Google Adsense:

1. Unique Content – Fill your site with unique hand written content so that it ranks better in the search engines resulting in more traffic to your website and more dollars per month as a result of those visitors from organic listings. We all know search engines love content, well more to the point they love unique content and they love NEW unique content, meaning they will come back to your site again and again and again. The more they come back and read your unique content the better you will show up in related search results. There are a number of ways to get unique content on your site. Write valuable, unique content every week and add to your web pages say under a useful tips or news heading. Again, giving lots of value and build a resource for your potential customers to come to rely on as a great place for unique and valuable information

2. Ad Blocks – Use a 336 x 280 or 250 x 250 ad block – Use this Adsense ad block above the fold as this is an area of prime real estate on your website where the lions share of the money is to be found.

3. Blend Your Ads – Get rid of that green that screams out “I am an ad” and change the colours so the ads on your site look more natural to your visitors. This isn’t about deceiving your visitors, it’s about displaying ads within the TOS as outlined. Doing this will increase your overall CTR (Click Through Rate). To maximize CTR you should also wrap text around your ads. Many sites have tried placing ads above text or even before articles, but in my opinion this is a bad move, as all it does is encourage readers to ‘jump’ past your ads straight to the content.

4. Use Custom Color Palette – Create a custom palette for your ads. Choose a color that will go well with the background of your site. If your site has a blue background, try to use blue as the color of your ad border and background. The idea to patterning the colors is to make the Adsense look like it is part of the web pages. Again, This will result to more clicks and earning for your site. Remember the best Adsense background is your site background.

5. High Paying Niche – Target a high paying niche that contains a good number of competing advertisers that are willing to spend money. There’s little point in trying to monetize a site that targets a low paying niche with very little advertiser interest or filled with advertisers that aren’t spending very much.

6. Filtering Low Paying Advertisers from Made for Adsense Website and Parking Domain – There are some advertisers in Adwords , who own “Made for Adsense” website or Parking domain and promote them on other sites using Adsense. When a visitor visits the advertised “Made for Adsense” or parking domain site, the ads are so placed that 90% of the time visitor will click the ad and They easily make profit and earn the money back.

7. Place Adsense in your top page – Remove the Adsense from the footer pages of your site and put them at the top. Do not try to hide your Adsense. You will be surprised how the difference between Adsense positions can make when you see your earnings.

8. 2 Ad Blocks Maximum – Although you can use more than 2 ad blocks on your site we don’t recommend it. This is because it starts to make your site look spammy and it also means you will also be displaying some lower paying ads on your site. In our opinion, less is more when it comes to ad blocks.

9. Track Your Stats – Find out which pages are getting traffic and where that traffic is coming from. By doing this you can concentrate on doing more of what is working to make you even more money from your websites.

10. Writing Posts That Get Good Adsense Ads – If you want to increase your AdSense earnings then you need ads with good CPCs, and to do that you need to write posts that will attract those ads. Writing posts about blogging, themes, what you did last night etc are probably not going to get good ads as no-one is going to want to advertise on those posts, whereas posts about products will.

I hope you have enjoyed these Google Adsense tips. Even more importantly make sure you put them to work so you can increase your monthly pay check and make more money online. These are simple tips that have worked well for some who want to generate hundreds and even thousands earnings on their websites. It is important to know though that ads are displayed because it fits the interest of the people viewing them. Let’s check your Adsense earnings today and compare with tomorrow earning when you implement this simple technique.

Guest post by Dean James, the author of a free step-by-step ebook called Content Cash Secrets

I have been working online since the beginning of 2005 after starting my marketing career offline a few years before that. I love making money online
and the idea that I can be on holiday in an exotic location and have to just answer a few emails is what I would call real bliss. At the end of the day to run an online business and make serious money online all you need is a working laptop/computer and an internet connection.

I have several different streams of income that allow me to make money online. Some are better than others as they take less time and energy. Those that you have to put the extra effort into are always the most rewarding just because of the pain and passion that has gone into the creation.

Here is a list of my best ways to make money online:

One page information sites: This is where you create a one page site of information that people will need to know on a daily basis and cover it from head to toe in Adsense. To be able to make a decent profit you want to have at least a hundred of these and they require absolutely no maintenance and can be forgotten for years to come. They could cover things like maps for holiday destinations, calendars, local area events or even software that people are desperate to get their hands on.

Affiliate Marketing: Just by writing a review for someone else’s product can seriously increase the amount of money into your PayPal account. Aim for products that are new and not those that have already been oversaturated in the market as you want a prime position in Google. If you own a website why not include a couple of banners or a review on a customers download page.

Blogging: I personally love Blogging and if you can write a simple Blog Post there is lots of money waiting for you. Create small little niche sites with lots of Adsense or Bidvertiser and make sure that your Blog Posts reflect what is being currently searched in the search engines and you have it made. When your Blogs are doing well and you are earning a regular income from it you can get Blog posts written for you for a rather low amount so in effect you can have an automated business with very little work involved.

Article Writing: Just by writing 5 articles a day and then have a link through to one of your products can seriously increase your sales. They say that if you do write 25 a week so that’s 5 a day Monday to Friday you can expect to make $1000 in your first 30 days. However as your popularity grows and your reputation increases for being a accomplished writer you will earn much more than this.

Forum Marketing: This is my personal favourite you just NEVER knock the ability to build a business through the likes of internet forums. I use them most days and through answering a simple question and telling the person that I am replying to that they can find the answer on my Blog I can add over 100 clicks in a matter of minutes. This can work in any niche too and doesn’t just have to be associated with the make money online niche.

Social Marketing: This has to be the most powerful way of gaining traffic through to your products and services. As a member of many of them including Twitter, FaceBook, Digg, StumbleUpon and Yahoo Answers I have seen first hand how much they can help your business day in day out. By answering a quick question on Yahoo about Hostgator I can create at least $200 in affiliate commission. Using bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon and Digg has had an amazing affect on the amount of sales that I have received and placed me in the search engines a lot quicker than I could have possibly imagined.

I have now provided you with five excellent ways to make money online. I have to say without a doubt even though these are not the only ways they are my best ways to make money online. Just think about which ones are yours!

A Big Problem: Commission Theft. If you’re new to affiliate marketing, you may have heard about affiliate link cloaking. In short, this is a strategy to block hijackers from stealing your affiliate commissions. This system will drive your visitors to the vendor url without showing your affiliate id (so you’ll remain hidden), but your commissions will be tracked.

Common Alternatives to Hide Your Affiliate ID.

Many new affiliates make a big mistake: They use free cloaking services (like tinyurl.com or others) instead of cloaking their affiliate links on their own sites. Now, this has a lot of disadvantages. The first one (and the more obvious) is that if the site stops providing the service and you’ve promoted a product over 100’s of sites (or have dozens of popular videos labeled with that free url service), you’ll lose that traffic.

Think this may not happen? Think it twice. It happened with 100’s of sites. The last one was Pinurl.com. And more will come.

On the other hand, you never know if the owner of a link cloaking service is replacing your affiliate id with their own affiliate id. Who knows? Do You Know? I don’t, but… how do they make money from a service like this where they show no ads on the service they provide? Mmmm… One last thing: Many services just do a redirect and they don’t remove your affiliate id from the vendor url (others could steal your commissions).

The Best Alternative: Keep Everything On Your Site.

The best alternative is to cloak the affiliate links on your site. Nobody can’t change them and you always keep the control. This is the most serious option and is being used by every serious / big affiliate marketer.

Is this difficult to do? No. It will take you 60 seconds more than what it takes you cloak your links with a free url shortener site!

How to Cloak Your Affiliate Links.

If you have some php knowledge, you can cloak your links by yourself otherwise, the best choice could be to use a professional link cloaker like “The Hidden Affiliate”, which has very cool features (like dynamic conversion tracking, etc) and it’s really affordable. This will be a better (and more secure) strategy for recommending affiliate products, instead of using those free (but suspicious) url shortener services.

Marketers and big companies are raking in millions of dollars on sites like Twitter, Facebook, MyBlogLog, MySpace, Hi-5, Linked-in and FriendFeed, etc. Dell reported earning over $3 million from direct marketing on Twitter. What do these social sites have in common? Traffic and lots of it. What makes them so popular and how did they get all this traffic? HOW can you duplicate their success and high traffic stats without allocating hundreds and thousands of dollars for marketing? How can you achieve their ranking?

Internet marketing these days states that there should be a right blend of the traditional marketing forms and the latest social networking methodologies in order to obtain the best of both the marketing strategies. Though both the marketing forms are extremely different and unique in their own ways, there are a few advantages that social networking enjoys over the traditional marketing method. Lets see what these advantages are:

It is absolutely free: while some of the traditional marketing techniques like PPC, CPM etc, are paid services, there is no service in social media that is paid. It vows for completely free Internet marketing solutions. This is one of the primary reasons why social networking has moved a step ahead of other marketing fundas.

Targeting your market is much easier in the social media than it is in the traditional internet marketing practices. Moreover, social networking provides an opportunity to the marketers to get up and close to their target so much so that they can even communicate directly with them asking for their feedbacks and suggestions. Here are some ideas for incorporating social networking into your mix:

1. Creation of social networking profiles — Register and create profiles with the heavyweights like MySpace, Facebook, and the other usual suspects, but also do create profiles with business-oriented such as LinkedIn and industry-specific sites. Don’t forget to look for local and regional, too!

2. Participate in these communities — One of the best ways to get the most out of social networking is to become an active participant in these communities. Just make sure that your posts add something of value to the communities so that other members are inclined to take you seriously. Most of all, take care to observe the written (and unwritten) protocols of these sites, and don’t feed trolls by rising to their bait.

3. Include your URL in your signature — After you’ve established credibility with the other members of the community, include the URL of your site in your signature. It’s a great way to increase qualified traffic, especially professional traffic, to your site.

4. Start your own community on your site and update it often to give your readers a reason to check your site regularly. Consider adding a forum where customers can ask questions and get feedback from you. Your blog posts can range from informative to promotional to humorous and you can whet your audience’s appetite to check back often by introducing exclusive coupons and sales.

5. Optimize your blog posts—This is a major aspect of search engine marketing. Optimize each blog post to make it as easy to find in a search engine as possible, but always remember not to overdo it. Obvious and repetitive keyword stuffing will reduce linking opportunities and turn off your regular visitors.

6. Include social bookmarking tools—When a reader likes your content so much that they want to share it with other communities, make sharing as easy as possible by putting popular social bookmarking tools at the end of each post. These include digg, StumbleUpon, MySpace, Facebook, and others. Pay special attention to the newer, industry-specific bookmarking tools, too.

On a more practical ground, it is seen that it is always much more advantageous to have a unison of the two or more online marketing strategies in order to ensure that your website is receiving complete online marketing treatment and showing positive results too.

Marketers and big companies are raking in millions of dollars on sites like Twitter, Facebook, MyBlogLog, MySpace, Hi-5, Linked-in and FriendFeed, etc. Dell reported earning over $3 million from direct marketing on Twitter. What do these social sites have in common? Traffic and lots of it. What makes them so popular and how did they get all this traffic? HOW can you duplicate their success and high traffic stats without allocating hundreds and thousands of dollars for marketing? How can you achieve their ranking?

There are many ways to use the free blogging platform WordPress to make money. From creating simple salespages to business blogs to article directories to paid forums to fancy e-stores, there is actually very little you can’t do with WordPress when you have the right tools and step-by-step instructions.

7 Essential Tools to Create a Money-Making WordPress Blog

1. Keyword Research Tool – Use the free service offered by Google or invest in something more comprehensive like Market Samurai. Keyword research is essential if you want to figure out what potential customers are looking for and how to word things to attract visitors to your site

2. Domain Name and Paid Hosting – AVOID free with both! If you are serious about making money online you need to have full control over your site.

3. Latest Version of WordPress Installed On Your Site

4. WordPress ‘Plugins’ That Help with Marketing – WordPress out-of-the-box lacks some of the features you need if you want to make money online. Plugins are pieces of code, often free, that you can easily add to your blog to make it do all kinds of helpful things.

5. WordPress ‘Theme’ Appropriate for the Niche – WordPress themes are pieces of code you add to your blog that changes the way it appears overall. Some of the better themes cost money but the investment can be very worthwhile.

6. Autoresponder Service - AVOID free ones! You need a reliable service and none of the free ones are reliable, flexible or safe enough, no matter what you have read.

7. Free Report/Offer of Some Kind – Offer something of value for free on your blog in exchange for personal information. This is where your autoresponder comes in handy to capture names of people who may become loyal customers over time.

Other Essential Tools:

• affiliate link cloaker if you are selling other people’s products
• digital download security service, like DL Guard, if you are selling your own digital products like ebooks and software
• social media accounts – sign up with sites like Twitter to promote your blog – accounts with article directories like Ezine.com – article marketing is key to getting traffic to your site!
• article distribution service so you can broadcast your articles to many different directories quickly
• video distribution account to distribute videos you create

There are many other tools to consider if you are serious about making money with your WordPress blog but that covers the basics. Good luck!

Confirmed opt-in as defined by SpamHaus, who is one of the most respected anti spam organizations in the world:

Known as “COI” in the legitimate bulk email industry, also known as “Confirmed Opt-in”, “Verified Opt-in” or sometimes “Double Opt-in”.

With Closed-Loop Opt-in the Recipient has verifiably confirmed permission for the address to be included on the specific mailing list, by confirming (responding to) the list subscription request verification. This is the standard practice for all responsible Internet mailing lists, it ensures users are properly subscribed, from a working address, and with the address owner’s consent.

In the event of “spam” accusation:

The Bulk Email Sender is fully and legally protected because the reply to the Subscription Confirmation Request received back from the recipient proves that the recipient did in fact opt-in and grant verifiable consent for the mailings.

Source: Spamhaus Website

Numerous myths have circulated regarding confirmed opt-in and its effects. There are many misconceptions out there, and we’d like to help clear those up.

Myth 1: My List Size Will Decrease Because Of Confirmed Opt-In.

Some addresses entered into your form will not confirm — that much is true. The percentage of addresses that don’t confirm depends on many factors, including the quality of your traffic and how effective your thank-you page, confirmation message and incentive for confirming are.

Percentages aside, there are compelling reasons that having fewer addresses on your list is a good thing.

Sometimes Less is Better

I know. You may be asking, “How can a decreased list size be a good thing?” Well, let’s consider:

5-20% of all web form submissions are undeliverable right off the bat.

This means that of your total list size you can cut that by 5-20% because these email addresses are simply dead. Remember these are not temporary undeliverable but permanent dead addresses.

Now, add on the bogus and malicious sign ups that undoubtedly will happen. For example, someone comes to your website and decides to put in bob@aol.com. Well, bob@aol.com was once a real email address and because you were not using confirmed opt-in you are now classified as an unintentional spammer.

A recent study by MarketingSherpa and KnowledgeStorm found that only 68% of users always enter a valid email address.So, nearly a third of respondents knowingly enter bogus email addresses.

- Source

ISPs do not differentiate between unintentional spammers or actual spammers. The potential for you to be blocked or even worse, blacklisted, remains the same.

Myth 2: My Mailing List Is Different! I Don’t Need Confirmed Opt-In.

Confirmed opt-in is for all businesses, plain and simple. Anyone collecting subscribers and in turn sending email needs to confirm that those people intended to sign up to your mailing list and want to receive your email.

In this age of email regulations and massive volumes of spam email, deliverability can be an issue. Why increase your chances of not getting delivered by putting yourself at risk.

Myth 3: No One Else Uses Confirmed Opt-In. Why Should I?

This is simply not accurate. Our own campaigns here at AWeber use confirmed opt-in for all email marketing activities. When someone signs up for a Test Drive of AWeber, they must confirm.

After setting up an account, if they want to receive our customer training email course, they must confirm. The same goes for our affiliates and their email training. Even when someone subscribes to our blog, they must confirm.

Ok, but AWeber must practice what they preach, who else?

If you want to sign up for the mailing lists of these organizations you will need to first confirm:

CNN	Microsoft
Oprah, CNet	bellagio.com
IRS.gov	weather.com
ign.com	maxim.com
tgifridays.com	olivegarden.com
pbs.org	visitpa.com
Whitehouse.gov

The list goes on and on!

Myth 4: Subscribers In My Market Don’t Know How To Confirm.

The simple solution is to tell them. The first page after someone fills in an opt-in form, commonly called a “thank you page” should tell the visitor exactly what to do next. Often this is done most effectively with a picture showing visitors what the confirmation email will look like.

An excellent example is our test drive sign up video on the thank you page showing visitors what to do.

Honestly, if they can’t click a link then you probably should be marketing your business offline. If someone can find your website online I guarantee they can click a link.

Myth 5: My Sales Will Decrease Because Of Confirmed Opt-In.

Have you tested this assumption? The answer is always, “No, but I just assume” or “No, my colleague told me it would hurt sales”.

It’s best not to assume anything, but rather to seek out your own answers by testing and observing your own campaigns. We have found from our own testing that while the raw number of email addresses on our list declined when we switched to confirmed opt-in, sales did not.

This means that the people who did confirm were the ones that truly wanted the information that they had to offer and the ones that didn’t were not left to bloat the mailing list.

Grow Your Business Without Risk

Will your results be exactly the same as AWeber or even anyone else? This can only be determined by proper testing and measuring.

Use confirmed opt-in as an opportunity to make sure that your lists are 100% clean and that you know without a doubt that 100% of the people receiving your mail have specifically requested it themselves.

Spend your time and energy building your business with subscribers who want to hear from you rather than dealing with issues created by people who don’t want to hear from you. For Toptut.com I use Aweber email marketing platform and I am more than happy to see my confirmed opt-ins returning to my website over and over!

Money is tight, but that doesn’t mean people don’t need you and your solutions. In fact, I’d be willing to bet that the people in your market need the guidance and insight you provide now more than ever. But in a recession, it takes a little more encouragement to get people to help themselves by buying your products, your affiliate products and services. In other words, you may need to fine-tune your marketing. Here are a few tips for helping your clients and prospects buy from you.

1. Emphasize the Value You Provide
If you want people to buy from you, be very clear about what you’ll do for them and how their lives will be easier. Will you save them time? Can you help them make more money? Emphasizing the value positions your product or service as an investment, not an expense.

2. Give Away Freebies
Giving away a free special report is a cheap and easy way to introduce prospects to who you are and what you do. It starts building your relationship with them right away. Make your report stand out by giving your leads something (a new strategy or a few tips) they can implement easily and immediately see results. And don’t be afraid to ask your readers to pass your report along to friends and colleagues.

3. Develop and Sell Information Products
Information products—like e-books, tele-seminars, and group programs—are a great way to leverage your time and give people more inexpensive ways to work with you. For example, although some people might hesitate to commit to a $1,000 monthly one-on-one coaching fee, they might be happy to participate in a group program for a few hundred dollars.

4. Keep Following Up
Even if a person is interested in what you have to offer, they might let opportunities to work with you slip past them during tight financial times. So now more than ever, following up repeatedly is critical. Even though you may be tempted to cut the frequency of your marketing to save money, keep e-mailing and writing your list to remind them about the value you provide and the results they’ll get from working with you. Marketing succeeds with follow up.

Selling Your Services in Any Economy
You chose your profession to help people be more successful, and with so much doom and gloom these days, the world needs you more than ever. With these strategies, you can help your clients and prospects see that a better way exists. When people feel comfortable and confident that you can help, they won’t hesitate to buy. And whatever you do, don’t stop marketing!