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Having spent endless hours researching the net and reading what feels like every computer geek’s perspective on Google page ranking, search engine optimization and site promotion I have come to the following conclusions:

1. Don’t develop your website to make Google spiders happy, develop your site to make your visitors happy. Why? Because “people” are what will make you successful, not Google spiders that crawl your site. Sure, it’s important to do what you can to improve your site rankings and promotion. But once you have applied the basics of setting up your site, fined tuned your meta and page tags and submitted your site to various search engines and directories, STOP and ask yourself what is the ROI on your time? What are you REALLY getting out of pouring your life away over another promo trick or one more article written by some geek who has little or no ability to relate to the “human side” of the Internet equation? What ever happened to plain old customer service?

2. There are only three (3) possible actions a person can take when they arrive at your site. They can click the back button and go back to Google or some other search engine. They can visit the site and review your offerings or they can click a link and go on to the next site. Out of these three options, the best are “they visit and check out your offering” and they “click and go on to the next site” so that the next business might have an opportunity to make a presentation of their offering. The worst thing a visitor can do is click the back button and go back to Google or some other search engine. Why? Well ask yourself, what has Google or any other search engine done for you lately? Will Google or any other search engine let you advertise for free? Well, when you have done a lot of hard work whether it is writing articles or online and offline advertising to get your visitor to your site, why in the world would you want that person to go to Google for free? I don’t know about you but I would much rather have my visitor come to your site so you have a chance to make a buck in this dog eat dog market.

3. Back to people for a moment—I got news for you, people are SICK of hyper advertising get rich quick crap that promises to show them how to be successful by giving up their email address and other confidential information for another false promise. People don’t buy into that hype. It repels them. It repels me. If you have a viable product or service, put up the best site you can, tone down the hype, get honest and make your site a place people want to visit and bookmark (.) A place that people will visit again and again because of the content of the information on the site that benefits them. If your site has quality information on it people will bookmark it and spread the word to their friends and family. And word of mouth is the most powerful advertising tool you will ever find to promote your site.

I have a comprehensive business background—and at 48 years old I have seen and done it all, management, marketing, direct sales, real estate and mortgage banking. I have authored and published books, been a media spokesperson, appeared on local, regional and national TV, I have signed autographs and personally filled orders and all of it revolved around customer service to people. People make you successful. And I have a new found skill set developing a website to help promote my products. But I don’t hype it. It’s a simple site that has a really BIG bang for the buck—the BANG is for the people who visit the site. I think it’s a cool place for information people need. And that brings me around to the meat of this article.

THINK LINKS—people get to your website because of links. Traffic is what you want—lots of traffic. I have had people tell me that they only wanted to exchange links with very qualified, targeted “vertical markets”. One case was a guy trying to sell a computer book, I offered to exchange a link with him because my website is called Smart Books and we sell real estate and business kits and books but not technology products. I thought it would be a nice link to offer my visitors. He declined. Which makes about as much sense as having a computer store in the mall and rejecting all visitors who don’t read computer books. Another technical geek idiot who doesn’t understand that eyeballs on product is what sells products. He lives in that stupid “geek universe” where offline buzzwords like “target market” and “vertical market” are more important—he read to many articles written by other geeks. Sure, it’s important to have link relevancy on your site but the key is to diversify—give your visitors alternatives.

So here’s the deal: I am on your side in the quest to serve customers and develop a site following. The quest to drive the market to your website. But if you are on a limited budget like I am, THINK LINKS. Relevant link exchange is one of the most powerful tools you have to promote your site and improve your site page rankings. Visit our website at the link below, check it out—there is a link button on the home page that will explain the linking process with us and provide everything you need. If you think your site is relevant to ours, submit your site. We will check out your site and if your site is relevant, we’ll link you! It’s just that simple! We are all in this together and when you consider all the help you are getting from Google and given the fact that Yahoo directory wants $300-$600 to submit your site for “review” link exchange has tremendous value.

Copyright © 2006
James W. Hart, IV
All Rights reserved

SMART BOOKS: http://www.smart67.com
FREE DOWNLOADS: We have a variety of free, high quality, problem solving EBooks you can downloaded directly at Smart Books. We don’t hyper-advertise at you either.
MEDIA INTERVIEWS Yes-See Bio for booking information

Have you tried Google Adwords and watched your money go down the
drain faster than you ever thought possible? This is the second
in three articles about how to make Google Adwords work for you
instead of watching your hard earned money go to Google Adwords.

Hot Tip # 4 - Edit your campaign with negative keywords

Negative keywords prevent your ads from showing up in searches
that you don’t want such as “free widgets”. This helps prevent
wasted clicks which tend to do nothing but cost you money. If
you only sell red and blue widgets then you should add yellow as
a negative keyword. You make a search negative by using the
minus sign i.e. “-yellow”.

Hot Tip # 5 - Go with your gut

If you are using a tool such as Google Adwords’ Traffic
Estimator, realize that it is known for returning less than
accurate results for your keyword. Don’t let that be your
decision maker.

Adwords Traffic Estimator is not accurate for narrowly defined
keywords phrases or “niche” words. Go with your instincts and
try it out. Fortunes have been made by people who are willing to
march to a different drummer.

Automated systems are helpful but they are far from perfect.

Hot Tip # 6 - Run lots of keywords

Start out with lots of keyword phrases and monitor them. Not all
people think the same so not all people are going to use the
same search phrases. This way you will catch people who you
normally wouldn’t catch. If you find that you are getting few or
no clicks, then pare them like you would the branches on a tree.

Remember to use the exact keyword matches and negative keywords
when doing this.

Hot Tip # 7 - Rotate your ads and split test

Google lets you have more than one ad for your ad group. It then
rotates them and keeps track of which ad gets the higher CTR.
Google Adwords will then begin to show that ad more often than
the ad with lower CTRs.

The best way to do this is to test and run only two ads at a
time. This way you can tightly manage your variables. Some tests
have shown several hundred percent changes in click through
rates just by switching around the first and second lines of an
ad.

If you start split testing more than two ads at a time, the
variables will quickly get out of control.

Hot Tip # 8 - Be Darwinian

Once you have identified that one version of your ad doesn’t
work as well as the other version, get rid of it. Now make the
stronger ad your baseline and run another ad against it to see
which is the stronger. What you are trying to do is improve your
ad.

What is the correct sample for testing ads? Top experts say that
50 clicks may be enough but 100 clicks is better. A larger
sample gives more accuracy. You, of course, know what your
budget will allow for.

This is a continuous process that will strengthen your CTR rates
and gain more customers at a continuing lower cost.

—————————————————– Grab a
FREE newsletter and eBook “Article Cash” worth $67.95. Send a
blank email to - ac@aweber.com ==>Visit my website –
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Being a web developer when you mention the backend, I
immediately think of database and content management system. In
this article we’ll talk about the backend in a different light.
The major source of profits from your online enterprise and you
don’t have to be technical to implement what you learn.

The backend refers to the income generated from the people that
bought your initial product by purchasing from you again and
again. The backend is where most of the money is made online.
Getting the first sale is the most challenging part, once you’ve
made your first sale, the customer will now how much value
you’re adding into their lives. A lot of marketers are happy to
make the first sale with little or no profit because they
realize the potential for profits in the backend. You can email
your customers whenever you want and when you create a new
product, there’s an instant explosion of sales.

Heres an example, let’s assume you have a product that sells for
$49 and you move 10 per week. After 6 months that’s a tidy
profit of $12 740. Let’s say you launch a new product that sells
for $97 and send an email to all the people that bought your
first product mentioning a 3-day only sale

If 20% (a reasonable proportion) bought your next product,
that’ll be 52 people buying a product at $97, you’d make $5044
in just a few days. That’s over 10 weeks of normal sales in just
3 days, spectacular!

Now what you can do, is pre-program an autoresponder so that
those people who now buy your first product after a few days
have the opportunity to buy your second product. That’s a
automatic system to upsell your customers and improve the amount
of sales per visitor to your website. Initially, focus on that
first sale and this knowledge will no doubt prove profitable.

Hope you received useful information in this article.

To find out more about how to manage the backend and for more
powerful concepts, visit http://www.internetprofitmentor.com.
Here I found a wealth of useful and free information with over
12 hours of video and a 120 page e-book.

The web is literally awash with travel websites. Search on Google for ‘discount air travel’ and you will find over 32 million websites. Try ‘cheap accommodation’ and there are over 11 million sites competing for your customer’s dollar. So how do you make a travel website rank highly on Google and the other search engines.

Broadly speaking, strategy in this space is similar to many physical world markets. You have to choose between being universal and being focused. If you want to be universal, i.e. offer a site which provides airline tickets, hotel and car rental bookings anywhere on earth you have to remember that you are up against some pretty stiff competition. The number one ranked site on Google for ‘discount air travel’ is Expedia. It has over 5 million back links as measured by www.marketleap.com. The cost of overtaking these mega sites for popular terms like ‘discount air travel’ is prohibitive. You will never get there. So if you want to be a universal site you must focus on less popular search terms. Look for variants on the popular search terms and try to rank highly against less popular terms. There are still very large numbers of searches done each day on terms like ‘discount plane tickets’ and it will be much easier to rank against this kind of term. Indeed the #1 ranked site on Google for this term isn’t even a home page: always a sign that this space is not too competitive. It also has a PageRank of only 4, which is not difficult to beat.

The focus strategy is easier to understand. Choose one market and optimize your website to rank highly only for that market. It’s not hard to beat the top-ranked players if you are searching for ‘Bed and Breakfast in Woodbridge ,Suffolk, England’ . Of course the problem here is that the value of ranking highly for this term is almost nil. You have to find the sweet spot of markets where a top-ranked position is valuable but yet the competition for this spot is not too intense. Once you have chosen your target market and its associated target keywords, the challenge is to get your site to rank highly. I do not propose in this article to go over the principles of search engine optimization, or SEO: there are innumerable articles which offer the latest thinking on this topic. However, a central part of all SEO strategies is linking: getting other sites to link to you. There is no substitute for the hard work of persuading other websites to link to yours, in return for a link from yours to them. Ideally you want to focus on a triangular link, where you link from one site and they link back to a different site – this will make your link less suspect in the eyes of the search engines. Look for a Free Travel Links site such as this one, complete the form, put your link up to their site and they will link back to you within 24 hours. Repeat several hundred or several thousand times, wait a while and you will be pretty much assured of a high ranking on the search engines. Then sit back and count the money.

Henry Schlee owns and operates several travel websites. He also offers triangular links from high PR URLs with few outgoing links. Use this link to submit your site and get a high PR link in return.

Professionals in tend to under-estimate the power of the web to bring them business, and to bring them precisely the kinds of clients they want! And, a few, invest in a great web site, but then don’t market it effectively! There are some wonderful sites that are virtually “hidden” out there on the web. Web marketing has one thing in common with other advertising: no matter how good the ad, it won’t build your business unless lots of people see it.

I tell my clients to view web marketing as having two separate components: first is the creation of a site, and second is marketing it. Building a site requires creativity, design skills, and an understanding of color, images, and popular trends. Marketing a site, on the other hand, is a much more routine, repetitious, even boring task that must be done consistently over time. The following are my Top 10 suggestions for marketing your web site:

1. Hidden Title. This is the first of three critical items that are coded in the “Head” of every web page. It is the first thing a search engine sees at the top of your page. While this title is visible on browsers, most people ignore it. I’ve seen great sites that have no title at all! Use 3-8 words that describe what you do and flag your site for the search engines.

2. Meta Tag: Keywords. The second item in the “Head” of your page should be a hidden Meta tag with 15-25 words to help people find you. These are words people are likely to enter in a search request to find you. An Accountant might have a string that started with: “Accounting, bookkeeping, records, taxes,….”

3. Meta Tag: Description. The third item in the “Head” is a hidden sentence that describes both your page and your site. Make it vibrant, use as many of your Keywords as possible, and make it accurate. This is a one-sentence description of who you are, what you do, and why people should visit your page. You’ve got 15-20 words. Use them!

4. Visible Title. This is the first thing people will see, and it’s what most people think of as the “title” of their page. Again, you want it to invite people, be accurate, and brief. While a beautiful logo or banner may look nice at the top of your page, remember that 3-5 powerful words will down-load faster. The words in your title will also connect with search engines in a way that your logo can’t.

5. First words on page. The first few seconds as a page down-loads are critical, and a short statement of what you do will down-load faster than most images. First impressions count! And again, search engines can catalog a brief but exciting description of your business, but they won’t catalog your pretty picture!

6. Have multiple pages, each with their own marketing system. A simple way to increase the “hits” on your site is to increase the number of entrance paths. Rather than have one long page, divide it into three pages, each with their own title, meta tags, and descriptions! If your pages are all linked within one site, you vastly increase the opportunities for people to find you.

7. Submit to search tools repeatedly. Search engines constantly up-date and expand their databases. To stay in the game, I suggest you re-submit your site at least once a month and re-submit after every change. Using the web to draw business is an on-going project, not a once and forget it task! There are services that will do this for you (for less than $100), or you can do it yourself. But schedule several hours every month, and do it!

8. Include your web URL on your other advertising. This seems obvious, but lots of people forget. Have your site on your business card, brochures, all of your advertising! If people are interested, want more information, or are just curious, make it easy for them to check you out. Display your URL on everything!

9. Exchange links. One of the best ways to increase traffic, and to target specific audiences, is to trade links with other sites that attract a similar audience. I recommend that you have a page dedicated to “Favorite Links” that have agreed to also put a link to your site on their page. “You scratch my back, and I’ll scratch yours” is a great way to build your web marketing impact.

10. Have something of value that changes often. Give your visitors something they can learn, do, or enjoy each time they visit. Let them sign up for your newsletter, post a “Joke of the Day” or a daily quote. It doesn’t have to relate directly to your business. People love parenting tips, humor, inspiration or practical tips for better living (Think Martha Stewart!). Give them a reason to come back!

Have a wonderful week, and remember to have some fun!

© Copyright 2003 by Philip E. Humbert. All Rights Reserved. This article may be copied and used in your own newsletter or on your website as long as you include the following information: “Written by Dr. Philip E. Humbert, writer, speaker and success coach. Dr. Humbert has over 300 free articles, tools and resources for your success, including a great newsletter! It’s all on his website at: http://www.philiphumbert.com

Step 1: Decide upon a theme for your contest

The first step must be to decide a theme for your contest. For best results, keep it seasonal or holiday-themed.

Step 2: Contest Details

Now you need to work out the details. What will people be required to enter your contest. It might be as simple as signing up with their email addresses to something much more interesting and creative as sending you their tips, stories, recipes etc. You can also plan a scavenger hunt as it will give your website and its content maximum exposure.

Step 3: The Prizes

Keeping in mind the theme of your contest, offer prizes to winners. If you sell a product, you can give away your own products as prizes. You can even get other vendors to sponsor your contests. Depending upon your audience, you can offer products, services, discount vouchers, e-products, free advertising etc. as prizes.

Step 4: Place a Form

To enable visitors to enter your contest, you will need to prepare a form which will need to be placed on a separate page on your website.

Your form can even be your mailing list subscription form (if you are going to plan a draw from the mailing list). Otherwise, prepare a proper form asking for the following details:

Name
Email
Snail Mail Address (for shipping the prize) - you can also choose to ask for this later when you contact the winners
Contest Entry - the required tip, story etc.

Test your form to see if it is working properly. This is very crucial.

Step 5: Your Contest Page

Dedicate an entire page on your website to your contest. This page will list the following:

1. Contest Description and Details, start date, end date etc.
2. Prizes Offered
3. Form mentioned in the previous step
4. Mention Your Prize Sponsors
5. Terms and Conditions (who can enter, how many times can 1 person enter, disclaimer etc.)

Do not forget to set a page title and add description and keywords to this page. This is the page that you will be promoting at contest sites and search engines are also likely to list it.

Step 6: Promote Your Contest

Only after your contest page is completely ready and uploaded on your server, should you start promoting it.

Promote your contest by listing it for free on Contest sites. You can also consider purchasing paid listings on these websites. You can also go in for other forms of advertising like website and ezine advertising.

And most important, do not forget to mention the contest (along with an active link) on the main page (and other important pages) of your own website. Also mention the contest in your newsletter, if you own one.

Step 7: Receiving Entries

Once you get listed in contest websites, you will start receiving entries. Place entries in separate folder on your computer or in your Outlook Express so that they are all in one place.

Step 8: Closing the Contest

On the day you have chosen to end the contest, remove the entry form from your contest page so that you do not go on receiving entries. Instead, place a message for all visitors to see, informing them that the contest has ended and thanking them for the response to the contest.

Contest participants will be likely to visit the page to see the results. Declare a date on which the results will be announced on that page. Request participants to bookmark your page and return to it on the said date to check out the results. You can also ask them to join your mailing list and then declare the results in your newsletter.

Step 9: Choosing the Winner

Sort out the entries and choose the winner/winners. You can choose according to accurate answers, best tip submissions or early bird entries according to the theme of your contest.

. Inform the winners by email that they have won.

. Inform the contest sponsors the names and addresses of the winners whom they are required to ship the prizes to. Don’t forget to thank them for their generous
prizes.

. Post the results on your contest page

. Announce the results in your newsletter

About the Author:

Lata Tokhi is a successful website publisher with a network of popular websites. She shares her internet success secrets with you at http://www.MomTycoons.com

Visit some of her other popular websites at http://www.DotComWomen.com, a Home & Lifestyle website and an online community and http://www.Celebrating-Christmas.com, a complete Holiday portal.

There are two ways to think about AdSense: you can think of it as a way to use your website to make money; and you can think of it as a way to make money with a website.

What’s the difference?

The difference is in the content. In the first case, you already have a website and you simply put AdSense on the page to turn it into cash. You might change the content a little to influence the ads and you could make sure that you include the best keywords to bring you the highest revenues. You should certainly play with the way the ads look on the page to make them attractive and unobtrusive - and there’s a huge range of different strategies you can use to do that.

Ultimately though, the content is there already. You’re just using AdSense to turn the content you’re going to create anyway into money - and you’re going to use AdSense secrets to make those revenues as high as possible.

But lots of people also want to build a website from scratch for the sole purpose of cashing in on all the money available through AdSense. There’s nothing wrong with that - provided the content is high quality.

This is crucial. Google doesn’t take kindly to sites packed with keywords and all sorts of other garbage just to provide a space to put up an AdSense unit. There’s a good chance they won’t approve the site, and little chance, even if they did, that you’d get any click-throughs.

But that doesn’t mean you have to really bust a gut to create the sort of website that brings you a small fortune in AdSense revenues. In my book, Google AdSense Secrets, I discuss in detail a number of different methods that you can use to create great content quickly and easily. Some of these methods cost a little money; some are completely free and still give you outstanding content. Whichever method you use though the important to remember is that your site has to have real content that people will genuinely enjoy reading. There’s no point in trying to cut corners in creating content - and absolutely no revenue to gain.

Joel Comm is The Internet Revenue Expert. Online for over 20 years, Joel teaches people how to make money in the digital age. The recognized authority on Google AdSense, Joel teaches how to multiply your AdSense income at The AdSense Code. To ask Joel Comm a question about making money online, visit http://www.AskJoelComm.com Joel invites you to download a free copy of The Internet Money Tree at http://www.internetmoneytree.net

Viral marketing magnifies marketing messages by passing them from user to user. The message starts small but gradually builds momentum and effectiveness as more users spread the message.

The message then scatters to hundreds, thousands and even millions more users. Hotmail.com is a classic example. Using viral marketing, it managed to get 50 million users in its first year of operation. It’s the online equivalent of word of mouth but spreads quicker because of the global reach of the Internet. When viral marketing is combined with other marketing efforts, the results are enhanced.

Main benefits of viral marketing are:

· Very low cost per acquired customer ratio

· Often spreads to new markets intentionally not planned for

· Creates enormous goodwill

· Generates excitement

Viral marketing doesn’t self-replicate as the name might suggest; it’s a totally proactive process. Putting up a site in hope somebody stumbles across it then forwards your URL to others is wishful thinking. Viral marketing requires special tools that stimulate the whole process namely:

· Refer A Friend services

· Opt-In Newsletter services

Viral marketing has a critical effect on customers that other website promotion efforts don’t have: it produces advocates. Transforming customers into advocates is the best thing that can happen to any business. You don’t have to try and sell an advocate’s circle of friends anything, as it’s already done for you.

Once customers reach the level of advocacy, your message is spread with lightning speed producing your own online sales force.

VIRAL MARKETING TOOL #1: ‘Refer-A-Friend’

You refer people all the time to places you have had pleasant experiences with. A movie you liked, restaurant you enjoyed or country you’ve visited. ‘Refer-A-Friend’ or ‘Tell-A-Friend’ services simply take this concept, replicate and adapt it to online efforts. As the name suggests, the tool involves people recommending their friends/associates to your website.

Overlooked Fact: Referrals are three times more likely to buy from you than those exposed to direct advertising. So it makes sense to cultivate a strong online referral system.

Refer-a-Friend overcomes probably the biggest challenge
businesses face when marketing online. Let’s look closely at what happens when somebody refers a friend:

·They forward your website address to their friends. Trusting the source, the recipient opens the e-mail. This is the key! Getting your e-mail opened and read these days is very difficult.

Customers have become more sophisticated in detecting solicitations like never before with the help of junk e-mail filters and software.

·The recipient clicks through to your URL.

·They navigate your site and will most likely buy from you, either immediately or later. But what this has done is instill in the prospects mind that you are the company of choice to do business with.

·Their friends eventually buy from you, and forward your website address to more of their friends. And the process repeats itself.

The snowball effect this tool creates is tremendous. Satisfying one customer may result in 2, 4 or more referrals. Those referrals can refer more, and so on.

What’s even more appealing is it barely costs anything to receive these referrals – pennies. The magic of viral marketing is it does the hardest part for you – getting your message delivered to a qualified prospect and ensuring that message gets read.

Ironically, it’s a low tech method that produces very advanced results.

The Author has put together a free resource website strictly to educate potential and current business owners about website promotion. You can visit it at http://www.1web-site-promotion.com

There are many advantages in using stories in your sales copy
but many people have already forgotten about the power of
stories.

Remember how as a kid, we are always looking forward to stories?

Stories interest and intrigue us as kids, so who’s to say that
adults don’t feel the same way too?

In fact adults would be able to relate to stories better because
of our experiences in life.

Using stories in your sales copy allows your potential customers
to imagine seeing, hearing and feeling as the characters in your
stories.

When people hear or read a story, it can affect their moods,
emotions, decisions and choices on a subconscious level, and
most often than not, when this happens, it will usually get
under most people’s radar.

Thus it is advisable to tell stories with characters who are
buying your products or services and enjoying the benefits.

People tend to remember stories better than normal
advertisements.

When people hear or read a story, it goes straight into their
subconscious mind. It is difficult for someone to remember
anything without an emotional attachment to it but with stories,
you can reach out to them and touch them emotionally.

Stories being entertaining, also have the ability to make your
potential customers lower their buying guard and open up their
willingness to accept your sales recommendation or offer.

It is also a great to make your sales copy more personal as you
would be the only one who can tell a story with your own
personality.

When people can feel your personality, it will make your offer
so much more personal, giving it a little more human touch and
an impression of knowing you.

Remember people want to do business with people they know and no
one really want to deal with robots.

When someone hears or reads a good story, they usually have the
tendency to share it with friends and family members. This being
the case, your stories have a very high chance to being viral.

Imagine your sales increasing just by word of mouth.

With all these advantages of using stories in your sales copy,
shouldn’t you consider adding one the next time you write your
sales copy?

First Things First

Adsense has been around since 2003 but I’d have to be honest and say that I only heard about it some weeks ago when a friend suggested I put a few links on my website. So I enquired about it on Google’s site and opened an account. I agreed to the long disclaimer with all the rules and regulations and to be brutally honest didn’t read much of it. However, I was able to ascertain very quickly the main principles of how the program works and I have to admit none of it inspired me all that much, but it was still worth trying it out.

In case you are wondering, here are the salient points on what Adsense is about. You sign up to receive payment from Google every time a visitor clicks on an Adsense ad at your website. Google prepares the ads and you simply cut and paste the html code onto your website. Google then serves various advertisements and over time these change though the whole point is that the adverts are geared towards the subject depicted at your site. The idea is that your visitors are then deemed to be targeted audience which means they are more likely to click on these adverts. The so-called win-win situation.

So What Happened

I opened the account on 19th January 2006 and Google disabled it on the 31st. They wrote to me explaining that it had come to their attention that invalid clicks had been generated on the ads at my site. They were absolutely right and I wrote back to apologise and thank them for returning the $14 back to the relevant advertisers. I also explained that my 3 young children were mostly responsible for the clicks because all three have access to my computer. But I have to say that I myself also clicked on the ads because I wanted to know what it was I was advertising. It’s all very well Google wanting to safeguard its name and reputation but surely they must recognise that the same is true of webmasters. In fact, I didn’t actually like most of the web pages that the Adsense links were bringing up.

My website is dedicated to a new paranormal stroke science-fiction novel of which I am the author. We all know that the system that tries to match adverts to one’s website is a moronic robot that simply does a comparison on words without appreciation of meaning and context. Why do I say that? Well on clicking some of these ads, I was transported to sites about tarot reading, faith healing, astrology and religious exposition to name but a few. And all because I had the words paranormal and supernatural at my site.

My point is that I firmly think webmasters should have the right to click on their own adverts because I don’t believe in simply trusting Google’s robots to serve relevant or appropriate material all the time. If one felt strongly about a certain link or ad, the site owner can then make an informed representation to Google to either retune their robot or to intervene manually to remove it. I know that most webmasters probably don’t care one bit where the adverts lead so long as they can make money from it but surely this stance is irresponsible and may in the long run damage the reputation of the webmaster if he or she has any aspirations about the future of their website.

But I know what you are thinking at this stage. If webmaster’s were allowed to click on their own adverts, doesn’t that open the way for false clicking to generate false income? Of course it does and if it were allowed to happen, no doubt it would lead to the eventual erosion of the Adsense program. But hear this. If Google is able to tell so quickly and so efficiently who is clicking on their own adverts, all they have to do is put a simple condition in the program code that stops the generation of income if the click came from the webmaster’s computer.

It’s plainly obvious that there is a fairly sophisticated system in place to look out for certain patterns in the computer IP addresses from which the clicks are instigated. This is to stop not only the webmasters from clicking on their own ads but also their associates, friends, relatives and such like from doing it as well. If some of these patterns emerge from the clicking at your website, your account is automatically disabled and I believe even the email that goes out is automated. I find it astounding that Google will not put in place some kind of a check to ensure that false-clicking is not rewarded but instead opts for this Gestapo-style termination at the drop of a hat. This way the conscientious webmaster would be kept happy because they are free to check the adverts themselves and the advertisers are also happy because they will not be charged for false clicking.

So Why Doesn’t Google Do This?

I don’t know is the short answer and I don’t suppose they would tell us if we asked them. As you would expect, I do have a theory. The first thing I would say about Google is that my admiration for them was boundless when they were simply a search engine. They are still the fastest, the most accurate and the biggest as far as this part of the operation is concerned. However, since diving into the deep blue ocean of profit-making several things began to change and there is no shortage of websites, blogs and forums to tell you about it. Google grew too quickly. It is still revelling in its own success and is showing signs of being absolutely petrified about losing it. It is absolutely paranoid about its reputation with advertisers so it will cut anyone else or anything else into shreds if necessary to safeguard this relationship. It knows that those webmasters that make sizeable income from the Adsense program need Google more than Google needs them. You know the adage I’m reminded of. Yes you’ve guessed it. “Power corrupts, but absolute power corrupts absolutely”. In fact, I have no trouble in comparing Google to a teenage pop star who suddenly has more worth that he can possibly handle. The only way, I’m afraid, is down.

For those of you that are using the Adsense program and making money, please carry on. I do not in anyway want to discourage you from doing this but at the same time it does no harm to be informed about what is going on.

In the meantime, for us small fish, here is a website dedicated to my book which is a supernatural come science-fiction novel. Please click on http://www.willofdreams.com to visit and learn more about the author and the book. Thank you for your attention