Trying to make a living from your blog is a great idea if you are up for a challenge. Some articles will make it seem like a piece of cake to sit back and watch the dough roll in. The truth is that making money from your blog takes time and effort on your part. There are a few things that can make your task a little easier however. Google Adsense is one of those things for many. If you are curious about whether or not Google Adsense is right for your blog, take a look at these characteristics of their advertising program.


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The first thing to consider when looking for a program like Google Adsense is their track record. You can rest assured that Adsense is the oldest program of its type. It has the largest base of publishers than any other program like it. Knowing this information, you can feel secure in becoming a member of their program. By using Adsense, you will know that you are in good hands of a company that certainly knows what they are doing.

Another thing to consider when signing up with an advertising program is the appearance of the program on your blog. You don’t want to sign up with a program that has annoying flashy ads that will scare people off from your site. Adsense provides ads that are mostly text. They have around 10 different sizes with various dimensions so you can place them in the most appropriate places on your blog, without sacrificing your content and overall site appearance. If there is an image advertisement run in your advertising space, it typically fills up the whole ad block and is less annoying than most.

One thing to remember when considering Google Adsense is that they have strict terms of service. While some may see them as being too restrictive, they are not abnormal by any means. Basically to be an approved Adsense member you must agree not to publish pornographic material or coversation on your blog. You need to keep it pretty family friendly. This is not a huge problem for most people. Also you are not allowed to change the Adsense code.

Another portion of the terms of service explains that those who agree also cannot specify keywords that ads will be pointed to. You pretty much surrender the choosing of the ads to Google when you agree with their terms. You may have control over the content of your blog, but they have control over the ad content. Lastly, if you work with the Adsense program, you must agree to have no more than three blocks of ads on one particular page. If you are looking for a program that also allows you to see which pages earn more for you than others, Adsense is a great fit. Some programs will not allow you to do this, so if you are interested in this option, Adsense is a great choice.

Again, Adsense is based on the context of your page. Whatever you allow on your page will have an effect over what type of ads are presented to your readers. Keep this in mind when you are posting on your blog. With Adsense you cannot afford to hide your main points within a bundle of text. You have to be clear and use defining vocabulary to ensure your ads will fit just right.

If you are a blogger who would love to get paid for referring others to a program like Google Adsense, then you will be glad to know that for each referral you have that signs up and earns $100, you will get $100 as well. This can be great for someone with many contacts or a blog building business. Overall, there are quite a few rules that you must agree to follow in order to become an Adsense publisher. The rules are not so restrictive so that you cannot make money. In fact, they are made so that the Google reputation is preserved and yours as well. By using an honest system such as Adsense, you will know that you are in the best possible position out there. You can make a bundle if you put in the time, so go ahead and check it out today.

Google has just released a new Google Talk (GTalk) version - 1.0.0.104. This new GTalk version does not really add any type of improvements to existing Google Talk versions except for support for Microsoft’s latest operating system, Windows Vista.
Here are some other interesting features added to Google Talk versions prior to 1.0.0.104.
Google Talk Orkut integration

Google Talk now enables you to chat online or place a call to your Orkut friends. Additionally, Google Talk automatically adds your Orkut friends to your Google Talk account, and notifies you if someone writes a scrap entry on your profile.
Support for Google Talk online messages

Just enable chat history in your Google Talk account and you’ll be able to receive messages when you’re offline. The system stores the messages you’ve received while offline and displays them the next time you log into your Google Talk account.
Google Talk File Transfer

The file transfer feature was introduced in version 1.0.0.95, along with voicemail and music status and music trends display.
File transfer is unlimited in number and size in Google Talk. You can send files of virtually any size to one or more Google Talk friends (Google Talk uses the peer-to-peer transfer).
Voicemail support was introduced in Google Talk version 1.0.0.95. It basically allows you to record audio messages and send them to your friend’s e-mail address as an audio file attachment.
Music status display is also a feature available as of Google Talk version 1.0.0.95. It changes your status message by displaying the audio file (e.g.: song) that you currently play on your PC.
If interested on the type of music other Google Talk users are listening to, feel free to visit Google Music Trends. There is also an embedded feature in Google Talk allowing you to send to Google Music Trends information related to the type of music you are playing.

In an exclusive tip-off from inside Google, Tech’s Message has learned that the search giant is sitting on a huge announcement that it intends to make public around the date that coincides with the consumer launch of Microsoft Windows Vista, January 30th 2007.
Google has a history of stealing Microsoft’s thunder, for example when Microsoft announced its MSN Search database held records for 5 billion web pages, Google co-announced that it infact held records for 8 billion. Could this be another such event?
Perhaps…
Possibilities
1) The announcement is likely to be the unveiling of a new Google product, the most hotly anticipated of which is the Google OS - a collection of web-based applications that provide free, networked alternatives to Microsoft’s Office suite of applications. Obviously Google Docs and Spreadsheets compete already with Excel and Word, but alternative solutions to spreadsheets, desktop email, frontpage etc could be easily deployed by the Google machine.
2) Another large possibility could be the fabled GDrive. This would be an easy way to consolidate all of a user’s Google files (Google Docs, Spreadsheets, Video etc) in one place, in a desktop environment. The GDrive may also offer a certain number of gigabytes of backup space, though this is less likely given the sheer exploitability factor.
3) Lets not overlook the YouTube acquisition. It’s unlikely anything major would come as a result so soon, but there’s always a chance.
4) There’s also the possibility of a more competative offering in the VoIP market. Google Talk is not a widely used application and was met with a damp response from users, and continues to only be lightly adopted in comparison to Skype. Skype, however, offers the ability to call physical phone lines, something Google talk does not do (yet). Adding “calling out” features would certainly increase the mass appeal and would make the service less of an IM underdog, and more of a competitor to Skype. This would undoubtedly create tension, however. Google has a multi-year partnership agreement with Skype’s parent eBay, to provide text-based adverts on the auction site outside of the United States.
Would a call-out service work from Google? Probably not. Could you imagine having a conversation with a friend about your recent contraction of herpes, only to get a automated announcement on the phone from the “Google system” about related anti-herpes offers from Google advertisers? No, certainly not a good system. Google would struggle to profit from a voice-based system but keeping track of all your conversations would, in a way, organise your data and would therefor be within Google’s manifesto of organising the world’s data. I leave the thinking to you.
5) A blog on ZDnet gave some insights on potential Google releases in 2007, one of which is claimed to be 100% certain. That is, an enterprise version of Google Apps For Your Domain. Currently the system offers Google applications to run as if hosted on your own website’s domain, but is actually hosted on Google’s servers. Various features are expected with such a product and you can read some insights here.
6) The announcement may be something less interesting but no less notable, such as Google’s GMail finally coming out of beta after almost 3 years. The site has recently allowed signing up functionality (previously, new users had to be invited by existing users). Whether this is a sign or not that the mail service is approaching its “finished” status, I wouldn’t like to say. It wouldn’t be huge news but it’d at least beat Windows Live Mail to the punch (that said, WLM hasn’t been in beta for anything like as long as GMail).
In Closing
This news should be treated as a rumour, but a strong one, and from a trusted source.
Personally, I want a gPod with a gFox browser and integrated gTooth and g-Fi for sharing my songs wirelessly with other gPods. To avoid Apple lawsuits, Google may want to annoy Microsoft more, as referred to above, by calling it the gUne (Goon). Either way, I want one. It won’t happen, but I want one.

Buy a Dell, plant a tree

Dell is launching a new program aimed at improving the environment. Customers will be asked to donate money to charities that plant trees. Dell is asking for donations of $2 per laptop and $6 per desktop.


Dell's backs plan to offset destruction of trees

By Damon Darlin Published: January 10, 2007

LAS VEGAS: Michael Dell, who made his name building computers, has a new goal — planting trees.

In a speech at the Consumer Electronics Show here, Dell urged the electronics industry to foster the planting of trees to offset the effect on the environment of the energy consumed by the devices they make.

He said Dell, the computer company he founded, would begin a program called "Plant a Tree for Me," asking customers to donate $2 for every notebook computer they buy and $6 for every desktop PC. The money would be given to the Conservation Fund and the Carbonfund, two charities that promote ways to reduce or offset carbon emissions, to buy and plant trees.

Dell said the planting of trees would absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, offsetting the equivalent emissions resulting from the production of electricity for computers over three years.

In his speech Tuesday, Dell also said, "I challenge every PC vendor in the industry to join us in providing free recycling. This is a better way than government regulation."


Dell intends to cover the administrative costs of the tree-planting program. Dell was not able to estimate those costs.

Customers in the United States will be given the chance to donate when they configure an order for a Dell PC. Dell also said the program would be expanded in April to consumers overseas.

Dell said in an interview before the speech that the tree-planting initiative came up during a meeting that he and Kevin Rollins, Dell's chief executive, held to discuss the company's efforts to recycle and reduce the use of various chemicals like brominated flame retardants and polyvinyl chloride. He said he thought, "This would be a fantastic way for our customers to get involved."

Dell said, "I am personally interested in the environment, but I have to give credit to our customers who have encouraged us in this direction."

Dell offers its customers free recycling of their old computers. The company said it wanted to recover about 275 million pounds of old computers from customers by 2009. "We're on track, a little ahead, in fact, to meet our goal," Dell said.

In his speech, Dell made a plea to the telecommunications industry to speed its efforts to lay high-speed fiber cable that would provide more capacity for moving content like movies and videos on the Internet to the home.

He noted that high-speed networks are already available in the Czech Republic, Denmark, Dubai, France, Iceland, Japan, Kuwait, Romania and Slovenia, while the United States lags behind. He said that just 44 percent of U.S. households had a high-speed broadband connection and that only 1 percent of those homes had a fiber connection.

2006 is just about over and 2007 will begin in a couple of days. Everyone is putting up their predictions for 2007, so why should I be any different.

1) What was once free will no longer be free. Free calling for VoIP will become a memory. Skype may be one of the first to charge a fee for calling into the PSTN, but they will be one of the first of many.

2) The US Government will begin to understand that Telecom mergers are not good business for them or the public. Mergers between US and non-US companies will be under greater view and may be denied.

3) Cable companies will bypass the need to sell VoIP services and instead be more interested in selling Video over IP and Video on demand.

4) VoIP will be renamed Internet Telephony so VoIP can be known as Video over IP.

5) Cell Phone carriers will start placing ads on incoming Internet and Messaging, unless a fee is paid to eliminate them.

6) Hot Spots and Hotels will pull back on free Internet and require payment for use. Hot Spots may start posting ads to their users.

What is the great secret to huge earnings with Adsense? The truth is, there is no great secret.

Let us look at adsense from the top.Adsense pays you a percentage of money for each click that you generate on your website. Which brings us to two very important facts that few seem to realize when building their adsense websites.


- You need traffic to click on your adsense ads.
- Your ads must be relevant to the search of the visitor.

Lets dissect them one at a time.

Traffic.

Most of the time you will have wasted your time and money. It would have been much better spent taking the dog for a walk or doing the dishes.

For an adsense site to be successful it needs visitors, many visitors. If you have just put up a new site it will mean you have not been indexed neither do you have any page ranking. Your 2000 page pre-built website at this moment in time means nothing. Don't forget that a thousand or so others have followed the same route as you, some before and some after, quite a bit of duplicate content don't you think?You can create adsense sites with software, buy pre-built sites, use PLR and so on. This is a nice quick fix to solve your problem of generating adsense income, or so many seem to think.

Lets move on.

Suddenly to your great surprise for the next month you have a total of two clicks, or worse none whatsoever. Four months down the line becomes six and still the results remain the same.

Fortunately you do not need to feel alone, there are many who have done exactly the same thing with the same results. But from your perspective the internet sucks and there are only a few who will make money and the multitudes of others will buy their products.The search engines have come by and your pages are now indexed after two or three months.

Sorry to tell you the truth, you are wrong. If you went about building your adsense empire with a plan, and not a quick fix, things would be quite different. But we all still love quick fixes and buy them, so there is no need to feel bad.

Building your adsense site takes careful planning.

You can do it as a new site, subdirectory or implement it on your current site.

The very first thing that you must do, and I cannot stress this enough, is keyword research.

It is a long and arduous task and does take a lot of time and thinking to get to the right keywords. It is the life or death of your site. You can have the best optimized pages around, but if you chose the wrong keywords you will never be seen.

The wrong choices would be keywords that are never searched for or the competition is so high that you will be competing against many high ranking websites, and your pages will just get lost in the maze.

Only when you have your keywords in place is it time to develop your content. You should try to create as many of these pages yourself. Now you are not able to write one thousand pages all by yourself but if you write one page a week, by the end of the year you will have 52 unique pages, that is what the search engines are looking for. Your pages need not be long 400 to 600 words are fine as long as the content is relevant, but we will get to that now.

If you are just starting your site you can mix up your pages with articles, PLR content and your own, but do create your own unique content as often as you can.

Now lets look at relevance.

If a visitor lands on your page from a search engine result he must find your content relevant to his search, otherwise he will leave as quickly as he came. He will not be clicking one of your adsense ads either to his next destination.

Why not?

Your adsense ads on your page will be reflective of your content, not his search, which means they will have no meaning to him whatsoever. That is why it is so important to have relevant content to your keywords, that is what brings the visitor, keeps him on the site and gets him to click an adsense ad when he leaves.


Placement of ads and the way they appear have been proven to increase or decrease CTR. Unfortunately this information is only obtainable through research over a period of time. You have to use different formats and placements on different pages and track each ad separately to establish which work best.

But the internet is constantly changing, and what is working now will not necessarily be working in six months to a year, so unless you have been doing the research yourself over a period of time and finding the right information at the right time, you will have to pay to get your adsense working effectively and profitably.

This is the great secret to successful adsense pages, it is nothing more than research information as to what is working best at this time. The information is gathered through persistent testing, tracking, more testing and tracking until the right combinations are found and then doing it all over again. The secret is finding and using the information first.