Welcome to Land of Tricks

You will need a Wordpress API Key to activate both the Akismet Plugin and theWordpress Stats plugin.

You get provided with an API key when you open a Wordpress.com free blog account.

So in order to install your Wordpress analystics with the Stats plugin and protect your website or blog from spam with the Akismet plugin you will need to first get an API key. Fortunately this is very easy to do…

Create an Account for yourself at Wordpress.com

Simply go to Wordpress.com and open a free account - it’s really quick and easy!

If you have already done this then just go to the next section. If not go to Wordpress.comand create your account. When you are done getting your free acount - log out!

HOW TO FIND YOUR API KEY

Login to your Account at Wordpress.com and click on MY ACCOUNT (in the top left corner of the screen).

Then select GLOBAL DASHBOARD from the drop-down menu.

In the Global Dashboard click on PROFILE in the left sidebar menu and your Profile page will be displayed. This lists a lot of stuff about your account and also…

At the top of the page you will see your API Key displayed.

Whenever you need your API Key just copy and paste from this key value into the field that requires during the configuration of Wordpress plugins from Wordpress.com, such as Askimet and Wordpress Stats plugin and any other plugins that they may release in the future.

Without a valid key these plugin installations will not work.

You Wordpress API Key is a valuable piece of data and you should keep it secure at all times.

It is also an essential part of your Wordpress kit as both Aksimet and the Stats plugin are invaluable to any Wordpress site owner.

Popularity: 18% [?]

Are your curious to know who some of the biggest Google Adsense earners are? I know that I was interested to know who the best are so I could check out their websites and see how I could possibly earn as much money as these people do. I realized from most of these sites that sites with user generated content usually ranked pretty highly for Google Adsense earners. It seems that these “community” type sites do tend to get a lot of traffic and we all know that traffic = money. So without any more delay here are a list of the top 8 Google Adsense earners as collected from online resources. Please note that this list might be a bit outdated but it has lots of useful information still.

1. Markus Frind - PlentyOfFish.com - $300,000 per month

If you haven’t heard of this guy yet you should check out the website plentyoffish.com. He is the person who created this free online dating website from his appartment all by himself. His website soon become one of the largest dating websites online. I have actually tried out his website myself and can see how it can be interesting and attract a lot of visitors. The graphics and layout of the website is nothing fancy at all but the functionality is all there and its fast to use.

There have been many of doubts that he wasn’t making that much money so he made those people silent by posting a picture of his paycheck on his blog. According to his blog check represented two months worth of Adsense earnings.

2. Kevin Rose - Digg.com - $250,000 per month

Kevin Rose started Digg.com in December 2004. It is a social marketing site that is mostly news, video, and pictures that are submitted by users for other users to read about and view. Basically what happens is you can signup for an account and you can submit a “news story” and other people can view it and if they like it they can “Digg it” and this boosts the rating of the post. If it gets enough Diggs it will appear on the Frontpage of the site and will get tons of traffic. Digg has both Google Adsense ads and Federated Media ads. It is estimated that he earns roughly $250k a month from Adsense alone.

3. Jeremy Schoemaker - $140,000 per month

ShoeMoney is considered to be one of the greatest Internet Marketers out there. He is very good with search engines and knows how to setup his sites to get optimal traffic to them. In one of his best months with Google Adsense ShoeMoney earned $132,994.97. You can imagine it was probably pretty difficult for him to cash a check of that size!

Unlike most of the other Google advertisers ShoeMoney makes his money from hundreds of sites and thousands of domains.

4. Jason Calacanis - Weblogs, Inc. - $120,000 per month

Jason Calacanis is the creator of Weblogs. Weblogs is a network of blogs and it was apparently making roughly $4,000 a day from Google Adsense! He eventually sold the company to AOL for a reported $25 million. He also announced his retirement from blogging earlier this year (July 2008). He is now focusing on his email campaigns instead.

5. David Miles Jr. & Kato Leonard - FreeWebLayouts.net- $100,000 per month

According to a Washington Post article these 20 year old’s claim to be making $100,000 a month from their site FreeWebLayouts.net which offers free Myspace templates. That is pretty impressive for a couple of young guys that are offering free Myspace templates!

6. Tim Carter - AskTheBuilder.com - $30,000 per month

Tim Carter is a licensed master plumber and carpenter with his own radio show. He started his website up in 1995 with his primary focus to cater to an avid following of fellow builders on the site. In April 2004, Carter learned about Adsense for content sites and he put it on his site. With minimal effort and time he optimized his website and his Adsense earnings grew from $1,500 to $7,500.

There was a Google case study done on Tim Carters earnings with Google Adsense. You should definately read it by clicking HERE. Read the results section because it gives a bunch of helpful tips on how he increased his revenue with Google Adsense.

7. Joel Comm - e-book - $24,000 per month

Joel Comm is a get rich quick guru. He wrote an e-book, What Google Never Told You About Making Money with Adsense. With his e-book and his website he earned $23,458.46 between Nov 2005 and Dec 2005. Check out his Google account stats here.

8. Shawn Hogan - DigitalPoint.com - $10,000 per month

Shawn Hogan is the creator of the forum DigitalPoint. This forum is a very usual forum with lots of information about: Search Engines, Marketing, Business, Design & Development, and Products & Tools. In a New York Times article it stated that he was making roughly $10k a month with Google Adsense.

The members of his forum speculate he is now making around double of what he was making in 2005 when this report was published in the New York Times.

So there you have it, the Top 8 Google Adsense earners. This list might be slighty out of date and there could be some new people in this list but this is the list I was able to pull from collecting information on the net. So check out these sites and see if you can strive to earn as much as these people do with your website or blog.

Popularity: 20% [?]

I get asked this question so much, I decided to post about it. I have around 200 niche sites with adsense on them. This should make me rich, right? Wrong! I made some mistakes and I would like to share some very hard-won information with you so that you don’t fall into the same traps that I did. Here’s what I found:

1) Niche choice is important. Here’s why: I have several websites that target small niches which Google pays me $0.04/click. These websites only make a few dollars/month. Generally, I view a site as a success if it makes over $10/day. I think that is reasonable. Let’s take our real world $0.04/click for a “poor” niche and see what it would take to get $10/day. I go to my adsense account and see that on average, 4.49% of my visitors click the ads. Let’s crunch some numbers: to get $10/day, at $0.04/click, we need 250 clicks/day. OK, sounds great. Now how many people need to see that with a CTR of 4.49%. That number is 5568 visitors per day! Ouch! OK, how many visitors is that per month? Well, just a shade over 167 THOUSAND visitors/month. OK, let’s say for illustration, we assume that each keyword here (I actually looked at on of my sites for this number) has around 2,000 searches/month. Let’s be kind and say that we capture every visitor. That would mean we need around 167/2 or around 84 articles to get there.

2) Optimizing and testing is soooooo important. Here’s why: Let’s say that we optimized our website for clicks and got a 10% CTR. That would mean we could get away with writing 38 articles instead of 84! Hey, big incentive there! People, that means you should be doing everything you can to get that click! OK, let’s say we got that 10% CTR, moving on, what else can we do? Here’s what: target keywords that get $0.20/click instead of $0.04/click. Really, it is not hard at all. Google’s external keyword tool now has CPC (cost per click) data. Fixing our website to target these clicks means we need 1/5 the traffic. Well, how much is that? 5568/5 is a much more reasonable 1114 visitors/day. With all our previous numbers being equal, that would mean we target 38/5 keywords, or 8 keyword phrases. Isn’t that MUCH better? Doing some research definitely means all the difference between success and failure.

Well, as you see in my example, choosing the right niche and testing and optimizing your CTR makes the difference between writing and promoting and dominating 84 niche phrases or just 8 phrases. Which would you rather do? Now go out there and make some cash.

Popularity: 17% [?]