A quick little finiancial checklist to start you off right. This was first shared by Scott Adams and I though I should add it here. This is from Scott Adam’s book “Dilbert and the Way of the Weasels.” He goes on to state that annuities are a bad idea. Whole life insurance is also a bad idea. Investing in individual stocks is a bad idea. Investing in managed mutual funds instead of an index fund is bad. The list goes on but that is the idea. Tell me what you think.

1. Make a will if you haven’t already done so.
2. Cut up those credit cards as they are the things of evil.
3. Seek and get Term Life Insurance if you haven’t already done so.
4. Fund your 401K to the maximum amount.
5. Fund your IRA to the maximum amount.
6. Buy a house if you wish to own one and only if you can afford it.
7. Always stash away at least six months worth of expenses expenses in a money-market account.
8. Take all other money and invest 70% in a stock index fund and 30% in a bond fund and do not touch until ready to retire. I like to use Sharebuilder to do this.

Popularity: 19% [?]

Google Adsense has become one of the core revenue generators for an increasing amount of web businesses. People around the world have found making money on the internet to be possible and with a little know how, rather achievable. Adsense makes it easy to, within minutes, incorporate advertisements onto your website or weblog and start earning revenue with your web traffic with ease.

There are still some that are not making the most of Google Adsense. Fact is, some are still only generating a few dollars with Adsense. Some are newbies while others are trying to squeeze every bit from their website real estate. The fundamentals are often forgotten and over complicated.

Should your ads take top priority where visitors can see them… Wrong

When placing ads you should take caution as to not be too obtrusive on the reader’s area of interest. Placing Adsense ads in sections where the visitor has already read your content and is about to leave your website like in the footer may be more suitable. Often when Adsense is placed in prime real estate areas of your website, competitor websites are typically displayed and the user ends up clicking away from your website before actually engaging on your website. This often leads to getting engaged readers and just pushing them off to your competitor thus losing a potential return visitor.

The idea behind this is to allow people to the opportunity to browse through your website in the hope that they will become return readers. Top priority is to create a loyal visitor base while you profit off of them when they’re ready to leave by providing them with relevant websites in the form of Adsense ads. This however is more of a long term thing and will deflate your short term earnings but will both allow you to hold onto visitors for a longer period of time therefore increasing return visitors and long term profits.

Relevant Adsense Ads by using section targeting

Why are you serving higher paying ads for keywords that do not relate to your website theme/site content? Use Googles’ quick tags to only target the actual page content and not the header, side and footer junk thus increasing click through rate and leading to more profits.

Simply add <!– google_ad_section_start –> before and <!– google_ad_section_end –> after the content you want to gear your Google Adsense ads to return relevant ads for.

<!– google_ad_section_start –>
Content
<!– google_ad_section_end –>

Key points to focus on:

• Try to exclude irrelevant content such as the footer and sidebar info.
• Wrap these tags before and after large chunks of content as they lead to better optimization by Google.
• Google allows for multiple sets of these tags on any page.

Integrate ads effectively into your website

Some websites out there go with the “trash the design” method and focus on horrible layouts and non blending colors. These often end up with angry readers and low click through rates. We are trying to make these ads look as though they are in fact just a list of relevant websites that the user may click on in order to get more content on referenced keywords.

Popularity: 12% [?]