Making Adsense Sites More Respectable
By: John Elder posted in Adsense
Hello good people!
Let’s face it…Adsense websites have a stigma attached to them. Some people consider them spam (I don’t), some people think they clutter up the Internet, and if you don’t design your sites just right, Google can determine that they don’t meet their “quality standards” and boot you out of their search engine and/or kick you out of the Adsense program and confiscate any unpaid earnings.
It’s a fine line that we have to walk. You want your site to be crappy enough that a site visitor pays less attention to your site and more attention to the Adsense ad, so that they click the ad (earning you income) instead of spending hours browsing around your site…but at the same time you don’t want your site to look SO BAD that it gets you kicked out of Google.
What’s the solution?
I’ve discovered over the years that there are a number of things you can do to make your site appear more professional to those who matter (namely Google employees) yet not detract from the, let’s call it “user experience”. One of the things you can do is to prominently displaying a phone number at the top and bottom of every page of your website.
After all, spammers don’t list phone numbers!
Of course, listing your actual phone number is insanity, don’t do that! The Internet is filled with wacko’s and you don’t want to give them your real number. They *will* mess with you. Here’s a great free solution…it’s called sipgate.com
Sipgate.com offers you a free telephone number that you can access right over the internet. You can accept calls right over your computer if you want, or – like me – you can just set it up to dump all callers directly into voicemail, then have the system send you an email letting you know when you’ve got a new message.
I didn’t even record a personal voicemail message, I just use the default “this user is not available” that comes with the number.
Every day I get anywhere from 1 to 10 voicemail messages from people who are looking for something, usually a specific product or replacement part, and think I can help them for some reason. It usually goes like this “Hello, I just saw your microwave website…I’m looking for a GE model 27b lightweight 1200 watt microwave in teal green, can you help me?”.
Of course, you just delete those voicemail messages and move on.
This phone number is also great to register domain names with. Domain name registration info is public knowledge (if you don’t buy privacy guard, and I never do) so using that number is essential to protect your privacy. Think about it, if you register your domain names with a sipgate.com phone number that can’t be traced to you, as well as a P.O. Box number, then why pay for privacy guard? You’re protected already.
But I digress….
The bottom line is…displaying a phone number on your website goes a long way to making you seem respectable and legitimate. Using sipgate.com allows you to do that for free, anonymously. Win win win.
Google also offers a similar free Google Voice phone number…and I use them for other things not related to my adsense empire. As I’ve mentioned in the past, its a good idea to use as FEW Google products as possible in conjunction with your Adsense empire activities. So I wouldn’t use a Google Voice number on your Adsense sites… sipgate.com is my recommendation.
And in the mean time… Keep on Building!
-John
The Marketing Fool!
