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Ad blindness is nothing new. You have experienced it, even Google has experienced it. This is basically failure to get people to click on ads. This happens because of (i think) 3 things:

• everybody isn’t surfing the web to buy products, and especially the kids on YouTube
• bad ad placemen - after all this time i still see sites packed with adsense ads but they are placed where no one can see them
• people are getting bored - happens all the time

So i think the only way to counter this trend is to come up with new advertising methods (not like that audio crap or annoying popups) and to target the ads to have targeted ad variations (say one ad variation for people that are interested in the product and one for the kids on YouTube). And for people who surf the web just to read content, link based ads like Kontera will be the future.

That is why i think you should start a change right now, before it’s too late.

Do not let Adsense own you. Think clear and you will own it. I’m not saying “Drop Adsense, it’s bad for your money” - I’m saying you must look for all possible ways to monetize your website. Work at full capacity. Get 100%.

There are various ingenious ways to monetize your site:

• Earlier i said Kontera Content Link. That is like in your face advertising, embedded right into the content. Your viewers will think it’s a link from your site. There no way ad blindness can get to this one.
• Feedburner offers options to monetize your RSS feed. That will give you a constant income stream.
• Adbrite BritePic allows you to monetize your images. There will be a small link on the bottom of your image will be like in your face for all the viewers.
• Also from Adbrite is InVideo - a small, transparent link at the bottom of your video, a great way to monetize your YouTube videos.

Besides the methods above, paid reviews are also a great new way to advertise/monetize. It seems even Google will get it’s share of this pie.

Times change. People change. Ads change. You must live with that. Google must live with that. How to survive ad blindness? Adapt. Be creative. Use all the methods you have. Get the most of it. Be like Jesus, make people see.

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It is my opinion that Adsense is not the best monetization method for most sites. I have written about it in a previous post and now i will give you more reasons.

Word around the Webmaster World Forum is that publishers have been experiencing a sharp decline in Adsense earning for the past month. The thing is no one yet knows what happens or it this decline in earnings is general or only experience by a small amount of publishers.

A small poll (43 participants) at Search Engine Roundtable shows that more than half of the webmasters suffered a decrease in earning, while the rest experienced a slight increase. First of all i think this poll is not representative but it still tells us something. It seems that Adsense is leveraging income over several niches and what it think happened there is Google artificially lowered the income on high paying keyword to equalize it with the others.

Now i don’t know anyone to be really impressed by Adsense. I don’t know no one who got the mythical $80 per click (people say, but i don’t believe). So I don’t really know how can this decrease in earnings be a problem. You usually get $200 per month and now you get $180, big deal.

If you don’t get like a gazilion visitors per day you won’t be able to make real money with adsense. In particular blogs, targeted by readers for their content (which they will read and ignore the ads) not for their keywords. Adsense works best on portal-like sites and on sites that people go through (not stay). But this is only my opinion…

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I told you i an previous post that adsense has something with non US publishers. Now it’s official. If you are outside of the US, Latin America or Japan adsense referrals will be retired. Just like that. The stupidity of this decision is that they ban you for your place of residence and not for other things like the quality and topic of your site or your audience’s location (I live in Europe but more than 80% of my traffic comes from the US). More on this story on Shoemoney.

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They say a picture is worth 1000 words. And an adsense ad is worth just 95. So if you combine a picture with adsense you will get 1095 words. “Now how can this help me?” you may ask. Well this can boost you adsense CTR by 300%. Woooooow… Hold your horses. That looks like a lot. But it can be done? Yes it can.

In one of my previous post i was telling you that banners (and all the types of image advertising) get more clicks than text based ads. But banners take more space than a text ad and usually cost more. So if you can combine the price of a text based ad with the efficiency of a banner that would be awesome.

The thing is a simple text based ad does not attract enough attention to get clicked. But when you put an image next to it the viewer’s eyes will be drawn over there and they will take a glimpse at the ad. To make one thing clear: images do not make an ad more attractive , they just draw the viewer’s attention towards it. So if the viewer is not interested in the product the ad is promoting he won’t click on it. This thing will improve your CTR with at least 200%. And will make the text ads you show more user friendly. And the best thing is it can be used with any advertising network.

Now for the pictures… they don’t have to anything related to the site or to the ad. You can even display your own pictures. But one thing we know: use pictures that have contrast (dark color on bright color) and use pictures that blend with the background of your site(if your site has a white background use images with white background). Abstract images are also known for their eye-catching effect.

There is one more thing i have to tell you first. As you know i am not a big adsense fan and because of that i don’t really know it this method is against adsense’s TOS. Most people say it’s not against the TOS but… i don’t know.

So if you are ready to give it a try here is how to implement it.

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You heard me. Google’s Biatch. Not Google’s bitch like in “Chief: Clarke, I need the phone number of a postal worker in Mr. Rogers Neighborhood, last name of McFeeley. Clarke: I’m on it chief. Lois: Clarke don’t you ever want to be more than just a Google Bitch?” I’m talking Google’s Biatch like in adsense, adwords, pagerank and so on.

Well it seems that there’s a long line of people wanting to be google’s biatch.

People worry to much because of google making changes. People need to stop worrying about google. Nothing will happen if your page rank drops. You will still get your visitors. Just think about it… you have your rss readers, you have your email subscribers, you have people finding you on Technorati and Bloglines… and trust me, the number of visitors coming from serps will not go down, it will still be the same. TRUST ME. One of my sites has a 0 (zero) PR and still is on the first page of serps for it’s keywords.

And let’s talk a little about adsense/adwords. First thing you must know, it’s not the only contextual advertising network out there. Yea (you would say) but it’s the best. First of all you should read my previous article about adsense. And if something from that list ain’t true just let me know. A thing i left out of that list is the lack of control. You can’t control ads that appear on your site (you can but you have to exclude certain urls - while on other advertising networks you can manually accept publishers that show ads on your site). And people always seem to optimize their pages for adsense (keywords and other things). How much do you get if you have an adesense optimized page but no one visits it? ZERO $$$. And what about adwords. There was this landing page fiasco that seemed to hurt everybody. The problem here consisted in 2 things: the landing page domain had very little available content and the keywords were very low cost. Now google doesn’t like low cost. They are here to make money (off your back).

So think about what you do. When you do something for google to like you, you basically work for google. Without gettin paid. You are google’s biatch.

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