William Charlwood

Do you want to see more interesting ads on sites you visit?

Google thinks you do so it has introduced what is essentially a time dimension to its AdSense program.  AdSense at the moment just displays ads that are related to the content of the web page that the ads are on. Google’s interest-based advertising system will now determine which ads to show on the basis of your individual browsing history as well as the content of the page you are on. So it is taking into account sites you’ve visited in the past as well as the site you are currently on to select AdSense ads from its inventory.

This does raise privacy issues and Google is being open about this and allowing you to opt out of its interest based advertising system by setting your own Ads Preferences.

Monetization is the process of turning your web traffic into cash. It includes generating income from direct sales, from advertising systems like AdSense, from affiliate sales or simply by getting people on your website to telephone or fax you and place orders.

Pure internet marketers tend to focus on automated systems of monetization so that once they have set things up, the money gets generated without further effort or work. You can do this quite readily provided you have acquired the skills necessary to generate targeted web traffic.

To maximise the monetization potential of any website requires a degree of testing because changes to systems and web page copy will have an impact on your average visitor value. If you start to measure the value of your traffic and identify where you lose people during a purchase process using Google Analytics for example, you can start to optimize the monetization capability of your website.

Classic ways of boosting monetization are to introduce autoresponders to generate repeat visitors, introducing and testing new web copy, offering downsells to people who reject offers and upsells to people who accept offers and buy from you. Autoresponders also allow you to increase your backend sales which are those you make to people who have bought from you in the past.

Another way to monetize traffic is to use Cost Per Action networks. These pay you when someone clicks on an ad on your site and buys something - it’s a bit like affiliate marketing.

As I’ve mentioned before, Clickbooth seems to work well.

The Long Tail of Search is the myriad of unique searches done daily that add up to the vast majority of search engine activity.  The top 10, 100, 1000, 10,000, 100,000 or even 1 million searches done each day are but a tiny, tiny fraction of the total.

The sum of the obscure, esoteric and often quirky makes up the majority and is known as the Long Tail.

Part of your role as an internet marketer is to market your web pages to people doing searches on line so you need to understand the implications of the Long Tail and how you can use it to get free targeted traffic and clicks if you are to maximize your AdSense affiliate or direct income.

For example, one effective way of capturing traffic from unusual searches is to create niche content that targets a huge range of similar search phrases or keywords.  There are tools available right now that can automate this for you. They essentially take single articles or web pages and generate thousands of permutations by replacing words with synonyms and phrases with other phrases with the same meaning. You then publish these different versions of your articles on your site.

In this way, you can capture a much larger volume of search engine traffic whilst still delivering the same informational value to your site’s visitors.

Here’s a quick example scenario.

Suppose you have an article that ranks well for the keyword “bicycling in France”. What if someone searches for “cycling in France”, “bicycling across France” or “bicycling around France” instead? Will you rank as well for those?

The answer is that you probably won’t but you might if you replaced the phrase “bicycling in France” in your article with the phrase “cycling in France”, “bicycling across France”
etc. and published those versions of your article too.

That is what chasing the Long Tail is all about and don’t forget, it is where the majority of your potential free traffic lies.

But don’t forget other languages too. If you create content in English, why not get it translated too so that you can attract searchers who are using different search terms altogether. So The Long Tail Of Search could just as easily become

• Der lange Schwanz der Suche
• La longue queue de la recherche
• La larga cola de la búsqueda
• A longa cauda de pesquisa
• La lunga coda di ricerca

Simply by placing these phrases on this blog I am likely over time to get a few visitors who are searching for the long tail of search in these non-English languages.