what is a proxy?
A proxy is a tool website that offers every Internet user the possibilty to acces a websites using a different computer than the one he is using to connect to the Internet.
Proxies are extremely helpful when you try to access websites that your school, company or even government block. Proxies are thus very popular amongst students who use them to access myspace from school because if they try to do so directly by typing myspace.com, the school network will block the connection. When using a proxy, the school network can’t see anything as only the URL of the proxy is visible, it looks like the student is just browsing an unknown website. The same applies to countries like China where the government keeps citizen from reaching some unwanted websites so they use proxies to reach the Internet without limitations.
Given how they work, proxies eat up a lot of resources on a server (mainly bandwidth) and so require a high end hosting in addition to the fact that most hosts won't allow you to have a proxy on a shared hosting plan. This will of course cost you a lot more than a classic content website because you will have to get a VPS or a Dedicated server and push you to try and monetize them as aggressively as possible to make up for your expenses.
Now let's see what strategies you can implement to make the most of your traffic using AdSense.
AdSense optimization strategies for proxies
Strategy #1: Lay out variation
As proxies are a valuable service to many people, you are most likely to have returning visitors. A returning visitor will very quickly get used to your AdSense placement and avoid clicking your ads or even looking at them. His eyes will immediately point towards the url input box where he can type the desired url and start surfing.
To try and keep your visitors paying for the service by clicking your ads, the first solution I advise you to use is to try and have more than one lay out served to your visitors randomly.
This mean when a visitor comes to your proxy, he can’t guess which one of the 4 or 5 (or even more) page lay outs he is to get thus pushing him to rescan the whole page to find the URL input box. While scanning the page, chances are high that your AdSense ads are seen and clicked.
Strategy #2: Strategic placement
Ask yourself, what is the most important part of my proxy’s homepage for my visitors? The answer is simple, the URL input box.
Because it is the most important area of your page, this is exactly where you should concentrate your monetization efforts by placing your ad units and link units as closely as possible. However, you should remain very careful about that to avoid violating the AdSense TOS by producing too many accidental clicks. Units should be placed in a way that pushes people to see them not click them accidentally.
Strategy #3: Use picture ads
Proxies are mostly used by teenagers so you should adapt your advertising strategy to their specific interests. I don’t mean the content of the ads because google takes care of that automatically but I mean that an image or video add is way more attractive to a youngster than a text one can ever be.
So you need to make sure you enable images and videos to show on your ads.
Strategy #4: Increase your pageviews per visitor
As you already know, AdSense doesn't allow you to put ads on frames. So you can't use AdSense on any of your proxified pages. This leaves you with your homepage as your unique revenue source from AdSense.
A very nice way to try and increase your earnings, is to push your visitors to see more pages with your AdSense ads on them of course. For instance, you could offer a link to a page containing a selection of websites to visit or a complete list of your other (specialized) proxies... anything that could have your visitor read another page before he starts navigating.
If you want to be more agressive and take the risk of loosing some of your visitors, you could make the URL input box unavailble on the homepage so that the internaute has to visit another page to find it. He will then spend some time before understanding that the input box is somewhere else which will dramatically increase your chances of getting some clicks and also the pageviews.
Tuesday, June 9, 2009
Revenue Sharing Explained
Revenue sharing is typically used in "community websites". A community website is a website that has a loyal readership regularly updating and renewing the website's content. Discussion boards or Forums are the best example to explain how revenue sharing works, as they are the most common form of community websites.
As a registered member of a forum, you get the right to access all the services it offers (ask for help, help others, send private messages, search the forum.).
To motivate their members, forum owners used to thank them by different flattering techniques (become a moderator, have your name on the best members' list, become known as an authority in a given area.) but when AdSense became a popular monetisation system used by almost every Internet advanced user (typically the people participating in forums), some clever forum owners thought the motivation would be even greater if the best members could benefit financially from their participation in the forum. Revenue Sharing was born.
Even though the terms may vary from a revenue sharing forum to another, the principle is the same: Every forum member is asked to give his AdSense publisher ID then, after fulfilling some "active member conditions", a percentage of the ads displayed on the forum would be for him i.e. displayed with his AdSense Publisher ID. If the advertising gets clicked, the member earns money directly in his AdSense account. This is called Revenue Sharing because the forum owner shares his website's earnings by sharing his advertising space.
To have your ads shown, you may be asked to reach a certain number of posts, start popular threads, be a member for a defined period of time.
As you can see, this a "performance based" strategy that ultimately benefits both the forum owner and his community: the forum owner gets loyal and active members making his content richer and up to date which will end up increasing his website's earnings and the forum members get a share of the money they helped make in addition to the help and services they get from the forum. This is a great win-win situation.
Some revenue sharing websites:
The fact that Revenue Sharing is a win-win strategy helped make it very popular among internet users and many websites are now using it. We have listed below - and commented on - some popular revenue sharing websites to help you make your choice if you want to get started making money from revenue sharing. We will keep updating the list as we discover new interesting websites.
However, we would like you to know you shouldn't expect to make much money out of revenue sharing as it will hardly ever earn you more than a few dollars a month (we have tried it!).
digitalPoint forums
DP Forums are among the most popular and usefull webmaster forums I know on the net. After registering and posting at least 50 times, you are allowed to enter you AdSense ID and get started sharing revenue.
For threads you start, your AdSense client ID will be used 50% of the time when the thread is viewed as a thread.
Your AdSense client ID will be used 50% of the time when the thread is viewed by post and you made the post of course.
As you can see, the only way you can have your ads shown is by starting threads. In about two weeks, I participated normally (two or three post a day) and two or three threads started. Here are the results : 322 impressions and 2 clicks earning a huge 25 cents! I also got some CPM impressions which got me 2 additional cents.
As a registered member of a forum, you get the right to access all the services it offers (ask for help, help others, send private messages, search the forum.).
To motivate their members, forum owners used to thank them by different flattering techniques (become a moderator, have your name on the best members' list, become known as an authority in a given area.) but when AdSense became a popular monetisation system used by almost every Internet advanced user (typically the people participating in forums), some clever forum owners thought the motivation would be even greater if the best members could benefit financially from their participation in the forum. Revenue Sharing was born.
Even though the terms may vary from a revenue sharing forum to another, the principle is the same: Every forum member is asked to give his AdSense publisher ID then, after fulfilling some "active member conditions", a percentage of the ads displayed on the forum would be for him i.e. displayed with his AdSense Publisher ID. If the advertising gets clicked, the member earns money directly in his AdSense account. This is called Revenue Sharing because the forum owner shares his website's earnings by sharing his advertising space.
To have your ads shown, you may be asked to reach a certain number of posts, start popular threads, be a member for a defined period of time.
As you can see, this a "performance based" strategy that ultimately benefits both the forum owner and his community: the forum owner gets loyal and active members making his content richer and up to date which will end up increasing his website's earnings and the forum members get a share of the money they helped make in addition to the help and services they get from the forum. This is a great win-win situation.
Some revenue sharing websites:
The fact that Revenue Sharing is a win-win strategy helped make it very popular among internet users and many websites are now using it. We have listed below - and commented on - some popular revenue sharing websites to help you make your choice if you want to get started making money from revenue sharing. We will keep updating the list as we discover new interesting websites.
However, we would like you to know you shouldn't expect to make much money out of revenue sharing as it will hardly ever earn you more than a few dollars a month (we have tried it!).
digitalPoint forums
DP Forums are among the most popular and usefull webmaster forums I know on the net. After registering and posting at least 50 times, you are allowed to enter you AdSense ID and get started sharing revenue.
For threads you start, your AdSense client ID will be used 50% of the time when the thread is viewed as a thread.
Your AdSense client ID will be used 50% of the time when the thread is viewed by post and you made the post of course.
As you can see, the only way you can have your ads shown is by starting threads. In about two weeks, I participated normally (two or three post a day) and two or three threads started. Here are the results : 322 impressions and 2 clicks earning a huge 25 cents! I also got some CPM impressions which got me 2 additional cents.
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