The AdSense Alternative

I was contacted recently by a client whose tarot card reading site I designed several years ago. Dianne was thinking about shutting the site down because she no longer had the time to do the personal readings and the site wasn't generating the income she had hoped for. But rather than shut the site down I suggested to her that we convert it from a service based site to an information (content) based site and "monitize" it with AdSense.

The beauty of Adsense is once it is set up it will generate income for you without any need for you to spend time processing orders, taking enquiries etc. It will literally make money while you sleep. You can see how I've blended the ads in with the content. This makes them look less like ads and more like part of the site. This increases your clickthrough rate and earnings. What do you think? Do the ads jump out at you and scream "I'm an ad - don't click me!" This is a mistake that many Adsense publishers make.

What we need to do now is improve the site's search engine rankings. It's doing well on MSN and Yahoo but back on page 18 at Google for our targeted keywords. To do that we're undertaking an article submission campaign. This will boost inbound links, and Google rankings will follow. Luckily Dianne is a good writer so this is a great strategy for boosting rankings and traffic. And once that traffic is coming in in significant numbers the Adsense earnings will just tick away, earning money 24/7.

Website Images

Interesting discussion going on at LED Digest (subscribe, well worth it). Robert Bass, a professional photographer stressing about having his images copied, posted a link to a page on his site and challenged readers to download his images. Seems he was using a paid service which disabled right-click and supposedly made it impossible to copy his images. Hah! Using a simple screen grabber I copied his images and loaded them into Photoshop within seconds.

Apparently, many other LED readers were able to copy the images using various methods. But here's the kicker, one LED reader pointed out that these images were in fact NOT his. That's right, he nicked them! Can't wait to read his response.

Moral of the story? If you're going to stress about your images being stolen DON'T put them on the web. No matter what fancy coding you use, if someone wants to copy your images, they will!