Jennifer Slegg - Search Engine Marketing Consultant |

Being a top AdSense expert, I inevitably get many emails from publishers who have gotten their AdSense account suspended and then I get the sob story about how they won’t be able to pay their mortgage, they will have to let all their employees, etc etc. Trust me, I have heard it all! But regardless of their AdSense account being suspended, the real reason of their immediate money issues is the fact that they had all their eggs in one basket… in this case the AdSense basket. The same can go for someone who is working one killer affiliate program that suddenly ceases to exist one day, and is left with no viable alternative option to slip into the deceased affiliate program’s place.

The same applies for those that have their one killer website… their pride and joy, but unfortunately the one that brings in 95% of all their income. If you are old school SEO enough, you will remember that many people found themselves in this position when the now-infamous Florida update hit in November 16th, 2003. When Google updated their algorithm (which wasn’t done in a continuous style back then like it is now) that day, the forums lit up with people whose websites literally stopped getting any Google traffic overnight. And with the huge Google share even back then meant that people who were living the good life with their Google rankings suddenly found themselves scrambling in panic-mode to not only restore their rankings but to also restore the sudden loss of income, whether AdSense, affiliate income, or other.

So if you are one of those who has most of your eggs precariously balanced in a single basket, here is what you can do to diversify a bit so that you won’t have to go into panic-mode when disaster strikes your bottom line, and why you should do it. Keep reading…

Not all of us have hit the household status we all wish our company names had. So if you aren’t a Sony or a WalMart, have you ever considered the fact that someone might be trying to find your company or product and either spelling it wrong or searching for a slight variation because the person who recommended you pronounced it incorrectly? And even the best SEO can’t rank your site number one for every single variation of your company name or brand. The last thing you want to do is lose those potential customers to competitors, when they were trying to find your site in the first place.

If you are lucky, Google might direct some of those misspellings to your site via their “Did you mean: ____” hint that it shows above the results when they believe there is a good chance that someone made a typo. But you have to be pretty well known to have Google do that for all your potential misspellings and typos of your company name. Keep reading…

Sometimes it is nice not to have to rely on Google AdSense or various CPM, CPA or CPC networks to generate revenue for your blog or website. And it is even nicer when you can supplement that income with additional revenue generated from direct buy advertisers, meaning they are advertisers that want to advertise directly on your blog without having to go through a middle man - meaning the advertiser gets more bang for their buck and you get the entire advertiser’s ad spend for your site without having to share it with a third party who takes a cut of your profits.

When you reach a certain level of traffic and repeat visitors, especially if you are well known as an authority in your space, it is often more profitable for you to solicit advertising directly, as opposed to using a third party such as AdSense or a CPM network for your advertising. What is the certain level? It will vary depending on your niche or market area, but if you are one of the top blogs or websites in that area, you can likely command the money to make it worth the effort of doing it.

Many people don’t want to deal with the added workload it takes to sell advertising directly, when they might only make an extra hundred dollars a month, but when you could be bringing in an extra ten, twenty or thirty thousand a month, usually the annoyance of the bit of extra work isn’t as much of a concern.

So now that you’ve decided to make the jump and accept direct buy advertisers, here is how you should do it to ensure that you aren’t leaving any money on the table and are making the process as user friendly for those advertisers as possible. Keep reading…