It’s a simple concept - Don’t rely on a single source of income, because if that revenue stream dries up, you’ll be screwed. And that’s exactly what happened with Henry and Wilson, twin brothers from Baltimore who got banned from Google AdSense earlier this year and lost roughly $200K as a result! AdSense was the only way they were monetizig their websites, so this was a devastating blow.

If Google suspects that you’re involved in click-fraud, they’ll ban you first, and ask questions later (if ever). It’s happened before, and it’ll happen again. It’s great that they’re so proactive when it comes to click-fraud, but many innocent bystanders have unjustly fallen victim to Google’s ban-stick.

Never let yourself rely on a single source of income or traffic. Making money online is all about maximizing income and traffic from multiple sources. Yahoo banned one of my sites about 6 months ago for no apparent reason, and my pleas to them fell on deaf ears. Has it affected my traffic? Sure, but I’ve worked around it, bringing in other streams of traffic to compensate for it.

Below are some AdSense alternatives that you should consider implementing on your site:

Some Good Affiliate Programs:

You’ve got nothing to lose, so try them out - The results might just surprise you!

The other night, I got a frantic call from one of my staffers, asking if I had looked at the analytics for one of our Blogger blogs. It’s a popular site that gets about 400-500 hits a day, but on that day we had over 4000 unique visitors to the site! It was already late, so I decided to look into the traffic spike the following morning.

My writer had posted a poll on the site, with a simple 4-word question as the title. For whatever reason, that post ranked #1 on Google, and #3 on MSN. (No idea where it was on Yahoo, but it wasn’t on the first page) The poll got over 1000 votes, and we made about $8 from AdSense. (The site generally makes about $0.50/day, as we just have a single ad)

It was pretty amazing. Being a Blogger site, there was no real SEO happening. No meta tags or descriptions, no huge keyword density for the phrase, nothing. My guess is that we were probably the first site to break the story, and because of that, we ranked #1 until other sites caught up and posted news of their own. 24 hours later, and we were no longer on the front pages of Google or MSN, and traffic went back to normal.

Truth be told, it was pretty exciting. It just goes to show you the power of search engines. Now imagine if we had planned this out in advance, and had a way to capitalize on the influx of traffic. Cha-ching!

What’s the point of this post? Post breaking news first! You’ll have a small window of opportunity, but if you do it right, you’ll be able to rank well for a popular search term, get tons of web traffic, and hopefully make some money from those visitors in one way or another. I’ve seen this happen time and time again, with topics ranging from Paris Hilton to Hurricane Katrina.. Try it out and see what happens!

Google Adsense is probably the easiest way to get started making money on your site. For those of you unfamiliar with AdSense, here’s how it works:

1. A merchant trying to generate traffic to their website signs up for Google AdWords.
2. They create their ads, and set a price-per-click (PPC) that they’re willing to pay.
3. Google starts displaying their ad on their site.
4. The ads are also displayed on any related sites running Google AdSense.

So say a ticket broker is trying to promote “Bruce Springsteen Tickets”. He would go to AdWords and create a new campaign. He specifies that he’s willing to spend up to $2 per click.

Now you decide to create a Bruce Springsteen fan site, get some inbound traffic, and throw up Google AdSense. Google is going to serve you ads that are related to Bruce Springsteen, and more than likely, a few of them will be from ticket brokers. If that’s the market you plan on targeting, including words like “tickets” and “concert” will help make sure that you’re served with those types of ads.

Then you just sit back, focus on generating more traffic to your site, and hope that some visitors click on those ads. For each ad they click on, you get paid. Some niches pay better than others, so you need to do some research to find out what the best market to target is.

It doesn’t sound very lucrative, but it costs you nothing but your time. On my first AdSense site, it took me 3 months to generate $100. But it was a learning experience, and the goal of the site wasn’t to make money. But here’s some proof that with the right planning, you can really kick some ass. ShoeMoney is a legend in the SEO community, and he’s even been featured in major publications, including Fortune Magazine. Here’s a picture of his largest check from Google:

Today, he’s making even more money than that, but he’s switched to payment by wire transfer, so no more cool pictures for us. If that’s not motivation, then I don’t know what is!

Someone asked Matt Cutts (Google Engineer) about any pagerank news, and he got this reply:

Ezhil, I don’t expect a full PageRank update for at least a few more weeks, and possibly longer.

Quite frankly, this sucks! Many of us have been waiting for this update since late July, and here we are in October no closer to the goal. Sure, people tell you that PR doesn’t matter, that Google calculates pagerank internally daily, and the SERPs reflect the changes. That’s great, but if you’re trying to sell ads, you’ve probably already seen the problem this delay is causing - Advertisers are basing their decisions on your site’s pagerank, without taking into consideration that the last PR update happened way back in March!

I’ve got sites that are getting thousands of visitors daily, but because they were started back in May and June, they have no ranking as of yet. So these morons plug our URL into a tool such as SEO Tools’ Link Price Calculator, and the program tells them that your site is worth $0. Never mind the great Alexa ranking, the recognition from national publications, and the activity the site generates on it’s own. It’s PR or bust. Talk about a frustrating situation to be stuck in.

Hopefully, this situation gets resolved shortly, and the 350+ page thread on DigitalPoint can finally be put to rest.

Based on past updates, most people expected Google to release their latest PageRank Update sometime in late July. Here we are in the midst of September, and the update still hasn’t happened! And even worse, Matt Cutts (Google insider) recently made a comment on DigitalPoint that said:

“As far as the toolbar PageRank, I definitely wouldn’t expect to see it in the next few days. Probably not even in the next couple weeks, if I had to guess.”

Many webmasters are reading too much into this, theorizing that Google will finally do away with PageRank completely. But more than likely, Google is just behind schedule. They’ve made it well known that they’re testing a “new and improved” algorithm that will discount paid links, and our guess is that it’s still not 100% complete. Hopefully they get the kinks worked out and update the PR soon. Many advertisers use PageRank as a measure of authority when buying ad spots, and the higher the PR, the more they’re willing to spend. Right now, we’re selling ads based on PR that was calculated back in MARCH of 2007!