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Google Adsense is without doubt the most popular online advertising network and used by many small and big site owners alike. And we would love to hear how we can earn more from the system. Here are 10 useful tools to help you boost your usage of the service, understand it better, and perhaps help earn more.

Adsblacklist

Adsblacklist is a site that lists the Made for Adsense (MFA) sites and Low Cost Per Click (LCPC) ads that Google Adsense users can add to their Google Adsense Competitive Ad filter tool.  To use the Adblacklist tool, you need to register yourself and your site. Once that is done, click on the Generate Filter List link on the left hand sidebar of the Adsblacklist site. This tool can generate upto 200 MFA sites or LCPC ad sites if you have a free account, or generate all that it has in its database if you are a premier account holder. You can also contribute to Adsblacklist by reporting MFA sites or LCPC sites that you have discovered.

Adsense Earnings RSS feed

Adsense Earnings RSS feed is a script that you can use to generate a RSS feed of your Adsense earnings, clicks, or other reports. So if you are the RSS buff who wants every information on the RSS reader, this is the tool for you. To use this, simply download the script, customize it a little by adding your Adsense login information and the range of days you want to aggregate data of. Then you can upload the script on your own server or some secret place on the web.

Ads Preview and Comparison Tool

Ads Preview and Comparison Tool is an online tool that allows you to preview the ads that will appear on your site from Google Adsense, Yahoo Publisher, and Chitika.  You can preview Google Adsense text ads, adlinks, and image ads in various sizes or compare them with corresponding ads from Yahoo or Chitika. This is quite an interesting tool and you might be surprised with some of the ads that may come up on the preview.

Adsense Charts and Graphs

Adsense Charts and Graphs offers eight charts for your Adsense data based on impressions, impressions (Cumulative), clicks, clicks (Cumulative), clickthrough percentage, earnings, earnings (Cumulative), and earnings per click. If you are the type who likes to study your Adsense data thoroughly with charts and graphs, then this is the tool for you. To generate your charts, you have to download the AdSense CSV file from your account and upload it on this online tool.

The charts can come out with some useful information like when did your earnings peak, when did it subside, which are the best performing channels, etc.

AlternateURL

AlternateURL replaces the Public Service Ads from Google Adsense on your site with paying ads. You can register at the site for free and generate the AlternateURL code to use on your site instead of the Adsense code. Simple as that. AlternateURL works on a 50:50 revenue sharing model with its publishers. They pay through Paypal monthly. You can also track your click reports from your AlternateURL account page.

There is a similar service to this from Adsense through which you can color mask your ad block, use an image, or make your ad unit collapse whenever there are no paying ads to display.

ClickAider

ClickAider is an online tool that will track clicks to Google Adsesnse ads and ads from other ad networks that are displayed on your site. This can be an useful tool that will provide you information like which advertisements are the most preferred by your readers. ClickAider also tracks where your site visitors come from and which outbound links they follow from your site.

Google Adwords Keyword Tool

Google Adwords Keyword Tool is essentially an online tool for Google Adwords users but Adsense users can take advantage of it as well. You can use the tool to generate a list of top keywords on any descriptive word, phrase, or website address. The generated list of keywords are also rated based on the amount of advertisers bidding on them, search volume in a particular month, and the average search volume. This gives you a sense of high paying keywords that you can used on your site to attract high paying Adsense ads.

FilterTool

FilterTool is a cool online tool that you can use to find a list of sites whose Adsense ads are likely to come up on your site. You can pick the bad sites from this list and add them to your Adsense filter list. You can also sort out the good sites and keep them separately so that the next time you run this tool, those sites are exempted from showing up. FilterTool is available for a free trail of 14 days.

Pubmatic

Pubmatic is a tool that you can use to optimize the ads you get from your various ad networks including Adsense. Once you register at Pubmatic, you can add your Adsense account details and generate the html codes that ypu can use on your site in place of the Adsense code. That’s all. PubMatic will get the best ads in terms of size, color, text/banner/video format, etc. suitable to your site.

SysSense

SysSense is a light tool that will sit on your system tray and monitor your Adsense account. The first time you run SysSense, you will be ask to set up your Adsense account. You can provide your Google adsense login ID and password and you are done. There are lot more features here than you will find on the Firefox addon tools providing similar services. For instance, there is the currency convertor, and the auto update that you can set from anywhere between 1 minute to 5 hours. You can set what information you want SysSense to show including page impressions, clicks, clickthrough rates, effective CPM rates, or earnings.

There have been many Greasemonkey scripts and Firefox addons that do the job of adding pictures and links on Gmail signatures. As you know Gmail, on its own, doesn’t support the use of html and pictures in its email signatures in order to prevent misuses. So these scripts and addons have been the favorite lot of many who wanted to spice up their emails a bit. However since the new version of Gmail debuted, many of them have ceased to work.

But luckily here is one script called Gmail HTML Signatures that still works. It not only adds pictures and links on your signatures but also enable float. In other words, when you are replying to an email, your signature will be visible just below your message and not after the copy of the original email embedded in your reply. See screenshot of a signature below.

For newbies, please note that you first need to install the Greasemonkey addon on your Firefox browser and  then this script. After you have installed the script, when you open your compose editor, you will see that just after the ‘From:’ section, you will see a link called ‘Create Signature’ . When you open that link, you will see a window where you need to add the html code of whatever signature you have created.

If you don’t know how to create a html and want a quick solution, you can use a free online WYSIWYG editor like this one at Real Graphics. Create your signature, format it well, add the font colors and the picture. When you are through, click the toggle (< >) button and copy the html code from there.

Remember if you using pictures, be sure to fill the  description of the picture in the ‘Alternate Text’ in the upload window. Whatever you fill there will come out in the alt=”…” section of the html code. For example: alt=”StumbleUpon”.

This will ensure that the image description is shown whenever your email recipient can’t receive html emails. Just like in the screenshot above.

Tired of receiving email forwards from your friends, whose email address you don’t want to block. You might not also want to write back and tell him/her not to send forwards anymore.

Try StopForwarding. You can simple add your friend’s name and email address at this site and they will send your friend a polite email asking him/her not send anymore spam emails and that spamming is bad. They won’t include your name in the email.

Well, I tried to add one of my colleagues’ email address to the site just for kicks. And you know what? I got an error message saying ‘An email has already been sent to this email address, in last 1 month. We do not promote spam. Use a different email address.’ :-)

Check out Yahoo New Globe. Set it on automatic and let the globe rotate on your browser screen showing you the important news happening across the globe. You do do it in the interactive mode as well.

The News Globe pulls out the top news new from Yahoo News Top Stories feed, runs then pass Yahoo Maps to get the latitude and longitude of each news item, and then uses 3D classes in ActionScript to get that visual experience.

Do you use Facebook status as your twitter and love updating your Facebook status regularly? Unlike Twitter that you can use from your IM or phone, you would have realised that you need to visit your Facebook profile page to update your status.

Not anymore. Now you can update your Facebook status from your Firefox browser with the Boost For Facebook addon. After installing the addon, it will reside on your browser as a toolbar showing a sidebar button, search Facebook box, Facebook shortcut links, and an ‘Update your Status’ box. You can type your new status in this box and hit enter on your system keyboard. That’s it. Your Facebook’s profile gets a new status update.

First time you installed the addon, you might not get the status update feature working on the toolbar. If so, visit the Boost for Facebook Help Page and see the instructions on the FAQ/ Feature Specific page.

To update your Facebook status from your mobile phone, add the Facebook Mobile application. This will allow you to text your status to Facebook. This application is currently available for users from the US, UK, and Canada.

If you are a new business development executive and are looking for new ways to leverage your online social networking in your work, here is one Facebook application that might help.

Post Your RFP is a Facebook application that you can use to browse a list of RFPs that other users have posted. There are more than 800 RFPs listed so far and you can see them listed in various industry categories.

If you are in an organisation, you can use this service to post RFPs and let your friends and contacts know about it. Post Your RFP can also draft and review proposals for you.

If you are new to the social media, there are a couple of great sites that list and reviews lots of new web 2.0 startups, provides lists of such sites categorised in groups. One of them is Mashable.

And recently it has come out with some good lists of web 2.0 sites and applications that you simply cannot afford to miss. Check them out.

1. Blogging Toolbox: 120+ Resources for Bloggers – A wonderful list of tools, advice, forums, and other resources for Blogger, Wordpress, Movable, or independent bloggers.

2. No Download Required: 30+ Apps That Are Killing Microsoft – List of web alternatives for MS Office

3. The Ultimate RSS Toolbox – 120+ RSS Resources – A detailed list of everything about RSS – readers, RSS to email convertors, plugins, directories, pingers, tips and hacks.

4. 90+ Online Photography Tools and Resources – Don’t have Adobe Photoshop? No worries. Here is a list of services you can use to edit your pictures online.

Also, Mashable allows you to create your profile page wherein you can link to your blogs, and other social networking sites, acting as a sort of social network aggregator. For example, here is my page. Further, you can have your own personalised Mashable page that will list the pages at Mashable you have been to, your profile, picture, links,and Mashable friends.

Surfing the Internet today involves a lot of visits to Web 2.0 sites. You want to read blogs, submit interesting items to your social bookmarking sites, check out the latest videos, and pictures uploaded by users at photo sharing sites. To remember all these site urls, either we use our browser favorites, a social bookmarking site, or use a feed reader. We also install select individual bookmarklets of social booking sites in our browsers to do the job.

Then we conduct tons of searches on the Internet – not only on Google, but dozens of blog aggregators, and other social bookmarking sites – as we want to search for not only news items or simple Internet searches, but among blog posts, forum comments, uploaded videos, and pictures. To do all these, we go to the individual search sites or use the search box in our browsers, or use a browser toolbar such as the Google toolbar or a Yahoo toolbar.

How about we use a single toolbar to do all these mentioned above? Enter Web 2.0 toolbar – a browser bar that lets you do dozens of things including:

What I liked about the toolbar is that it offers me the option to access all these Web 2.0 daily essential visits at one place in my browser, so that I don’t have to type any individual urls or log on to my feeds reader. The toolbar has versions for Inter Explorer and well as Firefox.

1. Submit interesting items to social bookmarking sites such as Digg, Del.icio.us, StumbleUpon, Spurl, Blink, Yahoo MyWeb, Reddit, Newsvine, Mag.nolia, and many others.

2. Read feeds of popular blogs such as BoingBoing, Techcrunch, Digg, Netscape, and many more.

3. Search on 32 search sites such Google, Wikipedia, ebay, Youtube, Dictionary, Blogger, etc. and also on the site you are on.

4. View job boards like CrunchBoard, GigaOM Jobs, etc.

5. Links to popular videos pages like Youtube Most Viewed, Google’s Most Viewed videos, etc.

6. Links to popular pictures pages like Flickr Most Interesting, Today’s New Webshots Album, etc.

7. Interesting items on the PRWeb site

8. Gadgets like weather, email notifications, etc. There are more widgets available.

9. It can also place a MS Office shortcut menu on the toolbar itself, so that you can access your favorite Notepad or MS Word from the browser itself.

Just one recommendation I have is that it should allow users to add their own specific feeds, search sites, and links to the list already there on the toolbar by default. This way, users can customise it to suit their taste.

Custom make your own browser toolbar

Now having written this, I did some more searches and realised that this toolbar has been created with a service from Conduit that lets webmasters and bloggers create their own toolbar. You can in fact create your own toolbar for your blog with this free service from Conduit.

The Web 2.0 toolbar is fine as it has got most of the sites covered. But just in case you are one of those who are keen to experiment, head on to Conduit.