Tutorial: Make More Money on Your Sites with a Mouse Trap

Jace · 05-25-2006

This is from a pretty cool blog I read on a consistant basis, thought I would pass it along:
----------------------------
Have you ever noticed that when you go to MSN, Yahoo, or Google the cursor goes to the search box when the page loads? I know I notice it when I start to type something in the address bar and half way through the cursor goes to the search box. I call this phenomenon the “mouse trap.”

The reason the search engines force the cursor to the search box on their sites is the same reason you should do the same on your site: to make more money. I have made this change on my site and will show you how to do the same on your sites.

Aaron Wall points out that the Adsense search box is the most profitable ad unit per pixel you can have on your website. BY A LOT!. So for this project:

Sign up for Google Adsense.

Once you have an Adsense account:

1. Log in and choose the AdSense Setup tab.

2. Choose the Adsense for search

3. You can choose either the Google WebSearch or the + SiteSearch option.

4. Customize the colors however you want and generate your code.

It should give you a code that looks like this:

Code:

5. Cut and paste this code to a text editor.

6. Now you have to add a name (let’s go with name=”google”) in the form tag so:

Code:

becomes

Code:

7. Paste this code where you want the search box to appear on your site.

8. Change your tag to

Code:

Now, whenever anyone goes to your site, the cursor will go to the search box so if they start typing and press enter, it will do a Google search. If there are adwords for the search term, they will appear on top of the search results. When they are clicked, you get paid.

I’m about 99% sure this is kosher with Google (after all, they do it themselves!). Matt, if you could give this method a thumbs up I’m sure everyone would appreciate it.
------------------------

and yes Robin, I pasted the whole freakin thing.....waaaaahhhh!

source