Talk about contextual advertising do and don’ts
Written on December 10, 2006 – 8:13 pm | by admin
Jeremy Schoemaker of Shoemoney.com has posted a video of his recent talk during the Search Engine Strategies (SES) conference held in Chicago. The title of his talk is “Making Money With Contextual Advertising - The Gray Area.” The 25-minute talk is plenty of time for Jeremy to discuss many aspects of making money online using contextual advertising programs such as AdSense.
He touches on many topics including keyword arbitrage, i.e., the practice of buying cheap clicks from one broker and selling more expensive clicks via another broker. He also says that it is a good idea not jump on the contextual advertising bandwagon until your site receives at least 1000 unique visitors a day. Another point he makes is that contextual advertising is only a starting point for making money online because once your website becomes popular then you can actually sell advertising space for a fixed monthly rate.
Finally, he talks a lot about ways to increase the click-through rate (CTR) for contextual ads by using tricks that might violate Google’s terms-of-service. For example, he mentions how displaying images next to contextual ads increases CTR. However, some people who use this method have had their Google AdSense account terminated. There are many such small tricks people use to increase CTR and Jeremy says that TOS agreements are usually too vague as to whether such methods are in violation of the terms or not. At the end of the day, it comes down to whether a webmaster is willing to take the risk or not.
You can watch the video of his talk on Google video here.
