By: Robert Greco

By now you should understand the power behind one the nets most powerful classified ad sites around; Craigslist. It makes no difference; buying or selling or running an online business, craigslist is a must for any netreprenuer looking to make money on craigslist. Before you decide to go out and make money on craigslist, understand that having a solid foundation in what makes craigslist tick takes priority.

If not, you may get blacklisted or receive a nasty letter from the good folks at craigslist. What you are about to learn, in order to make money on craigslist, is to be used at your own discretion.

Remember, there is no secret weapon or loophole to be found in order to make money on craigslist. However you are about to learn untold methods and procedures needed in order to be successful on craigslist.It doesnt matter what you sell or promote in order to make money on craigslist. It’s the marketing methods and procedures that will turn $1.00 into $1,000.00 right before your eyes! So let’s get started…

Simply Trick to Make Money on CraigslistOne of the most popular complaints from Craigslist users looking to make money on craigslist is that their posting(s) doesnt get published. Even after confirmation, some ads do not get posted and user end up getting very frustrated. There are many reasons these ads do not get published. Rather than overwhelming your brain with details, let’s look at a basic fact of craigslist that gets users banned on a routine basis.First, we must understand Craigslist guidelines. Posting guidelines set by Craigslist are pretty straight forward.

As far as posting time-frames are concerned, Craigslist specifies that you can only post one (1) ad per 48 hours. Number One Rule: Don’t Over-Post… “Over-posting” is a huge problem that leads to ads not being published. But why is it that “over-posting” causes ads from not being published?Simply enough, “over-posting” creates a spam. If you are serious and want to make money on craigslist, then don’t spam!

Think about it for a second….why was Craigslist created? Craigslist was created to connect people on a LOCAL basis. If you were to post the same ad to 35 cities in 35 different states you are no longer using Craigslist in the way it was meant for and therefore you are spamming.Keep in mind that Craigslist software is very intelligent. Their software notices that multiple ads (similar, if not the same) have been posted multiple times. When this happens the “Spam Flag” (as I call it) pops up and your ad (even after confirmation) is labeled “spam” and removed from the classifieds. How can you make money on craigslist if all your ads get flagged as spam?The bigger question remains. How can multiple listings be published without Craigslist removing the ad? This question has a really long answer because there is not one simple answer.

So, let’s talk about one way to get your ad to stick on craigslist without be flagged by user or flagged as spam by craigslist.If you want to make money on craigslist, you need to use different email addresses. A simple task that is overlooked by many can be the difference between getting an ad posted on Craigslist and not getting an ad posted on Craigslist.

Remember, you goal is to make money on craigslist, not get you IP banned.Why would using different email addresses change anything and/or improve your posting success rate? If you have 10 ads or 10 items for sale that you would like to post a classified for these items you can do one of two things. One, you can post all 10 ads with the same email address and probably get 75% of your ads deleted by the Craigslist software robot within seconds of posting you ads.

Two, you can create multiple email address giving each of your ads its own identity. The best scenario in this situation in order to make money on craiglist would be for you to create 10 different accounts. In turn, this creates 10 different postings as Craigslist looks for similar/identical posting including everything from email addresses to page links. FYI - Just because you have 10 different email addresses does not mean that all 10 ads will get posted.

This technique does however greatly increase your odds in having your classified posts live and not deleted by Craigslist. Remember, in order to make money on craigslist you want all your ads to be different. It does not matter if the difference is a word or a number. At this current point in time the best provider you can use is Gmail.

Craigslist has the power to block IP addresses, block IP providers, block mail providers and so forth. Google is an internet god (not to be confused with the real “God”) it would not be in Craigslist’s best interest to block Gmail accounts. Craigslist would lose tons of revenue and visitors if they did so. For the time being, use Gmail as your primary source.You can create a Gmail login name in under three minutes; it’s fast, easy and free. Personally I can create over 400 email accounts per hour!

Keep in mind I would use a personal hosting account. And yes, I have created over 400 accounts in one hour… Creating hundreds of mail accounts is highly encouraged if you plan to make money on craigslist.

Read the full article to Make Money on Craigslist

A Silicon Valley company run by a 12-year-old CEO has just raised $6.5 million in venture capital.

PlaySpan, based in Santa Clara, Calif. says it offers game publishers a technology that lets users make payments and shop for other items. It calls itself the first “publisher-sponsored in-game commerce network.”

Arjun Mehta, a 6th grader, says on his Web site that he is passionate about software that can make the game experience more “rewarding,” and that he started the company last year in his garage. He paid for it from earnings made from selling online game items he won from quests he fought.

This has got to be downright depressing for most budding entrepreneurs, most of whom strike out while pitching investors for funds, even in their 30s or 40s.

This is the second company led by a middle-schooler of south Asian heritage. In May we wrote about 13-year old founder and chief executive, Anshul Samar, who runs an educational gaming company.

The difference is that PlaySpan is making all the sounds of a traditional silicon valley company, right down to the slick web site and a press release manufactured by a PR firm that is barely decipherable. Mehta will probably learn to write his own press releases within a year

New York based Easton Capital led the funding round, along with Silicon Valley based Menlo Ventures, South Korea based STIC International and Hong Kong based Novel TMT Ventures.

The release said the market for “in-game commerce” has surpassed $2 billion this year and continues its rapid growth as more publishers adopt micro-transaction based revenue models.
Shawn Carolan,of Menlo Ventures, has some experience with gaming, as a board member of virtual world game, IMVU. The young Mehta even knows how to pick his VCs.

Venturebeat

Yahoo has acquired online ad exchange company, Right Media, for $680 million, a move that shows Yahoo is not resting in the wake of Google’s purchase of banner ad company Doubleclick earlier this month.

Right Media is notable because it is an ad exchange, where buyers of Internet ads (publishers) and sellers (advertisers) can find each other and negotiate prices with the efficiency created by a large marketplace. This is significant because it is more transparent than Google’s platform for publishers, Adsense — and could therefore give Yahoo a small advantage in its battle against the Google juggernaut. See coverage of Right Media, when it got a $45 million cash infusion from Yahoo and Redpoint Ventures in October. Right Media had previously raised an additional $7.5 million from Redpoint (see the coverage).

It is growing quickly, and in October boasted two billion ad impressions a day being bought on it. Chief executive Mike Walrath told us at the time it is the largest such marketplace. It takes “less than 10 percent cut” as middleman from each transaction, which is not enough to scare customers away, but still enough to generate a healthy income. Walrath said at the time his biggest competitors are Microsoft and Google.

The $680 million acquisition represents a major home-run for Walrath, who started Right Media in 2003. It is also a relief for venture capital firm Redpoint Ventures, which has been searching for its first major win ever since the young firm opened its doors at the height of the boom in late 1999.

The deal lets Google purchase the remaining 80% of New York-based Right Media Inc doesn’t already own.

BlogForward Money

Google announced late on Friday that it would purchase online advertising firm DoubleClick for $3.1 billion in cash from its two primary owners, the private equity firms of Hellman & Friedman and JMI Equity.

In addition to picking up a second form of advertising to compliment its AdSense technology, Google gets demographic data and the tools to gather such information, plus DoubleClick’s clients.

The combination of Google , which was also in talks to acquire DoubleClick. The Wall Street Journal reported of the talk in late March, saying DoubleClick was talking to the Redmond company “and other potential suitors.” Other suitors were believed to be Yahoo and AOL.

If the deal is approved, it should close by the end of the year. The DoubleClick acquisition comes just six months after Google paid $1.65 billion for YouTube.

DoubleClick was an early pioneer in online advertising and one of the few dot com success stories to survive the dot com implosion earlier in the decade. The company was taken private in 2005 for by the two private equity firms for $1.1 billion.

Last year, DoubleClick acquired Klipmart, the US’s largest provider of online video advertising and management solutions for Web publishers.

Google declined to give financial details on DoubleClick. According to the New York Times, DoubleClick generated about $300 million in revenue last year.

BlogForward Money

Google AdSense is probably one of the most popular revenue generators in the Web. We hear the stories about bloggers-genies, who manage to turn their blogs into cash machines overnight. However, it’s not that simple to find the actual tips, which stick to Google policies, might increase your revenues and don’t try to trick out the readers of your weblog.

Vitaly Friedman & Sven Lennartz spent several hours, trying to find out, what might increase your Google AdSense income and which tools you can use to observe and track your revenues. They selected the key-points of successful stories and useful tips as well as Google AdSense sites and services you can use on a daily basis.

Things You Probably Don’t Know About Google AdSense

• “AdSense Earning = Impression-count x Click-though-rate x Cost-per-click x smart-pricing-factor. Viewing your on website will not get you banned. Just make sure you don’t click on the ads. However, repeatedly reload your page to jack up page impressions can get you banned. Click-through-rate (CTR) is ratio of clicks per impressions. It can range from 0.1% to 30%, but most commonly around 1% to 10%.” [100 Google Adsense Tips]
• “First impressions count: make sure the ad unit with the highest CTR is the first ad unit in the HTML code of your page. Keep in mind that the first ad unit in the source code is not always the first ad unit that your users will see when the page finishes loading in their browser.” [Inside AdSense: First impressions count]
• “Ads placed near rich content and navigational aids usually do well because users are focused on those areas of a page. on pages where users are typically focused on reading an article, ads placed directly below the end of the editorial content tend to perform very well.”[Where should I place Google ads on my pages?]
• “Format is important for multiple ad units, display your ad units where repeat users will notice them, place a leaderboard immediately after the last post.” [Six AdSense optimization tips for forums]
• “The middle, above the fold location performs the best. Best performing ad format is the large rectangle, 336×280. So the wider ad formats are doing better than the other ones and the reason is that they actually take up fewer lines. And so with every additional line, you have a chance of losing that interested user. So the wider formats do best so specifically, the top three formats are the 336×280 that you see on the page; the 300×250 medium rectangle; and then the 160×600 wide skyscraper. We have a feature in the AdSense account where you are able to multi-select different color palettes that blend with your site to add some variety and freshness to the ads. And that also will help decrease ad blindness.” [Google AdSense Optimization Webinar]
• “The second most active placement in terms of click-throughs tends to be the right-hand rail or margin”. “Skyscrapers” and vertical banners do well when placed next to the content in the main body. Square and rectangle ads placed within the center column also do well, provided they are placed in context to the content. Ads placed below the fold tend to perform least well, although that isn’t a hard-and-fast rule.” [Yahoo! Publisher Network: Location, location, location…]
• “I found the most success in placing the Google Adsense medium rectangle either right in the middle of the page or in a middle right column as long as it has content above and below the ad unit. Its is fine to use Adsense Ads on a forum however expect a very low CTR.” [Google Adsense Tips for Webmasters]
• “Post Adsense ads on text rich pages, avoid titles like the approved ‘Sponsored Links’ and ‘Advertisements’, place Ads above the fold, Match the colors of your ads with the colour scheme of your site, Blend ads with your page - remove the borders by having a similar color as your background.” [How to Increase Google Adsense CTR]
• “To remove Public Service Ads (PSA) in Google Adsense develop sufficient good content with keywords, Ensure that META tags like ‘title’ & ‘description’ and the headings tags like h1, h2 etc. have content which matches the rest of your site.” [How to Remove Public Service Ads (PSA) in Google Adsense]
• “You can now run AdSense on the same page as other contextual ad programs.” [It’s official! You can now run AdSense on the same page as other contextual ad programs]
• “Google AdSense Policy: We ask that publishers not line up images and ads in a way that suggests a relationship between the images and the ads.” [ Inside AdSense: Ad and image placement: a policy clarification ]
• “Section targeting uses certain html tweaks to force the google adsense bot to focus on specific content. Section targeting is the latest and most effective addition to AdSense”. [Display Relevant Adsense Ads Using Section Targeting]
• “Over the weekend, I decided to change the number of ads units on my blog based upon where the traffic is coming from. I have a small PHP function that checks to see if the referrer is a search engine, and if it is, I display and additional 2 ad units. My Adsense revenue increasing by 284% on Saturday, Sunday and Monday!” [Positive Adsense Experiment]
• “Never click your own adsense ads or get them clicked for whatever reason. Never change the Adsense code. Do not run competitive contextual text ad or search services on the same site. Do not mask ad elements. Avoid excessive advertising and keyword stuffing.” [ 15 Common Mistakes that Violate Google Adsense TOS ]
• “Putting ads on your site won’t hurt your traffic. There are 6 sorts of bloggers’ income:
• Google Adsense, Donations (e.g. PayPal), Text Link Ads (sold for a fixed amount per month),
  Chitika eMiniMalls ads (pay per click), affiliate programs like Amazon, Advertising sold to individual advertisers (three-month campaigns or longer) [How to Make Money From Your Blog - a VERY extensive article]
• “A number of factors come into play when AdSense tries to determine what the page is about: The URL of the page, the page title, the anchor text of links, the keywords that appear most frequently within the page, search engine queries that lead to the page or to another page that links to the page”. [How to Get Relevant AdSense Ads (Especially For Bloggers)]
• “Ask yourself if you are willing to compromise your blog’s layout and over-all feel by adding ads in them. Look at your traffic and see if it’s enough to draw the crowd. Make good use of the Ad Channels. Give it time.” [Tips on Blog Adsensification]
• “You can put upto 3 AdSense units on a page. For short articles, CTR is best when ads are placed just above the content. For long articles, CTR improves if ads are placed somewhere in middle of the content. Go Wide - the large rectangle 336×280 is the best paying adsense format.” [Adsense Tips, Layout Optimization Tricks for HigherCTR]
• “Google AdSense folks have unveiled another useful feature for Adsense publishers - Section Targeting. The concept is simple but the advantages and possibilities are endless.” [Display relevant Ads in Blogs: Just suggest Google]

Google AdSense: Google’s Information and Tools

• Google AdSense FAQ: the Adsense support for official guidelines.
• Google AdSense Help Page provides a very detailed FAQ about Google AdSense. Learn optimization essentials, how to design successful ads, savvy ad placement and how to use features wisely.
• Google Adsense Program Policies.
• Google AdSense Ad Formats: an overview.
• Google AdSense Success Stories provided by Google itself. Many interesting insights in concrete decisions, which helped to increase Google AdSense revenues.
• Google AdWords: Keyword-Tool: The Keyword Tool generates potential keywords for your ad campaign and reports their Google statistics, including search performance and seasonal trends. Start your search by entering your own keyword phrases or a specific URL. You can then add new keywords to the green box at the right.

Google AdSense Tools, Services

• Getting The Most Out Of Adsense: Top 10 Adsense Tools: Contextual Ads Preview/Comparison Tool (for Google Adsense, Yahoo YPN, Chitika eMiniMalls), AdSense Calculator, AdSense SandBox, AdWords Bidding Tool/Traffic Estimator.
• List of AdSense Trackers: 15 AdSense trackers.
• AdWords and AdSense tools directory: 1200 tools and services for Google AdWords and Google AdSense.
• Google Adsense Tips and Tools Collection: a compilation of common Google tips and tools to make more money from Google Adsense. Among them dozens of AdSense Tools.
• AdLogger » Open-Source Click Fraud Prevention and Click Monitoring intends to prevent click-fraud on your websites by tracking visitors clicks and limiting the number of clicks one may make. AdLogger tracks AdSense clicks in real time and compiles the data for you to review.
• AdsBlackList.com - Filter them and increase your revenue !: increase your adsense revenue up to 50%, increase the reputation of your website by NOT linking to Made for Adsense sites, save the quality of contextual advertising in global.
• Adsense Notifier displays your Adsense earnings on the Firefox statusbar.
• AdSense Tracking Software | The Cutting-Edge Ad Tracking Solution reveals the precise AdSense Ads that are being clicked most frequently on your site, the exact pages that your AdSense Ads are being clicked on, the actual Ad Formats that are bringing you the most clicks and more.
• Free Charts Generated from your Google Adsense Reports: Charts include: total earnings, clickthru-rate, earnings per click, number of clicks, earnings per impression, number of page impressions, earnings by day of week and earnings by day of month. Most of charts include 7-day moving averages which allow you to spot trends within your results.
• Using The Competitive Ad Filter To Increase AdSense Earnings: The purpose of the Competitive Ad Filter is to enable you to block specific ads, such as competitor’s ads, from appearing on your pages.

Google AdSense Tips, Resources

• Adsense Tips for Bloggers: an extensive series of articles on how to make money from the Google Adsense Program. By Problogger Darren Rowse.
• 16 Adsense Optimized Wordpress Themes to Maximize your Contextual Ad Earnings: Ads Minded, Typo XP Reloaded, Seo AdSense and Problogger Clean.
• 10 Best Wordpress Plugins for Google Adsense: among them AdSense Deluxe, AdRotator Wordpress Plugin.
• Monetizing WordPress Plugins: an overview of 8 AdSense-Plugins you can use with Wordpress blog engine. AdSense Widget Wordpress Sidebar, AdSense Paster, AdSense Injection and more.
• What are alternatives to Google AdSense?: 46 alternatives, among them Yahoo Publisher Network, Chitika. Over 70 more services can be found on Other Advertising Networks Besides Google AdSense
• AdSense Forum is one of the most popular AdSense-related forums in the Web with thousands of questions and answers.
• How To Market Your Blog in 2007: 41 ways to kickstart your marketing efforts.
• AdSense Niches: If you want to make money with Adsense, NicheGeek’s free AdSense niches will show you exactly what niche you need to be in if you want to make 20, 30, 50, 70 cents per click or even more.

by Vitaly Friedman & Sven Lennartz

1. Text Link Ads (aff) - the team at TLA have gradually built a loyal publisher list over the past few months but providing an ad system that may not be as flashy or spectacular as AdSense in some senses but which works. Interestingly - I’ve chatted with a number of smaller bloggers over the past few weeks who say that TLA actually is their biggest earner. This is because it is not reliant upon clicks or traffic at all and is a very passive income for a blog that over time grows as more advertisers buy links. I spoke to an owner of a lesser known blog network recently and he told me that his network is earning five figures a month with TLA.

2. Amazon Associates - some publishers laugh off Amazon as not being worth the effort because the payouts are so small (4-6% in post cases) but I’ve chatted with a few publishers this week who are doing very well from Amazon. The advantage of Amazon over many affiliate programs is that they are a trusted brand. If you pick the right products to promote you can actually do quite well from them. I chatted with a publisher this week who is promoting lawn mowers and power tools on Amazon. Sell a $2000 tractor/mower a few times a week and it certainly adds up.

3. Chitika (aff) - as unpopular as they became with some publishers in their early days of launching they continue to be a big earner for some bloggers. They continue to be neck and neck with AdSense for me in the earnings they bring in. They continue to improve their products and expand what they offer in terms of channels, their recent launch of shoplinc etc and I know of a few product oriented bloggers who make more from them than anything else.

4. YPN - Yahoo’s contextual advertising system is still in beta (it has been a longer process than many expected) and is yet to fully compete with AdSense. I’ve given it a go (via b5’s account) and wasn’t too impressed with how it converted here at ProBlogger but do know of some bloggers who continue to find that it does well for them. I think it’s a blog by blog proposition but is definitely an ad network to consider if you can get into the beta test.

5. Direct Ad Sales - another emerging trend among bloggers (and networks of them) is the increased focus upon direct deals that are being done between bloggers and advertisers (and their representatives). This month I had a sponsorship with Canon on one of my blogs that has been well worth while and I know at b5media we are finding more and more advertisers willing to do deals as the word gets out that blogs are online real estate that converts pretty well for them. It’s not always easy to negotiate these deals as a single blogger with a relatively small readership but we’re now seeing networks of bloggers banding together which makes it much easier to negotiate such deals.

6. Product Bloggers - while there are not a lot of examples of this yet I suspect that 2007 will be a year that quite a few bloggers will launch products in their niches. Bloggers are starting to switch onto the fact that after a year or two of blogging on a topic that they are sitting upon a goldmine of information and expertise that can be reused in other forums. While this past year saw a number of bloggers release books I know of quite a few who are working up to releasing online information products, membership sites and coaching services in their areas of expertise. Whether they succeed or not is yet to be seen but it’s a logical next step for many bloggers.

Of course there are many other AdSense Alternatives out there for publishers also. The variety of systems open to publishers surely is having some impact upon AdSense and what people are earning with it.

[read full article and discussion at proBlogger]