The change to the Adsense privacy policy in latest Google TOS is the item which requires action from the largest number of Adsense publishers.

If you are an Adsense publisher, you would have recently been advised of Google’s updates terms of service for Adsense. There is an excellent description of the wider changes on Jim Karter‘s site.

While most of the changes are more ‘for your information’ there is one which has required some action from us and I’m guessing a lot of other publishers.

The Adsense team have re-enforced the requirement for sites displaying Adsense to display a privacy policy. They have also been quite specific requirements that make it necessary for publishers to:

post and abide by a transparent privacy policy that users see. According to this policy, publishers must notify their users of the use of cookies and/or web beacons to collect data in the ad serving process. This change relates to advertisers’ use of innovative products and features like Gadget Ads and other offerings in the future.

To be honest we have had a Privacy Policy up on only our higher traffic sites until now. The policy didn’t make mention of 3rd parties using cookies/web beacons to collect data.

Over the last few days we have:

• For all higher traffic sites have updated the displayed privacy policy to comply with Adsense requirements.
• For all smaller sites, built one group policy and had the sites link to it.

This approach was decided upon for the following reasons:

• There will be a requirement to update the policy again in the future. So limiting the number of policy documents requiring update was practical.
• For larger traffic sites we wanted to retain traffic on-site & for the smaller ones a bit of leakage won’t be the end of the world.

While it has involved a bit of work, we feel this is a positive step for our readers.

Appreciate that Google needs to do this to keep the legal beagles happy (& court costs down). but it is also important that readers have the opportunity to see what a site’s stance is on privacy.

In short it feels like the right thing to do irrespective of our status as an Adsense publisher.

If you haven’t sorted your own Privacy policy out yet here are a few links which will help:

The Adsense policy change announcement

Google’s own privacy policy

A Privacy Policy Template Site – If an Adsense publisher be sure to add the Google specified requirements

The Privacy Policy for this site

Our Group Privacy Policy

©2012 Home Based Business Opportunity. All Rights Reserved.

CollegeScholarships.org are offering a $10,000 Blogging Scholarship this year.

Its available to those in the US who attend college and maintain a weblog.

Here’s the heads-up I received today :

This is Shannon Prue, Scholarship Coordinator for the Daniel Kovach Scholarship Foundation.

Just this morning, we started accepting applications for our 2nd annual Blogging Scholarship.

The Grand Prize this year is $10,000 and will be presented at the Blog World and New Media Expo in Las Vegas, this upcoming Nov. 8-9.

We are looking for well qualified applicants, so if you think any of your readers would be eligible, then please let them know about this opportunity.

Full details are at CollegeScholarships.org

This is great, let your friends know and be sure to join if you qualify.

©2012 Home Based Business Opportunity. All Rights Reserved.

With new inventory to be sold, the Text Link Ads Discount Coupon offer is on again.

For the month of August you can save 15% on all new orders. Coupon code is august.

If this is your first purchase the starter kit offer is available which gets you $100 in free Text Link Ads. Just enter “starter kit” in the coupon field at checkout. The minimum order total to take advantage of the starter kit offer is $125.00.

Click Here to find out more

©2012 Home Based Business Opportunity. All Rights Reserved.

If your under 18, then OnlineMarketingKnowledge are offering places on their free internet marketing course.

The course runs for 45 days and is described by the OnlineMarketingKnowledge team as follows:

At the end of 45 Days you will have a website that makes $5 a day( $150 a month ) or more from adsense, and other media affiliates. You will have marketing and webmaster knowledge to continue and make more sites that are profitable.

The Price & Length Of the Course:

The course is $99.95 and the length of the course is 45 days. (Free for under 18′s for the 15 July 07 class)

What is included with the Course?

1) One Free Website CMS script with admin backend

2) One Year free hosting for ONE website (six months for under 18′s free entry)

3) 45 day lessons ( One lesson a day )

4) 2 hour private phone conversation with Sundaybrew

More details about the class can be found here.

Thanks to SundayBrew and the team for opening the doors to younger webmasters.

©2012 Home Based Business Opportunity. All Rights Reserved.

Team Link Network is a new entrant to the text link market. Apart from the usual income opportunities for publishers and advertisers, what is interesting is its unique and potentially very profitable affiliate program.

This offering allows you to make money from Text Link promotion, placement and revenue share. Here is a summary of the service:

How To Make Money As An Affiliate

• Place a banner on your website which advertises the service – Paying 25% of the sale value (Sales range from $50 upwards)
• Optionally join a Text Link Network Board. The full details are here. In summary there are a number of boards and you can elect to be allocated to one. Maximum fifteen people in the board. When the board is full the person at the top gets paid $1360. The balance of the board is split into two and the whole process starts again.

How To Make Money As A Publisher:

• Allowing text links to be placed on your website pages which have a PR of 1 or more – Pays $0.50 per link, with a maximum of 20 links to a page.

How To Make Money As An Advertiser

• Buying text links which directly or indirectly (improved SERPS) will increase traffic and sales. Minimum purchase 50 times $1 links or $50 per month. The links are allocated by the service to 50 unique domains.

Affiliates pay a one time sign-up fee of $200. Publishers and Advertisers sign-up for free.

Publishers and Advertisers can become affiliates also.

Text Link Network is new and it will take time for advertisers to join. However, once its going, this could be a good option if your a webmaster with lower Page Rank pages (PR 1 – 3). For affiliates the residual income will make this a program worthy of consideration.

This Post Is Sponsored By Team Link Network

©2012 Home Based Business Opportunity. All Rights Reserved.

Earlier this month Google announced another enhancement to their Adsense program. Its called targetable custom channels.

It works a bit like this:

• Each Google Adsense ad-block can be allocated to one or more “channels”. These are used to track the performance (including earnings) for the ad-block.
• This allows the publisher to experiment with colour, placement and Ad type to determine which combination works best for each site.
• Usually Ads are allocated to random Ad-Blocks by Google.
• Now, with targetable custom channels, advertisers can choose to locate their ads within a specified location on a publishers site.

There is a bit of debate about when and if this offering will be effective.

It seems Google has taken a step to slow the growth of competition like Text-Link-Ads et al, who already broker fixed placement ads for publishers.

Its interesting that Google recently changed their TOS to exclude placement of competing advertisements with the same look as Adsense.

With Google rounding out its portfolio it clearly has the scope to slow the growth of any medium competing for its advertising dollar.

Even though the internet advertising market is growing, Google will be keeping a weather eye on market share and move to ensure it is not eroded by competing new offerings. This is perfectly normal (and expected) behavior.

And in a paragraph of pure speculation, a potential future development from Google, is a sponsored posting option. Instead of an ad with a headline and a few words, you will be able to buy a few paragraphs or a whole blog post. With the rise in popularity of blogs, sponsored posting is maturing and becoming an accepted practice.This is just like text-link-ads were a few years/months ago. It would be simple for Google to also implement this into their portfolio.

Now lets talk about the Publishers. Will this work for them ?

Obviously it wouldn’t be smart to immediately implement this blog wide. There just won’t be enough advertisers interested and this isn’t what the product was designed for. Revenues would plummet.

However for small pieces of prime real estate, a custom channel should drive bidding higher than it usually would be.

Suspect that in the medium term this is only a viable option for large, high traffic sites. The further up the SERPS the better this will work for you.

This development is good for advertisers who want to be specific about where their Ad is to be placed. By being able to target location provides, another tool to improve hit rate. Prime spots get more traffic. If they have deep enough pockets they could remove their competition from key positions by simply out-bidding them.

In summary the new offering will take some time to bed down. Both publishers and advertisers will take time to work out the wrinkles.

As a publisher a small trial in a hot spot is the way to start out.

For Advertisers, look for opportunities to get highly targeted, advertising in premium positions, on very high traffic sites. Will cost a bit more but the results should be worthwhile.

©2012 Home Based Business Opportunity. All Rights Reserved.

After some recent downtime the DMOZ open directory is “open for business” again. Submissions once more being accepted.

If you’d like to know a bit more about this iconic directory you can check out this site Dummies Guide to DMOZ.org or vist the site itself DMOZ

©2012 Home Based Business Opportunity. All Rights Reserved.