Noticing invalid clicks in my Account. What to do?

In last few days, I personally noticed a lots of clicks with 0 CTR, only from U.S. The click through rate for my ads on one of my website doubled and I got a hint of some kind of attack from some jealous people around the world. I always though Blogger is much safer than WordPress in these kind of fraudulent activities but that's not true, at least in these past 15 days. So, what should I do to save my Adsense account? What should I do to stop these invalid clicks? 

I personally talked with several webmasters in blogging world, some experiencing the same problem, some even got banned due to these, and some are trying to save themselves just like me. And frankly I didn't get a satisfying answer. All were having different opinions but still some point was in common. 

Google says its your responsibility to save yourself from these invalid clicks. So they won't even think before banning you. If your account is an year old, still you are not at all safe. One of my friends got banned with a good reputation with adsense and that's ridiculous. Just because someone sitting in a room thousands of miles away, open your blog and clicks your ads several times must not lead to 'your' account ban. But still Google works that way.

Question is what should we do if we detect these unusual activities? 

• Remove AdSense. The first and most effective way is remove AdSense ads from your affected blog as soon as possible for some days. And then re-establish these ads and hope that the fraudulent activity will dis-continue. If its not, dis-continue again. 

• Trace the ip address of the clicks. Most probably, all the invalid clicks will be from the same location and ip address. You can use Google analytics to trace that. I noticed 1 page view from an ip address and number of clicks. Clearly, its a matter of invalid clicks. So i reported the ip address to Google and even banned it.  

Even by following these clicks, if you have been banned, then perhaps you should look beyond Google.  Time for a switch. There are not as good as Adsense but still better alternatives. Try them. Learn them. And earn from them. Your banning means you have been penalized for something you have not done so its not your fault. Its theirs that they lost one of there trusty customer. Join with other publishing programs, direct advertisement selling, buysellads, affiliate marketing. You may get more than Adsense. 

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How to get more twitter followers

Some of the pro bloggers accept that Twitter plays a huge part in driving traffic to their blogs. Twitter can be the best place for marketing topics and getting viral on Twitter can result in huge traffic to your blog. The only condition is you have to increase your fan base. You have to increase your twitter followers. There are several parties selling followers to you, but chances are that none of the bought followers are going to engage with you. So, what steps should be taken to get followers? Here are some. 

• Keep your profile real. Put your original picture and an attractive bio of yours. Placing your pic ensures your authenticity and chances are more of you getting followed. Include your blog address in your bio and use hashtags so that people may discover you in twitter search. Twitter bio is limited to only 160 characters, so you have to manage it very precisely. Including hash tags while introducing yourself is good idea. 'I am a blogger' can be replaced by 'I am a #blogger'. In this way, you are actually asking twitter to enlist you in searches of the word 'blogger'. People always search others in their niche, and you have a chance of getting discovered. 

• Follow and get followed. Old school trick but still very efficient. If you follow someone, chances are that you will be followed back. Follow people related to your niche, search them over twitter or search them in followers/following list of people already in your connection. Keep in mind those people which are average. Anyone with 100k followers or following will never notice your tweets unless you are a celebrity. Choose people who seems genuine and individual. Look for their profile pic and bio. 

• Tweet often. Tweet regularly. Let your followers know your presence. Even if you have nothing to tweet about your blog or articles, put up some jokes, or whatever you feel like. Only tweeting links is also a bad idea. Ask questions, share some news, jokes or anything. You can even tweet an article more than once with some other text description.  However, don't over do it. Keep in control the number of tweets you do. 

• Retweet and mentions. Mention people in your tweets. Take time to read others tweet and if you find anything interesting re-tweet. Its a give and take relationship. The more you build it, the more it will help you. Let your presence be felt by mentioning people, using hash tags, or re-tweeting others. 

• Include twitter gadgets on your blog. Putting a twitter follow gadgets on your blog will increase your number of followers. If your blog visitors finds your blogs interesting and informative, you will surely get a follower. For once, ask your already established friend circle on social media accounts like Google+ and Facebook networks to join you. You can leave an invitation personally to people who are in in same niche to you or update your timeline with a request to add you on twitter. There are various committee on Google Plus which helps you in promoting yourself. Put your twitter username there asking people to join with a short and brief description of your blog. 

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Google Page Rank calculator

Google uses PageRank to determine the search engine ranking position of a blog. It is general representation of website / blog popularity and is primarily based on link popularity. The websites with higher PageRank have higher search engine positions (although these days, there are other factors more involved). PageRank is a Google algorithm named after Larry Page. Bloggers are often keen to check page rank of their blog/sites and try to get good rank. 

Courtesy: Wikipedia

PageRank for a website / blog is assigned a value of 0-10. 10 being the highest. Getting even a pageRank 1 is a tough process and requires a lot of efforts. 

PageRank Checker. 

Here is 2 websites to check Page Rank of your blog:

• www.prchecker.info
• www.page-rank-calculator.com. 

PageRank updates are not done frequently so don't expect a increase for tomorrow. Its usually updated every 3 months although its not fixed. I used the term 'usually'. So, work for 3 months from now, market you blog on social media, follow these top 3 link building techniques and then hope to get a PageRank 1 for the first update.

Getting a good PageRank ensures your blog being positioned higher in search engine rankings. 

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Reason behind Adsense clicks but no earnings

If you are an Adsense publisher and noticing that the clicks you are generating on your ads are counting to zero earning, with Cost per Click zero, here are the three basic reasons for Adsense clicks but zero earnings. Although there may be some more reasons but these 3 reasons mainly account for zero earning with clicks on Adsense. 

• You are using Site Authorization feature and the website showing your ads has not been added to the authorized list, so the clicks it is generating is not counted at all. The solution is that stop using this feature or add that site to the authorization list. You may try adding different forms of your URL in the permitted list like 

1.www.y2do.blogspot.com
2.y2do.blogspot.com
3.http://y2do.blogspot.com

• The ads which are shown on Google may be CPM ads. Google reserve the selection of the ads and user cannot decide which ad to show up, Pay per Click Or Cost per Mile ads. If a CPM ad is shown and you generate a click on that ad, your cpc will be zero and earning will be according to the impressions. Usually CPM ads are low in income so for very less Impressions, your income will show to zero only. 

• Invalid clicks. Google monitors all the clicks and it might be possible that Google detected some of these invalids. There may be various reasons for invalid clicks and Google do not discloses its click monitoring system. However, these clicks are counted in stats which might confuse. 

Usually, these 3 points only results in zero earning from Adsense even if there are clicks. 

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Technorati for driving traffic to your blog

Technorati is a blog search engine indexing more than a million blogs till date. Its a place where different blogger share their blogs and can be used as a great marketing tool for your blog. Technorati provide a 'authority system' which measures site's influence in the blogosphere and ranking in its niche. The authority is measured on 0-1000 scale and 1000 is the best. 

Technorati ranking system. Technorati also provide a ranking system where your blog is ranked according to their algorithm. I will not get to it as you can find that information on their website. Based on the ranking system, top 100 lists are calculated and placed on the home page. Being in top 100 list can get you a huge consistence traffic although its quite difficult to get in it. However, even in top 1000 list will bring to you a considerable amount of traffic. 

How to register. 

• Sign up for Technorati.com . 
• You will be asked to verify whether you are the author of the blog which you registered. They will generate a token which you have to include in any post. You can either create a new post or update an existing one putting that token it its text. 
• Once they will crawl your website and find that text, you will be registered and they will final review your blog. Due to a huge number of blog being registered daily, it will take time since final review is a manual process. May be a day or two.
• Once you are approved, your blog will be listed in their blogosphere. 

Some key points regarding Technorati marketing.

• Choose specific category for your blog. Creating a blog on 'body building' and choosing a category 'technology' will always lead to poor ranking. 
• Check your technorati status and ranking often, to see your progress and compare your results with your previous ones. 
• Try hard to get to top 100 or even top 500 list. It will bring to you a huge lot of traffic. I was in top 2500 and getting 5% of my traffic from them. 
• Since, technorati is a place of bloggers, people visiting your blog are quality traffic. They are interested in your blog, so they are visiting you. 
• Technorati is just one more place to have backlinks. Interact with other bloggers, visit their blogs, discuss with them. 

Any more questions? You can put that in comments. Visit a day later, and you will find it answered. Surely. !!

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List of Social Media to promote your blog

Social Media has emerged as the main area of driving traffic to a blog or a website. Spending some time on Social media for marketing can lead to quality traffic to your blog and Social Media can even serve as the best platform to build a relationship with the audience. 

Here is a List of Social Media to promote your blog. 

Create separate account on each of them, connect with the audience, and promote your contents out there and you will for sure see your traffic going higher. 

• Facebook

• Google Plus

• Twitter

• Reddit

• Stumbleupon

• Digg

• Delicious

• Pinterest

• Technorati

• Bloggers

• LinkedIn

Do's.

• Make a separate account on each of these sharing platforms. 
• Share your latest contents regularly. 
• Give a thanks to likes, +, ups. Reply to comments and personally give a thanks to shares. 
• Join pages, communities, groups of your niche. Share your contents there and involve in various discussions going on. 
• Like and share others content which you find informative and interesting. 

Don'ts.

• Don't over do it. Its simply called spamming. 
• Don't get controversial even if someone responds to you in negative manner. 
• Keep internet clean. There is no need to put the same links few hundred times in the same community, or groups. 

Add some more social media platforms which you use for your blog and which results in traffic to you. 

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Best alternatives to Google Adsense 2013

Google Adsense is undoubtedly ruling the advertising section on internet for websites and blogs. But then it comes on the costs of its strict policies of approval. You can try out these Tips for getting Google Adsense account. However, if you still don't succeed in getting approval from Adsense, don't get demoralized. There are alternatives to Google Adsense which you can give a try and select the best one for you. The best alternative for Google Adsense may vary from people to people depending on their sites category and implementation. However, you can try some of them for a week, simultaneously or one at a time, and choose the best one for you. 

Best alternatives to Google Adsense: 

• www.infolinks.com

                                             

• www.clicksor.com

                                          

• www.chitika.com

                                              

• www.kontera.com

                                      

• www.bidvertiser.com

                                             

These five publishing programs do not have any minimum criteria in terms of traffic or contents. However, the more traffic and the more contents on your blog, chances are more of your earnings. 

Which one for you. Although these are no match to Adsense publishing program, you can give it a try. They all are legitimate and I personally have seen earnings from them. It depends on your site category and traffics that which one suits you more. Try them. One by one. Understand them. And you will surely find a way to earn from them. 

If you have any other alternatives to Google Adsense, which have paid you, do mention it in comments and your experience with it. 

I will try to publish reviews for all these publishing programs separately in coming days. You can follow the blog in the right sidebar to receive latest articles. 

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Top 3 Link building strategies 2013

Link building is just a way of leaving traces all over the internet through which your web blog can be reached by anonymous person. Its like you leave your address all over the globe and people reach to you through that address. It can be one of the major source of traffic to your blog if done in a right way. There are various link building ways you can follow to attract some readers. Some of them are been discussed below. 

• Commenting on other blogs. You are most probably already familiar with this technique. its still the basic and best technique for creating a link to your blog on some higher page rank blog. If you have not taken care of this, you should start spending some quality time on this. You can read this article to create better links while commenting.

Leaving comments on another blog.

Blogs hosted on bloggers do not have inbuilt link generating features. However, you can still post links in the comment section of the blogger. Its been discussed already in the blog by the name Put links in blogger's comments.

• Yahoo answers. Yahoo answers can be very useful in driving traffic to your blog. Answer questions related to your niche in yahoo. Choose at least 10 questions each day and answer them in such a manner so as the user is tempted to visit your blog while reading the answer. In starting, you won't see significant rise in traffic, but just imagine posting 10 links a day for a month will create 300 links to your blog. And yahoo answers are already search optimized. People will reach to it through search engines also. And getting some 'Thank you's are really motivational. Isn't it. 

• Posting in Forums. Many forums provide the facility of putting links in your signature. Utilize this feature. Answers questions in forums mentioning links to your blogs and you will start seeing some of the traffic from them. There are numerous forums related to your niche. You just have to select 3-4 of them with high rankings, answers questions already asked putting links in your answers. Choose those topics which are crowded and a progressive discussion is going on. There is no point in posting links to a topic which has been dead for a year. 

I am working on second part of this article. If you have any other ways of link building, do post in comments. I will surely take up your advice. 

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Tips for managing your titles

Post title is first which a reader sees and keeping it ordinary lessen the chances that user will go through your article. It gives the first and brief information about the content the user is going to read. So keeping a good informative and caching title will attract more audience for you. However, there are some basic guidelines you should consider before selecting an appropriate title for your post. 

• Keep an informative title. Never post any article without any title. Keep it informative and true to the content. Try taking it from the article itself if you have written the article and thinking about the title. Never put a blank title since it naturally reduces the reach of the article. Keeping it informative means selecting an article in context of what you have written. 

• Keep it descriptive. Don't just put a lame one word title for your post. Keep it descriptive. It should give an insight of the content which is presented to the reader. Writing  a complete post on body building and giving a title "body building" will make it a common thing for the readers. You can rather give a brief idea of whether you are going to discuss an exercise or about the eating habits.

• Think about the search engines. Imagine yourself as a reader, and you are searching for the contents in the post you have written / going to write. What are the words you gonna put in the search query for that content. Thinking about it will give you an idea about the title to put on for your texts. Titles are the first thing in a post a search engine looks for. So, keeping in mind the search engines boosts up your SEO practices and your organic traffic. 

• Avoid long titles. Long titles will be truncated in search engine results. Don't put a very long title. You have the body of the content to write anything long. Don't do that in the title section only. Keep it short and true to the content. Avoid misleading titles.

• Avoid repeated titles. Don't use a single title for more than one post. Keeping similar titles for all your post makes it impossible for the user to distinguish one content from another. Select a different title for each page. A blog with tile "Blogging basics" on several posts will create a mess for the reader to distinguish one article from the another. Do you want that? 

• Avoid keyword stuffing. Just for the shake of being discovered by search engine, some people put same words in titles. Avoid such steps. Its better to have some descriptive words in your title but that doesn't mean you put the same words in the same title. This can make your stuff look spammy or fake to user. 

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Put links in blogger's comments

Commenting on blog's of higher PageRank is one of the ways of getting back links and driving small still consistent traffic. You may have noticed in the process that some of the blogs/sites you have visited have options to insert links of your blog. Usually all the WordPress blogs have this features. However, Blogger's default comment section do not include any such options. 

Blogger has worked a lot in improving its design, templates and dashboards. However, the Comment section is still the old and same. There is no options of putting your links in the comment section. 

I have been personally suffering from this problem from a while when I started using comments for creating some useful back links for my blogs. WordPress on one hand has inbuilt feature of detecting the latest posts on your blog and creating links for them while some premium blogger's templates have commentLuv plugin which does the same. But for most of the users, who use in built templates or free third party templates has no such option. 

However, you can still put links to your blog on the blogs which are hosted on bloggers. Write a meaningful comment and by the end of the comment Insert the links to your blog. Here are the steps.

Inserting links in Blogger's comments.

<a href="http://www.y2do.blogspot.com">Blogging Basics.</a>

Replace http://www.y2do.blogspot.com by your blog address. 

And replace "Blogging Basics." with your caption. 

Caption shows the text by which your link will appear. 

For example: Blogging Basics. is the caption while the link is www.y2do.blogspot.com. 

Simple yet effective. 

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Ways to promote your blog

People often want to reach to maximum people through their blog and there are various ways to promote your blog and reach to maximum people. Here is a list of ways in which you can promote your blog and get some traffic. Although these steps looks basic and already over-written on internet, they still are the best steps to get traffic. 

• Quality content. Write good quality content. No one want to read useless crap articles and posts with lots of spelling and grammar mistakes. Read before you write. Don't copy paste others work. The best way of creating an article is to think what you as a reader wants to read and thus creating the content for the reader. The more you get traffic, chances are that you will earn more if you have monetized your blog.

• Follow SEO practices. Try to follow some of the search engine practices. Search engines are the primary sources of traffic to your blog and keeping them in mind while writing content is a good way to attract readers. Use keywords in your title, in your posts and use pictures with alt tag to get discovered in even Google image search. 

• Update regularly. The more content you have, the more traffic you will get. Chances of your blog being discovered is more if you have more content. A blog with 100 articles is more likely to have more visitors than another blog with 10 articles as there is more to read in the first one. Write regularly. In beginning, it can an article a day and later on you can publish article on weekly basis. Its your wish and convenience.

• Connect to social media. Facebook, Google Plus, Twitter can get you a huge lot of targeted audience to your blog. Connect to them, make a page for your blog, a community and ask your friends to join. Post links of your articles regularly. Most of the traffic for my blog comes from social media marketing. You can find various articles regarding promotion of your blog on various social media on this blog. I have written some articles on them. 

How to Get huge traffic from twitter
Facebook marketing for your blog
Google Plus Marketing for your blog

• Submit your blog to blog directories. Is your blog listed to technorati.com or bloggers.com? They can be a great way to promote your blog. Your new contents are regularly and automatically updates on their listing and they are hub for bloggers. Submit your blog their. 

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