Like most people my first foray into monetizing my websites was Google AdSense. It paid pretty well per click and made me enough for a few nights out every month. Recently I have been more involved on the other end as an advertiser. Using AdWords let me really understand what a total BS AdSense is and how much publishers get screwed.

Before I jump into my problems with AdSense I just want to let you know that this problem exists across other networks, I just happened to notice it on the Google.

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Before I kick things off, I want to thank all of you who have been posting your comments. They are great and help me discover new things every day.

Anyway I build websites both for fun and as a way to experiment with SEO. Recently I have been working on monetizing these projects just to see what the “make money online” hoopla is all about. I don’t make enough to retire, but its fun non the less.

One website I threw up had to do with DRM Free Movies. It was one of my early projects and I have not had the time to really build a valuable website. It did receive about 20 to 30 unique visitors, so I decided to throw up some AdSense, Amazon, and AdBrite to the site to see if I can monetize the traffic. I made about 50 cents to a dollar a day which was nice.

A few days ago I checked my analytics, and lo and behold I was receiving 0 traffic. I investigated to see if the site was still ranking for the keywords, and of course it was not. What was interesting is that the “brand name” still ranked the website, but all of the keywords I was targeting do not.

I believe it was due to human review that my site was removed. Thanks to Rose who posted a comment on Google Human Review and sent a link to SPAM Guidelines.

Lets use this opportunity to learn what NOT to do and how to avoid a Google penalty.

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Recently my AdSense earnings have been dropping significantly (yes I hate Google, but I gotta pay the bills). For a while I was wondering what the hell was going on. Well my theories are correct and advertisers are pulling their ad money out of AdSense due to the recession. he clicks remained high but the payout dropped significantly indicating there are less people bidding on many of the terms I am going after. You can check out a good summary about it at Google AdSense Down.

I decided to try my hand on using AdWords PPC and affiliate marketing to make up for the loss of revenue. I realized that now is the perfect time to use PPC to make money from affiliates. My findings below:

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