In reviewing my numbers I see that my overall traffic is down. I did a quick analysis of my top 6 sites and have found an average decrease in page views of 15% and a 17% decrease in visitors.

The lower traffic could be a result of the Panda algorithm change or it could be the result of old content. I haven’t spent much time posting new content on my sites this month. As a matter of fact, I’ve added 19 new pieces of content to my sites. 15 of the new pieces of content were posts here on NJFM, and I’ve shared in the past that NJFM is not my road to riches (far from it).

I’ve been spending my time working on projects that will help to shield me and my income from Panda fluctuations and other search engine modifications.

Effects of Less Traffic

Now that I’ve analyzed the lack of traffic and the cause thereof, it’s time for me to look at the income from my top 6 sites to see if the income trended accordingly.

Much to my surprise, the income didn’t follow the traffic. The income from my top 6 online properties is up 14% over last month’s. To what do I attribute this? Well, I believe a large portion can be attributed to adding the authorized sites to my AdSense account.

The rest I’ve got to attribute to changing some of the AdSense ad blocks. The first modification (authorized sites) took a total of 5 minutes or less to implement. The ad block changes took a little longer because I had to change each site. In total, it took a couple of hours to implement.

Sharpening the Sword

I’m reading several books by Dr. Steven R. Covey. If you have time, I strongly suggest you pick up his book 7 Habits of Highly Effective People. I’ve got to warn you, this book is not mental candy. It will cause you to think, reflect and change.

In his books he talks about sharpening the sword, which means retooling, sharpening your skills, learning new tools and taking care of the items/tools used on your journey to success.

Although it is my goal to reduce my reliance on Google and Google AdSense, it is a tool in my online writing arsenal. While I’m creating new venues and working on new projects, it is to my advantage to sharpen my AdSense tool to make it work better for me. I truly believe that if it were not for the sharpening of the sword, November would have been much worse. Instead, it’s my best month for online residual earnings.

If you enjoyed this post, why not sign up for NJFM’s Motivation for Writers Newsletter. A dose of motivation will be sent to your inbox every Monday.

I had always shied away from large AdSense blocks because I never wanted them to take up too much of the screen real estate. However, the change in real estate from 300×250 to 336×280 is barely noticeable.

Results of Changing Ad Size

Since I had made other AdSense changes right around the same time, I had to pay attention to the click through rate (CTR) instead of the overall change in income.

Comparing this month’s CTR prior to the change and the CTR after the change, my CTR average increased by a little over 3%. That may not sound like much, but a 3% increase over time ads up.

My hubby refers to golf as a game of inches. Earning money online is very similar. Sometimes (very rarely) you hit a hole in one, but most time it’s tweaking and improving one stroke at a time.

I’m off to tweak the rest of my blogs.

If you enjoyed this post, why not sign up for NJFM’s Motivation for Writers Newsletter. A dose of motivation will be sent to your inbox every Monday.

If you’re an AdSense publisher, I’m sure you’re familiar with the warning atop of your AdSense account. The warning tells you that your ads are displaying on unauthorized sites. The warning looks like this:

After seeing this warning for years (It seemed like years), I decided to look into it a little further. After all, AdSense had emailed me a few earning increasing tips in the past, I might as well see what this warning is about.

Horse before the Cart

I’m going to back up just a bit for those AdSense publishers who are not aware of the authorized site feature.

To prevent unscrupulous scrapers, spammers or other villainous fiends (sorry, was watching an old cartoon this weekend) from stealing your AdSense code, placing on their sites and clicking the heck out of the links to get your account suspended, AdSense implemented the Authorized Account feature. You can find the feature by clicking on Account Settings  link located on the upper left-hand section of the Home page.

Once on the Account Settings page, scroll down until you see Access and authorization. There is where you set the authorization preferences. I learned the hard way that it really works.

One of my sites consistently received clicks, but I never received earnings. It took me months to realize I had not included it as one of my authorized sites. I lost quite a bit of income for that little oversight.

Unauthorized Sites

If your account is anything like mine, after your list of authorized sites, you’ll see a few sites and IP addresses that are not authorized. The sites look like this:

www.google.com.sg
webcache.googleusercontent.com
translate.googleusercontent.com
www.bing.com
74.6.238.254
74.6.117.48
www.google.ca

These sites are search engine cached pages. I researched the two IP addresses listed and they belong to Inktomi Corpation (aka Yahoo). In other words, they are legitimate cached pages of your blog/website. These are not spammer sites.

I always ignored the warning until I decided to get to the bottom of it all. I found this on the AdSense Known Issue site:

Message for Unauthorized Sites Persists on Homepage
Details: When using the authorized sites feature, any sites that you haven’t authorized will trigger an alert message on your home page. We currently consider any framed or cached pages to be unauthorized, including when a user searches using Google Images and your site is displayed via frame. We encourage you to add framed and cached URLs of sites you trust to your authorized sites list. We’re investigating ways to improve this feature.

After reading that, I decided to add the sites to my authorized list (always check the IP information before adding an IP address to the authorized list).

Results of Adding the Unauthorized Sites

I did this research around midday on Thursday of last week. That means half of my Thursday’s earnings are based on the old authorization list and half on the new. Not wanting to jump to conclusions, I waited a couple more days before performing an analysis.

Here’s the scoop. My AdSense earnings from Thursday to Sunday of this past week are 62% higher than they were for the same period of time the week before.

Milk, Spilling, Crying and Such

When I realized how much money I had consistently left on the table I thought about crying over spilt milk, but what good does that do? I’m happy that I made the changes and am encouraging you to do the same if you haven’t done so already.

I love it when small changes yield large results!

If you enjoyed this post, why not sign up for NJFM’s Motivation for Writers Newsletter. A dose of motivation will be sent to your inbox every Monday.

Anyway, between learning more about consolidating blogs, formatting ebooks for a professional look, formatting books for Kindle and PubIt, I’m also learning quite a bit about newsletters, email lists and Aweber features (not to mention that my brainstorming sessions are never ceasing).

On top of that, I recently came across an ad management tool. This tool, DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP) Small Business is an answer to a growing problem that I seem to be having. You see, increasingly I’m receiving requests to advertise on my blogs/websites. The requests are emails that go something like this:

I’ve recently come across your site and am impressed with the content (they never tell me which site). I have a client who is interested or I am interested in advertising on your site (sometimes it’s a link within the content or a link on the home page).

My client/I have a budget of $XX and would be interested in arranging an advertising partnership.

That’s not the exact text of the emails I’ve been receiving but you get the gist of it. The emails have been coming with increasing frequency, which is good (I guess). The problem is I don’t know how to or want to spend the time with managing ads. That’s why I use Google AdSense. Set it and forget it.

Enter DoubleClick for Publishers

In reading the Inside AdSense blog, there was a recent post entitled Ad Serving Explained. Not that I was interested on how ads were displayed, but the DoubleClick video caught my attention. Check it out for yourself.

The best part of the whole deal is that sign up is free. So, I immediately signed up and realized, “Whoa, I’ve got a lot to learn.” I have no problem with learning, but for some reason I’m in an obsessive learning phase in my freelance writing career. If I could boil everything down into liquid form to drink it or vaporize it to inhale it, I’d be ahead of the curve.

Unfortunately, drinking or inhaling isn’t an option so tacked onto the rest of the things I’m learning, I’ve got to learn how to utilize DoubleClick for Publishers to get the most bang for my buck.

Although this current learning phase seems a little overwhelming, I fully expect that it will pay off in the end. A year from now when I’ve mastered these tools, I’ll be glad that I took the time to grow.

Speaking of growth, what have you been learning lately?

There’s something to be said for adversity. Personally, I don’t like facing too much adversity at one time, but every time I do I come out on the other end stronger.

The power outage was an inconvenience and an experience to learn from. There were several action items I took away from the experience. I’ve taken care of two of the action items and currently working on the next 3.

Unexpected Adversity

During the power outage, as I was accessing WiFi and sipping my calorie laden latte at the Bad Ass coffee shop, I discovered a Google AdSense hiccup. Well, to me it’s more like a cough, but in the grand scheme of life, it’s a hiccup.

It appears there’s a glitch that is affecting some AdSense publishers. The glitch is preventing us from getting paid. According to their interface, the affected publishers earnings didn’t exceed the $100 threshold in September to warrant payment in October. It was worded as follows:

“Unpaid finalized earnings prior to October 1, 2011. A payment will not be issued this month. Your unpaid earnings prior to October 1, 2011 was calculated to be $0.00. Payments are issued within 30 days after the end of the month in which your unpaid earnings reach $100.00.”

In my case that’s untrue. My unpaid finalized earnings prior to October 1, 2011 was well in excess of $100.

Here We Go

So, here I am in the coffee shop with caffeine coursing through my veins realizing that my usual AdSense payment that I send to the mortgage company will not be coming in. I’ll have to dig into my pocket to pay my mortgage this month (bummer).

I later found a few forum threads on the Google AdSense forum from fellow publishers affected by this glitch. In that forum thread I found a link to report the problem. If you are affected by the glitch and haven’t reported it yet, here’s the link:

https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/request.py?contact_type=payment_history_issue

Google’s Response

I submitted the form and received the following response:

Hi,

Thanks for bringing this issue to our attention. I’m currently working as quickly as I can to investigate your concern and I’ll be sure to send you another email as soon as I have any more information. Thanks for your patience, and please let me know if there’s anything else I can help you with in the meantime.

For additional payments related information, visit our Payments Guide at http://www.google.com/adsense_payments . You can also visit our Help Center at http://www.google.com/adsense_help for common questions and optimization tips.

Sincerely,

The Google AdSense Team

What Can I Do?

Until Google finds and fixes the problem, there’s not much I can do about it. It is annoying, but fortunately, I’m able to work around it. What this piece of adversity has done, however, is kick me in the pants (again). You see, Google kicked me in the pants with the first Panda when my income dropped by 50%.  In all honesty, Panda wasn’t fully responsible for the 50% drop.  A large portion of the drop was because eHow closed its WCP, but the Panda sure didn’t help.

I worked hard to get my income up to pre-Panda levels and then Panda two struck. As I analyze my numbers, my income took a minor hit with the second panda (about 1 or 2%), but it was a hit nonetheless.

I get it this time! You don’t have to hit me again; I get it. When a whole month’s worth of earnings (close to $1,800) is lost in the shuffle, it’s up to me to get into the cheese manufacturing mode. It’s time for me to create new cheese.

Going Forward

Now that my power is back on, and I’m able to continue working on the items I was near completing before the outage, I fully intend to devote 100% of my time on my new cheese. Well, maybe 95% of my time on the new cheese and 5% on some of the other online moneymaking ventures that I enjoy.

Having the income from Google is nice, but having 100% control over my financial future is nicer. Again, I must thank Google for the swift kick. They told me back in March to work on my own ventures, but I didn’t listen. I’m listening now.

This was delivered to my inbox this morning (how appropriate):

“I am grateful for all of my problems. After each one was overcome, I became stronger and more able to meet those that were still to come. I grew in all my difficulties.”
— J.C. Penney, businessman

11/2/2011 UPDATE: Update:  If you’re experiencing the same problem that I am (or one of the two other variations of the problem), here’s a link to an update: http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/AdSense/thread?tid=17c610a849512e85&hl=en

Here’s another link to a forum post in which the person copied and pasted a response from the Google AdSense Team advising that there’s no guarantee the problem will be resolved prior to the next payment cycle.

So there you have it. No sense in holding your breath waiting for them to fix the problem this month.  It’s time to go to Plan B.

The Plot Thickens: Update Part 2

Apparently I’m being penalized because I had signed up for the Google Affiliate Network (GAN). I signed up quite some time ago and have earned a grand total of about $1.50 with it over a period of a year. I’m not very active in the network.

Active or not, it seems to be the culprit in not receiving my September earnings. There’s a glitch with the Google system for GAN publishers that is preventing earnings from displaying on the Payment Page and also prevents Google from issuing the earnings check. Big time bummer!

If you haven’t signed up for the Google Affiliate Network, don’t bother. That small commission of $1.50 is the reason for this holdup. Even worse, some publishers haven’t earned a dime in the Google Affiliate Network and are having the same problem as I am.

You can either learn by making a mistake or learn by someone else’s mistake.  Consider this a lesson.