I warmly welcome you to my blog. I hope you will enjoy your first visit. If you like what you are seeing, I invite you to subscribe to my RSS feed.

It is time to reveal the winners list of our Rs 23,000 cash give away contest. I am very happy to announce a very successful ending to our first ever contest at “antharjalaya”.

We had 339 entries to the contest and I had to take 3-4 hours to prepare the complete list yesterday since I was busy with my exams early. All the email forwards have been recorded on the same day I receive the CC to my email account. So do not worry , all your efforts have been credited accordingly.

Today at 11.00 am with the presence of Mr Asanka Amarasingha of Amarasingha & Company Auditors I input the list to randomizor org and selected winners. Since I only had the email address of the participants, in the last 6 hours I have been trying to contact the winners to get their names and locations. I got details of 8 lucky winners and for the other two, I will publish the first part of their email address here.

Click here to see the output I got from randomizer. Then it has been matched with our spreadsheet of all entries to select winners.

Here is the list,

The Grand Prize Winner of Rs 10,000 :
Kusal Mudannayake - Lady Maccalums drive, Kandy

The Winner of 2nd place Cash Prize of Rs 5000 :
M. Ansar - Ambathanna Garden, Bandarawela

3- 10 places will get Rs 1,000 each

Lucky Winner No 03 : Sentitkumaran - Janaki Lane,Bambalapitiya
Lucky Winner No 04 : Roshan Rajadurai - Kurunduwatta road,Battaramulla,
Lucky Winner No 05 : prasadkodi@ xxxxx.com ( Contact me please.)
Lucky Winner No 06 : Daya Rathnasekara - havelock road,colombo - 6
Lucky Winner No 07 : Dr. Elmore Rodrigo - Dhammadassi Mawatha,KANDY
Lucky Winner No 08 : Kaman Athapathu - Maha hunupitiya Negombo
Lucky Winner No 09 : djhassan @ xxxxx.com (Contact me please.)
Lucky Winner No 10 : Kenneth jayasekara - Old Kottawa Rd,Nugegoda

I have already sent an invitation to Mr kusal mudannayaka for a lunch and to hand over his grand prize. For others I will be depositing money to their accounts / send cheques on 20 th October 2008.

“prasadkodi” and “djhassan ” please contact me and let me know the method you want me to send your prizes.

You can opt to,
Receive a check.

Direct deposit to your bank account.

Thank you everyone for participating. I wish I could give prizes to all the 100+ readers who joined the contest. I hope you all will make the full use of the “money making guide” I sent to you. It contains all the details you need for a start.

You can always contact me if you need any further guidance. Given that you are already equipped with some knowledge. I do not like to answer the noob question ” How can I make some money online?“. Do your research first and get back to me if you need any further assistance.

I will be holding another contest at the end of this month too. But this time, it will be available for participants from all over the world.

Wanna know how I am making money to give away like this? click here.

When you first start a web site or a blog, it is very hard to monetize it using other methods. Your only hope is adsense at this stage.

It is very easy to get in to the system and it used to be very easy to make money with adsense. Times have changed now. Still it is easy to get accepted as a Google publisher but it is not easy to earn clicks in a legitimate way.

That is why most publishers get desperate and use illegal methods to generate clicks. But eventually they get banned because Google is the Greek God of Internet. Google knows everything.

I started using adsense on the very first day of my blog. I was not desperate to make money from this blog so I just wanted to give it a try. I knew I could get rid of the code if it is not working out for me.

But as you can see, I am still running them. But most bloggers complain that their ads are not converting. They say people have become adsense blinded. But I realized Whether we can make money with adsense or not is completely depending on the way we present adsense to our viewers.

Most “adsense secrets guides” tell you to blend them as much as possible with the content. But we must not forget the fact that people do not live in caves these days. They can identify an ad no matter how hard we try to hide it. So the best way is to present it in a nice way without annoying the visitors. And if the ads are relevant, there is a high chance of your visitors clicking them.

The easiest way to get more relevant ads is to use Google section targeting. I have seen many publishers are ignoring this all important 2 codes. When you are writing something off topic use this code,

<!– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –>
<!– google_ad_section_end (weight=ignore) –>

For example, if you are writing about investments and in the last paragraph if you are asking your readers to subscribe to the web site, you can block that irrelevant part by using the above code.

And if you feel some paragraphs are highly relevant with keywords to your topic, use this code to highlight them.

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

My click through rate increased significantly once I started using these 2 simple codes.

You are seeing the best adsense layout worked for me so far. I have tried blue color Titles, Orange color titles and several different back ground colors. For several days I ran them with a white back ground and contrasting colors. But the current combination is the one worked best for me. That is not going to stop me from trying few different things in the future.

And you should not go ahead and change your adsense settings blindly. This adsense layout is working nicely for my blog. Unfortunately there is no universally accepted way to present your adsense ads. You have to figure out what colors and placement will do the work for you. But I am 100% certain that there is a wining combination of color and placement for all the web sites. The Sooner you find yours, more money you will make. It is really possible to make money with adsense.

The adsense unit you see at the very beginning of this post is the one which got me most clicks. Since it is the first ad unit of the web page, the value of clicks are also high. I have had clicks valid up to $3.90 a click. It is a good idea to float the adsense unit with your text content. You can do this by using the following code.

<div style=”float:left; margin: 10px;”><Your adsense code></div>

The main thing I realized is adsense is still a money maker. My blog is only 3 months old but I will be withdrawing my second adsense cheque next week. I created a content site last month on health and beauty just for adsense. And it is already showing good potential, both with Google search engine placements and with Adsense earnings.

What I like about that web site is I can simply forget about it in 2-3 weeks. It will still bring me money. It is much easier to maintain a web site than maintaining a blog. So if you are after few quick bucks from Google adsensde, always go for a web site. Not a blog. Not only it will make your life easy, web sites make it much easier to rank for good keywords in search engines. SEO guru’s may not agree with me. But I am speaking from my experience. Just my 2 cents though.

If you are planning to make money with adsense by creating a web site, Watch this video by my friend Lisa from 2createawebsite. She has some very good points and I am sure you will like it.

Do not forget to read,
I made $600 in 2 hours last week. Read this till I post a full report.