Let’s try something different. Perhaps a collective effort of some sort. I want to know what you think is the best way to make money online. What really works well to bring in a substantial amount of income (at least in your own experience).

There are a great variety of ways to make money on the internet. Sometimes far too much than is really necessary.

A serious beginner needs to wade through an incredible amount of information before he/she knows what works and what doesn’t.

Then again, everyone has a different threshold and level of knowledge. How far do you want to go, in order to make money online? What do you know about the different ways of doing so? What have you personally tried?

Survey Topic: What’s the Best Way to Make Money Online?

If someone came up to you and said that they wanted to know the best way to make money on the internet. What would you tell him or her? Let’s imagine that the individual in question is eager and willing to learn what is needed for real results.

By best, I mean the method that brings the greatest amount of potential income, while being practical, cost-effective and do-able. I know a great deal depends on the individual skill levels and interest, so it can be quite difficult to provide a fix-all solution that is suitable for everyone.

I would suggest focusing on what you personally think, feel or know is the best way to earn money online. Elaborate a little on the general steps you think someone should take to successfully utilize the method you’ve suggested. Imagine you’re talking to a friend who trusts your opinion and experiences.

Reasons Why I’m Doing This Group Survey

There are several reasons why I am doing this exercise. First of all, I am curious about what you all think about the topic matter. Not everyone reading Dosh Dosh is a blogger and many are entrepreneurs, small business owners and marketers, so the response should be interesting and useful.

Secondly, this is a good way to give some exposure for everyone. Many of you have been leaving comments regularly, visiting the site daily or promoting it on social media websites. Some have also been subscribed to Dosh Dosh for a long time too. I really do appreciate all the support.

This is a way of saying thanks, by sending you some traffic and visitors. Dosh Dosh gets a decent number of daily visitors and over time, that could translate into a fair amount of traffic and free publicity for you.

Rules and Guidelines

To participate in this group discussion, you simply need to address the survey topic by either leaving a comment or writing a blog post.

Everyone who leaves a comment will have their opinion listed within this or a new article itself, with a link to your website (if you have one). If you write a new blog post referencing this article, you’ll get a link to your blog post as well.

Having said that, there are six basic rules you need to follow:

1. Comment Length. Your comment should be at least a few paragraphs long. No witty one-liners, please. The reason for this is because I want to encourage everyone to add value and hence, generate something that’s useful for everyone. There’s plenty to write about and you don’t have to feel inhibited or shy here. Just go ahead and share what you think is absolutely the best way to make money online.
2. Write a Thoughtful Comment. Your comment will be viewed by many readers (over tens of thousands eventually) and I’m sure you want to brand yourself and show your best side. Spend some time to think about what you’re going to write and be sure to edit your copy for grammar/spelling mistakes. This is for your own benefit; I’m quite that visitors will prefer to check out the person behind a well written and insightful comment.
3. Leave Your Name, Please. Instead of leaving your URL or site name, leave your comment in this format: Maki - Dosh Dosh (name - site name). This makes it easier to reference and its more friendly too. I don’t really fancy comments with keyword or brand names because I don’t know who I’m talking to. Yes, this also means no anonymous comments too. Use a fake name if you must.
4. No External Links. I don’t really like deleting external links left by readers, especially when they point to to shady or spam sites so I’m going to institute a no-links policy for comments across the board. Please do not insert any links to any site in your comments. Of course, if you write a blog post, you can link to anything you want, within it.
5. Site URLs. I won’t be linking to poker, porn or pills and any other site which I deem to be really offensive. I would also prefer to not have any affiliate landing pages as well. This isn’t a free for all so do not use unsuitable urls.
6. Don’t Over Promote. It’s perfectly fine to talk about your own experiences or sites but please don’t use this as a chance to sell your services or products. This isn’t really the place for you to do so. Keep your comments on topic and relevant. Excessively promoting your own site will just make you look bad.

I’ll put up the comments as and when I receive them either in this post or a new article. I will probably close this post in a day or two depending on the number of entries received, so that it won’t be too long or difficult to read.

As you probably know, effective ad placement is critical if you plan to make any significant amounts of money through Google Adsense or other contextual ad systems.

Using a blog template with distinct ad blocks and optimized ad placements will very likely help you increase your Click through rates and affiliate conversions. These customized blog designs are also known as Adsense Ready themes.

How are Adsense Ready Themes different from other blog templates?

A key element that is central to all Adsense Ready themes is their focus on integrating contextual ads around content. As you will notice, the ads and link units are carefully placed above, beside and below each individual post to maximize exposure and their click through potential.

Several themes will also allow you to easily place blocks of square ads within each post, which is one of the proven ways to receive the highest amount of ad clicks from the average blog visitor.

Here are some general characteristics of most Adsense Optimized themes:

• Built in Adsense blocks for easy ad insertion.
• Ads are active once the Adsense Publisher ID is inserted or changed
• Optimized Ad placement, colors and types according to Google’s guidelines
• Adsense linkunits and search are already included.
• Search Engine Friendly. Post and category titles are used for page titles etc.

Why should I use Adsense Ready Templates?

The main reason why you should use an Adsense ready theme is convenience. You don’t have to sift through too much code and there’s no need to make major adjustments to the template’s form.

In many instances, all you need is to insert your Adsense publisher ID and you’re done. This will probably only take a few minutes, which can be a huge time and effort saver.

You can probably hack any other Wordpress template to include ads but they can be a hassle if you are unfamiliar with how to optimize your ad placement. Most of these templates are not terribly attractive but I think they are functional and their ad placement is pretty decent.

I think Adsense Ready templates are very useful when you own dozens or hundreds of niche websites which use credited feeds or free content. Niche websites with high paying keywords will be naturally more profitable when you use templates with optimized ad placements.

Dosh Dosh’s List of 18 Adsense Optimized Wordpress Themes

As far as I know, this collection of Adsense Ready themes is the largest online. I’ve included a link to each theme’s home page and as well as a direct download link for your convenience.

Some of the screen shots were taken from the websites referenced and others were screen grabs of blogs running the specific theme. If you know of any other Adsense themes I’ve missed, leave a comment and I’ll add it to the list.

Use Link Units near your navigation. Link Units tend to be most profitable if they are clicked on by users searching for something particular. Therefore, placing the Link Unit near your navigation is the prime place users look to find what they are looking for on your site.

One Google Adsense tip is to follow the Google Adsense TOS (Terms of Service). For example, you may use Google Adsense on as many web pages as you want throughout your website but remember to follow the Google Adsense rules that state you can have a maximum of three ad units and three link units per page.

When deciding on a topic to build your website around, choose a topic that is more of a niche topic instead of a general topic. Google Adsense works best when the website topic focuses on a specific niche because the targeted ads become more closely related to the topic. When a website is very broad you will notice the Google Adsense ads are often not relevant to the content of the page and this reduces the likelihood of users clicking on the ads. With a targeted site you get better related ads and therefore the CTR will be much better.

Pay not only attention to your earnings in your Adsense Reports but look closely at what type, color scheme and placement seems to be the most effective.

When building a new site it is best to not put the Adsense ads on the pages until after you have designed the site and added the content to each page. A real new site is probably better off initally focusing on building inbound links and generating traffic before adding the Adsense code to the pages.

Google Adsense pays approximately 60% of the revenue for each click to you.

The ads that are displayed are based on the content of the page and not the meta tags. So your keyword density in your copy is important for having the most relevant ads appear on you page.

Google Adsense Secrets

Google published a short list of the highest performing Google Adsense ad sizes:

• 336×280 Large Rectangle
• 300×250 Inline Rectangle
• 160×600 Wide Skyscraper

The Google heat map shows that most users focus their attention mostly on the content in the center of the page and in the usual navigation areas just below the top and on the left side. The Google Adsense secret to place ads in these areas will result in better click through rates then other areas of the page.

A few Google Adsense secrets are to blend the ads into your page so users cannot easily ignore your ads, a phenomena known as banner blindness. When you blend your Adsense ads into your content the ads look and feel like part of the page. For example, if you use black font then try placing some ads w/out a border and customize the ad so it has a black title, black description, and a black hyperlink. Another example of this is if you use high contrasting color links on your page then make the Adsense ads also use the same high contrasting link colors as well.

When using multiple ads on a page, realize that you want to have your users clicking on the higher paying ads so it is sometimes best to remove an ad. Removing this low paying ad allows the other two ads to earn higher paying clicks.

Overall, Google Ads are supposed to enhance your visitors' experience and not take away from it and this point alone is the best Google Adsense secret.

1. For short articles, CTR is best when ads are placed just above the content

2. For long articles, CTR improves if ads are placed somewhere in middle of the content - visitors read the long content and then they are looking for more resources.

3. Use Text Ads instead of Image Ads as users get more options. If you still want to display image ads, consider ad formats that support image ads - Choose either the 300×250 medium rectangle or the 160×600 wide skyscraper - or both, if you display multiple ad units on a page.

4. Google Ads without background color and borders always perform better. Make the border color and background color same as your page background color.

5. Always put ads above the main fold. Make sure that the ad unit with the highest clickthrough rate is the first instance of the ad code that appears in the HTML. Since the first ad unit is always filled before the rest, you want to make sure that ad unit is located in the best placement on your page.

6. Try setting the ad link URL color to a lighter shade. If your text is black, you may make the adlink as light gray.

7. Go Wide - The large rectangle is the best paying adsense format (336×280) - The Google Adsense Publisher team also feels that the best formats are the wider ones - the ad formats that contain the widest individual ads. Try using the 336×280 large rectangle, 300×250 medium rectangle, or 160×600 wide skyscraper.

8. Placing images next to ads or above ads does help in attracting user attention.

9. Blend AdLinks with other navigation links or place horizontal adlinks at the top of your webpage. AdSense publishers are permitted to click on link unit topics on their web pages, provided that they do not click on any Google ads on the resulting page.

10. Organize an Adsense Party for your friends and colleagues - Request them to navigate your website, watch their activity - it will provide vital clues about which regions on your website draw more user attention. Try putting ads near those areas.

11. You can put upto 3 adsense units on a page. Try putting a large skyscraper on the right navigation sidebar of your website. That area is close to the browser scrollbar. You can also add 2 AdSense for search boxes, 1 adlink unit and 1 referral button per product (i.e., 1 AdSense referral button and 1 Firefox plus Google Toolbar referral button).

12. The first few lines of your content are an important factor for determining what Ads are served on your webpage. That’s the right place to put keywords in bold (strong or &ltb> tags) or header tags (h1, h2, etc).

13. Always select the setting to open Google Adsense search box results in a new browser window, so you won’t lose your visitors. Click the Open search results in a new browser window checkbox and this add target=”google_window” to your form tag.

14. Maximum people think the search box is on the top right corner. So you know where to put it.

15. Don’t syndicate full content. If people can read everything from the newsreader window itself, why would they visit your website where your ads are.

16. Use URL channels to determine performance of individual pages. I track my most popular pages with Google Analytics, Statcounter and create a channel for each of the URL. You can even track adsense click with analytics

17. For low CTR pages, try changing titles or adding more content to get better focused ads

18. Block low paying advertisers with Filters. Why to loose a visitor for 0.01 cents. Use Overture or Google Adwords Keywords tool to discover keywords that are less popular with advertisers.

19. The AdSense for search Top Queries report shows you what your users are looking for, by listing the 25 most common searches conducted through your AdSense for search boxes. Use this report to identify additional topics to add to your site, or to keep track of your most sought-after information. Focus and improve that content.

20. Not everyone has a RSS reader. Use RSS to Email services like FeedBlitz, Bloglet or Rmail to let users subscribe to your blog by email.

Remember, you are the best judge when it comes to choosing ad formats. Even Google doesn’t offer the best advise always. For instance, in the visual heat map, Google suggests that webmasters are best served by positioning ads on the upper left-hand side of a Web page. But on the Google homepage, you will find ads on the far right.