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Tips to Boost Your Google AdSense Income

2009-07-22T08:46:00.000-07:00

Google AdSense can be a lucrative source of income, and due to this big making money opportunity, everyone is making effort to have his or her share of the pie. Even now at this time, there are thousands of fresh blogs being created by some online money makers around the globe.

Creating one fresh blog for AdSense purpose is a very simple task, even if you a newbie. There are tons of info on how to setup and use Google AdSense on the internet, and the good thing is, it is free. This article too meant for that same reason, and in it, you would read few tips on Google AdSense.

Many may probably have come across these tips somewhere else, but for those have not, I hope you will find it helpful. So, here the tips.

Tips to consider when adding Google AdSense on your blog:

1. Ads Placement.

Place your AdSense ads likely on the spot where it easily can be seen when visitors arrive on the site. The spots where most visitors will observe for the first time are, on top and below the post title, on the left and right side of the post body and on the top area above navigation bar. Ads placed near rich body content and navigational bars are consider the best spot because visitors are likely focus on the most on those areas.

2. Use Text Ads

Text ads have more advantages than image ads. You can blend in text ads with the post content and you can squeeze more of them in the space taken up by image ads. Another advantage using text ads is better description on the ads.

3. Make you ads blend in with the site

Customize your AdSense ads to blend with the site appearance. Using to many different color on your ads can make your site look ugly and in addition on that, many visitors hate sponsored link. That is why customize the AdSense ads to blend in with the site layout and main content, and loose the ads border. Visitors are more likely to click on it thinking it is linking to another useful content source.

Though those tips can help to increase your AdSense income, you need to understand that the most important thing about making money online from a blog with Google AdSense is getting the most traffic to your blog. The simplest way to say it, the more traffic you have, the more clicks you get, the more money you can earn.

4. Getting traffic to your website to boost your AdSense Revenue

You still doesn’t know how to gain traffic via targeted and long-tail keywords? Read this keyword tool.

How to Have Mind Blowing Sex

2009-01-11T05:14:00.000-08:00

As a relationship matures, sex inevitably starts to become boring. Both partners have learned what turns the other on and both are comfortable in their relationship. While in some respects this may be a good thing, it isn't necessarily a good thing for your sex life. Doing the same old moves in the same tired places, almost like a choreographed dance can suck the life out of your sex life and leave you wanting more.

How do you repair the damage? How can you make sex fun again?

These are the two fundamental questions that we're going to attempt to answer for you. While sex certainly isn't the be all and end all of a relationship, it is an important part and should be nurtured just like any other part of your relationship. Making sex fun and exciting is a key element to having mind blowing sex.

Location...location...location

Location is a huge part of sex. While bedroom sex can be good, having intercourse in a dangerous or sexy location can ramp up your sex life exponentially. The thrill of danger can be a huge turn on. Why not try having sex in a bathroom stall or along a hiking trail? Take your partner out for an innocent looking hike, pack some blankets and maybe a picnic lunch, and make love to them when they're least expecting it. Not only do you get to enjoy a nice hike together, but you get the added bonus of dangerous mind blowing sex!

Romance

Sometimes in relationships, we tend to forget about romance. This can lead to a stale love life very quickly. Your partner wants to feel wanted, and by going that extra mile to make them feel sexy, you can bring your sex life up a level...or two.

Here's an example. When your partner is scheduled to get off work, find a sitter for the kids and have a candlelit massage parlour set up just for him or her. Have sexy oils, candlelight, some wine, sexy music and some blankets ready to go. Watch their face light up when they enter the house, and treat them like the King or Queen that they are. Not only will you make their day, but you'll also get to erotically touch them all over. Making love while oiled up is never a bad thing either.

Toys and more toys

Experiment a little. Try shopping for some sex toys together, and explore your adventurous side. Maybe he or she has been dying to try something new in the bedroom, but hasn't worked up the courage to say so yet. Make the decision for them, and pick up a few toys that are sure to blow their minds. Toys can seriously add to the experience, and it's different, which is always a good thing.

Practice these tips for a mind blowing sex experience. There are hundreds of variations that can be used, and feel free to explore them. Sex should never be boring. It should be fun, exciting, loving and romantic. Don't let repetition turn your love life stale!

Want to have mind-blowing sex? Head over to WildSexSecrets.com for amazing secrets to make your partner melt in a wave of pleasure...

Anna Kournikova Tennis Player

2008-06-02T03:22:00.000-07:00

Russian tennis star Anna Kournikova first discovered tennis when she was five years old. After six years of practice in her native Moscow, Russia, she became more serious about the sport and moved to Florida at age 11 to learn at famed tennis coach Nick Bollettieri’s Tennis Academy. As her skills increased, she excelled on the junior circuit. Winning both the European Championships and Italian Open, she entered the pro ranks in 1996 as the International Tennis Federation (ITF) Junior World Champion.

Her pro career has had its ups and downs, and after nagging back injuries Kournikova has all but given up professional tennis. After a promising start to her career, she never won a pro singles tournament but managed a consistent top-20 ranking. She did, however, excel on the doubles circuit. Frequently paired with Martina Hingis, the duo ranked number-one and took 16 doubles titles (including three Grand Slam events).

In 2003 she made her last professional tennis appearance and underwent back surgery. But despite her fame on the court, Kournikova’s star still shines because of her stunning good looks. Today she remains a top internet search and has ventured into modeling, becoming the most photographed woman in sports ever. Much of that includes scantily clad swimsuit spreads in such publications as Maxim, FHM, and Sports Illustrated’s legendary Swimsuit Issue

Over the years her good looks have also landed her numerous lucrative endorsement deals, the likes of which include Adidas and Lycos. She has also appeared in the music videos of fiancé Enrique Iglesias; and although she hasn’t returned to pro tennis, she still plays in many exhibition and charity events.

Some say that Kournikova single-handedly changed the game of tennis. Her good looks drew attention to the sport, piquing interest from men and women alike and renewing the sport’s draw. On the court, rising stars such as Maria Sharapova, Daniela Hantuchova and Jelena Dokic keep the trend going that Anna began, as all three are successful on the court and as models.

How To Improve Your Google Adsense Earning

2008-04-07T05:37:00.000-07:00

Google AdSense is a powerful program, but it is important to plan carefully when implementing an online advertising strategy. This article tells you “How To Increase Your Google AdSense Earnings”

To many beginning website owners, the Google AdSense program can seem like a program for free money, but in fact earning money from hosting ads take planning, patience, and lots of hard work. While it is possible to earn a very good living from hosting AdSense ads, the truth is that most people do not use the program to its maximum potential. What separates those few top earners from all the rest is knowledge, and it is important to gather plenty of information to improve your Google Adsense earnings.

If webmasters want to monetize their websites, the great way to do it is through Google Adsense. There are lots of webmasters struggling hard to earn some good money a day through their sites. But then some of the “geniuses” of them are enjoying hundreds of dollars a day from Google Adsense ads on their websites. What makes these webmasters different from the other kind is that they are different and they think out of the box.

The ones who have been there and done it have quite some useful tips to help those who would want to venture into this field. Some of these tips have boosted quite a lot of earnings in the past and is continuously doing so.

Here are some 5 proven ways on how best to improve your Google Adsense earnings.

Concentrating on one format of Google Adsense ad. The one format that worked well for the majority is the Large Rectangle (336X280). This same format has the tendency to result in higher CTR, or the click-through rates. Why choose this format out of the many you can use? Basically because the ads will look like normal web links, and people, being used to clicking on them, click these types of links. They may or may not know they are clicking on your Google Adsense ads but as long as there are clicks, then it will all be for your advantage.
Create a custom palette for your Google Adsense ads. Choose a color that will go well with the background of your site. If your site has a white background, try to use white as the color of your ad border and background. The idea to patterning the colors is to make the Adsense look like it is part of the web pages. Again, this will result to more clicks from people visiting your site.
Remove the Google Adsense from the bottom pages of your site and put them at the top. Do not try to hide your Google Adsense. Put them in the place where people can see them quickly. You will be amazed how the difference between Google Adsense locations can make when you see your earnings.
Maintain links to relevant websites. If you think some sites are better off than the others, put your ads there and try to maintaining and managing them. If there is already lots of Google Adsense put into that certain site, put yours on top of all of them. That way visitor will see your ads first upon browsing into that site.
Try to automate the insertion of your Google Adsense code into the webpages using SSI (or server side included). Ask your web administrator if your server supports SSI or not. How do you do it? Just save your Google Adsense code in a text file, save it as “adsense text”, and upload it to the root directory of the web server. Then using SSI, call the code on other pages. This tip is a time saver especially for those who are using automatic page generators to generate pages on their website.

These are some of the tips that have worked well for some who want to generate hundreds and even thousands on their websites. It is important to know though that ads are displayed because it fits the interest of the people viewing them. So focusing on a specific topic should be your primary purpose because the displays will be especially targeted on a topic that persons will be viewing already.

Note also that there are many other Google Adsense sharing the same topic as you. It is best to think of making a good ad that will be somewhat different and unique than the ones already done. Every click through that visitors make is a point for you so make every click count by making your Google Adsense something that people will definitely click on.

Tips given by those who have boosted their earnings are just guidelines they want to share with others. If they have somehow worked wonders to some, maybe it can work wonders for you too. Try them out into your ads and see the result it will bring.

If others have done it, there is nothing wrong trying it out for yourself.

Making Money from Selling Advertising Space

2008-03-30T02:48:00.000-07:00

If you would observe the company that delivers the daily paper to your doorstep for a business case study, you will come to learn that the newspaper publisher hires reporters, writers and other important staff to create the contents and deliver the papers to their readers.

In addition to the above mention, the publisher has to invest regularly in heavy duty machineries and tons of papers in printing tons of newspapers on a daily basis.

And in order to ensure that the newspapers are delivered on time, the publisher appoints agents at every part of the covered territory.

So, how does the newspaper company make money? It is obvious that selling a copy of the papers at less than a dollar would not even be able to even fund the operations.

The answer? Selling advertising spaces! You have definitely seen lots of advertisements in the newspaper. The publisher simply sells advertising space in the papers to advertisers who want to leverage their advertising efforts on the paper’s high readership.

On the same analogy, you can make money the exact way from your newsletter: simply by selling advertising space to prospective advertisers!

If your mailing list size exceeds 1,000 (5,000 is recommended) subscribers and beyond, you can start selling advertising space for say, $10.00 per sponsor ad.

In this manner, you turn every issue you send out to your subscribers into a profit-pulling device. And since there is virtually no end to the stream of advertisers as products, services and businesses are cropping every single day in every industry imaginable, so are your money making opportunities.

How To Make Money Using PayPal

Paypal is the dominant payment processor on the internet today. It is hard to go just two sites now without finding someone who accepts this as a form of payment, it has made buying things dangerously easy! So how do you flip the coin and make money using PayPal?

There are a few different options, let's look at each in turn:

Blogging:

Blogging is the act of setting up a website with a blog installed on it (or using one of the free versions that host it for you) which enables you to quickly post your thoughts/articles online whenever you want.

The reason this has become so popular is because it takes away almost all of the technical aspects of creating a site (depending how much you want to customise you site). So a blog can now be installed with just a few clicks and then all posts made with a few clicks.

To make money using PayPal and your blog then you can either sell services, like doing reviews for people, maybe writing articles for them, or try affiliate marketing or even selling your own books through the blog. The blog is the way you advertise to people so that as they are drawn to the content on your blog they get to see your adverts for the other items and may buy.

Affiliate marketing:

This is the art of getting people to visit a specific site using your link. You place links on your blog to sites that you want to make money from and get people to click through those links and visit the sites, if they then buy something you get a percentage of that sale.

Most affiliate schemes pay by cheque or direct bank deposit, but paydotcom.com pays straight into your PayPal account!

How to get indexed by Google and othe search engines

2008-03-18T03:20:00.000-07:00

This question have been often asked by impatient bloggers on forums. Well, if you are patient, nowadays, you don't need to do anything, and your blog will eventually be indexed by Google and other search engines. However, it may take some time. If you are impatient, perhaps there are various things you can do.

The best thing you can do is to get inbound links from sites that have already been indexed by the search engines. Then when spider go to that site to crawl the site, it will come across you link and will go to you site to crawl it too. This will also do you good as having links to your sites will increase seaarch engine ranking. However, this is easier said than done unless you have your own site which has already been indexed. If you have no one to turn to to ask for inbound links, perhaps you can try to search for similar sites and offer to exchange links. For such purposes, it will be advantages to know the PageRank of the sites. See this post on how you can easily find the PageRank of your own site and any other sites: How to get the PageRank of your and other sites. (close the new window to get back to this page). Other ways to get links is to submit to blog directories.

Submit site to Directories

You can also submit your site to blog or other directories to get inbound links. To make your task easier, it is good to carefully prepare in advance title and a short description of your blog which you can use for all the directories, otherwise you will have to type it each time you try to submit your blog to a directory.

The best directory to get listed on is the Open Directory. To submit your site to Open Directory, go to How to suggest a site to the Open Directory. (Close the new window to get back to this page). Google, and many other search engines, uses the data of the Open Directory Project. In fact, Google Directory is taken from DMOZ, so if you get listed in DMOZ, your site is also listed in Google Directory. This means your site will have 2 high PageRank and authoritative site. However, it is VERY hard to get into the Open Directory. This blog got listed in DMOZ. You can read about it here: DMOZ, the most important directory, and Blogger Tips and Tricks got listed without even submitting (click BACK button to get back to this page).

It is easier to submit your blog to blog directories. There are many blog directories. Here are some blog directories:(Close new windows to get back to this page)

There are many other blog directories. When I have the time, I will compile them into a post and put a link here.

Submit URL to search enginesYou can also submit your URL to search engines, but I hear they may not help much. Anyway, here are the links to the sites where you can submit your URL to search engines:

Add a Google Sitemap to your blog

Some are of the opinion that adding a Google sitemap will help your blog get indexed faster. In any case, adding a Google Sitemap to your blog has its advantages. It will make it easier for the spider to crawl your site. To get instruction on how to add a Google Sitemap to your blog, go to Adding a Google Sitemap to your blog. (Close the new window to get back to this page)

Websites You Should Have Bookmarked Part #1

2008-02-18T01:51:00.000-08:00

1. Authority Black Book
http://www.authorityblackbook.com/
Learn Web 2.0 Tools And Tactics That Generate Traffic Instantly?
Do NOT Buy Any Product That Says Web 2.0 Until You Read The 100% FREE Authority Black Book!
Here's A Small Sample Of What You'll Learn In The Authority Black Book:
Over 500 links to the most powerful and useful Web 2.0 traffic and buzz resources on the web! We're talking immmediate traffic to your mini-sites, Adsense sites or affiliate sites.
How to use RSS subscriptions to explode your reach! So many marketers and webmasters are doing RSS the wrong way... we'll show you the right way!
How to create and syndicate video to the top video sharing sites for high-powered and valuable backlinks (Google likes video links!)
Linkbait: What is it, How to write it, and how to generate massive buzz and hundreds of backlinks in your niche using it.
A tool to instantly and with the click of a button bookmark any page on the web in all the social bookmarking sites – FREE!
Where to get buttons for your browser to submit your pages to all the leading buzz sites like Netscape, StumbleUpon, Reddit and dozens more!
Thorough explanations of more technical steps and strategies by Jack Humphrey, the author of Power Linking Profits and the Authority Black Book.

2. Beginner's Guide To Search Engine Optimization
http://www.seomoz.org/article/beginners-guide-to-search-engine-optimization

This guide provides a complete overview of many of the processes, techniques and strategies used by professional search engine optimization specialists.

This guide represents the opinions of Rand Fishkin, the author, and of contributors who assisted in its creation. This guide is not representative of the guidelines of any of the search engines mentioned (Yahoo!, MSN, Google or AskJeeves). If you have contributions, criticism or would like to discuss this piece, please visit this Beginners' Guide thread at Cre8asiteForums.

3. BlogBash: Deep Secrets of Successful Blogging - Learn from 30 Experts
http://chitika.com/blogbash.php BlogBash - 30 days 30 experts!
was one of the most successful events ever done on the Chitika Blog. Dreamed up by Chitika's CTO Alden DoRosario and inspired by an interesting series from the Month of Apple Bugs, Chitika's goal for this event was to "empower the blogger."
The experts wrote about an array of wide-ranging topics, from "Dare to be Odd" and "Shopping and Blogging: How to make the marriage work", to "Help me! My mom is my blogs only reader!" and many more.
Go ahead; explore the deep secrets of these 30 expert bloggers, learn from their mistakes and their success as we celebrate YOU the blogger!

4. Blog Profits Blueprint
http://www.blogmastermind.com/blueprint/
Most bloggers are rewarded with little more than "chump change" for their time, expertise and efforts. Download My New Blog Profits Blueprint FREE and let me show you...

"How To Earn US $5000+ Per Month FromYour Blog, 'Working' As Little As 2 Hours Per Day"

Let me Take You 'Behind The Scenes' Of My Blogging Empire And I'll Show You How I make a Full Time Income Blogging Part Time...

Here are some of the things you'll learn....

5. Dive Into Web 2.0
http://www.deitel.com/eBook/tabid/2478/Default.aspx
introduces the principles, applications, technologies, companies, business models and monetization strategies of Web 2.0. The eBook provides you with Web 2.0 literacy and points you to extensive resources where you'll find additional information. Dive Into Web 2.0, along with the many free Resource Centers on our website, evolved from research we’ve done to build our own Web 2.0 businesses. In the spirit of Web 2.0, we are sharing this research with the community.
Dive Into Web 2.0 is a chapter from our book, Internet and World Wide Web How to Program, 4/e (Prentice Hall, ©2008; order from Amazon.com or Informit.com). By offering this chapter as an eBook, we're able to keep it up-to-date with the latest developments in Web 2.0. Check this site regularly for the most recent version. The eBook version of the chapter contains extensive hyperlinking to 80 Deitel Resource Centers and many other Web 2.0 websites and blogs.

How To Make Money Online With Google Adsense - Total Newbie Guide

2008-01-16T00:29:00.000-08:00

Well where should I start? I was one of the MANY people who tried to find a profitable internet business to make extra income. I bought every single money making ebook and tried just about every program out there. Though, most were scams, those that did work, made me no more than a few dollars.
I recall coming home from work everyday to sit infront of a computer searching for my internet success. I almost gave up, thinking that there was no way I was going to make a living off of this thing.

I read forums, ebook after ebook, newsletters, I tried them all. After a while I learned the tricks of the trade, and developed the knowledge of how everything works and I finally did it.
Now that I'm situated in my life, I'll provide you with My Free service that made me lots of money. Though there's one thing I found out and remember this, There is no way you can make money online, without spending money.

Here are some simple steps to get you started:

1. Get Web Hosting and a Domain Name.

2. Sign up for Adsense.

3. Start Building Content and your Website with Xsite Pro.

4. Promote, Advertise and everything else in your power to get traffic.

5. Watch the money start pouring in.

You must learn to build and grow your website, who knows, maybe you'll start earning big money like the pro's who earn thousands a month doing nothing, except for what they love to do.
Joe Peacehttp://www.itsjustanothersite.com/I'll Setup an Adsense Empire for you for FREE! 200+ Content Rich Pages.

How to Increase CTR of Blog Traffic - PPC Internet Marketing Advice

Almost all bloggers monetize their traffic with the help of PPC (pay per click) programs and systems, among which Google AdSense program is the most famous one. And, of course, one of the most important tasks of every blog owner who uses PPC program is to make more people click the ads: the higher percentage of clickers is - the better.

All these efforts come down to simple question: how to increase CTR level of my ads? Note: CTR is click through rate which shows the % of the people who click on the ads.
Try to put yourself into the shoes of blog visitor, and the situation gets clear. Only the person who is search hungry is very likely to click the ads of PPC program, because these ads are usually very good in giving more relevant results to the search hungry visitors of your blog. These people are happy to find as much info around their topic as possible, and their clicking habit at this very moment is extremely high.

So, search hungry people who came to your blog from the search engines are very likely to show better CTR and click on your PPC ads a lot more
And this is the time when modern PPC Internet marketing solutions come to help.
Technologically it is possible to set up your ads to be displayed only to the traffic that comes to your blog from search engines. You are not dispersing the efforts any longer. If the solution "sees" that blog visitor A is a regular visitor to this blog - it is very likely that he or she is reading the content of this blog very attentively and will not be mentioning the PPC ads. When solution "sees" that visitor B came to the blog right from the search engine and has come here for the first time, this person should see the PPC ads.

Solutions that help to create this kind of scenarios greatly help to display the necessary type of ads to the necessary type of audience: affiliate offers for loyal blog visitors, PPC ads for the traffic that has just come from search engines to the blog. This increases the effect from your advertising and will give you very nice CTR on PPC ads which is also a nice record to be shown to other potential advertisers.
Create scenarios for PPC ads with blog platform of this successful blogger
Read more about blogging and PPC Internet marketing advice

Using Titles Effectively on Blogs

2008-01-03T03:00:00.000-08:00

My Mum drilled into me at a young age that first impressions are important.

Outside of the design of your blog (that’s a whole other post) perhaps the best way of creating that impression is though your post’s title.

Titles are so important on many fronts - including:

Grabbing Attention in Search Engines - Head over to Google and type in virtually any word you can think of and you’ll often find millions of results. The interesting thing is that for most search results in Google (and other SE’s) there is very little for readers to go by in deciding which result to click on. There is a title, a short excerpt and a URL. The most highlighted of these is the title and I believe it is key in getting SE referral clicks.

Getting RSS Readers Attention - in a very similar way titles have the ability to grab the attention of those following your blog via RSS in news aggregators. Even if your feeds are full post feeds rather than excerpts it’s likely that most news aggregator readers scan the titles of posts for things that interest them rather than reading full text. The same principle is true in other indexes and directories like Technorati, del.icio.us, digg etc

Loyal Readers - Good titles also impact the way your loyal readers interact with your blog. As I’ve already mentioned - web users scan pages and one of the best ways to make them pause as they roll their eyes down your site is to capture their attention with a good title that intrigues them enough to slow down their frantic web surfing and actually read some of the content that you’ve pour time and energy into.

Search Engine Optimization - While there are many factors that contribute to how search engines ranks a page of your blog, one of the most powerful onsite factors are the words that you use in the title of that page. This means making sure that the titles of your posts end up being in the

Using Titles Successfully

There are many strategies that successful bloggers use to draw attention to their posts with titles. There is no real right or wrong and as with many aspects of blogging what is a ‘good title’ is a little subjective. Having said this - you might want to consider these six factors in writing titles for your blog posts:

Keep it Simple - Most research I’ve seen into titles seems to argue that the most effective titles are short, simple and easy to understand. While breaking these rules can help grab attention (see below) they can also confuse, frustrate and put a glazed look in the eyes of potential readers. Shorter titles are also good for Search Engines - keep it under 40 or so characters and you’ll ensure the whole title appears in search results.

Grab Attention - Good titles set your posts apart from the clutter around them and then draw readers into your post. Grabbing attention might happen using tactics of ’shock’, ‘big claims’, ‘controversy’ or even ‘confusion’. While these tactics do work at getting people in - it should also be said that they can do more damage than good if the rest of your post doesn’t live up to the promises your title makes. By all means try to grab attention - just just ‘trick’ your readers into thinking you’ll provide them with something you can’t give them.

Meet a Need - An effective title draws people into reading more because they feel you’ve got something to say that they NEED to hear. Indexes like del.icio.us illustrate just how effective this is. Quite often the articles that get to the top of the list are ‘how to…’ or ‘tutorial’ type articles that show readers that they will learn how to solve a problem or need that they might have.

Describe - Some readers will be drawn into a post by a cryptic title that doesn’t tell them much about what they’ll be reading - but the majority of readers need to know something about what they’ll find if they read further. Titles should describe (in a word or few) what readers will get in the main post.

Use Key Words - As I mentioned above - titles are a powerful part of SEO. If you want to maximize their power you need to consider using the keywords that you want your post to be found with in your title in some way. This of course is challenging when you are attempting to ‘keep it simple’ and to also ‘grab attention and intrigue’ - but it can be done. Words at the start of titles are thought to be more powerful than words at the end when it comes to SEO.

One last tip on titles - Take your time with your titles. Many bloggers pour a lot of effort into writing engaging and interesting posts - but then just slap any old title onto it without realizing that in doing so they might be ensuring that their post is never read.

Treat your title as an mini advertisement for your work. Take at least a few minutes before hitting publish to not only make sure your post is in order - but that your title is going to do everything it can to maximize the chances that people will engage with what you have to say.

Blogs Will Change Your Business

2007-12-18T08:45:00.000-08:00

Look past the yakkers, hobbyists, and political mobs. Your customers and rivals are figuring blogs out. Our advice: Catch up...or catch you later

It's time for a frank talk. And no, it can't wait. We know, we know: Most of you are sick to death of blogs. Don't even want to hear about these millions of online journals that link together into a vast network. And yes, there's plenty out there not to like. Self-obsession, politics of hate, and the same hunger for fame that has people lining up to trade punches on The Jerry Springer Show. Name just about anything that's sick in our society today, and it's on parade in the blogs. On lots of them, even the writing stinks.

Go ahead and bellyache about blogs. But you cannot afford to close your eyes to them, because they're simply the most explosive outbreak in the information world since the Internet itself. And they're going to shake up just about every business -- including yours. It doesn't matter whether you're shipping paper clips, pork bellies, or videos of Britney in a bikini, blogs are a phenomenon that you cannot ignore, postpone, or delegate. Given the changes barreling down upon us, blogs are not a business elective. They're a prerequisite. (And yes, that goes for us, too.)

There's a little problem, though. Many of you don't visit blogs -- or haven't since blogs became a sensation in last year's Presidential race. According to a Pew Research Center Survey, only 27% of Internet users in America now bother to read them. So we're going to take you into the world of blogs by delivering this story -- call it Blogs 101 for businesses -- in the style of a blog. We're even sprinkling it with links. These are underlined words that, when clicked, carry readers of this story's online version to another Web page. This all may make for a strange experience, but it's the closest we can come to reaching out from the page, grabbing you by the collar, and shaking you into action.

First, a few numbers. There are some 9 million blogs out there, with 40,000 new ones popping up each day. Some discuss poetry, others constitutional law. And, yes, many are plain silly. "Mommy tells me it may rain today. Oh Yucky Dee Doo," reads one April Posting. Let's assume that 99.9% are equally off point. So what? That leaves some 40 new ones every day that could be talking about your business, engaging your employees, or leaking those merger discussions you thought were hush-hush.

Give the paranoids their due. The overwhelming majority of the information the world spews out every day is digital -- photos from camera phones, PowerPoint presentations, government filings, billions and billions of e-mails, even digital phone messages. With a couple of clicks, every one of these items can be broadcast into the blogosphere by anyone with an Internet hookup -- or even a cell phone. If it's scandalous, a poisonous e-mail from a CEO, for example, or torture pictures from a prison camp, others link to it in a flash. And here's the killer: Blog posts linger on the Web forever.

Yet not all the news is scary. Ideas circulate as fast as scandal. Potential customers are out there, sniffing around for deals and partners. While you may be putting it off, you can bet that your competitors are exploring ways to harvest new ideas from blogs, sprinkle ads into them, and yes, find out what you and other competitors are up to.

Add your Adsense Knowlegde

2007-12-16T06:14:00.000-08:00

Vertical Ads
Place vertical ads on the right side of the page. Most surfers tend to use their mouse to scroll down on the right side of the page; so placing your tower (or vertical) ads on the right gives it a higher chance of grabbing the visitor’s attention.

Small Ads
Studies say that the upper right hand corner is the first spot on your site that someone sees. Try placing your small ads at the top right hand corner. Grab the visitor’s attention when they first come to your site with your AdSense ads. If an ad interests them, they’re still going to browse through your site, but they will come back to click through that ad.

Ad Format
Wider ads appeal to more visitors because they’re easier to read. If something is easy to read, someone is more likely to take the time to read everything rather than just glancing at the first few words. However, it’s important to balance your ads and the content on your pages. You’ll discover that the way you think the ads should be for optimal CTR aren’t always where they need to be. Monitor your ad placement versus CTR and you’ll find the place and format that works best on each page.

Size of Ads
Again, you’ll have to experiment on your site, but AdSense webmasters and insiders all seem to agree that the following ad sizes result in the higher CTR:336 x 280 Large Rectangle160 x 600 Wide Skyscraper120 x 600 SkyscraperThese formats are easy to read and attract attention.

Color of Ads
Remember it’s very important for the ads to blend into your site. Use the same background color for your ads that you use on your site. However, don’t forget to change the color of the links to match as well. This helps blend them even more.

Amount of Ads
If you ever go through sales training for a job, you’ll learn that the customer has to trust you in order to buy from you. This isn’t any different with a website. It’s hard to build credibility when you don’t have the chance to meet them in person and let them see your smile or get to know you a bit, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. Too many ads on a site are the equivalent of spam in email. If your page has too many ads, it makes every ad you have less credible. Instantly, your customers do not feel like you are trustworthy, and they’ll probably leave your site immediately for fear of adware being installed on their computer. Your site should be about the content, not about ads. If your site is getting a lot of traffic, you’re going to be very successful with targeted ads from AdSense. Stick with it and don’t participate in every popular ad bank out there. It will cost you ad revenue because it will make you less credible.

Type of Ads
If you’re going to display other ads in addition to AdSense ads, be sure those ads are just as credible because, again, people have to trust you to some degree to click through. If you’re advertising free adult shows on your homemade jewelry site, nobody is going to trust any of the ads you’re displaying. AdSense targeted ads help build confidence and trust. Don’t discredit yourself by placing any ad that you can find on your site. It will only cost you a high CTR. If you want to put other ads on your site and on a page with AdSense ads, make sure it’s not against Google’s TOS before doing so.

Ads on Multiple Pages
Having AdSense ads on more than one page can increase your CTR, but also adds more interesting information to your site and offers more selection. Ads can be placed on forum pages, article pages, and even merchandise pages if placed correctly. Having different AdSense ads on different pages offers your visitors more options. Of course, they are all targeted ads, so you are providing them a service while increasing your revenue.

Reduce Your Filter List
While your AdSense filter list filters out unwanted content, if your list gets too large, it filters out the number of ads that can appear. Instead of blocking a top-level domain from appearing, only block the exact pages you don’t want.

Search Box
Put a Google search box on your site. You’ll be doing a service for your customers by allowing them to search from your site, but you’ll also be paid for every ad they click through on the results page. This is an excellent way to let your visitors find the ad that they want to click through. How much easier can it get? They’re searching for something that they’re determined to find; you provide the vehicle for them to find it and be paid for helping them. Go to Google and check out their AdSense for Search program.

Treat AdSense Like a Business
Ads that don’t look like Ads
Take away the border and background colors of your AdSense ads. These make them stand out as ads rather than information your visitors will be interested in. As said earlier, your ads should blend into the page. By making them appear as information you’re providing, you’re giving them another point of interest rather than an ad that many people might shy away from. This screen shot below is a good example. The ads are framed in a column as the rest of the page’s information is. It is not made to stand out. They blend in and become part of the content. Your AdSense ads are not just ads you are displaying on your age in hopes of making a few extra cents. Many webmasters enjoy thousands of dollars a month and more in revenue from AdSense. Those webmasters, however, treat it like a business of its own. They monitor traffic and where it comes from, key phrases that draw in more traffic. Don’t just track your site’s content, product, or service success. Track AdSense as well and make it work for you.

Before you apply to AdSense

2007-12-15T00:21:00.000-08:00

Getting started with AdSense is easy, but when reviewing the applications we get, we've noticed a few common pitfalls. To help make sure your application is approved the first time around, ask yourself the following questions below before submitting.

Do I have what I need to apply?

Website: To display Google ads, you need administrative access to the site you submit for AdSense in order to place our JavaScript ad code on your site. Adding the Google code to your site's source code will enable you to show ads, search boxes, and referral units on your pages.

If you don't have a website of your own, that doesn't mean you can't participate in AdSense. We offer a couple of options to help you easily create your own site.

First, there's Blogger, a free tool for setting up and publishing your own blog online. With its easy-to-use and customizable templates, you can create an account and start blogging right away. You can also set up AdSense ads easily through your Blogger account.

If you prefer more flexibility and control, then our web page tool, Page Creator, may be more suitable. Signing up for a Page Creator account is free as well -- all you need is a Gmail account. The best part is that you don't have to download any software or hire a designer. Once you've created your Page Creator site, you can begin displaying Google ads in minutes.
Valid payee name: Payments will be made out to the name on your account, so make sure to include your full and valid name, or that of your business, rather than just initials. If banks won't accept the name you enter in the 'Payee Name' field, neither will we.
Valid address: We want to make sure your hard-earned money reaches you, so please also provide a complete valid address where you can receive mail. If you live in a country or territory that doesn't have a standard format for addresses, please be sure that your application includes as much information as a mailman would need to find your residence.

Does my website meet all the necessary requirements?

Valid URL: If you manage an entire website, give us the URL of your home page. If you manage a blog or other account within a larger website, you should provide the URL of the specific page that you manage and not the URL of the entire hosting website. Don't forget to double check your URL for typos!
Fully launched website: Since we won't be able to review websites that are not fully launched or built, please ensure that your site is live and functioning at the time you submit your application.
Unique content: We want visitors to sites in the AdSense network to have a good experience, so please publish content that's interesting and unique. Avoid using "doorway" pages created just for search engines, or other cookie cutter approaches such as affiliate programs with little or no original content. If you're participating in an affiliate program, give people a reason to visit your site first.
Supported language: We're constantly working to provide targeted, relevant ads in more languages. However, until then, we can only approve your application if the majority of your website is in one of our supported languages.
Pay-To Sites: If your site participates in programs that compensate people to perform activities that drive traffic to you, we can't approve your application. Some examples of these "pay-to" programs are sites that encourage users "to click" or "to surf" or "to read email." In addition, you shouldn't encourage others to join these programs in the content, links, or third-party ads on your site.

We also encourage you to read our program policies in detail for further insight on how to create a successful application. Now that you have all the necessary information, now's a good time to apply.

Introducing the Ad Review Center

2007-12-14T23:51:00.000-08:00

In an effort to provide you with more transparency and control over the ads appearing on your pages, we've developed the Ad Review Center. This new feature, which we'll be rolling out to publishers over the next few months, will allow you to review ads placement-targeted to your site and ensure those ads are relevant to your site's users.

When you first opt into the Ad Review Center, you'll be able to see all placement-targeted ads currently targeted to your site, and a couple of days later you'll be able to review placement-targeted ads that have previously run on your site. If you think an ad is not relevant for your users, you can prevent it from appearing again by blocking it in the Ad Review Center. We recommend you carefully consider the revenue impact of blocking an ad, since blocked ads won't compete in the auction on your site, and advertisers whose ads you block may choose not to target your site again in the future.

In addition to letting publishers weigh in on the relevance of placement-targeted ads, the Ad Review Center will also help advertisers improve their placement-targeted ad campaigns. When you block an ad, you'll be prompted to select a reason. We'll share this constructive feedback with advertisers so they can use it to improve the quality and relevance of future ad campaigns.

As we've done with past features, we're gradually launching the Ad Review Center to all publishers over the next few months. When it has been enabled for your account, you'll see a green notification box at the top of your 'Competitive Ad Filter' page, located under the 'AdSense Setup' tab. By default, the Ad Review Center will let you review all placement-targeted ads after they have run on your site. However, if you have a strong need to manually review ads before they appear on your site, you may do so by clicking on the 'update settings' link in the Ad Review Center. You'll then have 24 hours to review ads before they are automatically allowed to run on your site. Please note that you can also return to the Ad Review Center and allow a previously blocked ad, or block a previously allowed ad.

We strongly recommend you keep your review preference set to 'auto-allow' and review ads after they have run. Ads don't participate in the auction while they are awaiting review, and ads that you have blocked cannot compete in the auction either. The actual revenue impact will vary in each publisher's situation, but when using the Ad Review Center, please consider the revenue effects of blocking ads or switching from the auto-allow setting.

To learn more about the Ad Review Center, please visit the Help Center. We hope you find this new feature useful and look forward to hearing your feedback.

Miscellaneous Adsense Tips

2007-12-11T00:22:00.000-08:00

We have unpacked our Adsense Equation in detail and have given numerous tips for maximising Adsense Revenue. Whilst there are occasions that Adsense doesn’t perform as well on some websites for no particular reason as others we can safely predict that if you work on each of the four areas you should see an increase in the amount of the cheque that Adsense sends you at the end of each month. Remember though that your revenue will only be as high as your weakest link - work on all elements of the equation - not just one or two.

As well as the proceeding tips there are a number of other things that might be helpful to know in using Adsense that we couldn’t find a place for in previous posts.

Outgoing Links - One theory going around is that pages with fewer outgoing links result in higher click-throughs. Give your readers fewer options of links to click on and they are more likely to click on your ads. This MAY be true, but don’t let it determine your content. My Digicam site has many outward links because it is a page that acts as a hub of information from around the web. I’ve not noticed that this makes my revenue levels suffer - in fact I suspect its because of these helpful links that people come to my site.

Using Frames - If your site uses frames I’m told you should make sure your ads are placed in the frame where you content is or else it will not provide relevant ads for your content. Thanks Greg for this tip.

Don’t click your own ads. - It might be an obvious way to get a few click throughs and increase your Adsense revenue - but Google is very clever at working out if your clicks are genuine or not. Its not hard to track IP addresses and to see patterns emerging between where clicks are coming from. It is not worth the risk of being banned from the program for a few cents per click. Especially don’t click ads from the same IP address that you check your stats from - this is asking for trouble.

Don’t encourage your readers to click on your ads. Its against the agreement that you enter into with Google. Once again they will track you down if you break these rules. I’ve seen a number of people who have been banned from Adsense for this. Let your ads speak for themselves

Monitor your Statistics. Many adsense users check their stats all day everyday. Whilst this might be overkill (its like watching grass grow) it is useful to track what is happening at this end of your campaign. Use channels to monitor which pages are doing well and which are not. Tweak pages that are not doing well and make more pages similar to those that do.

Alternative Ads - Use alternative ads for when Adsense cannot serve ads to your page. When they cannot find a suitable ad for your page Adsense will serve you with a ‘Public Service Announcement’ (PSA). These ads may be for a good cause, but they will not relate to the content of your page and will not earn you any money. Instead Adsense allows you to nominated an alternative ad that they will serve into the position instead of the PSA. I use Amazon for this, but also have experimented with affiliate alternative ads Affiliate Sensor which I find works really well as it lets you choose from a wide range of affiliate products and still target them to your site.

That is the end of our Adsense tips for Bloggers series. Feel free to submit your own Adsense tips and strategies in comments below. You also might like to check out some of the following alternative Adsense Tips pages for more tips from around the web. You might also like to check out the the Chitika eMiniMall Ad system which I make most of my income off these days. I reviewed it here and have a series of tips for getting the most out of your eMiniMalls.

19 Strategies for Finding Readers

2007-12-05T21:59:00.000-08:00

These points come from a variety of older posts I’ve written on the topic - sort of a ‘best of’ kind of thing. I’ve updated some, others are straight extracts from things I’d said before and a few are new:

1. It takes time - It may not be what you want to hear, but it unless you’re a genius, extremely lucky or have an amazing new idea, it takes time to build a readership. So settle in for the long haul and muscle up some patience.

2. Content Content Content - I’ve said this over and over again so will keep it brief but unless you have ‘good’ content you’re unlike to build a readership. What is good content - start by thinking about it in terms of usefulness and uniqueness and I think you’ll be on the right track. Other words that come to mind when it comes to good content might be ‘fresh’, ‘variety’, ‘up to date’ and ‘well written’.

3. Link to others - Perhaps one of the central features of blogging is that they are linked. The intricate web of links and relationships was one of the first things that attracted me to blogging and it’s part of the reason it’s got real viral properties that allow ideas to spread so quickly. Participate in the linking to other blogs and you’ll find that many benefits come. For a start you’ll be participating in the conversation, you’ll be getting the attention of others and your readers will appreciate that you’re interested in helping them find the best content out there.

Of course you don’t want to be linking randomly to everyone and anyone - be selective and link to quality content that is relevant to your niche topic. As you engage in linking you’ll find that others will link back (assuming you have something worthwhile to say yourself) and you’ll find the traffic begins to flow - both from their sites and as a result of your increased search engine ranking.

4. Get Links from other Bloggers - I can hear the comments already - ‘Easier said than done Darren!’ This is true - but if you’re smart, genuine, helpful and polite there are ways of increasing the chances of getting links from others.

5. Participate in other people’s conversations - I suspect that a number of my first regular blog readers first came to my blog because I left a comment on theirs. It was not a strategy I thought about - I just found myself quite addicted to reading others blogs and giving feedback. When you leave a comment leave your own blog address. Often people like to know who is reading their blog and will come visiting you. Don’t comment just for the sake of it. If someone leaves me a ‘hi’ comment or is obviously spamming my blog I won’t visit them and delete the comment. Make genuine comments on posts that connect with you. You might make a good friend in the process and in the long run will find the flow on effect of this is more interest in you and your own blog.

6. Interact with Readers - When a reader reaches out to you with a comment, email or link from their blog - interact with them. For starters it’s good manners and secondly it’s a good way to increase the chances that they’ll come back again. I get a lot of people telling me that they don’t have enough readers to their blog - while I can related to this frustration I generally encourage them to see what they’ve got as a good starting place. Interact with those who do come to your blog and make it the best experience you can for them and you’ll find that they spread the word for you.

7. Update frequently - With the advent of news aggregators people can be notified of your new post in real time. I noticed that when I publish a new post that my stats nearly always go up slightly just afterwards as those readers with aggregators log in to have a quick look at my latest musings. This works a lot better on some blogs than others (some topics seem to attract more RSS subscribers than others do). Another side benefit of frequent posting is that search engines like it and many believe that the more you post the more often SE’s will send their spiders out to index your blog. Similarly - the more you post the more you’ll get indexed by blog engines like technorati (and numerous others). Of course I’m not encouraging massive amounts of meaningless content - keep it of a high quality.

8. Add a signature to your outgoing email - This is an oldie but a goodie. Many bloggers do this. Simply add the domain name to your outgoing email. Most email programs will allow you to do this automatically via a signature option. However be careful with automatic signatures if you don’t want your blog to be read by everyone that you email.

9. Promote your RSS Feed - Most blog platforms come with a RSS feeds built in but there are ways of increasing your subscriber list. The most obvious of these is to put it in the sight of your readers by putting your RSS button in a more prominent position. There are a variety of different buttons available that you can make available to readers to help them to subscribe to your blog via their news aggregators with one click that might also be worth investigating. Also, if your topic is not one which many readers seem to use RSS in, you might need to do some education on the topic of RSS feeds. Write a post on how to follow your blog via RSS and you might find more do.

10. List your site on Portals, Blog Indexes, Directories and Search Engines - There are MANY places that you can list your blog to help it get more attention. In fact there are too many and you could probably spend all your time submitting your blog to them all. I’d recommend that you don’t become obsessed by this and work on other factors in this list first and then in your spare time add your blog to some of these types of things as you go. Making sure you get listed on some of the bigger sites like Technorati should probably be a priority (here’s how for Technorati) - but don’t make this the first thing you do. In terms of getting into search engines - you can submit yourself (most have ways of doing this) but most people believe that the best and quickest way to get indexed these days is to get a link from another site that is already indexed.

11. Search Engine Optimization - While some bloggers don’t think much of SEO I think it is well worth knowing some basic SEO principles and keeping them in the back of your mind as you blog. After all SE’s are the place that most people go to when they are searching for information on a topic. Don’t become obsessed by SEO, but don’t ignore it either.

12. Participate in others Blogger’s Projects - From time to time other bloggers will invite your participation in a blog project of theirs. Put your hand up, volunteer some time and contribute in some way. Don’t just do it to get a link on their site, but take the opportunity to build a relationship with them and their readers. Not only will you make a friend, but over time you build some credibility as a blogger who is not just thinking about themselves. On the flip side start your own blogging project. Some of the more popular things to get involved with these days are Blog Carnivals.

13. Participate in other web forums - Blogging is not the only vibrant online activity at the moment. I visit a number of other discussion forums and e-zines that explore similar ideas/hobbies/interests to me and my blogs. I’ve found an increasing amount of traffic to my blog is coming as a result of my contributions to these forums as many of them allow you to add your link as a signature to your posts. Don’t spam these forums - but be a genuine contributer that adds useful comments and you’ll find people are drawn to your other projects.

14. Explore other formats of communication - Another of the more effective things that I’ve done over the past year in my blogging is worth hard on email newsletters for a few of my blogs. I don’t do it with all of them (mainly due to the time it takes) but here at ProBlogger I’ve grown a list of over 1600 email subscribers who I send weekly information to. These newsletters both are about keeping people in touch with what happened on the blog each week as well as giving extra tips and information to build a sense of community and ownership of the site. Other bloggers use forums similarly.

15. Offline Techniques - Blog Promotion need not only happen online. Consider how you might promote it offline and you could just bring in some new readers also. Such techniques can include putting your URL on business cards, letterhead, using press releases and other assorted methods. Read more on this here.

16. Make it viral - One of the things about infectious diseases that makes them so deadly is that they are very easy to pass on from one person to another. There are a number of things you might want to consider doing to help with this. For instance a lot of bloggers these days are adding links on their posts that allow readers to bookmark the post in social bookmarking sites like del.icio.us and digg. Other bloggers have features that allow bloggers to ‘email a friend’ about a particular post. Others (like ProBlogger) allow readers to subscribe to comment threads via email. All of these types of plugins allow your readers to do the work for you in either spreading the word about your site or making it more sticky. Speaking of social bookmarking - there are also ways of writing content that tend to be picked up more in this scene that you might like to explore if that’s a source of traffic that you’re interested in.

17. Advertise - I’ve written a lot over the past year about running advertising on blogs as a form of income - but on the flip side of many advertising platforms that you can run as a publisher are the opportunities to actually advertise your blog in the attempt to find new readers. In the last few months I’ve dabbled a little in this side of things, mainly using AdWords (the advertiser side of AdSense) but also advertising on a few sites using BlogAds. I’ve actually been learning about AdWords using Perry Marshall’s e-book (aff) on the topic and am finding it quite helpful if you’re looking to a good introduction to using it (he has a free 5 day taster too). Of course you’ll need to weigh up the cost of advertising vs the benefits that you think it’ll bring - but I know of quite a few bloggers who run an AdWords campaign in the first month of a new blog to give it a kick start and swear by the method.

18. Link baiting - This is one of the terms that has become quite common among bloggers over the last year. In essence ‘link bait’ is some sort of comment that will attract links to it and in many ways is no different than paragraph 2 above - write good content and people will link up. Of course there are many tactics that many bloggers use to link bait - I’ve explored a few of these here.

19. Take all advice with a grain of salt - Be yourself and have fun! - The web is full of advice like the above - what I’m saying isn’t rocket science. There are no rules of blogging and it seems everyone’s experience of growing a blog (or not growing one) is different.

I’m sure there are a lot of blogs out there that ignore all or most of the above advice that have a bunch of regular readers and healthy hits. So relax, be yourself and have fun with it. Experiment with new tools, styles of design and writing.

My suspicion is that bloggers who obviously enjoy the blogging process and who are themselves are the type of bloggers that people are drawn to. Bloggers that are uptight and who complain constantly about how their blog isn’t achieving what they want it to achieve probably do quite the opposite and turn people away. Traffic is a good thing for a blog but it’s not the ultimate measure of a good blog in my books. Write it for yourself and have some fun and a lot of the rest will end up looking after itself.

10 Steps to Guarantee You’ll Never Make More than 0.14 cents per month with AdSense

2007-12-05T21:40:00.000-08:00

Every day I come across and courses which promise to teach people how to make thousands of dollars a day with AdSense by following a few easy steps - so I thought it was time for one that shows you how to guarantee to keep your blog from making money with AdSense. Here’s my top 10 tips for a guaranteed earning of 0.14 cents or less per month from your blog:

1. Position Ads Out of Sight - Ensure that you put any ad units that you put on your blog below the fold where they’ll be sure not to annoy your readers. If you do choose to put your ads above the fold (why you would I’ll never know) make sure they are placed in the white zones in the diagram to the right. Obviously the bottom of the page is best but the top right corner and right hand skyscraper positions can also work against you very well. Do your best to keep the ads away from the areas that people’s eyes will be drawn to (ie away from content, pictures etc). This helps keep the money from rolling in quite well.

2. Only post to your blog once every few weeks - Lull your readers into a hypnotic trance decrease the chances of them ever visiting your blog.

3. Unclear Post Topics - If and when you do choose to post make sure that your posts have as little focus as possible in terms of topic. Write about multiple topics in every post in an attempt to confuse the AdSense bots. Never blog about anything with a commercial aspect to it and attempt to keep your posts as uninteresting, unoriginal and as useless to readers as you possibly can.

4. Poor Post Titles - Never use the keywords that relate to your post in your post’s title. In order to get lower paying (and irrelevant) ads use the word ‘blog’ as much as possible both in your titles and posts. Also try to find topics to write about that AdSense has no ads in their inventory for. Do this by simply adding keywords into Google.com until no ads come up next to the search results.

5. Never set your ads to show Alternative Ads - If you do your readers will see ads that might make you money when Google can’t find any of their own to show (something that ideally you will have if you get #4 above right). A much better strategy is to just allow the PSA (public service ads) to appear which will guarantee you earn nothing at all.

6. Click your own AdSense ads - This might make your AdSense total go up for a little while but the chances are that you’ll never see the money because you’ll be banned from the system. You might even go into negative earnings if Google decides to get their lawyers onto you!

7. Break Other Rules - If clicking on your own ads doesn’t get you banned fast enough try breaking some of the other AdSense terms and conditions like blatantly encouraging your readers to click your ads, using obscene language, writing constantly about violent and adult topics, labeling your ads with things like ‘free prizes if you click here’ or by putting flashing arrows pointing at the ads etc. Another good one is to add YPN ads to the same pages that AdSense ads are on. This has the double bonus of possibly getting you banned from both programs in one hit! If AdSense do contact you to make a change to some rule you’ve broken it’s best to ignore these emails, or if you decide to write back be as argumentative and uncooperative as possible.

8. Make your ads stand out - Set your AdSense ad design to completely clash with the rest of your blog’s design. Blending your ads is for sissies - be bold! In essense what you’re aiming for is to make your ads look as much out of place and as ad-like as possible. Here’s a few of my personal favorites (keep in mind I’m not a very good designer - I’m sure you could do worse if you put your mind to it):

9. Never track your AdSense ads performance - Definitely do not use channels to monitor how your different ads perform. This way you’ll ensure that if you do happen to fluke some well performing ads - you’ll never know which ones they were and will never be able to reproduce the results elsewhere.

10. Lower your Traffic - Ultimate the probably one of the best ways to ensure you never make much money from AdSense is to work hard at maintaining as little traffic as possible to your blog. You can do this in many ways including:

Ignoring any readers that do happen upon your blog
Practicing black hat SEO principles to make sure you get banned from Google and other Search Engines
Writing the worst content possible
Stealing other people’s content (and other unethical practices)
Post as infrequently as possible (I know I’ve said this already - but it’s worth repeating
Never promote your blog in any online or offline forums

If you do have an occasional surge in traffic you can always remove the ads from the page that is getting the most traffic. Some bloggers do this well by only showing ads on certain pages (like their front page) and not showing them on other pages that get traffic.

Relevant Ads

2007-12-04T02:01:00.001-08:00

Revenue = high readership + high paying ads + relevant ads + well placed and designed ads

The third element of our Adsense equation is that of relevant Adsense ads. It is all very well to rank high in search engines to generate high levels of traffic, but without relevant ads that relate to the content of your blog you are not likely to generate much in the way of click throughs.

Let me give you an example. Recently I was asked to help a fellow blogger who has struggling with his Adsense ads because whilst his content largely focused upon the topic of ‘health care’ - most of the ads being served to his blog were focused upon ‘blogging’. He was getting quite reasonable traffic levels and had a reasonably high paying topic (there are some good health care ads out there) but as you’d expect, people coming to a blog about health care did not click on ads for blogging software and services at a very high rate. The challenge was to get his ads reflecting the content of his blog.

Another fellow blogger had the problem of not getting ANY ads being served to his site. Instead of paying ads all he was getting was the public service ads that Adsense serves when they couldn’t find any relevant paying ads (these pay nothing).

How do you get relevant ads? Here are a few things to try.

Make sure there are ads available - My friend who didn’t get any paying ads served was focusing on a key word for which there was no or very few ads. A simple way of checking this is to do a search on Google for the key word you are targeting. If they don’t serve ads on their own search results page its an indication that such ads are scarce - if not non existent. They way we got ads on my friends blog was to experiment with other related keywords. He didn’t have to change the focus of his blog - just the way he described his topics. For example if there are no ads for ‘bed linen’ try ‘blankets’, ’sheets’, ‘quilts’ etc. Experiment with different combinations until you find something that works.

Increase your Keyword density - The more you use your keywords the more likely you are to get ads on those topics. Its not common knowledge exactly how the Adsense bot decides what ads suit your content best (if someone knows feel free to post it in comments below) but it’s a pretty safe bet that if you put you keyword in your title, at least once in your first paragraph and then scatter it throughout the rest of your page that you’ll convince the Adsense bot of what your topic is. It MAY also be helpful to include your keywords in the URL of your page (Moveable type can let you do this - ie look at the URL of this page - it incorporates my title and therefore some keywords). It MAY also be worth putting your keywords in outward links, bold, italics etc. All of these strategies also help optimise yor blog for search engines which won’t hurt either.

Examine your Sidebars, menus, header and footer - It is not just your main content that the Adsense bot searches to find the topic of your page, but also your other areas. When I looked at the healthcare blog that was getting ‘blogging’ ads I noticed that he had the word ‘blog’ in his title, three times on his sidebar and once in his footer. It was also in his URL and he also used the word quite often in his content. My recommendation was to remove the word from as many of those places as possible and to increase his health care keywords. The ads improved their relevancy almost immediately.

Stick to one topic per page - Obviously this may not be feasible on your front page - but attempt to keep each individual blog entry/post as highly targeted as possible. I’ve noticed that some people often include two or three topics in one entry - this will confuse Adsense’s bot so split them up into two entries.

Block irrelevant Ads - Sometimes despite your best intentions Google just gets it wrong and serves your ads that have nothing to do with what you write. If you’re getting some repeating irrelevant ads block them. Adsense lets you do this to quite a few sites and its easy to do. I have a number of ads blocked, some because they are philosophically not consistent with what I write about, but mainly because they just are not relevant to the topic of my blogs.

Ask Adsense - If all else fails notify Google Adsense of your issue. Of course they are busy people - but Google prides itself on being responsive to its users. I’ve emailed with queries a number of times, once on an issue of irrelevant ads, and every time I’ve had positive results from my query. You’ve got nothing to loose - shoot them an email!

If you do all of the above you SHOULD find Adsense serves you with relevant ads. In conjunction with the other elements in our equation this will contribute to increased click throughs and hopefully higher Adsense revenue. Next in this series on maximizing Adsense revenue is a post on Well Placed and Designed Adsense Ads.

An Equation for Success

2007-12-04T01:58:00.000-08:00

There are many factors that impact the level of revenue generated from a blog using the Google Adsense program. Books have been written explaining expert strategies for Adsense - However for the purposes of this series we’ve boiled it all down into four elements that we believe impact your Adsense earning capacity the most. Speaking in general terms here is a simple equation that illustrates how the factors each contribute to Adsense Revenue.

Adsense Revenue = Traffic Levels + High Paying Ads + Relevant Ads + Optimally Positioned and Designed Ads

Its not Rocket Science. Each of the above four elements contribute directly to the total revenue that your Adsense Ads will produce. Don’t just work on one of them though because if any one is weak it will hold your potential earnings back. Lets break each factor down….

Traffic Levels - The more people that see you Adsense Ads, the more likelihood there is that someone will click on them. As I examine the statistics provided by Adsense that report my daily earnings I notice that my earnings in the past 8 months have increased considerably as my total page impressions have increased. For example earlier in the week when Slashdot linked up to this post I had an influx of 50,000 visitors in 24 hours to my blog - it doesn’t take a genius to work out what this did to my Adsense earnings that day! Work on increasing your traffic levels and you should see an increase in your Adsense Revenue.

High Paying Ads - Once again I’m stating the obvious, but if the content you provide on your blog attracts high paying ads you’re going to do significantly better. For example it has been documented that the PVR Blog is doing pretty well when it comes to high Adsense earnings - the secret of its success is partly due to it being served with ads that are high paying. The topic of the PVR blog is, as you’d expect, PVR technology including TiVo, Replay TV etc. This is cutting edge technology and therefore advertisers are willing to pay top dollar to get their products and services out there! In comparison if a person was to start a blog on ‘toothpicks’ I suspect the ads are not likely to pay very much. It would take very high traffic levels to earn as much from a toothpick blog as it would the PVR blog.

Relevant Ads - A second reason the PVR Blog is successful is that it servers relevant ads. To put it simply people looking for information on PVR technology are confronted by Adsense ads for PVR technology. I recently visited a blog that was having trouble getting relevant ads - they had a blog on Tourist destinations in Australia - but unfortunately they were getting Adsense ads for remote control cars. You can guess what their revenue was like. Increase the relevancy of your Ads to your content and you are one step closer to increasing your Adsense revenue.

Optimally Positioned and Designed Ads - One of the coolest things about the Adsense program is that they give you freedom in choosing the best position and color scheme for your ads. Just like in the wider world of advertising - positioning is a key element to an ads success. A Billboard positioned on a road where no one drives is not likely to get the same results as one positioned on a busy intersection. The position and design of your Adsense Ads is critical - if they are out of site they’ll never get clicked on.

Bringing them Together - The above four elements are in many ways pretty obvious when spelt out like this - the challenge comes to improving each to optimize Adsense revenue.

Your revenue will only grow as high as the weakest one of these factors on your blog. For example if you have high paying, relevant, well designed and positioned ads but no traffic you’ll not do well. Likewise if you have high traffic, high paying and relevant ads but they are poorly designed an in a position where they’ll never be seen - you’ll waste all your other hard work. Its not enough to work on one element.

How do we improve each? In the next four posts we’ll examine each area in turn and suggest a number of ways that you might try tweaking them to increase your revenue.

High Paying Ads

2007-12-04T01:54:00.000-08:00

Adsense Revenue = Traffic Levels + High Paying Ads + Relevant Ads + Optimally Positioned and Designed Ads

The next element of this Adsense equation to be examined is how to get high paying Adsense Ads running on your site. Obviously in any business one way to get higher profits is to charge more for your product - whilst you have no direct say in how much is charged for ads run on your site - there are ways of targeting types of ads that might bring in a higher return than others.As we mentioned in our initial explanation of the equation, the PVR Blog is one example of a blog that targets a well paying ad type - ads for PVR technology. Whilst I do not know specifics of earnings I would suspect blogs like Gizmodo who run Adsense ads would also be generating a higher paying ad, due to their focus on technology.

The lesson we can learn from blogs such as these is that they attract specific ads (that presumably are well paying) by keeping their content targeted on the same topics. To over simplify what we’re saying - if you want ads about Camera Phones blog about Camera Phones.

Finding High Paying Ads is not as easy as it sounds (is anything?). Do a search for Google on High Paying Adsense Ads and you won’t find too many sites listing the best keywords for Adsense. The top Adsense users in Adsense discussion forums tend to be pretty secretive about not only what keywords they focus on, but also what sites they run. I don’t blame them either - its good business sense really.

Having said this there are a number of strategies and tools that you might like to employ to help find high paying keywords.

Buy them - Finding high paying keywords for your blog is possible by yourself for free - but as with everything a few entrepreneurial types are willing to do the leg work for you to save you some time and give you a comprehensive result. One service that you might like to try to find good keywords is Top Paying Keywords.
Trial and Error - I know this will frustrate some of you who want a nice and easy quick fix but overall it is one of the best pieces of advice I can give. Try writing on a topic - track the results - if it pays off do it again….lots. Adsense allows you to track specific pages or sections of your blog using its ‘channels’ feature - if you’re smart you’ll watch which sections of your blog are generating the highest ads by dividing your overall earnings by the number of clicks and comparing it to other channels. Keep trying new topics until you strike gold and then dig in like crazy!
Are there Any Ads? - This is a good first question. Despite the many thousands of advertisers using dsense there are some topics where the answer to this question is no. A simple way to check is to head to Google and do a search for the key words you’re wanting to blog about. The results page will bring up not only a list of other sites writing about that key word (they are you competitors) but on the right hand side there will be a list of ads - these are the same sorts of ads you’ll get on your site if you write on the topic. If there are ads there, it is a good sign.
If there are not - maybe its worth finding another topic to write on if you’re hoping to attract ads.
7 Search has a list of the 100 of the top paying keywords (in their advertising program - not Adsense) at the moment. Its a bit depressing actually to see a list like this because you’d have to sell your soul somewhat in order to go with many of them. Its an interesting site to check out though.
Also from 7 Search (and more useful) is their Keyword Suggestion Tool which gives you an idea of what people are paying per click on different tools (again this is not specifically for Adsense but it will give you an idea of what the going rates are). Find What also has a similar service.Google Adsense’s biggest competitor are Overture (they run the ads on Yahoo) - they offer a service where you can enter your keywords and they will not only tell you how much advertisers are paying for the words but also how many people are searching for the term. This is a very useful tool.
Sign up for Adwords - One way of getting a feel for how much people are willing to pay per click is to sign up with Google as an advertiser yourself. It doesn’t cost much to start a mini campaign and do some research this way. You’ll get a feel for what people are bidding on different words very quickly this way.
Word Tracker is the best tool I’ve seen to help in finding keywords that people are searching for in the major search engines. The excellent thing about Word Tracker is that they also tell you how many other sites out there are targeting the same words! This is very handy as it will stop you targeting ‘Britney Spears’ as a Keyword phrase even though its one of the most searched for keywords on the web because literally hundreds of thousands of other sites have beaten you to the punch. Word Tracker has a free version to trial it and their paying version is even better - well worth the investment.
I’m told Keyword Sleuth is a similar program to Word Tracker however I am yet to trial it.

Targeting High Paying Adsense Ads is an important aspect of generating an income from Adsense. It is not enough in and of itself however. You can have $10 per click ads (I’ve not found any of these yet) but without generating any traffic your research into the right ads will be useless. Likewise it is one thing to identify which ads you want to target - but it is another thing to actually get these relevant ads showing on your site. It is to this topic which our next post in this series will head - Finding Relevant Adsense Ads.

Adsense Tips for Bloggers

2007-12-04T01:50:00.000-08:00

How do you make money from the Google Adsense Program? What AdSense Tips can you share with us?

I have been asked this question so many times in the past few weeks that I thought I should write something on the topic. It seems increasingly bloggers want to try to cover their hosting and ISP costs with some revenue from their blog - and increasingly they’re doing it and are able to make a few (or quite a lot) dollars on the side. Many are turning to Google’s Adsense program.

Covering costs of my Digital Photography Blog is why I originally signed up with Google Adsense - blogging can get expensive when you have high levels of traffic and a lot of pages.

Whilst the agreement you sign with Google stresses that you are not allowed to give specific information about your earnings from the program I can say that I’m glad I’ve signed up because its well and truly covered my costs - and then some. In fact I think its quite feasible to expect that Adsense coupled with other strategies for making money from Blogging could quite easily generate a decent living. It takes time and hard work, but I think its very doable. (Update: Since writing this series I’ve revealed that I am now looking at making over a six figure income this year in 2005 from blogging).

So how do I make money from Google Adsense? Let me share some AdSense Tips that heve helped me.

This will be the first in a series of posts on this topic. Let me say up front I’m no expert - there are a lot of people out there making a lot more money than I am using Adsense - however most of them are not telling their secrets - well not for free anyway. I’ve got no secrets to hide and am willing to share what I’ve learnt since I signed up for the program 8 months ago. If you want a REAL expert’s opinion on Adsense I’d recommend buying Joel Comm’s What Google Never Told You About Making Money with Adsense E-Book. Joel earns $15,000 per month from Adsense and has some good things to share.

I know some bloggers are put off or offended by the idea of making money from blogging so I’ll try not to let these posts dominate my blog - however if you are not interested in the topic, simply skip over these posts.

I am going to assume a few things in this series to cut down the amount of introductory comments I have to make. Here is what I am assuming:

You have a blog. Whilst most of the following tips will apply to other types of websites I run Adsense on blogs and will speak from that experience.
You have (or will) read a basic overview of Adsense and have some understanding of what it is.
You have(or will) read the program policies as outlined by Google. These give details of site eligibility, ad placements and other requirements for using the system.

Enough introductory comments - lets get stuck into the Adsense Tips for Bloggers!

Is Your Blog Suitable for Adsense?

2007-12-04T01:46:00.000-08:00

Is your blog suitable for Adsense? - Before you rush into signing up for Adsense expecting it to earn you a million dollars it is worth asking the question of whether Adsense is the right revenue strategy for your blog. By no means is it the only option - you might like to check out this tip on other ways of making money from blogging.

Whilst there are some amazing success stories about earning big dollars with Adsense out there, it is worth taking a realistic look at some cold hard truths about the Adsense program.

Whilst there are some amazing success stories about earning big dollars with Adsense out there, it is worth taking a realistic look at some cold hard truths about the Adsense program.

Google does not accept every site that applies to the Adsense program.

Google Adsense Program Policies indicate that the content of sites must not contain things like excessive profanity, pornography, illicit drugs etc. Basically your blog needs to have content that is reasonably ‘family friendly’.
Also in their policy document is a reference to them not normally accepting pages of a personal nature. This is the topic of discussion in many Adsense forums and is obviously open to different interpretations. Many (if not most) blogs are personal in nature - however to maximize your chances of approval by Adsense a blog should be targeted on a particular topic/s. For example whilst this blog is often personal in nature - most of my individual posts (pages) focus on very specific themes which are repeated throughout the blog. update - this may have changed recently with Blogger now allowing blogger blogs to use Adsense.
Sites accepted into the Adsense program are also required to be easily navigable, have an adequate quantity of text based content (don’t apply if you’ve been blogging a week) and be written in English, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Japanese, or Spanish. They may not to have excessive advertising or other contextual/competing advertising.
Whilst not stated in the Adsense Policy document, many also believe that sites accepted into the program also need to have reasonable levels of traffic. If your blog is new, it may be worth waiting a few weeks or months before applying to build up traffic and content levels. Others speculate that a professionally designed, well-organized and privately hosted blog has a better chance of being accepted. The more professional and successful your blog appears the more likely it is to be accepted by Adsense.

If still in doubt after reading Google Adsense Program Policies you can email Google for clarification or just apply and see how you go.Of course, acceptance by Google into the Adsense program does not guarantee your success. The fact remains that certain blogs will always be more successful than others at generating income.

Future posts in this series will focus upon strategies and tips for increasing your revenue but it should be stated here that the most successful sites are generally sites with very high traffic levels and/or content that is directly related to a particular product or service (the more targeted and niche-like the better).

It is also worth saying that Adsense works best on pages with lots of text content. It only reads text in determining ads, not images so make sure you have enough relevant content.The next posts in this series will expand upon these aspects of successful blogging with Adsense with our Adsense Equation.

How do You ‘Sell’ Your Blog?

2007-12-04T01:44:00.001-08:00

am no stranger (nor are you, probably) to how the wider media sometimes depicts bloggers: as closeted wannabees who add to the rise of ‘faux journalism’. Books are currently being published on the subject.

This could understandably contribute to any beginner blogger’s self-consciousness; especially those who are staring at their ad revenue reports, wondering if any money is every going to start showing up

I used to be bashful when I talked about my blog. Not anymore. Why should I be? I’m proud of it. I’m proud of what it catalogues; thoughts, my goals, even my ambitions.

No doubt you feel the same about yours, too. But any hint of shyness, or pause, when you talk of your blog is hardly going to attract readers. Or advertisers.

Recently, I migrated from Blogger to Wordpress; a rather stressful time for me, for I was deathly afraid that over a year’s worth of work and effort would somehow evaporate into nothingness (luckily, it didn’t). I had several reasons for the change; the main ones being I was a little tired of the limits of Blogger, and I wanted a purer control of my own writing and ‘brand’, for lack of a better word.

When I discussed my plans with non-bloggers, they all asked me “Why?” Why change? Why bother? What’s the difference?I replied, “I just felt like it was time. It didn’t feel comfortable anymore.”

Granted, this was rather a drastic change. It needn’t be. Standard templates only need to be tweaked slightly to give yourself the opportunity to individualise (and hence ‘validate’) your blogging status. This mightn’t be important to some people; for others it just might be the chance to assert their creative will, and this newly found confidence can lead them on to loftier plans.

And sometimes stamping your own blogging status begins with how you speak about blogging in the first place.

Here’s my challenge:Put your blog’s URL as part of your signature in your email (if you haven’t already).
Mention it in conversations.
Enter blog carnivals.
Do what you can (short of spamming, naturally!) to spread the word of your blog.
What are you waiting for?Help sell your blog to the world.
Isn’t it worth it?

How to Get Your Blog to 100,000 Visitors and Beyond

2007-12-04T01:41:00.000-08:00

I’ve had a lot of requests to detail how I got 100,000 visitors (now past 150k as I write this) to Free Money Finance. While the topic is not clearly in the subject area of personal finances, it can be part of how you increase your income (and thus improve your net worth), so I’ll cover it. Plus, this will serve to help out other bloggers as well as remind me of what else I need to do to grow this blog. If this isn’t your cup of tea, simply ignore these posts. I post frequently enough that a new, money-related post is not far behind this one.I’ll over this topic in a series of “steps”, each one presenting a simple, unique step I took to get to 100,000 visitors. I’ll also try to keep the steps in the order I did them, though several happened simultaneously, so that won’t be easy.That said, here we go.

Step 1 to getting to 100,000 visitors and beyond: Pick the right topic.

This might seem to be a simple step (and maybe even counter blogging — can’t I just blog about what I want?), but it’s critical. To me, the right topic is one that:You’re passionate about — If you’re not passionate about it, you won’t post regularly, you’ll lose interest, and your readers will be able to tell your heart isn’t really in it (and they’ll go away). If you are, your readers will identify with you and get to “love” your personality. And they’ll come back. And tell their friends to stop by.You’re knowledgeable about — You don’t have to be an expert on the topic, but you need to know more than most people to get a lot of people to your site. Otherwise, why would they stop by (or come back)?Is it popular — Let’s face it, if you want to write about the exercise habits of your hamster, not many people are likely to visit your blog. You have to have a topic that many, many people want to read about if you want to get to 100k. This isn’t to say that you shouldn’t write about your hamster (or anything else a large group wouldn’t want to read about). If you blog for your own pleasure, then go for it — make Hammy a star.

But if you want to get to 100,000 visitors, you need a topic (like personal finances) that many people what to know more about.Watch out for the rest of FMF’s series later in the week at Free Money Finance.

What is a blog?

2007-12-04T01:39:00.000-08:00

So what is a Blog anyway?It’s a good question to ask at the beginning of a Blogging for Beginners Series as it is a question I am asked every week.There are a number of ways I could answer this question ranging from the broad to the highly technical.

Here are a few definitions from other much wiser people on the ‘what is a blog?’ question to get us started (and once you’ve seen what they have to say on the topic I’ll share my own thoughts):‘A weblog is a hierarchy of text, images, media objects and data, arranged chronologically, that can be viewed in an HTML browser.’ Source

A frequent, chronological publication of personal thoughts and Web links.’ Source

‘From “Web log.” A blog is basically a journal that is available on the web. The activity of updating a blog is “blogging” and someone who keeps a blog is a “blogger.”‘ Source

‘A weblog is kind of a continual tour, with a human guide who you get to know. There are many guides to choose from, each develops an audience, and there’s also comraderie and politics between the people who run weblogs, they point to each other, in all kinds of structures, graphs, loops, etc.’ Source

‘A blog is basically a journal that is available on the web. The activity of updating a blog is “blogging” and someone who keeps a blog is a “blogger.” Blogs are typically updated daily using software that allows people with little or no technical background to update and maintain the blog. Postings on a blog are almost always arranged in cronological order with the most recent additions featured most prominantly.’ Source

‘A blog is a website in which items are posted on a regular basis and displayed in reverse chronological order. The term blog is a shortened form of weblog or web log. Authoring a blog, maintaining a blog or adding an article to an existing blog is called “blogging”. Individual articles on a blog are called “blog posts,” “posts” or “entries”. A person who posts these entries is called a “blogger”. A blog comprises text, hypertext, images, and links (to other web pages and to video, audio and other files). Blogs use a conversational style of documentation. Often blogs focus on a particular “area of interest”, such as Washington, D.C.’s political goings-on. Some blogs discuss personal experiences.’ Source.

Positioning your Adsense Ads

2007-12-04T01:23:00.000-08:00

The amazing thing about the Adsense advertising system is how one simple change in positioning of your ads can have a profound impact upon the earnings you receive from it. I still remember a fateful night about 8 months ago when I learnt this lesson and doubled my income overnight (no this isn’t one of those posts where I’m selling something - relax).

It was 10.30am and I was about to head to bed when on a whim I decided to shift my Adsense ads from the position that I’d always had them at the top (banner position) of the blog I was working on at the time. I shifted the ad to a new position and then got distracted with something else and forgot about it.

A few hours later (I got very distracted) I again was thinking of bed but decided to check my Adsense stats for one last time before shutting down my powerbook - imagine my surprise when I found that my click through rate was 40% higher than normal (and so was the earnings for that time of night)!? At first I thought I was dreaming, then I considered that maybe Google had made a mistake, then I panicked that someone had been randomly clicking all my ads - and then I remembered the repositioning of ads that I’d done a few hours before.

Needless to say I didn’t sleep much that night. I lay awake excited by the potential that I’d just unlocked in my blogs, inspired by the fact that I could make the same changes to all my other blogs tomorrow, kicking myself that I hadn’t done it earlier (what a missed opportunity) and wondering if there might be an even better spot to try putting my ads.

The following morning I lept out of bed and checked my Adsense stats again to find that my click through rate was even higher than the night before and that I’d stumbled upon a way of doubling my income - literally over night.

Once again the response to my post yesterday to Positioning your Adsense Ads has been quite amazing as people have emailed and left comments asking for further details of what the ’secret position’ is to place ads on a blog that will magically double earnings overnight.

Perhaps I’ve created a monster in the past week or so here in telling people how much I earn. Since then I’ve been quite overwhelmed by the attention - emails, comments, instant messaging - all on levels I’ve not experienced before from a post. I guess people want to make money from their blogs! I can’t blame them I guess - I’m obviously interested in that too.

So what is the magical, secret position to put your Adsense ads? Someone even emailed me tonight offering to pay me to reveal the secret. Hmmmm - maybe i should hold an Ebay auction and offer the information to the highest bidder!

No - I’m a nice guy - you can send cash if you want to but I’m not into secrets and am always (well usually) happy to share what I know. The ’secret’ was simply to move my ads down from the banner position into the actual post itself. At the time Adsense only allowed one ad placement per page, these days they allow three (like I have on my blog here) - so now you can actually keep your banner ad and also put one inside your content.

So why do ‘in content’ ads work better? The answer is pretty obvious - in fact its quite literally staring you in the face as you read this…..you’re reading this….your eyes are trained upon the content of this post. What better place to put ads than the place your reader is pretty likely to look? Now keep in mind that different websites and blogs tend to have different results when it comes to where their readers eyes are drawn to (see this fascinating blog for some studies on this) but it is generally accepted that the first paragraph of content is generally reasonably well read of most pages.

Of course there are some who argue that this isn’t an ethical thing to do - putting text link ads into the content of a blog - I’m not going to get into that argument here except to say that in my opinion blog readers are usually smart enough to tell what is content and what is an ad (the Ads by Goooogle lable is enough for me). All I’m saying here is that in my opinion and experience, the positions that generally get the highest click-throughs are within the main body and content of your blog.

I’m not really telling a massive secret here - if you look at most of the top earning blogs out there you’ll find that most of us are using the same strategy with our ad placements. There are slight variation on the theme between us but check out some of these blogs use of ads within content and you should see what I mean:

Engadget - ads placed after a post and before comments on individual pages and between posts on the main page. Digital Photography Blog - ads here are within content at the top of posts. Another ad can be found at the bottom of posts before comments.

Mobile Tracker - ads at the end of posts and before comments on individual pages and between posts on the main page. Gizmodo - ad at the base of each quote on individual pages and between posts on the main page. Of course they are all variations on a theme but there is a pretty common theme there i think.

I will say this however - not all blogs are the same and each one of my blogs vary in degree to which they prove this point. Sometimes the click through rates between blogs vary incredibly despite the fact that the ads are in exactly the same position. Obviously its not as simple as just sticking an ad into the content of your blog - its worth experimenting and tracking your results. What works on one blog will not always work on another.

In my next post on this topic I’ll answer the question - ‘can you have too many adsense ads on a post?’ and ‘when does more actually = less?’

In a previous post in this series I asked the questions:

In a previous post in this series I asked the questions: ‘can you have too many adsense ads on a post?’ and ‘when does more actually = less with adsense?’

There are probably two main ways of answering these questions. The first one is from the point of view of aesthetics and the second is about cold hard cash and whether it will earn you more money to have more ads or less.

1. Aesthetics - probably the most common complaint I hear against Adsense (and other types of ads) is that advertising is an eyesore and ruins the design of a page. I’ve read post after post of people complaining that they do not want to be exposed with ads and especially offensive to their sensitivities are pages that have ads all over them.

I have some sympathy for this view and its something that always weighs heavily on my mind as a blogger - how many ads are too many ads? The beauty (probably the wrong work in a paragraph about aesthetics) of Adsense is that it is customizable and ads can be made to blend into or contrast the design of a page. Even so, the more ads you put on your page the higher the chance you have of offending the those who are advertorially (I know its not a word - I’m being post-modern) sensitive.

Related to this is the theme of your blog. I have some blogs that I only serve one ad per page (or even no ads) simply because I don’t feel its appropriate to commercialize the blog at all.

2. Financial Considerations - believe it or not - but having more Adsense ads on your site can actually mean you earn less income from them! I know this sounds stupid and some of you think I’ve finally lost it - but its true, I found out for myself last week. Let me tell you the story.

Last week I decided to ‘tweak the ads on one of my blogs’. The blog in question had two ads per page, one in a banner ad at the top of the page and the other in a position within the content section of my blog. The ad within the content was my primary ad - the one that performed best (as previously discussed). Adsense allows three ads per page so the logic in my mind said ‘three ads will perform better than two’. So I cleverly decided to ad a small ad to my side bar (similarly to the one I have on this blog at present over on the left). I added it (with a label saying it was an ad) and smuggly went to bed imagining that I’d just earned myself a few extra dollars a day.

The next day I noticed that the Click Through Rate of my Adsense ads was lower than normal overall - so were earnings. I was not too concerned because it does tend to go up and down from day to day. The following day I noticed the same thing - lower CTR and lower earnings. Day three and I was starting to worry a little that something had gone wrong as the trend continued and I had little idea why. At first it didn’t even cross my mind that the new ad might be having any impact.

I checked the channels feature of Adsese at this point and realised that only one of the many channels that I track was lower than normal. It had halved its normal rate! Of course the channel that had decreased was the primary in content ad from my blog (my cash cow of the blog).

It only took me a few moments to work out why this had happened. You see the ad that I had added to my side bar was stealing ads from my primary ad in the content and leaving it with few, if any ads to serve. Let me explain.

The way Adsense works if you have more than one ad running on a page is that it will serve ads to the ad that it finds first on your blog. It fills up the first one first, the second one in the code second and the third one in the code third. If at any point it runs out of relevant ads it stops serving them and you either end up with a public service ad, an empty space or an alternate ad (depending upon how you configure your set up).

On that particular blog the code was in this order.
- 1 Banner ad
- 2 Side bar ad
- 3 In content ad

You can see what was happening - the banner ad got first priority and was always served ads. The side bar ad almost always got ads and the in content ad got them some (50%) of the time. Of course this left my primary position empty half of the time (not a wise move).

You can probably guess what I did faster than a speeding bullet - side bar ad was gone very quickly and the banner ad didn’t last long either. Now the in content ad is always full and I have moved a secondary ad further down the page. CTR and revenue are back up to normal (in fact they are up a bit).

So - take home message time. When designing the ads on your page rank your ad positions in terms of priority. Which spot do you want to get the first ads and always be full? Which are secondary spots that don’t matter so much if they are empty from time to time? Then check to see which order they appear in the code on your site. This is easily done. Simply select the ‘view source’ option in your browser. This should open a window that shows you the back end of the page you’re viewing - find the google adsense code and work out which is which (you should be able to tell by the size of the ad). If your primary ad isn’t the first one you might need to make some changes either to where you place your ads or to how your blog is configured and serves the code.