Your merchant account is very easy and simple to establish. They are also a very important aspect of your business. Most merchant account providers will have the forms that you will need to complete in order to obtain your merchant account. Others may even send a representative to you business’s location. Here is a list of items you will need to be able to apply for your merchant account.

Your Business Checking Account: This is an easy one for most companies. If you are just starting your business then it is as simple as going to your bank and establishing a checking account. Your local bank may offer merchant accounts as well.

A Voided Check: The voided check will be used to provide a sample to the merchant bank so the bank knows where to deposit the funds from your credit card processing transactions.

Business Licenses: You will need to provide eveidence that you are infact, a “real business”. A copy of your license will usually be sufficient.

If applicable - Your Website Address: The would only be necessisary if you are planning on selling goods or services thorugh the internet. You will need to supply the bank with your URL.

A copy of your Return Policy: This is simply a description of your return policy. If your sales are final then you should simply state that in your policy. If you have a 30 day money back guarantee then the details as to what qualifies will need to be disclosed. Many place post their return policy on receipts and others only have it posted in the stores location. If you are a web based business than supply the merchant bank with the a copy from the web sites of your refund policy.

A couple Trade References: Trade references are the relationships that you have already establishedwith various vendors. What the processor is looking for is evidence that you pay your business related bills on time. The longer you have done business with a supplier / vendor the better, but if you are just establishing a business you may need to have your personal finances weigh in on any decisions.

Tax Forms: A merchant bank may also ask for copies of your previous tax forms to establish the income of your business. This will guide them as to how many sales and possible amounts that will be used through your merchant accounts.

This list is the most commonly requested items by processing banks when setting up your merchant account, but other pieces of information may be requested by the bank. You will need to know the estimated number of credit card transactions. Remember that this is an estimate and adjustments can be made once your merchant account is established. In no time you will be accepting charges for your goods.

A little known method to increase the relevancy of AdSense’s ads on your site without modifying your content visually is by forcing AdSense to focus on or ignoring certain sections. This is called “section targeting.”

Internet Advertising Tactics
Section targeting allows you to suggest sections of your text and HTML content that you’d like Google AdSense to emphasize or downplay when matching ads to your site’s content. By providing Google AdSense with your suggestions, you can assist Google AdSense in improving your ad targeting. Although implementation is easy, I recommend that only those familiar with HTML attempt to implement section targeting.

To implement section targeting, you’ll need to add a set of special HTML comment tags to your code. These tags will mark the beginning and end of whichever section(s) you’d like to emphasize or de-emphasize for ad targeting.

The HTML tags to emphasize a page section take the following format:

You can also designate sections you’d like to have ignored by adding a (weight=ignore) to the starting tag:

With these tags added to your HTML code, your final code may look like the following:

Irrelevant text here

This is the most important content of your webpage. You prefer Ads being shown related to this content.

Other irrelevant or low-paying keyword-content here

You can use section targeting to make suggestions about as many sections of a page as you like. However, please be aware that Google AdSense can’t guarantee results, and that it may take up to 2 weeks before Google’s crawlers take any changes you’ve made to your site into account.

In order to properly implement this feature, you’ll need to include a significant amount of content within the section targeting tags. Including insufficient content may result in less relevant ads or Public Service Ads. In addition, please keep in mind that this feature should only be used to emphasize significant sections of your site’s relevant content. It is against Google AdSense’s program policies to manipulate the ad targeting to result in ads that are not relevant to the content of your pages.

So the bottom line is to use section targeting wisely. This means you do not wrap a single sentence or even a medium-sized paragraph in section targeting tags.

One real-life example that I’ve used myself in the past is ignoring menus. NOTE that Google AdSense ignoring your menus does NOT mean Google’s Crawler will so no worries there. I had a menu section with links to articles on a huge variety of topics. Most topics were totally unrelated to the specific page / article. Since I wanted ads to be relevant to the currently viewed article, I wrapped my menu in ignore tags and wrapped my article in ad_section targeting tags. After a few weeks, my Google AdSense ads did become much more relevant and I didn’t see the random ads that were related to the topics in my menu anymore!

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