Googles Click Fraud Detectiion

In general practice, Google uses a 3-stage detection methods to detect click frauds and invalid clicks:

1. Real Time Filters: In this stage, automated algorithms from Google filter out invalid clicks in real time. All the clicks are analyzed for click fraud. This stage detects most of the invalid clicks in advance and prevents those clicks from reaching your account in the first place.

2. Offline Analysis: After the first stage of real time filter, most of the invalid clicks are automatically filtered out. The second step involves manual analysis of clicks. This stage is mainly focused on the Adsense network. In case some invalid clicks still pass through this stage, Google has a policy that states that if you have been charged for invalid clicks in the past 2 months, you see a credit in your "Billing Summary" labeled "Adjustment-Click Quality".3. Investigations: Almost all the clicks are filtered out in the first two stages itself. In the last stage of the 3-stage system, all the clicks and advertiser inquiries are investigated by the Google click quality system. If invalid clicks are detected, a refund is made to the advertiser.

Google takes click fraud protection to the advertisers very seriously and is doing a great deal of researches on updating its click fraud detection technology regularly. But on the publisher's side, I'm still afraid that the detection system is far from perfect, and hence often ban the innocent publishers. It is not hard to hear many publishers claiming that their Adsense account has been lost due to invalid clicks. How poor it is.

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How soon after starting a blog should I begin to advertise?

A handful of readers have asked this question in the past couple of weeks so I thought it was time I shared my own opinion to the decision of when to start running ads on your blog.

There are two main opinions on this question - both of which have their good points.

Run Ads from the beginning

The thinking behind this approach is that if you’re thinking of running advertisements at some point you might as well from day one.

The reasons include:

Reader Expectations - starting a blog with no advertisements and then integrating them later means running a high risk of disillusioning readers whose expectations are that your blog will always be ‘ad free’. Some of your readers may feel very strongly about this and to change the rules mid flow can cause big problems. Start with ads from the launch of your blog and you set the expectations from the beginning and don’t have to manage a transition from no ads to ads further on down the road.

Consistent Design - running ads from the beginning of your blog means that you design how your blog looks with ads already integrated. This means that you don’t need redesign your blog later on to integrate advertisements.

Earnings - my first blog was advertisement free for almost 9 months before I found out about Google AdSense. At the beginning I didn’t generate large amounts of traffic, although I was receiving a reasonable amount of hits I was only earning a small amount of money each day. Of course a little every day for 9 months can add up to quite a significant amount. Put advertisements on your blog from the start and you’ll begin to see money from the early days. It may not be much but every little helps!

Advertisement Optimisation Education - run advertisements on your blog from the beginning and you begin a process of educating yourself about how to make the most out of your ads- your blog will also be optimised from the start. The majority of us learn best ‘on the job’ rather than by just reading ‘theory’ or other peoples experiences. The best thing about advertising early is that you can experiment and try different techniques without alerting too many people along the way. This means that by the time your traffic increases you can have your ads optimised well already!

Establish Readership and Then Run Ads.

This argument is that if you put ads on your blog from the beginning that you might potentially turn people off your blog because it will look too commercial or too much of a money maker.

The thought is that you can gradually place advertisements later once you’ve established a sizable readership and some good search engine presence.

Whilst I understand the reasoning behind certain bloggers taking this approach I don’t use it myself. For the same reasons I’ve outlined in the first approach above I tend to place advertisements from day 1.

Having said this, when I do I tend to take a subtle approach with ad placement and design in the early days. You can see an example of this with my AdSense placement on my other blog TheOnlyDevice.com where I use a blended approach and limit the number of advertisements per page to 1, unless it’s a bigger page where I'll place two.

This may well change as the blog establishes a bigger readership (currently it’s sitting on around 600 hits a day). In the future I plan to introduce a purpose built professional design to that blog and will use that opportunity to reposition ads in a slightly more prominent position where they are likely to perform a little better than they are at the minute. In the mean time however they are there and readers know that they are a part of the site - they also have earned me a nice monthly pay cheque from the launch of the site and have taught me a thing or two about what does and doesn’t work in terms of placement and design on this blog.

Ultimately the decision to add advertising to a blog from the beginning or half way through writing is one that can only be made by an individual as they look at their blog’s goals. Obviously my approach won't work for everyone!

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Promote Your Blog With Facebook!

Now you can use favourite social network site to promote your business and your blog. With the 75 million members it has already, plus the 250,000 new sign ups a day, no wonder people in the biz are calling it the new Microsoft!

With these staggering figures there is always the potential to acquire customers or readers and drive valuable traffic to your site. There are a few different things you can do with Facebook listed below.

The first thing you should when promoting your business with Facebook is to create a company profile and a company network.

This will allow you to invite your business colleagues and customers to be your friends. The chance are that your business contacts are on Facebook already, so get the filofax out and send out some friend requests This is extremely important as it can help build you a Facebook community for your business. You will be able to make bulk postings that will appear in all of your friends’ newsfeeds and have the ability to post items in the marketplace.

A great feature that Facebook boasts is the ability to import your blog into your Facebook notes. You can incorporate your feed and all of your postings will appear in your newsfeed and all of your friends! You can access the notes setting from the application menu in on the left hand side of your profile page.

Creating a Facebook application is the ultimate way to promote your blog! You can either get a designer to do this for you or if you have the know-how you could even attempt it yourself. Building a Facebook application will add serious amounts of friends to your business profile and if your application is successful it will drive hoards of traffic to your site.

A good example of this is the ‘Top Friends’ application. This is owned by Slide.com and it is documented that 90% of Facebook members have this application on their profile. That’s 67,500,000 people all generating traffic for Slide.com. As you can see, this is a very powerful tool!

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Pay-Per-Post Blogging

In the last few years or so there’s been a great breakthrough for bloggers to earn some extra cash. Although this method of blogging won’t make you a millionaire it will certainly boost your monthly pay packet whilst starting out.

Pay-Per-Post Blogging, as its name implies is where you post an article on your blog about a certain product or service and get paid a set amount for doing so. You can get paid from anywhere between £2.50 - £80 per post depending on your page rank, traffic rank or quality of writing.

Write about web sites, blogs, products, services, and companies and earn cash for providing your opinion and valuable feedback to advertisers.

The great thing about Pay-Per-Post Blogging is that it’s free to sign up! As soon as you do you can begin with your first post, writing an article like this one about the company and get paid £10! Once your blog is approved by the Pay-Per-Post team you can sign in and search for other available opportunities. Choose an advertiser, submit your content and get paid directly into your paypal account. It’s that simple.

You can easily make £300 a month or more, depending on how much spare time you have on your hands and how hard you’re willing to work. At the time of me writing this post, Pay-Per-Post’s top earner has made just over £11,000!

Click here to sign up FREE!

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Free Layouts For Your Blog!

It’s one thing having great written content for your blog, but you also want it to look presentable as well. Although this isn’t the most important aspect of blogging it certainly does help if you have a well laid out site.

Below are a couple of websites that I've used in the past to jazz up my own blogs!

If you’re using blogger FreeTemplates.blogspot.com is a great place to visit. There are lashings of quirky blog designs including 2-column, 3 column, modern and simplistic, the site is updated most days and yields some extremely interesting designs to make your blog really stand out.


If you’re using Wordpress as a platform you can find some really eye catching themes at WPThemesFree.com. All the themes are free and at the time of me writing this post they boast a whopping 2,524 themes for you to choose from!

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