AdSense Progress so far

It's been awhile since I've last posted so what have I been up to? Well the purpose of this blog is to update my AdSense progress, so I've been making mistakes and learning from them so I can bring you what I've learned.

Some of the things I've found:

#1. Good AdSense newsletter, but he keeps pushing his book. The newsletter is full of good content, and I'm sure the book is too, and you can also visit his blog. I haven't bought the book yet, but plan to once I get in the black. The idea of AdSense is solid, but to be honest, to make the huge gobs of money some people report you have to have lots and lots of traffic (see points # 4, 5, and 6).

#2. There's been some speculation about whether or not you need an outbound link on your pages. The blog I link above says you don't need to, but I figure it may not be necessary but might be a part of Google's algorithm, and at this point I need all the pagerank I can get. The problem with outbound links is you're providing an exit point for someone to leave your page that isn't one of the ad units. Additionally, Google has revised its position concerning competing ad programs. So, what I've done is registered with Amazon as an associate and placed text-links to relevant items, books, etc on my pages. This way if I lose the visitor by the link I have another shot at monetizing them. I also used the "target_blank" modification on the links so that the links open a new window. This way, I hope, the visitor will still have my page open, if they aren't interested in what Amazon has to offer.

#3. I've been playing around with using article indexes to provide some extra fodder to my sites. Since it's duplicate content I don't know if it'll bring down the pagerank for the entire site or will that individual page get a lower rank, or not indexed at all. Any feedback on this would be appreciated.

#4. One way to get more traffic to your site is to have more links out there. This way you have higher online visibility, and more quality links will give you a higher pagerank (placement in search engine results). I read somewhere that you should add your pages to various social bookmarking sites. Actually what I read was to add every single page from your site. This seemed like spamming so I just added the index pages from my subfolders. I got an email from Simpy saying that this "self-promoting" was frowned upon and that they would block all my future posts, and my sites as well. I haven't heard anything from the other social-bookmarking sites so take from this what you will. I think the best alternative, which I haven't done yet, is to add a small list of icons for these sites for your visitors to add them to their own bookmarks. So that was a mistake, I learned from it, and now you have too.

#5. Contribute to relevant forums. I haven't done too much of this yet, but I intend to. The thing here is like point # 4. You don't want to spam. I believe in karma so what goes around, comes around. Forums have members who hate to see spam on their site, they want good relevant posts. It would be very easy for a person on a forum to make a post saying "Hey, this guy wants hits? Lets give him so many hits in so short a time Google will cancel his AdSense account for click-fraud." Or the forum may just block your account with them, thereby removing your visibility with them. I think they're an excellent venue for quality links back to your site, say, in your signature, as long as you're respectfull.

#6. And lastly, contribute articles to those same article indexes. Like the signature field on forum posts, you can include links back to your site in the "About the Author" field of your contribution. Thus, by providing others with a little free content, you can get hundreds if not thousands of links back to your site.

So that's what I've been up to. My next post will probably be about how to add those social bookmarking links easily to your site. From what I've seen so far, its pretty easy to automatically add to blog posts, but adding to regular html pages has to be done manually (per page). Either that, or how to be banned from the internet altogether. We'll see how it goes.