If I had a dollar for every time I read a forum post somewhere about “I got banned from Adsense, and I didn’t even do anything”, I’d be a rich man.  Oh wait, I am a rich man..but I digress.

People, if you got the dreaded “letter” from Google regarding your Adsense account being suspended because your sites are a “liability to Google publishers & advertisers” or because of fradulent clicks, guess what, you either have a crappy MFA (made for Adsense) site, or you clicked your own damn adds like an idiot.  You’ll get no sympathy here, especially if you did the later.  So here are the top 5 reasons you will probably get banned from Adsense if you have no Commonsense.

1.  Clicking Your Own Ads – This is a 100% way to get your account terminated…never to return.  Don’t think you can ask your friends to do it either.  Google software is much smarter than your tiny brain, and you will be discovered. Say bye-bye to your precious $1.43 a day you were making.  In fact, don’t even tell your friends or family about your Adsense.  They’ll be tempted to click your ad’s thinking it helps you, when in fact they’ll have you thrown out of the program for good.

2.  Altering the Adsense Code – Try to get cute by messing with your ad code, changing sizes, putting adsense on page load pop-up’s etc…You will be banned.  Leave the code alone.  There are enough sizes, shapes and colors to fit anyone’s site.

3.  Adsense in Close Proximity to Photos – This is a sure fire way to increase your CTR.  Put 4 nice 100×100 photos in a row above a full Adsense leader board advertisement, and it looks like each ad showing corresponds with the image above it…very tricky, and very against Google TOS.  Keep your ads and any photos or images a safe distance from each other.  They don’t play well together in the eyes of Google.  You’re asking for trouble if you don’t.

4.  Porn, Warez, Gambling…All The Things That Makes Life Worth Living – Think of Google as your local Church Minister.  He doesn’t like naked chicks, he frowns upon stealing and selling stolen goods, and he dispises pissing your money away at the poker table.  But he sure likes young boys..(Did I just say that??)  Promote any of these vices, and the Google Vice Squad will hunt you down, and drop your account like a bad habit.

5.  Improperly Mixing Google Adsense Ads With Other Ad Programs – Hey, there’s nothing wrong with diversifying your income streams.  Adsense, Adbrite, and YPN are great programs and you can earn very well from combining them on your sites…However, make sure each ad unit look different from one another.  If you make your Adsense looke like your Adbrite ads, chances are you will get the letter from Google asking you to change them or just straight out dropping you from the program.   Be mindful of the looks of your ads and you’ll stay in the good graces of Google.

These are all so common sense that I still can’t believe how many people are bitching daily about their account with Google being terminated…and they act like they don’t understand how it could happen to them.  Make sites with some good content and stay away from any of the problems above, and you’ll be earning with Adsense for a long time to come.

Looks like Google updated Pagerank in some or most of their datacenters this week.  Just for fun, I checked a handful of my sites and guess what…THEY ALL LOST PR!  Whoopty Frickin Doo.  WHO CARES about pagerank anymore?

PR is not a valid representation of the well being or even popularity of a site and maybe it never really was.  I completely understand Google’s interest in finding some kind of “rating” system to rank websites, and while I don’t profess to understand 100 percent, how to increase your site’s pagerank, generally increased link building, increased traffic will give you a bump in PR.  I have a couple sites that have increased traffic by thousands per month, as well as good, relevant backlinks by the thousands, and they dropped in PR.

It’s not a game I even care to play anymore, to be honest.  I know, people still like to brag about how theirs is “bigger” than yours…but the only people who really care about PR now is the high dollar directory mongers who charge $49.95 for a yearly link on their PR5 directory.  Never mind the fact that the page your link appears on is PR1.

Do yourself a favor…forget about PR and just make a site that people want to visit and you’ll have loads of quality traffic and eventually a site that you can make money from and be proud of at the same time.

Arcade Sites Don’t Make Any Money!

Ok, that may in part be slightly true, but it’s only because the site owners don’t use all of the tools available to have a decent income stream.  In the never ending search to find decent ways to monetize an arcade / flash game site, I ran across an Australian site named Fizzy that looks to be a promising addition to any arcade webmasters money making arsenal.  I’ve had a couple game sites going now for about a year and it’s always a struggle put together a decent CTR with any advertising or affiliate program.  What I like about Fizzy is that they give you some great games to put on your site, and you make $$ every time the game is played…easy frickin money.  After all, people are coming to your Arcade to play games…not click on Adsense ads, so this seems like a no brainer.

Now don’t get me wrong, you’re not going to be making hundreds of dollars a day from the Fizzy program.  But if you have an arcade site that gets lots of unique visitors per day, and you have a few dozen Fizzy games on your site, you can easily make some extra cash, without any extra effort, and the games will blend seamlessly into your current site.

Supplemental Income…

Now don’t worry, Fizzy isn’t going to make you ditch your precious Adsense or any other of your current money makers.  Fizzy plays well with the other children, so you can keep all of your other income streams up and running.  Fizzy is a great supplement to your arcade.  Check it out and put even more cash in your pockets.

Visit their affiliate site at Fizzy Affiliates

This was great…and the memo line is the best part!  Click on the image to get a better look.

I’m hoping that this post will help others in the future because I found it extremely frustrating that there are no decent instructions out there about how to transfer a domain you registered with Google (most likely when you signed up for a Blogger account) over to another Registrar.  This process takes a few steps and will more than likely take you a couple days to finish, but stay with me and we’ll get through it together.

The first thing you will need to do is have an account at a registrar where you want your Google domain to be transferred to.  I’ve been using  GoDaddy.com forever, and I’ve never had any issues with them, so if I can give a plug to any hosing company, GoDaddy is the one.  I believe it’s only $7.00 to transfer a domain name, and you get an additional year of registration for free.

Now that you have your account set up there, log in and go to the top “Domains” dropdown tab and select “Transfer Domains to GoDaddy”.  Type the domain name you wish to transfer from Google in the box and select “Go”. If the domain name is available for transfer, click “Proceed to Checkout”.  Continue through the checkout process and pay for the transfer.  You will receive several emails from GoDaddy, one of which will contain transfer codes for your domain, so don’t trash these!

In the next step, you have to get into it with the nice folks over at Google.  When you buy a domain name through the big “G”, your domain name is actually being hosted by Enom.com or GoDaddy.com (Yeah, go figure), but for some reason it’s extremely difficult to get access to your own domain name.

Proceed to the Google Apps page here…http://www.google.com/apps/intl/en/business/index.html

Click on “Returning User Sign In” in the upper right.  Enter the domain name that we’re trying to tranfer and click GO. This should log you into your domain management control panel.  If you are asked to log in again, just log in with your domain username and password (Hopefully you remember this).

Click on the “Manage this Domain” text in the upper right. On this page, click on “Domain Names” in the upper left section of the page.  Doesn’t it seem like we’ve clicked “domain names” about a thousand times already?

Finally…you are now looking at the domain settings for your Google domain.  In the Primary Domain section, see the link for Advanced DNS settings..Click that.  You will now see

To change Advanced DNS settings, sign in to your DNS console
with the following information :

Domain : domainX.com
Password : xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
eNom customer service email : GoogleClients@enom.com or GoogleClients@godaddy.com

Write this password down, because you’re going to need it when you email Google for your “Authorization Code”.  Send an email to the address you see on the screen above, it could be either of those addresses shown.  Tell them you are the owner of www.YourDomain.com and you need the authorization code to transfer your domain to a new registrar.  Write in the password show above also.  This will be all they need to unlock your domain, and email the transfer code to you. It may take a few hours to a day to get the email.

Once you do, copy the Authorization Code and go back into your GoDaddy.com account and go to the “My Domains” tab where you can manage your domain names.  In the upper left, you will see another 4 tabs that read  “Domain Names” | “Buy/Sell” | “Tools” | “Help”.  Roll over the “Domain Names” tab and select “Pending Transfers” from the dropdown list.  You should now see the domain name you are trying to transfer.  Click the checkbox next to the domain name and on the left portion of the page you will see an “Authorization” button.  Roll over Authorize and select “Begin Transfer Authorization”.  Find that email GoDaddy sent you before, which contains a Transfer ID  & Security Code and enter those numbers into the appropriate boxes which should now be showing.  Click “Next” and select that it is ok to transfer. Now enter the holy Google Authorization you were emailed. You should now be seeing a message that says “Accept Transfer at Current Registrar”.  That’s it, it’s now out of your hands.  Hopefully within the next 1-5 days, someone over at Google domains will press the button to finalize the transfer into your GoDaddy.com account. Once it’s been transferred, it will show in your “My Domains” section of your account, and you’re free to change DNS NameServers, forward it, or any of the other features.

Now doesn’t it feel good to be free and have control over your own domains?  I thought so.  Thanks for reading.

I know, you’re still struggling to make a few bucks a day and you’re probably just caught in a creative money making rut. I’ve been there, and I’m sure most internet earners find themselves in this no-man’s land of money making now and then. It can be hard to dig yourself out of this “woe is me” funk.

So here’s the trick… GET CREATIVE!. Diversify, do some keyword research, find something you never thought of promoting. Make a sub-page to an existing site you own, and do some SEO and deep link building. I hate the old “think out side the box” addage (or is it think outside the bun?)…hell I can’t remember anymore, but the point is, break out of your normal ways of doing things.

Find a random affiliate product and write an Ezine article or blog about it and generate some traffic and interest. It doesn’t matter if you build a niche site selling bathroom urinals or some great SEO E-Book. None of that matters. What does matter is that you’re experimenting. You’re finding out methods that work, and lots of methods that just plain suck.

These are the keys to finding that “next cool idea” like Facebook or whatever the next great web idea may be. It’s out there. Most of us are searching for it. Some of us will find it. When you do find it, will you know how to get it in front of the people that can make it a success?

Hone your SEO techniques on anything and everything. Most importantly, have fun, get your juices flowing. The money will follow. It doesn’t have a choice.