With it being the third article in this series of 26, today’s letter is C, and I thought that if I have been blessed to have a number of new friends following Off The Record, that today might be a good time to play Come Find Me.

There aren’t many people these days who aren’t involved in writing on a number of different sites, as well as promoting and sharing information on a range of Social networking sites.

In case you are looking to add me as a link elsewhere, here are a few other places where you can find me online:

Blogs and Web Sites

The Laughline
The Michiana Directory
Squidblogs
Squidtop
The Big Poddys Blog

Social Bookmarking Sites

Best Reviewer
Delicious
Digg
Redgage
She Told Me
Stumbleupon
Stumpedia
Xomba

Social Networking Sites

Facebook
Twitter

Writing Sites

Bukisa
Gather
Helium
Hubpages
Infobarrel
Qondio
Squidoo
Yahoo Contributor Network

I hope this list of places where you can find me proves useful.  It’s always good to have new friends online, but a list like this is also useful if you find a site that you haven’t come across before.  You never know which sites are going to suddenly generate traffic or income for you.

Have you read any of my articles on Associated Content lately, if at all? 

I joined in January and currently have 343 articles, which include my writing about a myriad of different topics, as well as publishing slide shows of places that I have been to, writing poems, and there is even one audio poem if you ever wondered what I sound like (I hate the sound of my voice by the way).

If you have a few minutes, would you be able to help me to reach my target by reading any of my articles, or viewing my slideshows etc?

Each page that you view counts as One Page View (it’s that simple for once), so if you find an article that is three pages long and read each page, that’s three Page Views.

Any help that you can give would be much appreciated, and if you do find something that you like, there are links at the bottom left of the page below each article, where you can share it using Twitter, Facebook, and a number of other sites as well.

Thanks so much for helping in advance, for accelerating me past this huge target and on to the next, and for being a good friend.

To view my articles, just click HERE

My traffic hopes for Friday were therefore based on a news article about passengers stranded on a plane in Scotland, but when I just looked, this had only 51 page veiws! Drat!

However, I did get almost 900 page views for my poem on Friday, but I haven’t got a clue where from.

It wasn’t Stumbleupon, could be via RSS Feeds though, or just because people are searching for the title, which I decided upon because I thought it was a catchy title.

It seems “Typos Typos Everywhere” is some sort of Sci-Fi short movie. Go figure…

So with my article being number one on Yahoo (thanks Yahoo) and on the 1st page on Google and Bing, I assume it’s searches that are getting the traffic for me.

Sometimes, those page views come in for the most unlikely reasons.

My drive home from work is only 8 1/2 miles, yet last night it took close to 1 1/2 hours to get home.   It was even worse for several people I know in the office who didn’t get home until 8pm and 8:30pm, and that was only a drive of 14 miles.

The problem last night was on the motorway close to work, where a woman fell from a bridge onto the road, plus about 5 or 6 miles further up the road where two trucks collided.   The whole motorway system therefore came to a grinding halt for 10 or more miles around.   

Unfortunately, the city of Southampton is sandwiched between the South Coast of England and the River Itchen, and the motorways run from the southeast, north around the city and off to the west.   So, if the motorways all get snarled up, people come off looking for an alternative route, and that leads them onto the regular roads that are already heavy with traffic for most of the day.   The regular “A” roads around here are more often than not only 1 lane in each direction as well, so it doesn’t take much to cause major holdups where the roads cross others, or where they cross the river.

Since I work to a fixed timetable (the buzzer sounds at 5pm and everyone rushes out at the same time to head home), there isn’t much I can do to avoid the rush hour, and given the location of the office, I don’t have many alternatives as to the route I take to get home.   So, like thousands of others last night, I just sat in traffic and listened to the radio.

Hopefully tonight will be better, but as soon as it gets dark and wet here in England, everything slows right down.  The one big consolation is that I drive an automatic, so I didn’t have to spend 90 minutes with my foot on and off the clutch at least.

I have been using Adsense for over a year now, and the month by month experience does teach you a lot, however my current earnings are at best $100 a month, and that frankly isn’t good enough, it won’t support me, however $100 a day would at least help to cover much of my expenses.

I am sorry if you thought that this article was going to be the Golden Egg, the secret to wealth and fortune, BUT don’t leave yet, since my aim here is to share my knowledge with you as I learn more and try different techniques to increase my earnings.

So what is the secret to earning a lot of money with Google Adsense?

Well, ultimately it’s getting enough people to click on links on your web site / blog, but it’s a lot more complicated than that.

To get clicks you need traffic.   Yes T-R-A-F-F-I-C.    The clicks won’t come unless you have visitors.    Now these visitors must also be interested in what you have to offer, and it has to look interesting from the start and load fast, otherwise they will leave a page even quicker than they arrived,  and that does you absolutely no good at all.

“Oh great” you might say, all I need is to just get enough decent traffic, enough clicks from my visitors, and I am all set.

WRONG!

It’s still not that easy…

Clicks are not all worth the same, and I wish I knew the secret as to which ones are worth more than others.  The truth is, that while you might get a click that is worth $2, you might also get 20 clicks that are only worth $0.01 each.    I have had quite a few days where I only had a handful of clicks, and I made more than those days where I had 40 or 50 clicks which totalled less than $1.

So the question is, “How do I try to get better value clicks?”

It’s all based on keywords.

Different topics are worth different amounts, and advertisers pay a higher price to get their adverts in front of you for certain topics.

Take Credit Cards for example, or Mortgages.   These are two examples of higher paying keywords.

Well, now we know the theory of what you need to do, (a) get the right traffic to your site, (b) make the page design and advert look/placement attractive to maximise clicks, and (c) gear the page to higher paying keywords.

If you can get 100 clicks a day that is a good start, but at 1cent each, that’s only $1 total!  If they pay an average of $1 each, there is your $100.

That’s the lesson for today.  I am working on taking this to the next stage by focusing on traffic.   You can have a brilliant design that is perfectly optimised, but without traffic it’s worth nothing.   Equally traffic without clicks doesn’t pay, but traffic does get you noticed and affects your search engine rankings.

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