Just a week ago, we added Amazon affiliate links. However tastefully we tell ourselves that addition was, it was also a move made in advance of publishing a list of personal finance books. My reasoning is that I would have linked to those books via Amazon anyway. At the same time, I didn’t think a Google Adsense approval was coming my way any time soon. Don’t click on your own Google Adsense ads Turns out, if it’s good enough for Amazon, it’s good enough for Google. Now, about clicking on your own advertisements. With Amazon affiliate links, it’s no big deal. You have to make a purchase in order for Jeff Bezos to kick you a percentage of a sale, so simply clicking an affiliate link won’t raise any red flags. But with Google, there is direct compensation from ad clicks. Repeatedly clicking on your own Google ads = profit, right? Incorrect. This probably goes without saying, but it absolutely needed to be said to my inner circle about a decade ago. In my first foray into the blogosphere, while in college, my roommate and I created a crappy little blogspot site and filled it almost exclusively with nonsense.
The goal was to make a little beer money off the blog, primarily via Google Adsense.
Back then, it was much easier to get approved for Adsense. Rest assured, our site would never pass the quality content phase of inspection nowadays. But we did have some content, and we spammed message boards and posted provocative pictures that had nothing to do with anything and did all of the stuff you shouldn’t do with a blog to get people to stumble upon it. Sure enough, our sketchy tactics led to a few ads being viewed, which led to a view pennies added to our Weekend Beer Fund.
In this arrangement, I was the main content publisher and my roommate was more of the “marketing” guy. Which meant he was responsible for annoying people on message boards until the admin kicked him off. Marketing really hasn’t changed a whole lot since then. In his role as our CMO, unbeknownst to me, he was also raising our CTR, by clicking on our own Google Adsense ads.
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