Want To Make a Living on Google Money?

AdAge has a good post about how Google’s promotion of fraudulent advertising is undermining their brand…

In a world of double-digit unemployment and old-line industries in mid-collapse, here’s a sales pitch tailor-made for the times: “Get Paid by Google.”

It’s a pitch that’s compelling millions of people to visit sites such as Kevinlifeblog.com, Scottsmoneyblog.com, Maryslifeblog.com and Googlemoneytree.com, all promising some variation on one theme: Just buy our guide and we’ll teach you how to make thousands from Google, right in the privacy of your own home!

Google’s 5-Step Easy Money Process

1. Find a high paying affiliate program which sells a product about how easy it is to make money on Google.
2. Ideally the program will just charge for shipping to get the credit card details, and make most of the money through back end reverse billing fraud.
3. Create a fake blog (or fake news site) complete with fake comments about how you lost your job, this program took you from zero to here. And it makes you 6 figures a year.
4. Do keyword research to find freshly desperate and unemployed people.
5. Create ads targeting those people and market them through Google AdWords

Drug Dealers ***ARE*** Affiliated With Their Drugs

The surprising thing about this process is that Google claims no affiliation to these ads. From the above AdAge article

“As Google is not affiliated with these sites, we can’t comment on individual claims,” a [Google] spokesman said.

Nice try, but Google ***is*** affiliated with such offers, since they create the distribution channel. Just as a guy who just happens to have a boat load of cocaine he is distributing to clients ***is*** affiliated with the drugs if he is caught in possession.

Businesses Are Responsible for Their Own Business Strategy

Google gives webmasters this guideline “Your site’s reputation can be affected by who you link to.” Why shouldn’t it apply to Google as well?

As long as Google has 30%+ profit margins they are making a BUSINESS DECISION to run these fraudulent ads. They could spend 1% of revenue on cleaning up this issue (if they wanted to), but they are making a choice not to. Hal Varian has probably done the math, and the offers stay after repeated media exposure of the issue.

Google keeps running the ads because they want the revenue. And they know exactly how much revenue comes from scamming consumers with these ads:

Amoral Ad Networks Constantly Promote Fraud

Is risked mis-priced? Is an asset class overvalued due to fraud? Are consumers unaware of a new type of fraud?

It does not matter where there is a bubble in the economy – amoral ad networks will find it. As Jay Weintraub put it:

The truly complex part of the problem comes from the size of the un-branded continuity program market and just how much it is helping certain companies hit their numbers, along with what happens were it to go away. In so many respects, the current fakevertising trend is the 2008-9 equivalent of the mortgage advertising boom from 2002-2006.

Not surprising that yield based ad systems promote the biggest scams in the marketplace. Mortgage fraud was a multi-trillion dollar industry, and even as the market heads south, there is still yet another way to exploit the public with ads by targeting their dire situation and desperation.

Please Help Google Fix This Issue

Since Google has not put up consumer warnings and lots of consumers are getting ripped off, I believe it is our job as marketers to help warn consumers about this brazen looting and fraud. If you have a blog or website could you please write about this topic? Bonus points if you reference this post using keywords like “Google money” and “make money” as the anchor text such that we can try to rank a warning high up in the Google search results.

And if you write about this topic to help consumers and your site does not carry AdSense ads on it, please list it in the comments below such that anyone who comes to this page can see how big of an issue this has become.

Source: Seobook.com

As the end of the school year approaches, many high school and college students find themselves scrambling for summer jobs so that they can save up some spending money.

Unfortunately, there aren’t many decent paying jobs available for teens, especially in a rough economic climate. However, there are a number of websites that offer very easy money for teens online. For a teenager who is disciplined and responsible, online jobs are the easiest way to earn a significant wad of cash this summer.

Websites That Offer Easy Money for Teens

Teenagers today typically have an assortment of skills that are useful and valuable on the Internet. For teens who are skilled writers, earning money will be that much simpler. Additionally, there are also well paying jobs available for teenagers who know how to write web pages, write high-volume blogs or forum posts, or program in different Internet or desktop programming languages. However, finding those opportunities often involves wading through a mountain of garbage and scams. This article will provide teens with a guideline for the best opportunities on the web that offer easy money for teens.

1. Easy Income for Teens Who Can Write Articles

For any teen that has excellent writing skills, the Internet offers an abundance of cash just sitting there for the taking. Yes, it may take a full eight hours a day of good solid writing work – but what could be better than rolling out of bed at ten in the morning and going to work at home, in your pajamas? Sound too good to be true? Well put on your pajamas and check out these opportunities.

Associated Content

Associated Content is one of the most popular “user-generated content” sites that offers articles on just about every topic under the sun.

At Associated Content, you can either “claim” topics from the assignment desk, or you can submit topics of your choosing. You can earn both upfront payments, as well as monthly payments based on traffic to your articles. Starting out, you might only earn $3 to $4 per article you write, plus $1 to $2 for traffic – but if you wrote 5 articles a day, that’s $400 a month, plus additional monthly royalty payments.

Not only does writing for a site like AC establish you as a writer, but if your writing is exceptional, AC will even consider you as a preferred content producer, and their clients may ofter you writing gigs that pay $20 and up for an article.

Helium

Helium is another user-generated content forum that pays you both upfront fees as well as traffic royalties.

Helium is unfortunately a bit cheaper with their payments, and they’ve established a bunch of loopholes you need to jump through. You can earn about $1 per article plus traffic payments. However, to earn those payments you have to spend time “rating” articles – a painful and tedious process of comparing two articles and picking the one that’s better. But with Helium, the real money is in the “marketplace” section, where you can compete on client writing gigs worth anywhere from $5 to $100 or more.

Triond

Triond is another content site that accepts your articles and pays you royalties for traffic.

Triond is one of the few sites known for actually sending authors the payouts they’ve earned, so it deserves mention here. However, if you want to use Triond to add an income stream to your summer writing, you’ll need to submit a very large quantity of articles that are well written with SEO in mind, and can attract a very large stream of readers from the search engines. If you can accomplish that, then yes – you can earn money from Triond.

2. Make Money Writing Reviews or Writing Letters

One of the most popular reasons many people use the Internet is to research products before buying them. This has turned “reviews” into one of the most popular types of content online. If you like writing up product reviews, then there are countless opportunities to earn income from your written opinions.

’ve written for Shared Reviews (the image above) before, because they do legitimately pay their authors. However, I’ve also heard that Epinions is another great review site to earn money from.

Have your friends ever told you that you’re amazing at writing letters? Then consider spending your summer creating custom letters at Letter Rep. Yes, the website isn’t exactly the prettiest site in the world – but by submitting letters to custom letter requests that visitors submit to the site, you stand to earn $10 per letter. Not only that, future visitors to the site can also purchase your letters, making your pile of work a wonderful source of residual income, not only throughout the summer, but even throughout the school year.

3. Quick Money for Teen Programmers

If you are an ace programmer with any programming language, you could spend your summer doing programming freelance jobs for some real cash. However, when it comes to finding freelance work, you have to be very careful what websites you visit – as most of them are useless or flat out scams.

Scriptlance is about as far from a scam as you can get. At the beginning of my online writing career, I spent months sifting through the latest project postings there (there are dozens per hour), and bidding on the ones that matched my skill set. There’s writing work, but the bulk of Scriptlance is programming work. If you post a professionally written proposal to the person who posted the project, your chance of landing the gig will be excellent. Just working on scriptlance projects alone, you could easily earn several thousand dollars by the end of the summer.

Other legitimate freelancing sites (although none quite as big as Scriptlance), include Rent A Ghost Writer, Elance, and iFreelance. Be sure to watch for new updates often, and be the first to post a bid.

Work Hard, Be Persistent, and Rake in the Dough!

The key for teens to successfully earn a small fortune during summer break through online work is by staying persistent, even when it looks like you’ll never land that first gig. Keep posting your daily articles to the royalty paying websites, and bid on freelance projects constantly. Soon, you’ll find that you have more work than you know what to do with. If you can discipline yourself to work for at least eight hours straight for every weekday during the summer – you’ll save far more money than any of your friends could earn waiting tables or mowing lawns!

Have you ever earned money from any of the sites listed in this article? Are there any good opportunities missing? Share your opinion in the comments section below.

Source: MakeUseOf.com

To which you react with horror and suspicion….

How could it be possible to increase my sales without driving more people to my site?

And the answer to that is simple:

convert more of the visitors that are already visiting your site!

Yes. Mr Cow, you say, that would be great. But do you have any actual helpful tips to, maybe, you know, help me do that?

At this point I realize that my imaginary reader is quite sarcastic today, and I might want to lighten up, because it obviously says something about my own issues.

Anyways, fear not, imaginary reader, because I certainly do have advice for you on how to improve your conversion rate without spending money on additional traffic.

The secret is: make simple changes to your website to improve its overall performance. The best part about this is, unlike buying traffic, which is a short-lived benefit (i.e. only for as long as you’re paying for it) the changes you make to optimize your conversion rate is the gift that keeps on giving.

The first thing that you need to do is figure out your list of priorities, and I can’t tell you what these should be. Look at your metrics, and find out if there’s an obvious place to start – i.e. a page where the drop-off rate is drastically higher than anywhere else on the site. If there is, then start with that page. If there isn’t an obvious place to start, then I would start with your checkout process and work out from there.

You need to identify where people abandoned the buying process, and try to figure out why. Go over those pages. Is there something that would turn a buyer off, or lose trust in you as a seller. Are you asking for too much information, or is the buying process not transparent? Look at things from a buyer’s point of view – what do you look for when you’re buying something?

Here’s a list of simple things that are easy to do that could help improve your conversion rate, without much effort on your part:

Make sure your ‘buy now’ button looks like a button
You’d be surprised how many people miss this. Your purchase button should be the most prominent thing on the page, and make sure that it’s obvious that it’s a button.

Give security assurance at the point of purchase
People want to know that they’re buying in a secure place, and that your site is a safe place for them to buy. Don’t assume they’ll see the https://, tell them about it on the page.

Make sure you’re providing what your ad promised
Even if you’re offering the same thing, if you word it differently, people may think that you’re not proving what the ad promised. (Eg. – Ad says buy one, get one half off! Website says buy 2, get 25% off both! It’s the same thing, but it sounds like a different offer.

Be clear about the whole buying process if it includes multiple steps
People don’t like thinking that they’re almost done, only to have to keep filling out page after page. By letting your customer know how long the process will take, and what information they will give and get at every stage, they’ll be less likely to drop out in the middle of the process.

Be clear about shipping charges as soon as possible, if you have any
If you’re shipping out physical product, let people know what the shipping charges are before the final checkout screen. Surprise shipping charges are the cause of a lot of mid-checkout abandonment’s.

If you’ve already done all these things, then great. Start testing other elements to see what else you can do to improve you conversion rate. If you haven’t then start now! The true benefit of these improvements is seen over a longer period of time, so the longer you wait, the less money you’ll be making.

Source: JohnCow.com

I’ve rated franchising four stars plus, because when you work with franchising, you may see sudden spikes in earnings beyond what you can imagine. This often happens as a new franchise owner starts a bidding frenzy to attract qualified prospects. So if you are playing with franchises, anything is possible (I mean it in a positive way).

Buying a franchise is one of the most popular ways of starting a business (and a relatively safe one). Franchising business opportunities vary in price tremendously. Some low cost franchises take only a few grand to get off the ground. Others cost 100K plus. A lot of people chose to hire franchise consultants, because the choice is really huge and sometimes difficult to make.

Ok, so where is the money in franchising? One way to go is to target specific franchises, like Domino’s Pizza franchise or Subway franchise. You can also pick a category – pizza franchise, retail franchise, real estate franchise.

Another profitable segment is franchise lawyers. Many company owners want to start a franchise, so they hire franchise lawyers and franchise consultants to create legal documents, rules, regulations and contracts.

And finally, there are franchise advisory companies who have contracts with dozens of franchises and get commission on every sale they make. These always look for folks searching for franchise information.

I think this about covers franchising. Of course, there are more secrets, but you’ll figure them out on your own, once you start playing with the niche.

P.S. If you have a blog or a website and enjoy information I provide at NicheGeek.Com, a link would be very much appreciated.

In order not to violate Google TOS, I rate niches with my own star system. ** – $0.20-$0.30 per click average, *** – $0.30-$0.50 per click average, **** – $0.50-$0.70 per click average, ***** – $0.70-$1.20 per click average. While I don’t mind sharing information on ***** niches, I don’t make this information publicly available because it would quickly kill these niches or get Google pissed off at me.

All AdSense niches were tested by me personally and your results shouldn’t be very different, unless your account was smart-priced, too much time passed since my testing, MFA got a hold of the niche or your site or traffic source sucks big time.

Source: NicheGeek.com

Business opportunity and homebusiness is a niche that I know very well and have had quite a success with. In fact, my most profitable website is exactly on the subject. I love to read about business opportunities and successful homebusinesses.

Here are some homebusiness and business opportunities ideas that I totally love (they are all real).

1. http://www.hungrypod.com Catherine Kean makes $100000 a year uploading CDs to other people’s iPods. She charges $1.75 per CD for the first 50 CDs, and $1.50 for each additional CD. Keane will pick up both the CDs and iPods at her clients’ homes or offices in Manhattan for an extra $15–unless they have more than 100 discs, in which case pickup is free.
2. http://www.procharms.com Here is a lady by the name of Jennifer Gonzales, who stared making Italian charms for basketball and baseball teams from home. It’s was a total success and she now employs half a dozen employees and makes very good living.
3. http://www.mannequinmadness.com This is another interesting business opp story. A woman in San Francisco makes $130000 a year reselling old mannequins. Great idea, isn’t it?

There are plenty of profitable and unusual ones. And this is where the money is.

In order not to violate Google TOS, I rate niches with my own star system. ** – $0.20-$0.30 per click average, *** – $0.30-$0.50 per click average, **** – $0.50-$0.70 per click average, ***** – $0.70-$1.20 per click average. While I don’t mind sharing information on ***** niches, I don’t make this information publicly available because it would quickly kill these niches or get Google pissed off at me.

All AdSense niches were tested by me personally and your results shouldn’t be very different, unless your account was smart-priced, too much time passed since my testing, MFA got a hold of the niche or your site or traffic source sucks big time.

Source: NicheGeek.com

MLM opportunities can be a GREAT source of income.  All you need to do is find the right one.  If you find the right system and you work the business properly you can make millions a year.  It is definately has a lot of hardwork involved but that is part of the fun of running your own business.  You aren’t ever going to get paid to sit at home watching TV so you got to work at it.  So try it out and you will be surprised how successful you can be with MLM opportunities.

Source: Retireat21.com

Making money from a blog is an interesting topic for me and among my favorite money making bloggers, I find John Chow as one of the most interesting money makers in the blogosphere, particularly because he posts his revenue details that he makes from his blog – John Chow Dot Com.

John has been posting his revenue details ever since he first monetized his blog back in September 2006 and every month I find him beating his own record. Starting with just Google AdSense, John Chow dot Com made $352.94 in its first month as a monetized blog.

John kept adding more revenue sources and on October his revenue jumped to $1,361.64! Even after that John’s earnings continued to grow – $2,139.93 in November, $2,790.05 in December, and $3,440.66 in January.

And even though February is the shortest month of the year, it did not stop John Chow’s revenue from increasing. Guess what, he earned $7,011.05 on February !

John continues to impress me with his earnings, some may say he is boasting, but I disagree. By reading John’s making money from a blog series, it helped me find more revenue sources for my blog.

Following John Chow, I found two bloggers disclosing their revenue details on their blog – Everton and Thilak.

I have listed out these three blogger’s February revenue details in the order of their earnings

• AdSense – $2,775.5 (Everton), $977.60 (John Chow), $493.32 (Thilak)
• Text Link Ads – $1,162.50 (John Chow), $319.37 (Everton), $109.9 (Thilak)
• FeedBurner Ads – $373.62 (Thilak), $240.77 (Everton), $99.80 (John Chow)
• Direct Ad Sales – $400.00 (John Chow), $150.00 (Everton), $75 (Thilak)
• ReviewMe – $2,250.00 (John Chow), $200 (Thilak), $125.00 (Everton)
• IntelliTXT – 728.24$ (Thilak), $516.98 (John Chow), $75.82 (Everton)
• Blogads – $200 (Thilak), $100.42 (Everton)
• Vizu Answers – $118.96 (Everton), $48.10 (Thilak)
• Affiliate Sales – $1,005.00 (John Chow)
• AdVolcano – $375.00 (John Chow)
• TTZ Media – $224.17 (John Chow)
• Adbrite – $1.83 (Everton)
• TribalFusion – $420.68 (Thilak)
• Chitika – $77.46 (Thilak)
• Grand Total – $7011.05 (John Chow), $3,907.67 (Everton), $2524.74 (Thilak)

Blog Traffic and Page Views

• Everton: 220K visits and 452K page views
• John Chow: 127,614 visits and 266,641 page views
• Thilak: 232,120 page views

As you can see, Everton has done very well in Adsense when compared to John Chow and Thilak, but when you compare the overall earnings, John Chow earns a lot more.

John has been successful with Text Link Ads, Direct Sales and Affiliate sales.

and had got a lot of ReviewMe orders last month which helped him to beat his old record of $3,440.66.

Thilak somehow manages to earn more in Feedburner Ads even though John Chow and Everton has more traffic and RSS readers than him. He has also done well with Intellitxt. Good going !

The reason Everton earned so low with IntelliTXT is that he has been trying it for only 1 week. Perhaps by next month IntelliTXT will be his biggest money maker.

Congrats all of you, and I hope you continue disclosing your monthly earnings. It helps us find more revenue sources worth trying out. Now if only Darren Rowse could disclose his earnings like this

I hope this post makes bloggers realize that they should not depend on just Google Adsense. May be in the beginning stage of a blog AdSense will do enough, but as your blog grows you should keep adding more revenue sources if you really want to earn from your blog. But also keep in mind that overloading your blog with Ads can make you lose readers.

Source: JohnTP.com

Here are some easy ways to make money, if you like writing. (I probably should have said simple ways to make money, rather than easy ways to make money, because there is a difference between simple and easy. But who cares, this is about how to make easy money quickly).

1. Make easy money online naming domains. The original idea comes from Dane Carson’s blog. While you can earn money as a contributor for services such as PickyDomains.Com, here is a better idea. Go to Google or any other search engine, find sucky domain names and contact their owners directly, offering them your services. The key to success is to make it 100% risk free. Inform your prospective clients that you’ll accept money only if they like your domain name. If you come up with one approved domain name a day and charge what PickyDomain charges, you can make $1500 a month. Another twist – come up with cool domain names, like SiteToRemember.Com or ItsMe.Com, register them yourself and sell them on the aftermarket.

2. eBay arbitrage. A lot of people like buying stuff on eBay, because it’s cheap. And some people never buy on eBay, because they are afraid of being ripped off. Here is your solution to making easy money on eBay. Go to Craigslist.Com and see what items people buy and sell most often. Look at prices. Then go to eBay and see, if you can get it cheaper. Once you find your niche, you can buy things on eBay (or better yet, act as a representative for an eBay powerseller) and sell them for a profit using local classifieds and Craigslist. You can do this online as well. Set up a proxy store, and when you get an order, simply buy the same item on eBay for less, substituting shipping address from your own to that of your buyer.

3. eBay copywriting. If you are good at copywriting, go to eBay and look for highticket items, like boats. Find auctions with totally sucky descriptions. Contact an owner and inform him or her that good description of his or her item is likely to increase the chances of that item being sold. Then offer your services for a 1% of the selling price. You can use free eBay software

4. Get Paid Writing Reviews. This idea comes from a blog called Business Ideas That Work. A site called SoftwareJudge.Com pays up to 50 dollars per good review. However, if you are good at reviewing software, you can do this on your own. Go to CNET or any other site that lists software. Find sites that don’t have any reviews or testimonials. Contact developers directly, offering them your review services. Good reviews and testimonials increases sales, so you shouldn’t have any difficulties convincing developers that they need your services. And you get free software and games too! Oh, and you don’t have to limit yourself to software alone.

5. Social Bookmark Whoring (oops, I meant to say PR). This is really easy money online. RedDit and Digg can bring a crapload of traffic. And traffic means money. If you have experience creating linkbate titles and getting to the top, why not offer your services? Say, you charge 10 dollars for submitting news to RedDit, Digg, StumbleUpon, Furl, NewsVine, Fark and all the other social bookmarting sites. The key is to work only with interesting stories, so you don’t become a spammer. 10 news a day and you are 100 dollars richer. You can probably work out a deal with online PR agencies, because they are totally clueless about this.

6. Writing Google AdWords Ads. Every time I see “Cake Icing. Used And New. eBay.Com” type ads or “Four best sites on killing your wife”, it makes me wonder. Aren’t there any GOOD AdWords ads copywriters? Look’s like a great job to me. The ads are only three lines long and if you charge 10 bucks per ad, you can make a lot of money. And the customers are easy to find, too. Just look at all these terrible ads that Google displays on their search engine and contextual network.

7. Wacky blogs. Steve Pavlina gets over 300 dollars a day from AdSense alone, writing on wacky topics, like polyphasic sleep, astral projection and psychic development. Or take David Icke, who claims that president Bush in an alien and a reptilian. Your blog doesn’t have to be true, it just has to be interesting.

8. Blog whoring. There are a number of services, like PayPerPost.Com, that pay for promotional blogposts. Once again, you can do the same thing, cutting the middleman out.

9. Unique Personal Ads. Write memorable personal ads for online daters. Most personal ads suck. “Hi, my name is Bambie, I’m a Vergo, I’m 19 and I love dogs.” Here is my favorite personal ad. If people pay for resume writing, they might pay for a great personal ad.

10. Poet For Hire. This is nothing new. Still, if you love writing poetry, why not make some money with your rhymes.

Source: NicheGeek.com

1) Million Dollar Homepage

1000000 pixels, charge a dollar per pixel – that’s perhaps the dumbest idea for online business anyone could have possible come up with. Still, Alex Tew, a 21-year-old who came up with the idea, is now a millionaire.

2) SantaMail

Ok, how’s that for a brilliant idea. Get a postal address at North Pole, Alaska, pretend you are Santa Claus and charge parents 10 bucks for every letter you send to their kids? Well, Byron Reese sent over 200000 letters since the start of the business in 2001, which makes him a couple million dollars richer. Full Story

3) Doggles

Create goggles for dogs and sell them online? Boy, this IS the dumbest idea for a business. How in the world did they manage to become millionaires and have shops all over the world with that one? Beyond me.

4) LaserMonks

LaserMonks.com is a for-profit subsidiary of the Cistercian Abbey of Our Lady of Spring Bank, an eight-monk monastery in the hills of Monroe County, 90 miles northwest of Madison. Yeah, real monks refilling your cartridges. Hallelujah! Their 2005 sales were $2.5 million! Praise the Lord. Full Story

5) AntennaBalls

You can’t sell antenna ball online. There is no way. And surely it wouldn’t make you rich. But this is exactly what Jason Wall did, and now he is now a millionaire. Full Story

6) FitDeck

Create a deck of cards featuring exercise routines, and sell it online for $18.95. Sounds like a disaster idea to me. But former Navy SEAL and fitness instructor Phil Black reported last year sales of $4.7 million. Surely beats what military pays.

7) PositivesDating.Com

How would you like to go on a date with an HIV positive person? Paul Graves and Brandon Koechlin thought that someone would, so they created a dating site for HIV positive folks last year. Projected 2006 sales are $110,000, and the two hope to have 50,000 members by their two-year mark.

8 ) Designer Diaper Bags

Christie Rein was tired of carrying diapers around in a freezer bag. The 34-year-old mother of three found herself constantly stuffing diapers for her infant son into freezer bags to keep them from getting scrunched up in her purse. Rein wanted something that was compact, sleek and stylish, so in November 2004, she sat down with her husband, Marcus, who helped her design a custom diaper bag that’s big enough to hold a travel pack of wipes and two to four diapers. With more than $180,000 in sales for 2005, Christie’s company, Diapees & Wipees, has bags in 22 different styles, available online and in 120 boutiques across the globe for $14.99.

9) PickyDomains

Hire another person to think of a cool domain name for you? No way people would pay for this. Actually, naming domain names for others turned out a thriving business, especially, when you make the entire process risk free. PickyDomains currently has a waiting list of people who want to PAY the service to come up with a snappy memorable domain name. PickyDomains is expected to hit six figures this year.  Full Story

10) Lucky Wishbone Co.

Fake wishbones. Now, this stupid idea is just destined to flop. Who in the world needs FAKE PLASTIC wishbones? A lot of people, it turns out. Now producing 30,000 wishbones daily (they retail for 3 bucks a pop) Ken Ahroni, the company founder, expects 2006 sales to reach $1 million.

Source: NicheGeek.com

Kontera ContentLinks is a way to advertise on your website without giving up advertising space on your website/blog.  How it works is it picks certain keywords within the content of your website and it puts a double line under it and makes it into a popup ad when you move your mouse over it.  While doing some research on this advertiser I found out that it is possible to change the double underline link to a single underline link using code provided by Kontera (but not default code).  Before I show you how to do this I want to tell you why I haven’t done this on my blog first.

One of the main reasons why I haven’t done this on my blog is because it can confuse the readers of my blog and could possibly frustrate them.  If they unknowingly click on the link because they thought it was a hyperlink they might not be very happy.  By having the keywords double underlined they know it is not a regular hyperlink and they can click it if they want.  The second reason why I haven’t changed my Kontera ContentLink’s to have a single underline is because when I tested it for one day with a single underline it dropped my CTR.  It is possible that people will not even know that the ads are there and therefore never check them out.

Before testing single underline links for a one day trial period on my website I contacted Kontera just to make sure this test I was doing wouldn’t go against their rules and this is what they had to say:

Changing the links from double into a single underline isn’t against our TOS, however we do not recommend it. We don’t want to  confuse or mislead users into unknowingly clicking on ContentLinks and that’s the reason for using the easily identifiable double underline to differentiate them from regular links.

So now that I have explained why I haven’t applied this change on my website I will show you how you can test it yourself if you like with your Kontera ContentLink ads.  All you need to do is add the following line of code to your Kontera ContentLink code:

var dc_single_line = ‘yes’;

So it is up to you whether you would like to try this out or not.  Maybe it will work for you but use your judgment whether you think it is the right decision or not for your website.