Ravi’s Rants

My question was very simple: I wanted to know how I could promote products using CPA (Cost Per Action) on the Google Network and allow publishers who have access to “AdSense Referrals” to promote my products by placing a piece of code on their web sites, and when someone clicked over to my web site and purchased one of my products, the publisher would get a piece of the sale.

Classic “Affiliate Program” stuff - where this time around, I wanted to be the merchant, and not the affiliate.

I contacted a Google AdWords Specialist on chat - who turned out to be not as much as a “specialist” as you would think they would be.

Read the chat transcript below to see how long it takes for the rep to even understand my question, and give out a meaningful answer. It is painfully obviously that I know more about Google Products than her!

But I am glad that she eventually gave in and deferred the question to a “technical specialist” (read: someone who knows their $hi#).

Completely unedited except for minor reformatting for readability, and removing of private content.

Chat Information: Thank you for contacting Google AdWords. Please hold a moment while we route your chat to a specialist who will help you with your question: “”.
Chat Information: AM has received your message and will be right with you.

AM: Hello Ravi. Thanks for contacting Google AdWords. I’m happy to help you.
AM: Could you clarify what you mean by referrals?
AM: Ravi, are you there?

Ravi Jayagopal: yes
Ravi Jayagopal: I meant, how would I advertise through Adsense Referrals?
Ravi Jayagopal: I’m currently using Referrals as a publisher
Ravi Jayagopal: I want to advertise my product through Referrals, so that publishers can promote my product, and then I would pay them a commission based on sale
Ravi Jayagopal: you there?

AM: Well, I am actually an AdWords specialist so I am really not familiar with AdSense Referrals.
AM: However, you can find out more at https://www.google.com/adsense/static/en_US/Referrals.html?gsessionid=N8x_KdsMNys.
AM: Referrals Help Center
AM: In the Help Center, there is a Quick Start guide.

Ravi Jayagopal: I don’t want Adsense referrals, actually
Ravi Jayagopal: I want to “advertise” - so wouldn’t that fall under “AdWords”?
Ravi Jayagopal: Publisher -> Adsense
Ravi Jayagopal: Advertiser - AdWords
Ravi Jayagopal: No?

AM: Yes Ravi, but you asked about Referrals.
AM: Referrals is not a part of AdWords.
AM: It looks like you already have an AdWords account.
AM: What do you have questions about in particular?

Ravi Jayagopal: Ok, here’s my question: Right now, as a “Publisher”, I pick out referral ads and display them on my site, and I make money when my visitor clicks on those referral ads and goes on to buy something. With me so far?

AM: Yes Ravi.

Ravi Jayagopal: Ok, now I want to put my “Advertiser” hat on and promote my product so that “other” publishers can promote “My” product through the referrals network
Ravi Jayagopal: how would I become an “Advertiser” and promote my product?

AM: Through the Content Network.

Ravi Jayagopal: Ah, that’s what I wanted to know
Ravi Jayagopal: So is there a way to say “Referrals” when I put my ad out on Adwords?

AM: You do already have an AdWords account with the email address <>.
AM: All you will need to do to appear on other sites is to opt into the content network when you create your campaigns.
AM: We don’t use that term.

Ravi Jayagopal: But when I opt-in to the “Content Network”, it automatically becomes just a PPC campaign right?

AM: We call your advertisements ads and we call our publisher sites ‘the content network.’

Ravi Jayagopal: I don’t want it to be PPC, but a CPA item

AM: You can also create a CPM campaign.
AM: Cost Per Impression if you’d like.

Ravi Jayagopal: not CPM. I’m talking about CPA - cost per action
Ravi Jayagopal: which is what Referrals is - CPA.

AM: That is not an option right now Ravi.

Ravi Jayagopal: then how are all these advertisers on Adsense Referrals?

AM: Again Ravi, I’m not familiar with AdSense referrals.

Ravi Jayagopal: Is there someone higher up who can help me with this question? Because it is definitely not an AdSense question - because AdSense is for Publishers

AM: If you want to contact the AdSense team to ask them about that, you can email them directly at adsense-support@google.com.

Ravi Jayagopal: and I am talking as an Advertiser

AM: Ravi, they will only be able to tell you what I am telling you, that you can create advertising campaigns that you’ll pay on an impression or click base.
AM: Those are the only options right now for our advertisers.

Ravi Jayagopal: So how are these advertisers advertising on a CPA basis? That’s what I want to know
Ravi Jayagopal: If you don’t know the answer, I would appreciate if you could put me through to someone who does
Ravi Jayagopal: But don’t tell me I’m asking the wrong question

AM: Please hold on just a moment Ravi.

Ravi Jayagopal: Ok, thanks

AM: CPA is not an option at this time in your account Ravi. I just checked with our technical specialist.

Ravi Jayagopal: Why? And when would it be?

AM: It’s a limited beta right now. If you give me the best email address to reach you at, I can email you if it does become available.

Ravi Jayagopal: ok…thanks…it’s <>

AM: You’re most welcome.

Bottom-line:
You cannot yet sign up as an “Advertiser” and promote your products through Google “Referrals”. It is in limited beta, and unless you were invited to be part of the beta, you would have to wait until they open it up to others.

As much as I love Google and probably qualify as a “Google FanBoi”, I have to say, Google sucks at most things not handled by their machines (read: Human Beings).

My “Video Unit” link wasn’t available yesterday when the announcement was first made.

Was able to see it today.

“Linked” my Adsense account with my YouTube account.

Got the confirmation from Google in a few minutes (they do warn that it could take up to 12 hours).

Created my “player”, got the code.

The ads load asynchronously, and they seem quite on target from the other sites I tested so far.

Way to go Google!

In this era of the open web, it is hard to monetize information that you can easily get elsewhere.

Want to read about what’s going on with the presence of Iranian dictator Ahmedinajad in NY City? Just Google-News it up (yes, that’s different from Googling it up), and you’ll get all the latest relevant news stories you can handle, in reverse chronological order.

So why would people pay for accessing the NY Times?

Not too many would, and not for long, figured the NY Times - and finally opened up the gates.

It’s official: the “Adsense Model” is in.

Open up your content, make money from ads. This same model didn’t work for most sites just a few years ago, in what I call the “Pre-Adsense Era” in my book. But now, it can work for all sites - whether you are NYTimes.com with millions of impressions, or a LinkOverLoad.com with just tens of thousands of impressions.

Usually I never follow NYTimes links that show up in many of my searches, because I know that 4 times out of 5, I will hit a password-protected story. But today, knowing that they have removed the wall, I read a very interesting article about the new model of outsourcing, a glimpse of which I had gotten earlier looking over the shoulder of someone reading the NY Times paper on the subway.

If you want to charge for your content, make sure your content is not easily available, not easily validated, or that there is too much information that cannot be easily made sense of.

“Our invalid clicks rate – the activity rate – has remained in the range of less than 10% of all clicks every quarter since we launched AdWords in 2002. At Google’s current revenue rate, every percentage point of invalid clicks we throw out represents over $100 million/year in potential revenue foregone.”, says Google’s Inside Adwords Blog.

Yep, that’s $1 billion! Is it really a loss? Because that’s billing that would’ve never occurred anyway, if those were truly fraudulent clicks.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Google. You could even call me a Google fanboy. But when you put it like that, it sounds like Google’s taking a huge hit because of fraud. Doesn’t matter how you say it, sure makes them look like a hero.

We all knew this day would come, but I had been more curious about the type of video ads that would show up: would they be pre-roll (first show the ads, then the actual video)? Would they be post-roll (after the video) or some kind of pop-up (probably not, knowing their Adsense policy about pop-ups)?

Well, it appears that Google is going with overlay ads on YouTube. I am yet to see an ad on YouTube, but I will update this post when I find one.

Maybe quite a lot, and mostly not a lot.

“Huh?”, you say?

If you look at this “top bloggers” list, you may end up buying into the fantasy that blogging will make you big bucks.

Not every blog will make that kind of money. Actually, it would even be fair say, that less than a fraction (less than 1%) of all blogs will make big money. Maybe a little more than a fraction will make decent money. But 95% of all blogs will not make any money. Why? I think there are quite a few reasons.

In my new book “No Business Like E-Business” that is being released shortly, I quote figures from Guy Kawasaki, about his self-disclosed ad revenues on his extremely popular blog. Here is a snippet from the book:

Excerpt from “No Business Like E-Business”

Imagine blogging for a whole year, ending up with a very popular blog that has 23,457 subscribers, ranked #45 out of all blogs in the world, and earning (brace yourself) a whopping $3,350 for the entire year!

Now stop imagining - this stuff is real.

I’m talking about Guy Kawasaki’s blog (blog.guykawasaki.com). These statistics only prove my theory further, that:

1. It is very hard to get tech-savvy folks to click on ads the way the average surfers (moms-and-pops) do.
2. It is not easy making a living just by blogging.

I myself own a site targeted at moms-and-pops, and I made many, many times more than what Guy’s #45-ranked blog earned. And mine is a very small niche, and a lot, lot, lot less less popular than Guy’s blog.

Here are some key stats from his blog:
• 2,436,117 page views (about 6,200/day)
• 23,457 RSS feed subscribers
• Total advertising revenue: $3,350 for 1 entire year (= $1.39 cpm)

You’ve got to take these stats with a pinch of salt, because these stats could be skewed due to a number of things – especially due to improper optimization for Adsense (or ads in general). Like mentioned earlier, Adsense optimization requires a lot of continued experimentation and tracking – in other words, a lot of focused effort - in order to make it work, which I’m guessing Guy probably didn’t due for various reasons.

But then there’s the other school of thought that overrides common sense. If you read the actual article, you will see that most of them did not start the blog with the sole intention of making money.

The main take-away here is that blogging may not make you directly cash-rich, but there are a lot of indirect, intangible benefits of blogging that simply cannot be overlooked:

• Build your brand: Develop a group of regular readers who are more likely to buy stuff that you actually sell down the line. Brand yourself as an expert in your niche. You will sell more books, get more paid consulting gigs, and all of that will eventually snowball into…. selling more books and getting more paid consulting gigs.
• Looks great on your resume: Unless you are putting up personal pictures or talking about stuff that you did when you were drunk, it adds a lot of value to your profile, because not everyone is capable of writing, and even among those few, not everyone is capable of writing about a focused subject in a professional way
• Ad-revenue: When you eventually start getting a lot of traffic, there will be plenty of ad-revenue opportunities (mostly CPM types); don’t count on PPC revenue, because tech-savvy folks just don’t click on ads.
• Develop original content: If you sat down to write a book, you may get overwhelmed by the amount of writing that needs to be done, and the sheer amount of effort that needs to put in. Instead, just start blogging chapter by chapter, and you could eventually compile those into a book (or other product).
• Blog posts can be transformed into articles: Writing an article for the sake of writing one can be extremely boring and painful. Instead, write short and crisp posts, and over time, you can pick each one up, expand it a little, and convert it into articles that can get you some incoming links.
• More traffic: Writing great posts that are instantly digestible and usable, and submitting to sites like Digg and StumbleUpon can not only get you tons of traffic, but also potential new subscribers and maybe even sell more of whatever it is that you are selling.

- Ravi Jayagopal
Author, “No Business Like E-Business“

Google came to prominence with a “Hate Images, Love Text” campaign. Slowly but steadily, they ventured into “banner” advertising, then “video” advertising, then affiliate programs, and now they have purchased one of the biggest “traditional” online advertisement networks, DoubleClick.

Their huge dependence on their “advertising” model is both exciting and scary at the same time.

Imagine blogging for a whole year, ending up with a very popular blog that has 23,457 subscribers, ranked #45 out of all blogs in the world, and earning (brace yourself) a whopping $3,350 for the entire year!

Now stop imagining - this stuff is real.
I noted in an earlier post, that in spite of being a Google fanboi, I only see pure “click-thru” earnings decline over time for everyone. This is based on my own theory, as well as general consensus, that the more tech-savvy your audience is, the less likely they are of clicking on Adsense (or other PPC) ads, be it on Google’s search pages or on third-party web sites.

A recent posting on Guy Kawasaki’s blog only goes to prove my theory further, that:

1. It is very hard to get tech-savvy folks to click on ads the way the average surfers (moms-and-pops) do.
2. It is not easy making a living by blogging, leave alone by monetizing your blog with Adsense.

I own a site targeted at moms-and-pops, and I made many, many times more than what Guy’s #45-ranked blog earned. And mine is a very small niche, and many, many, many times less popular than Guy’s blog.
Here are some key stats from his blog:

• 2,436,117 page views (about 6,200/day)
• 23,457 RSS feed subscribers
• Total advertising revenue for one whole year: approximately $3,350 = $1.39 cpm.

This is not very far from the pathetic $1.80 that I’m seeing with my own Adsense earnings these days (a drop from the high $2’s, and even low $3’s). However, this drop is not because of number of click-thru’s or the click-thru rate (both of which have actually gone up due to my persistent optimization of the content and the ad placements), but actually due to a big fall in the CPM (Cost Per-thousand iMpressions).

This could be because advertisers are generally bidding lower in this new year, or the advertisers in my specific niche are bidding lower, or that Google somehow (read smart-pricing) has determined (or just decided) that my click-thru’s are worth less than before, or it could simply mean that Google has given themselves a pay-raise this new year by taking a bigger chunk of the earnings-per-click.

I have already started researching other ad options. I’m not sure how well other PPC networks will compare to Adsense, and in fact I don’t believe the other PPC networks will earn me more than Adsense does. So it is time for a change. Time to change not just my PPC options, but time to change the ad strategy - like maybe CPA (cost-per-action, a.k.a pay-per-lead or pay-per-sale).

It’s the new year after all. Out with the old, in with the new.

- Ravi Jayagopal / LinkOverLoad.com

If you know what a “blog” is, you probably already know what a “RSS Feed” is.

One of the best (not to forget, cheapest and fastest) ways to get free content for your web site, is to display a third-party RSS Feed. Every time the feed’s content changes, content on your web site automatically changes, thus keeping the content fresh and ever-changing on your site.

This trick can be used for both legit and illegitimate purposes. Sploggers (those who create Splogs - “SPam-filled bLOGS”) often use it to generate thousands of “made for adsense” pages, whose primary intention is to increase PageRank, get ranked higher for highly competitive and high paying keywords, get people to visit their splogs, and manipulating the navigation that they end up leaving by clicking on AdSense (or other PPC) ads.

But if you use it for legitimate purposes, you will find that publishing RSS feeds on your site can be a great way to provide targeted, complementary content for your visitors.

Magpie RSS is a great open-source PHP script that will allow you to easily publish any third-party RSS feed on your site. I have personally tried many RSS scripts, and highly recommend Magpie. I have even used Magpie to create a pretty cool web-based feed-aggregator service, a la Google Reader and Google Personalized home page.

If you want a quick and customizable free script that is based on Magpie, and gives you sample scripts that show you how to publish one, two or more feeds on a page on your web site, go get my Free RSS Feed Publishing script, “FeedMonster”.

- Ravi Jayagopal