One of the biggest problem in a downward or stalled economy is the perception. For most people nothing has changed, They have the same job and same mortgage and gas and food prices have been high for a while now.. but all the news and media play to our fears and we “feel” poor. When people feel poor they stop spending and this makes situation worse.
Some say the answer is get people to spend more. It is ironic that CNN and CNBC pundits go on ad nauseum about the horrible worsening economy yet run constant commercials to buy buy buy.
I am actually and advocate of spending less and living simply and think we have become as a society victims of our own success.
Yuppies and DINKS had kids and wanted to keep all their toys and jobs. Parents a work means money for daycare and low paying day care jobs and parent guilt which lead to parents spending $500.00 on video consoles and yearly trips is Disney World.
I suppose that is a whole other post but now we have ended up in a crappy economy and are starting to pick up the cheque for the free lunches of the past 10 years or so.
At any rate- what does this mean to ME?

Why Have My AdSense Earning Gone Down?

My AdSense earnings are not meeting my projected targets. My CTR seems a little low and EPC also down.
AdSense is so tricky and hard to figure what exactly is the actual problem. Are my blog boring and readership down? More people know how to implement SEO on their bogs and websites and more people going after the same pie?
I can use analytics to figure most of it out and from my numbers nothing much has changed and my conclusion is that ADWords ads are costing less because people are spending less on advertising. For some reason in any kind of a cash crisis small businesses will slash their advertising budgets first.

This is the time of year when my AdSense ads will start to go though the roof with all those Christmas dollars waiting to be spent. I think Advertisers are frightened no on is buying or will buy and are hedging their bets and waiting to see what happens in the coming weeks.

Tags: Google Adsense // 20 Comments »

I have still not had a response from Google. I ha identified 5 pages on one of my sites where Google Adsense Ads have been replaced by Public Service ads or no ads at. there are about 1500 pages on the blog with problem and the 5 pages that are not showing ADSense ads have related terms. They are all about the same topic. which see,s too much to be a coincidence. I am suspecting that the pages MAY have been mistakenly banned because of keyword stuffing. This seems to be the only thing that can make sense. If it we something going with scripts on my pages would be on wider variety of pages and not just on the 5 that deal with a single particular topic.

I am going to have to find out if the pages have been “banned” from Adsense. I would have thought that if one page was bad they would pull on the ads. I am having trouble finding out what exactly are the repercussion of a banned page and if a whole site is affected or not.

I have been toying with idea of just adding a redirect and putting pages on new URL within the blog. I am also not sure if by “fixing” the page it will automatically be “unbanned” or if I have to manually request or submit.
I am annoyed because I have done nothing wring and don’t; want to fix a age that isn’t broken. I also don’t want to further tick Google off.
ARGH..
I may just ignore for a few days and see if Google ever gets back to me and let them tell me best way to solve problem.

Tags: Google Adsense // 7 Comments »

Argh. Last few days my AdSense revenue not performing as well as I expected. I checked some of my more popular pages which are my higher money making pages and see that there is a public service ad running in one spot and blank white space in the others on several pages- all related in content. It is very strange.
I went through checklist :
Is there viewable text? Yes.
Is is offensive/adult content that could be banned? No.
Are there other javascripts running that might be conflicting? No.
Are they ads showing up on other computers or browsers? No.
Are ads showing up on other pages? Yes.

Sigh. I put in support email/ticket to Adsense but not holding my breath, I have received 2 auto-responder emails from them.
I am not happy. This is my BOOM time of year. My Amazon links are kicking butt and I should be having a banner Adsense month. My Adsense revenue down by about 15 %.
Odd that the ads are not showing on my top pages.
Is always something this time last year was when Google changed their clickable area and took my months to tweak and get blogs back on track.
This is why you must NOT rely on one revenue stream for your income.
Also this time of year is when Google stripped people of their page rank and the PayPerPost money tree disappeared.

Will let you know when and if I get an answer. If any thoughts on why this is happening. please feel free to comment.

Tags: Internet Marketing and Blogs // 1 Comment »

…to recover data from a damaged drive did not work for me this time. I wrote about my hard drive dying and losing some family pictures last week. One of the tricks used to recover is to stick your broken driven in the freezer over night. The theory is that the metal parts will contract enough to be able to sue the drive temporarily, long enough to grab your last data from the drive.
Note: Put drive in ziplock freezer bag to avoid moisture. I will note that I did do this and still got a lot of condensation on the drive when I pulled it out. There was enough water there to worry me.

This operation was not a success and patient died.

I have also heard of people doing the same thing by sticking drive in oven on low temperature. This seems very weird to me. Not sure why you woudl want metal and part to expand.
At any rate- drive gone.

Tags: Computer and Hardware // 5 Comments »