22
Dec
2009
Can Twitter Be Used To Make Money?
Is Twitter useful for business as a marketing tool? Since the hype peaked this year, I’ve often mulled over this question. Even during the peak of the hysteria over Twitter when Ashton Kutcher and CNN were racing to be the 1st to make it to 1 million followers, I just could not understand the hype. For those of you who have lived under a rock for the past 24 months and have no idea what I’m talking about, Twitter is a free social networking and micro-blogging service that enables its users to send and read messages known as tweets. Tweets are text-based posts of up to 140 characters shown on the author’s profile page and delivered to the author’s subscribers who are known as followers. Users can send and receive tweets via the Twitter website, Short Message Service (SMS) or third party applications.
Whilst I do not think I will ever fully understand Twitter, it’s more a case of if you can’t beat them, then join them. So over the past 6 months, I’ve begun using Twitter to compliment my site where possible. Because I had no idea about Twitter, initially I was unsure on how to use it to generate revenue or traffic.
There are many uses of Twitter but I decided to use it to drive more traffic to my site and indirectly generate revenue through Adsense. Given my site focuses on free samples, the fact that I can use a free service is just great.
To begin with you will need to get followers. Basically I manually followed a couple of people and began from there. Obviously much like Google search, you want followers that are interested in your niche. So type your key word into Google and check out all the sites on Page 1. More than likely they will have a Twitter account. Start following all their followers and you will notice that you will increase in number. However after a while, you won’t want to keep manually following people because it’s time consuming. That’s where an automated following software comes in handy. We purchased a licence and have been using this service for a couple of months. We now have over 17K following us.
Also for efficiency sake, I’ve installed the Twitter bar that allows you to type your message into the URL bar for immediate posting instead of logging into my Twitter account. Once a day I update my Twitter account with the latest offerings and freebies, spending less than 5 minutes a day on Twitter.
All this and according to Google Analytics, I receive between 80-100 hits from Twitter a day. Is it worth it? Well I suggest it is after getting the initial setup. So whilst I still will never understand Twitter, as long as it continues to drive traffic to my site, I will use it.
More about FreeStuff4Free
FreeStuff4Free.com is a website that specialises in finding freebies, free samples and freebies. This site is visually compelling and easier to navigate than text based free sites. The site is updated daily and dead links removed regularly. There are no scams and all freebies are 100% legitimate.
15
Dec
2009
Optimising Your Site For Increased Adsense Income (Part 1)
For some time, I’ve been utilising Google Adsense on my site as a form of income. Whilst it’s not something I would give up my day job over, a couple of dollars here and there fast turns into a couple of hundred dollars a month. Can’t scoff at that.
But here’s the fantastic thing – no matter how much money AdSense is making for you right now, a few easy steps can increase that amount substantially. I read an article recently which I decided to implement and execute and managed to increase my Adsense income by 20%! If it’s that simple and there are tricks and tips on how to increase that revenue, then why not?
This is Part 1 that contains a selection of tips to help maximise your income from Adsense. Part 2 will be released shortly.
1) If you haven’t already done so, you must colour code your ads to match your web site palette exactly. Human psychology plays into this and research has demonstrated that people will click more willingly when adverts appear to be part of your site and not a stand alone function. Don’t use frames around your ads as that isolates the ads. Instead, in the AdSense code generation settings, make sure you choose the identical colour as your page background for the ad frame and the ad background. When choosing the adverts heading colours, match them to the equivalent colour of your page titles. Use the equivalent ad background shade as your page background. In addition, use the matching ad text font and colour as the wording on your pages. This one single tweak will possibly make the greatest difference to your click conversion rates.
2) Adapt your page matter to a particular niche or focus. As you should know, page content that is tailored towards a specific theme is much more likely to trigger AdWords ads that closely match the content and is more likely to spark interest from your readers to click. My site focuses on free samples, and often when I check the ads by Adsense closely align with my site’s content. It’s amazing!
3) Anecdotal study indicates that the horizontal banner design or leaderboard image ads are ineffective. This is possibly because they were the original ads and therefore people know it’s blatant advertising. So make sure you use the text based or vertical image adverts.
4) Get tips using Google’s own AdSense research at https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/static.py?page=tips.html to aid you in deciding where on to place the AdSense ad code. Placement is important. It needs to flow and feel like a part of the site.
5) Research competitive keywords using a keyword research or grab a list of the most popular keywords from various sources and use them in your web site pages where relevant. Targeting popular keywords will trigger AdSense ads on your pages that optimize those keywords. So the more popular the keyword or phrase, the higher AdWords advertisers are willing to pay per click therefore resulting in greater commissions.
Be on the lookout for Part 2 in a couple of days.
More about FreeStuff4Free
FreeStuff4Free.com is a website that specialises in finding free samples, free samples and freebies. This site is visually compelling and easier to navigate than text based free sites. The site is updated daily and dead links removed regularly. There are no scams and all freebies are 100% legitimate. Visit our website today for all your free stuff.