“If you were to start from scratch with NO list, NO JV partners in your niche, and all you have is $100 capital, what would you do to start making sales for your niche membership site within just 15 days?”

Before I answer this question, let me state my assumption.

I’m assuming that you already have a niche membership site and you can make some modifications to your website to accommodate the marketing plan that I’m going to tell you.

Ready? Here we go……

If I have a niche membership site, with no list, no JV partner and only a hundred bucks……

1) I’ll go to Clickbank and see what kind of ebooks people are buying in my niche.

2) I’ll think of a topic that complements (not competes with) the popular niche ebooks sold in Clickbank.

What I’m going to do is to turn that topic into a special report that people are willing to buy.

It is important that you don’t write something that compete with the popular ebooks sold in Clickbank. You will see why later.

3) Since I only have $100, I’ll have no enough budget to outsource but to write the report myself. So I’ll spend 2 solid days to write a report on the topic that I’ve researched.

I am planning to sell the report for just $7.

4) On day 3, I’ll spend 1 day writing a powerful sales letter to sell my new report.

In the sales letter, I’ll include my niche membership site as a free bonus, i.e. those who purchase the report will get 1 month free membership to my niche site.

5) Day 4 is a technical day. I’ll have to spend the whole day to integrate the sale of the report and the one month membership trial together. (If you are not a technical person, you can outsource this job to a freelancer at GetAFreelancer.com for $60. This was what I used to pay before I figured out how to do it myself.)

6) Day 5 onwards is all about marketing.

First, I will go to Clickbank and find all the best selling authors in my niche. I will then contact them with my JV offer.

My JV offer is that I will give them 100% commission for the $7 report that they sell. I will also give them 50% commission on all the future sales generated from my membership site if their leads stay on my membership site after the one month trial.

Since my report actually complement the ebooks they are selling, there is a high chance that they will be interested to promote the report to their customers and lists.

Next, I’ll go to the top bloggers in my niche and contact them with the same JV offer.

With 100% upfront commission and 50% recurring commission in the future, I’m pretty sure that a handful of the bloggers in my niche will take up the offer.

7) Finally, my job is to overdeliver to my members so that they will stay on my membership site for as long as they can.

The entire plan actually costs me $0. But if you have $100, you can spend it on outsourcing certain tasks such as system integration.

Is that your dream too?

Well, here’s what is happening……

Yes, I now travel to different countries anytime I like. But I have to carry my laptop wherever I go. When I book hotel, I have to make sure that it comes with high speed internet access.

And yes, I really sit in my office and shake leg (as a habit). But my hands are always on the keyboard and my eyes are glued to the computer screen.

So what happen to my dream?

What happen is I’ve fallen in love with my work. (My wife hates me saying this!)

Sometimes I ask myself, what would I do if I retire. Guess what my answer is? I will still be doing the same thing as what I’m doing now!!!

Will you say you are going to ‘retire’ from your hobby? You won’t, right?

You may be wondering what is it that I’m doing everyday that makes my work so interesting.

Let me tell you the truth……

I’m doing all the boring things that you probably have been dragging yourself to do; things like writing articles, posting ads, replying emails, creating websites and managing freelancers.

I bet this is not the first time you heard people saying that to succeed, you must love what you do. But I bet no one has told you my version:

“To succeed, you must love the boring things that you do.”

Most people can’t succeed online because they’ve been painted with the fantasy of easy money, but when they get down to the actual work, they find it boring and quit. Those who eventually make it are those who love doing the boring stuff.

Don’t ask me how I fell in love with the boring things. It’s like falling in love with your wife (or husband). There is no reason!

So, how do you fall in love with the boring things in internet marketing?

Like I said earlier, I don’t know how. To me, it’s like falling in love with your soul mate. Is it fated? I don’t know.

But what I can tell you is that when I first started, I was motivated by money.

As I went through the process, I slowly get used to it and now it has become part of my life.

Come to think about it, that’s how two person fell in love with each other, isn’t it? You may fall in love with someone for some initial reasons, but when you’re truly in love, what you really love is the feeling of being together.

So the moral behind this is, if you want to fall in love with the boring things that you do, keep working until you get used to it.

In this article, my goal is to share with you some essential truth about creating a passive income online. I know most of you are more keen to learn how to create a passive income online. I’ll talk about it in future. But before I do that, it is important for me to cover some grounds and get your mindset right.

Passive Income Doesn’t Exist!

First of all, I need to get this straight - passive income doesn’t exists, at least not according to what most newbies define as passive income.

Most people define passive income as “making money without having to do anything”. If you are one of them, you will be very disappointed when you realize that this is not true.

Do you realize that whenever you get into an opportunity that ‘claims’ to give you a passive income, you end up being overwhelmed with lots of sh*t and often have to work like a dog? That’s when most people give up.

Truth is, there is no such thing as making money without having to do anything. If such opportunity exists, it’s most likely a scam (unless you’re talking about putting your money in the fixed deposit).

So what is a passive income then?

Here is my definition of a passive income - “A passive income is an income system that does not trade time for money.”

If you go with my definition, you are less likely to be disappointed and more likely to succeed because you’re prepared to work hard to create such a system.

Once you get the definition right, all you have to do is spend most of your time creating different streams of passive income and spend less time making money.

“Huh, what are you talking about, Kenneth?”

If you understand what I am talking about, good for you. If you don’t, let me explain.

Most people spend time to make money. One obvious example is working for a monthly salary. Some other less obvious examples include the following activities:

- Staring at the computer screen to trade the stock market or forex.

- Selling products in Ebay (unless you have plans to turn it into a system).

- Posting ads to sell Clickbank products (unless you have plans to turn it into a system).

- Providing freelance services such as graphic design, article writing etc (I hope my freelancers are not reading this!)

If you are pressured for money, yes, go find a job and do some part-time freelance jobs. But if you want to be rich, spend most of your time creating different streams of passive income.

You need to understand that making money and creating a passive income are two different things.

Creating a passive income may not make you money, although the ultimate goal is to make lots of money passively. When creating a passive income, you are creating a system that does not trade time for money and in the process of creating this system, you may spend more than you earn.

Many people can’t get pass the idea of losing money before making money. That’s why most people fail to create their first passive income online. On the contrary, those who are ‘lucky’ enough to create their first stream of passive income online will continue to create the second stream and third stream because they’re used to the idea of losing some money before getting it all back, multiplied. Another reason is because with their first passive income established, their risk appetite is higher and they are more willing to lose. The last reason is because they are more experienced now.

If you’ve just started out, go find a job to make money. But don’t spent too much time on it. Take 3-5% of your monthly income and most of your spare time to create a passive income online. Online opportunities cost much lesser than offline opportunities and 3-5% should be enough for you to learn the ropes. How soon you’ll see your first passive income established depends on how fast you learn and how hard you work.

Get your definition of passive income right and spend most of your time creating a passive income online. Once you’ve created your first passive income, go on to create the second, the third and more streams of passive income. This is possible since you don’t trade time for money with these systems. This is the sure way to make a fortune rather than just making a living.

In this post, I’m going to bring you to our back-office and show you some stats about the traffic that we send to you.

Some background

Early this week, we added an extra fraud prevention system that tracks the userid, IP address and number of clicks. This system will tell us which IP address is viewing our members’ ads and whether the visitor is a member or non-member.

When we launched the system, I was excited to see what it will return.

I was surprised!

Take a look at the screenshot of the database that recorded the click-through in the first 10 minutes after we launch.

The userid column is blank, meaning none of the clicks is from our own members!

This means our members are getting traffic from non-members, people who happen to come to our website via non-referred links such as the search engine. Frankly, I was pretty excited when I saw this.

This is just the first 10 minutes. After 24 hours, I exported the 24-hour record and separate them into member and non-member clicks.

The result is 64% are member clicks and 36% are non-member clicks. In total, we recorded 4763 clicks on that day.

Why am I showing you all these?

First reason, I’m excited. I can’t wait to share this info with you.

Another reason is I want to show you that LeadsLeap is more than just a traffic exchange system. Our members are getting traffic from non-members. 36% is not a small percentage.

How can you channel our traffic to your website?

One way is to become our PRO member. Your PRO ad will be shown in our network all the time 24/7.

Another way is to make sure that you have enough credits in your account so that you FREE ad can be shown in our network. If you are a member, you should have learnt the different ways to earn credits. One smart way is to refer 20 people to join you in LeadsLeap. This will earn you 500 credits every month.

20 people one time = 500 credits every month = endless traffic months after months.

Do the math. It’s a good deal.

Monthly bonus credits will be added on the 1st of each month. If you want to quality for the bonus on the 1st of August, you still have about 5 days to reach your 20 referrals. Go for it!

Many gurus will tell you that safelist is a complete waste of time and to certain extend, I agree. But if you know the tricks, it can be a good source of traffic for you.

Without further ado, here are the tricks to get good response from safelist advertising.

1) Don’t sell. Build list!

Safelist traffic seldom buy stuff on the spot. Don’t advertise your business opportunity directly or sell your product upfront. It won’t work.

Instead, your main job is to give. Give away free gifts, free info and/or arouse their curiosity so that they opt-in to your list.

After they opt-in to your list, you can lead them to a one-time offer using the strategy I shared with you earlier on. If the offer is good, they will bite.

To illustrate, when I advertise LeadsLeap program, the sales page I use is this. (You can use the same page to build your leadsleap team by simply adding your referid at the end of the url).

As you can see, I’m giving away more than 1000 minutes of internet marketing videos. The opt-in conversion is good. After prospects opt-in, they will see my one-time offer. About 5% will take up the offer, but bear in mind that it’s not the end.

Safelist traffic are usually newbies of the newbies. Once they opt-in to your list, if you can feed them with great information and show them the way to make money online, they can be your best long term customers.

2) It all started with a catchy email subject.

Safelist members receive tons of emails a day. Wanting them to read your email is very tough and that’s why most people fail to get much traffic.

(Usually, when you join an individual safelist program, the response is so low that it can be a waste of your time. For better response, it is wiser to use a safelist submitter that allows you to submit your ad to thousands of safelists at one time.)

As I’ve said, safelist members receive tons of emails everyday. When they browse through their list of emails, the only thing they see is your email subject. Therefore the only way to capture their attention is through your email subject.

There are 2 important tips on writing email subject:

i) When writing your email subject, focus on giving and don’t try to sell or hype.

Email subjects such as “Make $3000 A Month On Autopilot” will not work because people know you are trying to sell something.

Instead, email subject like “Free Report: How I Make $3000 A Month On Autopilot” will get some traffic to your squeeze page.

ii) To further increase the response, you MUST make your subject stand out VISUALLY.

This is the main secret, so pay special attention to this.

What I’m saying is you should add some special characters that can make your ad quickly recognizable from the list of email subjects.

To illustrate what I mean, look at the list of email subjects below and tell me which one captures your attention.

Still Reading Commercial Emails For Free?
Start to Increase Your ClickBank Sales Today!
The Gas Alternatives Report : Up To $2000 Monthly!
### Free Report ### How I Make $3000 A Month On Autopilot
You won’t believe this is free
THE LIGHTNING RESULT SAFELIST - FREE TO JOIN - FREE TO EARN!!
3 Reasons You Should Consider

If you browse through the subjects above, you should see that “### Free Report ### How I Make $3000 A Month On Autopilot” stands out from the rest.

The trick is to use some special characters to increase your chance of having your email subject being read.

Some tricks you can use include:

### Free Report ###
**** Urgent !!! ****
[Unadvertised Bonus]
FW:
RE:

I’ve also seen people starting an email subject with characters like these:

(¯`*
L@@K HERE >>

Be creative and think out of the box when using characters to capture attention.

But remember, this trick can ONLY capture people’s attention. Eventually, it’s the words that determine if they want to read your ad. Remember to give rather than to sell or hype in your email subject.

Email subjects like this

**** Urgent !!! **** Start to Increase Your ClickBank Sales Today!

will not get you much traffic, but email subjects like this

**** Urgent !!! **** 6000 Free Leads For You At $0 Cost

will.

To sum up, effective safelist advertising begins with 1) a VISUALLY powerful email subject, 2) an irresistible email subject that offers something that one would be crazy to reject and 3) a squeeze page that can get people to opt-in to get the offer, and finally 4) a good follow-up system that lives on the principle of “give and thou shall receive”.

Last but not least, remember that the success of any advertising campaign does not lie in the source of your traffic (so long as the traffic is targeted). More importantly, it lies in the amount of charcoal you have set up.

Like many of you, I started my career in internet marketing with little knowledge, no JV partner, no internet marketing friend and I didn’t pay thousands of dollars to attend any seminar on internet marketing. I started from scratch, learning the ropes by reading tons of ebooks and email newsletters (blog wasn’t popular when I started online).

So I believe whatever web site traffic strategy that works for me will work for you.

My Most Important Web Site Traffic Strategy

My most important web site traffic strategy is viral marketing.

Viral marketing is a huge topic by itself and it encompasses many different strategies, including viral ebook, viral software, affiliate program, tell-a-friend system and even list building.

Before I even start thinking about the details of any new web site, the first question I will ask myself is “How can I multiply my initial traffic into more traffic?” If I can’t get a good answer to this question, I will not build the web site at all. (Clarification: I’m referring to mega web sites like LeadsLeap, not those little Adsense or affiliate web sites that rely on search engine traffic.)

The whole idea of viral marketing is that you want people to tell other people about your website.

You may think all you need is an affiliate program. If you do, you are dead wrong! Just because you are having an affiliate program doesn’t mean that people will start spreading the words. In most cases, they won’t!

The key in viral marketing is to create a buzz in the community. You need to position your new web site in such a way that there is some novelty in it, something that will make people say “Hey, it sounds interesting” or “Hey, this is something new”. If you can do that, together with a good supporting system such as an affiliate program, your web site will spread like wild fire.

Next, You Need Web Site Traffic Starter

I derive the term Traffic Starter from Fire Starter. When you set up a fire, you need fire starters. Similarly, if you want  your website to spread like wild fire, you need a traffic starter, which is the initial traffic to your website.

Can you imagine what will happen if you burn lots of fire starters but you fail to put some charcoal around them? Yes, you get some initial fire but it soon dies.

In the case of web site traffic, the charcoal is the viral marketing components. That’s why I say viral marketing is the most important web site traffic strategy. You MUST have that in place before even thinking about where to get your initial traffic.

Am I clear on this point?

Ok next, where do you get the initial traffic?

Frankly, it really doesn’t matter where you get the initial traffic, as long as the traffic you receive are targeted.

When finding the initial web site traffic, an important question to ask yourself is “Where can I find people who are interested in my web site?” Whatever answer you get, go there and find ways to channel the traffic to your website.

It could mean you have to pay some money to advertise. It could also mean you have to write to some website owners and strike out some JV deals.

When I first started, I had no JV contact and I got all my initial traffic from advertising. I spent quite a bit on advertising (5 figures to be exact), but I soon earned back the money because I put a lot of “charcoal” around my traffic starter. Get the idea?

That’s really my main secret to increase web site traffic and I hope you get the gist of it.

Whenever Ewen advertises, there is something we can learn.

In Singapore, most seminar organizers sell their seminars via free previews. I believe this method of selling was copied from the US. The idea is to give you a 1-2 hour free seminar which will then upsell you with a $1000+ full seminar. This method works.

Of all the seminar organizers who advertise with us, almost all of them advertise their free seminars directly. That means they advertise a sales page that tells you about their free seminar, how you can benefit and how you can register for free.

This method of advertising is direct and you get attendance to your free seminar immediately. But it’s a short term strategy.

Guess what’s the long term strategy?

It is to put list building as the first priority.

Here is what Ewen did - Instead of advertising a free seminar, he advertised to give away an ebook that he is currently selling in the market for $19.90. It’s a no brainer, even I opt-in to download the ebook!

And here is the smart trick - As a ‘bonus’, those who opt-in are entitled to attend a free seminar by him!

Can you see how powerful this strategy is?

If you simply promote a free seminar, people will check their schedule and if they can’t make it on that day, they will not sign up. On the contrary, if you give away an ebook that you are currently selling in the market, many people will opt in to your list to download the ebook. At the same time, they know that they have the privilege to attend your seminar for free. If they can’t make it this time, you can always follow up with them for your next seminar.

Building a list is no longer a secret. But when it comes to paid advertising, most people still tend to sell the actual product directly instead of giving away something of value to build a list. I believe that’s because most people have the mentality of “if I pay to advertise, I want to make sure that I earn back the fee.”

This mentality is not wrong. But there are smarter ways to do it.

Like what Ewen has done, instead of selling the product directly, you can give an irresistible offer to entice people to opt-in. Once they opt-in, I rephrase, immediately after they opt-in, you can show them whatever offer that you want to sell to them. This way, you can build a list and make sales at the same time.

An important thing to note in this strategy is that you must present your offer immediately after your prospects opt-in, not via autoresponder or after a day or two. This is because if people bother to opt-in, you have already gotten their full attention. You want to continue showing them your offer when they are still with you. Once they divert their attention to some other things, it will be harder to sell to them again.

To make sure that you grab the concept behind this strategy, here’s the flowchart:

Give an irresistible offer > Opt-in > Once prospects opt-in, show them your offer (it can be an affiliate product you’re selling, a network marketing opportunity, a seminar you’re promoting or your own product) > Follow up

If you put list building as your first priority whenever you advertise, your list will eventually grow and when that happens, you can do traffic exchange with other list owners and grow your list even bigger.

Look at your advertising campaigns today and ask yourself if you are putting list building as the first priority. If you are not, you may want to re-think your strategy.

But before I tell you what I did, let me give you a brief background about this particular website.

I have a niche website that I created back in 2004 and it has been in the top 10 in Google for a competitive keyword for years.

To give you some idea, that ’single word’ keyword gives 6,900,000 results in Google, i.e. more than 6 million websites are fighting for that keyword.

A few months back, I realized that the sales from the website dropped. I suspected that my ranking in Google had probably dropped. Indeed, it dropped out of the first page into the second page. The exact ranking was 12th position. Just missed the top 10 by 2 positions.

To regain my top position, I needed to get lots of backlinks fast.

Thus, about 2 months back, I engaged a freelancer to submit the website to 1000 link directories for less than $30. That’s all I did.

A few days ago, I realized that sales from the website increased. I went to Google and checked. Indeed, I’m back to the top 10. I’m now in the 7th position.

From this experience, I once again prove that directory submission is still a viable promotion method.

Some Advice In Website Creation

When I first started creating niche websites to profit from Adsense and affiliate sales, I followed the advice of the ‘experts’ - follow your interest.

I wrote very good articles and each website took me one month of intensive effort!

Soon, very soon in fact, I ran out of interested topics and I had nothing to write. It took me a while before I decided to create websites using Private Label Articles.

I’m glad that I made that decision.

The traffic and earnings from some of the websites created using Private Label Articles outperform those ’sweat and toil’ websites I’ve created.

For example, one of the websites I’ve created using Private Label Articles is now consistently generating more than $500 a month from Adsense. The highest record was $700 in one month. It took me only a few hours to create the website and a few hours to promote it.

I’ve tried at least 4 different Private Label Article services in the market and there is only 1 that worth my time and investment. Unfortunately (or fortunately?), that website will be closed on 30th June 2008, i.e. it will stop accepting new members after 30th June 2008 (but existing members will still continue to receive new articles). When it reopens, probably after 3-4 months time, the same service will cost you double.

If you are just starting out but are committed to build some passive income online, I suggest you grab this PLR service that I use before it’s closed to the public and ‘naively’ follow the instructions laid out by them, especially their 90-day challenge as well as my step by step guide. If you can just do that, you will thank me one year from now.

The #1 reason is indecision!

They can’t decide if internet marketing is for them. They are getting mixed messages from everywhere, messages like:

“You can make a million trading the stock market.”

“You can achieve financial freedom with MLM.”

“No, I think I should be a REAL brick and mortar businessman. Internet marketing is not a career!”

One of the secrets of success is that when you make a decision, everything else will fall into places. It’s one of the secrets of the universe, as important as the law of attraction.

The tough part is to make a decision.

If you haven’t made up your mind that you’re going to create a full time income from internet marketing, I hope this article can help you to make a decision today.

Ok, let’s compare Internet Marketing with Stock Trading, MLM and a Brick And Mortar Business.

I’ve been through all the 3 other options and I believe I’m qualified to share with you my experience.

Internet Marketing vs. Stock Trading

I see stock trading as a form of wealth management. You should learn how to park your extra money in the stock market to get better ROI (return on investment) than putting money in fixed deposit.

But trading the stock market full time is a bad idea, unless you package it into a business, especially an online business. If so, you’re back to the idea of internet marketing.

The truth is most stock trading experts make money teaching people how to trade stocks! They create courses, software and books to teach people and make huge profit from there.

In stock trading, there is no sure-win. If you get a return of 50% consistently, you are considered an expert.

But do you know that you can get 1000% ROI in internet marketing? For example, I can invest $200 to get freelancers to rewrite articles, create a website and build links. In the years to come, this website will easily earn me more than $2000. That’s a return of more than 1000%!!!

My risk? The worse case is I break even. These days, I hardly have a website that lose money. It’s just a matter of time before I break even.

My advice is, trade stock if you are interested, but spend more time building your online empire because you can get better ROI at lower risk.

Internet Marketing vs. MLM

The dream of MLM (Multi-level marketing or network marketing) is that you can achieve time and financial freedom. This is the idea that most MLMers will try to sell you.

To me, the true value in MLM is mindset training. Success is all about mindset. Good MLM companies have good training that can instill the millionaire’s mindset into you. This is something internet marketing can hardly achieve.

Other than that, I really can’t see any advantage over internet marketing.

If you talk about financial freedom, internet marketing can definitely give you financial freedom. Online income is definitely more passive than MLM income. In fact, you can have multiple streams of online passive income, which makes it more stable than just 1 source of passive income.

If you talk about time freedom, MLM can give you time freedom ONLY after you are successful. During the process of team building, it’s hell!! Your working hours are nighttimes, Sundays and public holidays. These are times when your family members are free but you are not!

Internet marketing, on the other hand, gives you time freedom EVEN before you are successful. You still have to work hard, but you chose when you want to work. You can work when everyone is sleeping. Or you can work an hour and play with your kids for the next hour. It’s all up to you.

Moreover, if you truly believe in the power of MLM, you should explore online MLM instead of the old-school brick and mortar MLM. The old-school MLM is really a time waster.

Internet Marketing vs. Brick And Mortar Business

Ever since I tasted the goodness of online marketing, I’ve never thought of doing brick and mortar business again!

I started out running traditional business and it was a relief when I converted my entire business to online. When I ran my offline business, my mind was all about how to pay my rental, my staff’s salary, how to bring in customers etc. I hardly have time to think of business strategies and expansion.

But online business is almost stress-free. When you are small, you work alone. There is no worry of office rental and staff cost. You spend most of your time thinking of business strategies and how to expand your business, which is definitely more important than working hard to pay bills!

Another important difference is in offline business, you can hardly find people who are willing to show you how to make money. But in online business, many people (too many in fact) wanting to show you how they make money. Some of them may charge you, but you are talking about $47 or $97. That’s cheap!

Final Remark……

I hope I’ve been impartial in my comparison. I’ve been on both sides of the equation and I just hope that my experience can help you make a better decision.

Remember, regardless of which decision you make, once you make the decision, everything else will fall into places for you!

Frankly, this email is a wake up call to me. I’ve heard of people’s account got disabled, but I haven’t had any close friend whose account has been disabled.

The reason why her account is disabled is unknown. She didn’t click her own ads. The only possibility, she confessed, is that one of her neglected blogs posted junk info. But the site receives practically no traffic and zero click through. Does that justify an account suspension?

Ignorance can cause your Adsense account disabled

We know the general rule of Adsense. Basically, an Adsense website should be content rich and provide values to the visitors. This is the rule that I’ve been playing with all this while and I believe I’m pretty safe.

But after hearing this sad news, I start to think if there is anything else I need to be cautious about. It is possible that your ignorance (or should I say negligence) may cause your Adsense account disabled.

Here are some of the issues I can think of:

1) Do you have a ‘forgotten’ junk site with your Adsense ad in it?

It could be a Blogger blog that you created years ago. You probably followed the advice of some “black hat” marketers to auto-post junk info into the blog and profit from Adsense. This is a time bomb. Make sure that you remove those ads now.

2) Have you been sabotaged?

Google says that you can’t click your own ad or ask other people to click on your ad. This means if you offended me, I can sabotage you by going to your Adsense website and mass-click your ads until your Adsense account is suspended!

Is it possible? One word, yes!

This is stupid, I know, but it can happen. Here’s what Google say about how to prevent sabotage.

As you can see, the answer they give is just a diplomatic answer. It just tell you one thing, that is, you can be sabotaged.

If you have hundreds of websites, how on earth are you going to monitor each of the traffic log for suspicious activity?

If your website is suspended due to fraudulent clicks, do you think Google will believe you that someone actually sabotage you? Or they will think you actually get someone to inflate the clicks so as to help you earn more money?

I have yet to have a solution to this problem. All I can say is if you ever experience the following scenarios, report to Google immediately. If you file a report with them before they catch you, you are in a better position to prove to them that you’ve been sabotaged.

The scenarios include:

- You experience an extremely high CTR.

If you have a CTR of 500%, it means for every page loaded from your website, a visitor actually clicks 5 ads. This is an obvious sign that you’ve been sabotaged.

- You experience a sudden surge in your Adsense income on a particular website.

There is no absolute amount for the surge. If your website has been earning $1 a day and suddenly it increases to $10 and you didn’t do anything special, you probably want to check out the traffic log and report to Google if necessary.

3) Is your advertising media reliable?

If you advertise your Adsense website, be sure that you know the source of the traffic and that the advertising media is reliable.

For example, you may go to a forum or Ebay to buy 100000 visitors and you drive the traffic to your Adsense website. Many of these cheap traffic services actually use pop-under technology and if Google happens to know it, you are in deep soup.

Talking about advertising media, please do not advertise your Adsense websites on LeadsLeap.com. It’s for your own good. Although LeadsLeap is not a click-exchange program, it does have some elements of click-exchange. Click-exchange traffic is forbidden for Adsense. To play safe, I wouldn’t advertise my Adsense website via LeadsLeap. Frankly, you won’t get much click-through anyway. Instead, those ad will make your ad look unprofessional. I never put Adsense ads in my squeeze page or sales page.

4) Are you keeping up-to-date with Google policy?

Google may change their Adsense policy from time to time. Things that you do today may be violating their rules tomorrow.

For example, in 2006, all the gurus asked you to put a picture beside your Adsense ad to boost click through. But in 2007, Google added to its policy that images are not allowed alongside Adsense ads.

If you have any website built in 2006 with images beside the ads, be sure that you’ve removed those images by now.

5) Do you have other self-feeding ads on your website?

Besides Adsense ads, you may insert other advertising feeds such as those that automatically generate a list of items sold at Amazon or Ebay, or you may sell text links on your website. This is usually not much of a problem if the program that you use is reliable. But some advertising or link selling programs allow adult contents and if you are not careful, you may end up having porn ads on your website!

What should I do if my account is disabled?

If your account is already disabled, you can’t register another Adsense account using your name. However, there are 2 alternatives I can think of:

1) Open another account under a business entity.

You can set up a business entity and register another Adsense account. The advantage is you are still in full control of your Adsense account. The disadvantage is you will have to open a business account with your local bank in order to bank in the money. Depending on the bank, a substantial minimum deposit may be necessary. In Singapore, it’s $10k.

2) Use your relative’s account.

You can open another account under your spouse’s name or someone you trust. The disadvantage is the cheque will be issued to another person’s name and you have to treat that person well or…..

In both options, the best is to use a different mailing address. If it’s under the same mailing address, Google will pay special attention to the activity in that account.

Actually, not all are lost.

Once you have another account, you can put the id back to your existing sites. Your account may have been banned, but your site has not. But this time, make sure you do things right. Also, make sure that you do not put it on sites that violate Google policy or you’ll risk your account being banned again.

Some final words……

Last but not least, I want to say that I still love Google Adsense. The income is 100% passive. There is no need to handle any customer support or do any updating work for changes in affiliate programs. As long as you keep your hat ‘white’ and don’t make ignorant mistakes like those I’ve suggested above, you shouldn’t worry too much about having your Google Adsense account disabled.