I’m used to being treated in a racist manner, and while I was miffed about not being allowed in the AdSense referral club anymore, I didn’t actually have it on my site so I didn’t cry into my pillow or anything.

But Darren is clearly upset, and fair enough. First he read about it on Google’s blog, and then he received one of those impersonal, ‘no-reply’ emails. After all the referrals he sent them for AdSense!

It reminds me – in a very random sense – of that TV show Big Love, about the polygamous Fundamentalists in Utah. Google had all these relationships, but is now casting people aside because it doesn’t need them anymore. That results in hurt and anger. Haven’t you heard of Fatal Attraction, Google?

(Disclaimer: Rich Minx means Google no harm, wishes them all the best and will not touch their pet rabbit.) 

So after over a week of non-blogging and non-blog activity in general, I check my RSS to discover that Google PageRank has changed and some major bloggers have dropped, inexplicably, from a PR7 to a PR4.  Godoogle works in mysterious ways.

Meanwhile, RichMinx.com celebrates a PR8, despite erratic blogging times. Wait – my page rank indicator was cached. It’s still PR0. Which reads like ‘PRO’, so it’s not all bad.

Some of the big bloggers out there are being very chin up about the whole thing. There’s a real element of Pollyanna: “Well, I got bitch-slapped by Google, but that’s okay; I understand that the beatings must continue until morale improves.” Nonsense! Come on, BBs, let’s have some Chris Crocker style hysteria.

“And how DARE Google lower my PAGERANK! All you Google people CARE ABOUT is your money and SEARCH engine! All you want is more, more, MORE! Leave my PageRank ALONE right NOW! Please…” *Sob*

But before you get all worked up and think the $144 is one month’s Minx earnings, think again. The $144 has been slowly accruing since 2004, when I started my first blog (a travel blog about living in Berlin) and haphazardly added some of the world’s first AdSense ads. My profits grew slowly, my blogs changed, and here we are now at the grand total of $144 dated to the end of June 2007.

So, $144. Should I invest it? Should I start a new business? Should I buy a one-way bus ticket to a new life? No, it’s going towards my overdraft.

Thank you, Google.

If you are unsure what Google AdWords is, and whether it’s worth signing up, click here to see a post I wrote about it a while back. But basically it’s paying (per click) to advertise on Google or on sites that run Google ads. You control the keywords and your daily spend, among other things.

What is a Google Advertising Professional?

A GAP is someone who has enough experience with AdWords to take a test and pass it, as well as meeting the other requirements. Once that’s done, they’re officially recognized by Google as a Qualified Individual (see below for the benefits). The procedure is:

• You pay $50 to sit the test and you must pass with 75% or higher.
• Visit their Learning Center and read/watch the tutorials about AdWords, AdSense and Analytics.
• Set up a My Client Center page in Your AdWords account where you manage your own campaigns and/or someone else’s for at least 90 days.
• Have spent the equivalent of about $1000 on the campaigns during that time (if you are an experienced AdWords user you should at least make that money back through whatever your conversion goal is – subscribers, sales etc).

Why bother?

• It’s another income source.
  
• More and more businesses want to advertise on Google but don’t have the pay-per-click advertising know-how. Help them!
• It’s a qualification that isn’t too hard to achieve if you’re familiar with AdWords or are willing to learn, and gives you more knowledge about how to run Analytics and AdSense as well.
• You’ve given access to an official logo, your own Status Page and marketing tools to help with future campaigns and attract more clients.
• If you enjoy stuff like affiliate marketing, PPC advertising, checking stats, selecting keywords and all that sort of geekery, you’ll have fun!

How do you use your qualification, Rich Minx?

To be honest, I haven’t really built up my Status Page or worked very hard on my own campaigns lately (which are affiliate-related) since taking off on this world trip I’m on, but my GAP has helped me market myself on my resumé and meant that a few people/companies have trusted me to manage their campaigns this year.

Interested? Sign up for the GAP exam, or sign up for AdWords.

Google AdSense tries so hard but it really needs to paws and think sometimes.

I was reading a post about bloggermeister John Chow when I glanced over to the ads on the sidebar and saw this.

Like this post? Buy me a Chow Chow puppy.

I call them my ‘magic bean’ shares because they have increased a lot since I bought them, at the beginning of 2005, for $180 each. It’s not magic, but it may as well be because the only reason I bought them at the time was because I ‘liked Google’ and ‘had faith’ that it was a good foot in the door of investing. Pretty lame, but luckily for me it has been a successful, if volatile, investment. I say volatile because news about Google occurs on a daily basis. Who are they buying? What are they hiding? What are they releasing? The price ebbs and flows like the tide, though it mostly hovers in the late $400s.

Rich Woman calls such stocks ‘bad boy shares‘ in an attempt to get my silly female brain to understand the market. Google’s like a bad boy: unpredictable, a little wild, a little exciting. Maybe rewarding now, but do we have a future together?

If I were to consider buying Google shares today I’d know to look at its balance sheet and income statement. How does its gross profit compare with the last quarter? How much does it invest in new projects and research? It has a much higher Price/Earnings ratio than most companies: 31.2. Does that mean it’s overvalued? Fool users have mixed opinions.

It’s risky, no doubt. I certainly wouldn’t invest all my money in Google shares, and my other funds are doing well but traveling skywards at a more leisurely and predictable pace. ‘Nice guy shares‘. You generally know where you are with them.

I certainly have much more to learn about investing yet, but I’m willing to hold on to my magic beans for some time.

What investments do you have? Are they bad boys or nice guys? Recommend any good books on trading?

What is AdWords?
AdWords is a pay per click Google advertising product that lets you sign up for an account, choose your daily spending budget, write some ads for the site you want to promote and add some related keywords where you want your ad to appear. When Google users search under those keywords, your ad will appear depending on how much you are spending per click.

Reasons for using AdWords:

• You control your daily budget. You can spend as little as 10c a day if you want. When your budget has run out, your ads stop appearing.
• You control (mostly) when and where your ad shows on Google.
• You only pay when users click on your ad, not when it is displayed.
• Used correctly, AdWords can help you get more targeted traffic to your site, and if you set up the conversion option it can also help you track your sales/signups from visitors who arrived via AdWords.

Reasons against using AdWords:

• There is no guarantee that people who click on your ad will buy/sign up for something. Your spend on AdWords may not pay for itself if your campaign is not optimized.
• Maybe there is too much competition for your keywords and your ad appears far down the ad list on Google, or not at all.
• You may prefer to concentrate only on optimizing your site for ‘organic’ (natural) searches which are harder to control but are free.

Tips for optimizing your AdSense campaign:

• Geotargeting. Google lets you decide which countries/cities to target. Where are most of your readers? Where is your content targeted?
• AdWords for Search, not Content. AdWords can appear in Google search results (Search) or in the AdSense ads of similar sites (Content). I personally find switching off AdWords for Content helps optimize my campaign.
• Timing your display. You can choose to bid more during key seasons/days/times. If you’re selling stuff, maybe there’s a time where it’s worth bidding more to appear higher. Check your stats for indications of traffic fluctuations.
• Create multiple ad groups with specific keywords. Organizing your campaigns helps you keep track of what’s working. Don’t use vague, expensive keywords. Use niche keywords that will ensure users clicking to your site get exactly what they wanted.
• Use the Keyword Tool. Google’s keyword tool generates variations of your most popular keywords, suggesting some you (and other advertisers) may not have considered.
• Use Negative Keyword Searches. If you want to appear under the keywords ‘women money’ but not ‘women money sex’, a negative keyword search will accomplish this!
• Create beautiful ad text. Get the spelling right, avoid exclamations and too many caps. Use the keywords in your ad text. Include a ‘call to action’ such as Buy, Read or Visit, which motivates the user to click then and there.
• Create multiple ads. Experiment with different ad text and see which ones perform better. Google automatically serves the most popular ads more often.
• Use targeted landing page urls from your site. Don’t link to the homepage and expect the user to find their way to the relevant product. Dump it in their face as soon as they click.
• Check your ‘exit’ points. Where do users exit your site from, and why? Analyze these clues to help your campaign performance.
• Aim for a high clickthru and conversion rate. You don’t need thousands of impressions or even tons of clicks to make your campaign a successful one. The key is targeted, relevant traffic that will make the most of your site.

Hope that helps. Have you got AdWords experience and stories? Share them in the Comments!

Micey’s apparently rounding up some spare change – $45 billion or so of it – for the acquisition. I don’t have Microsoft or Yahoo! shares, but I have Google shares. How will they be affected? *bites nails*

The following keywords are purely related to the story of a M&A, but they could easily be identified in any Mills & Boon paperback: suitor, marriage, propose, get into bed with, match, yield… okay I’ll stop.

What will this merged company be called? Yamsoft? Mahoo?

The conference was pretty interesting. I already know the basics of AdSense but I met some people using it on their sites and making quite a good profit. In a nutshell, I gleaned these tidbits:

• Experimentation works best. Keep moving ads around, try more or fewer of them, play with colors and layout.
• Ads at the bottom of your articles can work as ‘supplemental’ content when users have finished looking at that page.
• Keep the ads subtle so they look like part of your site and don’t deter users.
• Looking at reports, you can track progress on different sites you own or even see how different placements perform on the same page.
• Make sure you filter out competitor urls to stop their ads showing up on your site.
• You can opt in to show both text and image ads on your site. Rich media (eg. image ads and video ads) can often be more effective with a female audience.

For more, visit adsense.google.com