Referring people to Adsense used to make lots of sense but as Darren Rowse explains in this informative post, it now only makes sense for people in specific locations of the world.

Adsense Change Rules – stupidity – stupidity – stupidity

If you are lucky enough to live in North America, Latin America or Japan then referring people to sign up for Adsense (for a commission) will continue to be a good source of revenue for you. Outside of those areas you may be better off using the space for something else.

We thought the world was getting smaller and that we in Australia were no longer considered to be struggling in the backwoods of culture, the raw material from which the more populated areas of the world carve their technology from. We thought the frontier had vanished and the harbour bridge had wiped out those old tribal boundaries. We thought the search for excellence was an American Business Strategy and that good profits were rewarded with recognition and shares. We thought Google was aiming to be master of the WORLD WIDE WEB!

Where’s my humpy? I need a safe place to go lick my wounded pride.

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When you are just starting out it’s hard to comprehend even the normal elements of an url so adding more elements to it may seem like an impossible task. One wrong character and your url gets 404′d ( it goes to an error page) and you have lost any chance to see a positive result.

You won’t know where your stats are or how to read them, you may not even have enabled them on your host. Go to CPanel right now and do it if that’s the case. Enable everything you can and start checking the results at least once a week.

More importantly still you should go and sign up for free Analytics from Google. Don’t be paranoid about it, they are a friendly big brother who is trying to help! If you need a visual guide about how to do it there are some videos in the library that will help you.

Adding Google Analytics to Blogs

Its not hard to do, they have some new code in there now, choose the new code rather than the old as this will be used for new features they are implementing. You will copy the code and place it in the side bar of your blog using a text widget under the tab appearance and then widgets in your admin area.

I just finished reading this excellent article from Ralph Wilsons Site written by John Henson of Lunametrics.

Tracking Ads And Google Analytics

You may be a beginner and think this is too hard, this is an advanced technique. Trust me on this, it is not very difficult to do at all. You sign up, you enter your main url, you copy the code to notepad. You go to your site or blog, paste the code into the text box on a blog, or just before the last body tag on all your webpages, save it and its done.

If its six months before you return to Analytics with the correct mindset that you can now start analysing and understanding this side of marketing thats fine. Because you listened to me here, that six months of data will be just sitting there waiting for you.

If you don’t do it now, when you want the data – you’ll have to wait for it. And if you’re impatient like everyone is these days – this will be annoying.

If you can start tracking now, just by following instructions, do it now. The article above is an excellent tutorial telling you how to do it and how to use analytics to create an accurate url. You have time to understand why? and what? later but you can’t get back stats that were never created. Alternatively, if you are more a visual person, you can refer to the video tutorials on Analytics in the library.

Sign up now for best free stats from www.google.com/analytics/

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Usability of a site is of prime importance to its success. There has never been a generation more impatient about waiting for something than this one. There is a glut of websites and blogs to visit, if yours takes too long to load or to give instant gratification – one click and they’re gone forever.

Testing all your links on a new site is tedious and time consuming but as far as I know there is no way around it. So once your site is up, get clicking. Sign up for your own autoresponder course and make sure all the links go where you expect. Click on your navigation links and your Globals and while you’re at it, try and see your own site as a customer does.

If you reach a page and it bores you, think of something to add to it that may entice a customer to either click to something better on your site or engage them sufficiently to stay long enough to see what that page is there for in the first place. A free joke, a block quote  such as magazines use, a picture (worth a thousand words), a first paragraph that is a quick anecdote to introduce your topic.

Take another look at your action pages. Is the call to action clear as a bell or a bit muffled under too many blankets of hype. Make notes of improvements you could make. Many top marketers and copywriters are modest about their reputation and attribute their success to this one factor. The fact that they look again and again at the pages and make constant small changes to improve the elements on them.

Many use something called split test software. This is software that enables you to upload say five different versions of the same page into it. These pages will all be reached through one url. When the url is called the software tracks the IP and presents a first page . Should that customer return, he will always be served page 1. When the next customer lands they are given page 2, the next customer gets page 3 etc etc.

They do not usually  have radically different pages as their five examples, but rather the same page with one or two element changes. The headline will change, some words in the first paragraph, the placement of a picture, where the first call to action is, whether a video works or not, whether audio is worth adding; these are what are being tested.

When an action is taken on an element on a page you can check your stats to find which version of the page worked for you. In time you will find one page works better than others. This will then become your control page. Sometimes the software can allow you to percentage the pages. By that I mean that you can have it show your control page 40% of the time and you can continue testing each of 2 other pages 20% of the time, and maybe 2 other  pages 10% of the time.

How these people find time for all this I don’t know but I do know that research is a key to their success. Wouldn’t it be nice to have staff. Luckily when most people start out they are using pre written pages for their resale products. Many of these have already been tested in this fashion and will convert well for them.

Unfortunately they don’t come with a certificate to say that they have, so many have not been tested and don’t perform well. Its all trial and error and each error costs you. Use your own instincts, if the copy talks to you, if you would be tempted to buy – or did buy – then it will probably work for you without much testing.

If you have written your own page – it might be worth investing in some split test software to get some feedback on its worth. For this to be of use to you , you will need to be able to drive enough visitors to the page to get some results.

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