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Monday July 26, 2004

Mega bucks

After Jeb's success with ads on mac.fiveforks.com I thought I would try it out on the only page on my website that seems to get any traffic, the Dejumbler page. Of course as soon as I put an ad on there traffic dropped off sharply and I wonder if Ask Jeeves knocked me down in the rankings when they saw a Google ad? All my referrals come from Ask Jeeves which for some reason ranks the Dejumble page very high when you enter "unscramble" in its search engine.

Anyway, after 4 days I've had one click-through which was me seeing if it would really work and I guess they knew that because I didn't make any money on that one. That's out of 90 page views. Since you only get paid once you've reached $100 it could be a long wait.

What bugs me about the whole thing is that I could tell Google what kind of ads they should put on my page: puzzles, Scrabble, games, crosswords, etc. But instead they are reading the text on my page and putting stuff in there about programming and coding. I couldn't see a way to give Google any hints on what to advertise.


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Comments (2)

1. You get paid monthly when you accumulate $100 or, if not, at the end of the year. So you *will* get a check from Google if you generate any money.
2. Put some text on your jumble page that will guide Google. Maybe a paragraph that inccludes the keywords you listed above. Creative writing! It pays off!
3. Get Kelly to visit your Jumble page once a week. I think she is responsible for a lot of MacFive's Google bucks.

After writing this I did get a few clicks (no doubt from 5forks people). I got 3 clicks for 3 cents each, but then one click was worth 60 cents. Although I'm getting good traffic (more on that in a minute) of 50-80 hits per day, I am 0 for August.

One advantage (possibly) of having a Google ad is all of the sudden Google now indexes my Dejumbler page. Though my page is not ranked as high with them as with Ask Jeeves, I still get about half of hits now from Google searches.

I took Jeb's advice and added more text that would entice more clickable ads, but it was still showing the same lame stuff (a spell checker for web applications; oh boy). Actually today I saw an ad for something else, but I forget what it was now. I'm thinking before I abandon the whole thing I will put a 3-ad banner on the page so maybe I will get a better variety of ads showing up.

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