John Gall Internet Income And PC Tips And Tools

Ok this topic has been done before but I still had trouble with it so I decided to make some notes on my Adsense blog in hopes of simplifying the process and maintaining it for myself in the future. If you want to do some split testing of your Adsense ad blocks ( Commonly called A/B testing). You’ll need to first create two ad blocks with a unique channel assigned to each. I am usually testing differen’t sizes like a 300×250 vs 468×60 so I name my Adsense channels with 300 after one and 468 after the other, or you could use red or blue if you were testing colors etc. So now that you have the code for your two ad blocks paste both into Notepad so you can work with them. Now take this code and paste it into your website or blog where you want the ad block to appear.

<script type=”text/javascript”>
    var random_number = Math.random();
    if (random_number < .5){
        //your first ad unit code goes here
    } else {
        //your second ad unit code goes here
    }
</script>
<script type=”text/javascript”     src=”http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js”></script>

Ok now the tricky part. Where it says “//your second ad unit code goes here” or “//your first ad unit coes here” remove that and replace it with the INSIDE of your Google Adsense ad block. Here’s my code below. Notice I only included the code that starts with that is the tricky part. So the part I inserted from my code is in red. Enjoy your testing.

Adsense Split Testing Code

One of the things I like to do is profile local hotspots such as restaurants that are popular. Many times a local reataurant will have folks searching for hours, location or reviews so I just create a simple website that offers them the core data they are searching for. A local restaurant called Pittsburgh Blue is one such restaurant that was attracting alot of search traffic. I created a small website with the inforamtion that searchers were looking for and pointed them to some reviews of the Maple Grove restaurant and while it’s not making me rich, it did add to the revenue pile with 6x my investment in the domain name in the first year.

Many times using Google Trends, i’ll find people asking questions using Google. This tells me there is an opportunity to answer the question with a specialized site. Ideally the question should be asked often so that your efforts are rewarded over and over. Take for example near and certainly on any holiday people start typing USPS Holidays or USPS Holiday Schedule in an effort to find out if they should expect their United States Postal Service mail that day. I took this and made a website called USPS Holidays that outlines all the mail holidays for 2009. Each year I’ll update the list and change the year and i’m set. I win because it generates some revenue and the visitors win by getting the answer to their question very quickly. Another example is that I noticed people searching for Costco Hours and they maintain the same store hours across the US. I simply created a site that provides that specific bit of information to the customers.

Google has a great site called Google Trends which will show you the up to the minute most popular search keywords. Aside from giving you an idea of what is going on in the world, it can show you what people are trying to find and what they may or may not be finding. If you can find keywords that are not well served you have an opportunity to create a site or even just a simple blog post that might rank well in Google and thus draw traffic, and thus bring money to your pocket. Here’s an example. Yesterday I noticed that many times the keywords rihanna and chris brown pictures and rihanna pictures were showing multiple times. I’d see this as an opportunity for a website. I’d head over to http://www.givingstuffaway.com and try and find a domain like rihannapictures.com or something like that. I can see that the closest I can get now is rihanna-pictures.net but that would certainly work. I’d then scour places like http://community.webshots.com for pictures of Rihanna or any other site where I could find a picture of Rihanna that wouldn’t get me sued. I’d also use snagit to clip only the part I want. I’d then just build a site with 6-10 pictures of Rihanna and wait for the money. Now a site like this won’t make you rich but it would take like 20 minutes to complete and probably make $15-$30 per month.

One place I hardly read but should and every newcomer to Google Adsense deffinetly should is the Official Google Adsense blog. This is done by the folks at Google and has WAY more information than I have and contains updates etc. I find it to be a bit much so maybe check the categories on the right side of the blog to find the getting started type stuff. The optimization stuff is probably going to be very helpful. I’ll need to make time to read it myself.