When AdSense Goes AWOL

No matter how hard you work to optimize your page, there are going to be times when Google just can’t figure out which AdSense ad to deliver, so it defaults to delivering a PSA (Public Service Ad) instead.

Now I don’t have any problem with charities, but I give to the ones that I choose to give to. Since I don’t have a non-profit license of my own, the goal of my web site is to make money and I depend on Google AdSense revenues to help pay my bills. Someday I want it to fund my retirement as well, so I can’t afford to have non-revenue PSAs showing up on my site.

The good news is the Google understands the human’s basic greedy nature, so it provides us with an alternative to donating our precious web real estate to charitable organizations. That alternative is known as AdSense Alternate Ads.

As strange as it seems, this feature allows you to let Google competitors into your site. Don’t worry, Google is allowing it with their eyes wide open. They even tell you how to set up the alternate ad code to work on your site and they let you do it right in your AdSense control panel.

Once you add the code to your site, Google will pull ads from whatever service you defined rather than serve a PSA. Google will do that even if those ads are coming from Yahoo, or Overture, or your grandmother’s attic.

This goes a long way towards ensuring that you never lose an opportunity to monetize a visitor’s time spent on your site. How nice it is of Google to gives us that opportunity.

Who do you choose?

Ah, now that’s the big question. Most people head straight for Overture or Yahoo, but there are other fish in the sea worth considering. In fact, some of these fish make their living almost solely by serving replacement ads for PSAs. Run this search on Google and you’ll have plenty of options to choose from.

Why bother?

Sometimes Google doesn’t have any ads in its inventory to match your site’s keywords. Sometimes Google gets confused and can’t figure out which ads to deliver, so it grabs a PSA ad.

Google also has a not-so-readily-available list of what it calls “stop words”. When the Google AdSense spiders detect these words on your page they automatically trigger PSAs. Some of the more commonly known words include severe profanity (think: George Carlin’s 7 Words You Can’t Say on T.V), as well as other words which may very be quite legitimate for your site such as pharmaceutical, drugs, death, dying, abortion, and the list goes on and on. At least we THINK that it goes on and on but no one really knows for sure outside of a trusted few Google staffers.

But no matter what the reason, you don’t want non-revenue ads running on your site. There’s no excuse when Google makes it so easy to keep the revenue flowing.

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About the Author: Diane provides marketing and internet profit tips.
For more Google AdSense tips, visit
http://www.adsense.deeljeabiz.com
Email : deeljeabiz@gmail.com

Marketing - Is It The End All Of Business?

Marketing, as we all recognize, is a key, vital area of any business. Its function is to ensure that your products or services are in the public eye, sought after and then purchased. Proper marketing can “make a company” and if done improperly can, “break a company”.

Your organization, with its staff of one or ten thousand people, may be doing a great job of marketing but still be failing in other key areas. Marketing is vital, yet it is only one of twenty-one key areas of every business!

A business needs to manage all of its twenty-one departments, not just marketing or sales. For example, if you bring in a lot of business, yet aren’t prepared to deliver, the business will still fail. Or if you bring in lots of business and produce lots of products and then have weak quality control, your business will fail eventually.

The Lincoln Continental and Cadillac were neck and neck in sales in the 1950’s. Ford Motor Company rushed to be the first of the two companies to come out with power windows. The new model was released in such a rush, that they had not gotten the bugs out of the power windows.

Every owner had trouble. The dealers were recalling every one of the cars as a result. Many long time Ford customers never bought a Lincoln or a Ford again. Only, 40 years later are people buying Lincolns in large numbers again. Cadillac throughout the 60’s became the American Luxury Sedan with no competition domestically for over a decade.

When you understand all the components of you business, then you can be analyze it in much the same way that a doctor does when he gives you a full body examination. Whether you are a one-man show or have a very large staff, your company still has these 21 key areas within its seven major divisions. Each of these key areas needs to be functioning well.

There are a series of steps one goes through to do a business check up. Among the first things normally done in analyzing a business is to establish what the ideal business picture is for your business. Next, you need to determine what your short and long term goals are for the business. Then in depths study of your business (all 21 departments) is done, as it now exist. This study would then be compared to the ideal business picture. In doing this, one can pinpoint the exact key areas that need to be addressed immediately to make the actual scene look more like your ideal scene. These areas are typically the one’s that are ‘driving you crazy’ and stressing you out.

Once these areas are pinpointed, an Action Program can then be worked out and executed. An Action Program has steps that address and handle the trouble areas found. Your existing staff may do these program steps or you may elect to bring in specialists to assist in their implementation. The goal is to be in greater control over all the key areas of your business. An Action Program generated in this way and effectively executed, immediately starts relieving stress in a business.

By this time, I guess you might be asking the question: So what are these seven divisions and 21 departments? Here is a brief overview of what’s involved in a business and the areas that would need to be fully analyzed in creating an effective Action Plan for your business. Each of the seven main divisions of a business further breaks down into 3 departments, to give you a total of 21 departments in a business.

1) The Establishment Division: This division deals with personnel, communications and business ethics. Regarding personnel, we are talking about hiring, handling and basically managing personnel so that there are enough of them to do the work of the company and to ensure that they are properly allocated. Communications deals with handling the mail in and out, internal dispatches and making sure that the company keeps communicating with its customers, vendors etc and that letters from customers are not stuck in desk draws and remain unanswered.

Business ethics deals with ensuring that customers are fairly dealt with and that personnel are actually being productive on their jobs and not being a drain on the company while a few carry the entire load. Sort of like a friendly traffic cop that just makes sure that the personnel are actually doing things that are supposed to be done. The whole concept of this division is one of building the basics. Get the staff in, make sure they are trained on the basics of their job and are on their jobs, ensures that communication is taking place and that the personnel is doing what they are supposed to be doing.

2) The Sales and Marketing Division: This division deals with promotion/marketing, publications and repeat business. Promotion and marketing pieces are designed and disseminated from this area. Brochures, information packets, catalogues, newsletters and anything to get your existing clients to give you repeat business is here. Books and literature, which support your services or products, are sold here. Contacting repeat customers and making further sales is also found here. Most companies have a “gold mine” within their existing customer lists. You can typically get business from an existing client at one-fifth the cost of developing a new client. Continued contact with your existing customer base is done in this division.

3) The Finance Division: This division handles income, disbursements and financial records. The financial matters, records, assets and materiel of the company are its main functions. It is responsible for making sure that less money is spent than came in. It is this division’s responsibility to remain solvent and never (and we mean never) spend more than it makes. This division budget‘s all expenditures, including major purchases of real estate, so the company runs on internal finance. Part of budgeting is doing income planning. Budgeting also includes a required contribution to your untouchable cash reserves, which is only used as a last resort and preferably never.

Reserve accounts are funded to set aside money for payment-in-full purchases. Budgeting, properly done, ensures that a business is able to pay for everything it needs, with few exceptions. This division naturally handles payroll and banking and keep exact track of all financial and accounting records. The main objective of this area is to track and record every penny; from the instant it enters the company to the moment it leaves.

4) The Production Division: This division develops the services or products you sell. The delivery of services, scheduling, preparing and delivery is done in this area. This is where manufacturing plans, schedules and produces their products. This Division is all about creating and delivering the products and / or services that you are selling to your customers.

5) The Quality Control Division: This division sees that every product or service leaving the organization is of high quality. Customers are listened to here. Their praise, as well as their complaints are noted and paid attention to. Whenever complaints are found, they are addressed to create 100% customer satisfaction. The business area(s) involved with customer complaints are addressed and corrected quickly so integrity of services and products are maintained 100%. Most companies do not have adequate quality control. In every major failed company in history, failure was from a lack of Quality Control!

How is it that during the later part of the twentieth century a relatively small country, Japan (with no real natural resources) was able to take major portions of business away from the biggest automobile manufacturers in the world? Answer: The big guys were not listening to their customers and they had a terrible reputation for quality control. Have you ever heard the expression, ‘Fix Or Repair Daily’? Look over the first letter of each word, F O R D! There are countless examples of ‘used to be’ businesses all around us. Ford is still around, but poor quality control almost buried them.

6) The Public Division: This area delivers introductory services and products to the broad public. Information nights, mixers, and introductory lectures about some aspect of your business can all be done here. Introductory newsletters or a web site is formed around this division’s products and services. The entire objective of this division and its departments is to attract new people to your services or products. It’s all about getting out there and letting prospective people know about your services and products. This includes finding new distribution channels for the companies’ products and /or services. The basic idea is that this division brings them in and sells them initial products and services and then the Sales and Marketing division keeps them buying more and more products and / or services, into the future.

7) The Executive Division: This is the top management division. This division coordinates and supervises the activities of the company. It makes sure the company runs well, produces its products profitably and delivers its products and services to individuals and the community in abundant high quality. This is where long term planning strategy gets done for existing and new ideas. The company’s legal requirement are addressed and kept up to date and in place. The executives are ensuring good public relations are kept in as an integral part of staying in tune with the community. Additionally, senior executives meet regularly to address the financial solvency, income planning and productivity of the company. This division also ensures that it is kept well versed on the business market the company is operating in, generating policies for the company and its personnel to operate on and generally run the company in a coordinated manner.

Here’s a challenge for you. I bet that you cannot find a single aspect of any business that does not easily fit into one of these 7 major divisions as described above. If you find one, call me – I’d like to talk to you!

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About the Author: Willard Michlin is an Administrative/Business Consultant, Private Investor, Business Broker, California Real Estate Broker, Accountant, Financial Distress Consultant, and Well-known Public speaker. He can be contacted at his Ventura, California office by calling 805-529-9854 or by e-mail at kismetrei@earthlink.net. See other article by Willard at http://www.kismetbusinessbrokers.com

Personal Contacts: The Key to Successful Networking

When the word "networking" is used, we tend to think of upwardly mobile college graduates with a bursting day timer in hand chatting up the competition at business meetings, conventions, or workshops.

The average blue/pink/white collar worker disconnects, feeling that they could never be that pushy, don't know enough people to even start the attempt, and that the method only works in competitive business environments.

Wrong!

While networking can, and often does, follow such a scenario, the concept is much broader than that. The premise is that most people find a job through someone they know. It may be a direct referral or, more likely, indirectly hearing about an opening that seems suitable.

Procedurally, networking could not be simpler: contact everyone you know to see if they have any firsthand knowledge about job opportunities. Then contact all the people they know.

Obtain referrals to other people from everyone you contact and in a short period of time, you will have a veritable army of people working with you to find the right position.

An organized approach to this time-demanding but highly effective technique is discussed in depth in my workbook "The Wolf at the Door: An Unemployment Survival Manual" (Authorhouse, 2003). Contact lists in various categories are provided as well as schedules for follow up and strategies for maintaining the strength and commitment of your lists.

For now, let's look at the different levels of networks you can develop.

1. Sizzling Contacts. These are the people you know personally. They include your family, friends, former coworkers, and acquaintances: your barber, your mailman, your doctor, your real estate agent, the guys you see at the golf course, the women at your club, your children's teachers, other PTA parents - anyone with whom you have regular contact.

Often, you need go no further. How many of us obtained our first job through our family or their friends? It is a common occurrence. Look for a moment at ethnic groups and how they operate.

Most new immigrants find a position through personal contacts. Hispanics are famous for bringing in their brothers, cousins, and nephews when there is an opening.

Most companies who hire mainly Spanish-speaking labor never advertise. All they have to do is tell their employees that they need more workers and the next day dozens of assorted relatives show up and they can make their selection.

There are large ethnic communities in different parts of the country: Vietnamese, Armenian, Indian, Korean, Chinese, Irish, Portuguese, Samoan, and Filipino. In almost every group, initial job search is strictly word-of-mouth. Later, as individuals, many workers become culturally assimilated and move into more mainstream jobs but the core of the group, especially those with poor English skills, tend to remain within their original subculture.

There are, for example, airlines whose entire ramp staff at some airports are Pacific Islanders, manufacturing companies where the usual language on the production floor is Portuguese, and supermarkets where the workers (and customers) are overwhelmingly Korean.

Contrast the successful employment rate of these groups with, for example, African-Americans who are very loosely tied to their communities. Until recent attempts by Church and civic organizations, networking was almost non-existent in African-American culture and a consistently double-digit unemployment rate directly reflected that lack of connectivity.

2. Warm Contacts. From everyone you seek out while you are making personal contacts, you try to obtain the names and contact numbers of people they know and if you can use their names as a source of referral. If all the people you directly know, literally dozens, give you a few names to call, you may have well over a hundred names within a few days. Frequently the first and second level contacts are all that is required. Someone you touch will know of something suitable somewhere.


3. Tepid and Cold Contacts. If you are really unfortunate, your circle of social acquaintances is very limited, your geographic area has devastating economic blight, your have negative or limiting personal aspects (prison record, disabilities, a very poor work record), then you may need to expand an extra level or two. Secondary referrals have some potential but the more tenuous the link between you and your friends and the target person, the less effort to help you is likely to be encountered.

When you have exhausted all of your contact lists, unlikely but possible, you are left with the standard job search techniques (classifieds, internet, job fairs, agencies) or cold calling. Cold calls, whether by telephone or, preferably, in person, require you to call or walk into an employer without any introduction, and with no knowledge of any openings.

You are likely to receive many negative responses to your queries but sometimes you just happen to time it perfectly and there is a newly available position that suits you.

While the chances are sobering, you can still feel proud that you are out in the world, taking positive actions for yourself, rather than withdrawing into the sanctuary of home where the odds against success become astronomical.

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About the Author: Virginia Bola operated a rehabilitation company for 20 years, developing innovative job search techniques for disabled workers, while serving as a respected Vocational Expert in Administrative, Civil and Workers' Compensation Courts. Author of an interactive and emotionally supportive workbook, The Wolf at the Door: An Unemployment Survival Manual, and a monthly ezine, The Worker's Edge, she can be reached at http://www.virginiabola.com