The full program

This is an audio program. Listen and/or download here.

A few lessons from this program

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About this program:

Most companies lie to you about how they make their money. They give you a noble-sounding answer, which usually involves cliches like “We just make good content.” But they keep the real answers to themselves.

In my interview with Marc Phillips, we talked about some of the real answers that companies don’t talk about. The focus was on AdSense–Google’s program for paying web sites to run text links–but we also talked about other ad types.

About Marc Phillips:

Marc is the publisher of AdSense Publishers Directory, which lists over 350,000 websites within the AdSense Content Network. He’s also the director of ADSPACE, the contextual advertising conference. And he’s the CEO & Founder of SearchForecast which provides website publishing software, diagnostic tools and solutions for lead generation via search engines.

An edited excerpt:

HealthCastle.com is really an AdSense rock start. If you check their web site and click through to different page, you’ll see what they’ve done is use the font and the color and the style guide and they customized their ads. It’s really about integrating the ads into the content.

Whether an ad is below the fold, above the fold, to the left, to the right, in the middle, or on the side, there are opportunities not to choose the Google default ad format. It’s about customizing your ad colors to the colors of your site.

The more indistinguishable you can make the content from the advertisement, the more likely people will feel that the ad is part of the content.

The full program includes:

• Discussion of ad targeting, placement and design.
• “Mouse trapping” and other tricks sites use.
• Why ugly sites can out earn beautiful sites.

Give your feedback:

What do you think of techniques like this? Have you used them on your site?