AdSense is the choice of many when it comes to monetisation. It’s used by starters and pros alike. While there’s a lot written about it on the net and offline, I’m here today to share a few of my tried and tested tips and help you make the most of your ad space. Since this information comes right off my several years of experience as a professional blogger and web-developer, it would be fair to say that these are the lesser known tips of the trade.

First a little background. Many of us would already be familiar with the Adsense heatmap. It is basically a schematic of the regions of a web page most likely to receive visitor clicks. Essentially, these are the regions which are better suited for placing the ads on a site. So take a good look at the figure and keep it handy for the rest of this article.

The Tools

AdSense heatmap has been created after studying several thousands of web-pages on the net. Thus it is a generalized diagram relevant to the common generic layout. It does not take into account the site layout, theme, or design, the type of audience or the age and popularity of a particular website. So we would first need the tools to create and understand the heatmap of your individual site.

Those who have purchased web hosting can grab this gem called clickheat from labsmedia. Follow their directions to install it on your server. Those on a free hosting or not having access to the server can make use of CrazyEgg which is a paid service and a more polished version of a similar technique. If I were you, I’d choose to pay for the hosting rather than CrazyEgg (for obvious reasons). Both these tools let you generate the heatmap of your site on a periodic basis like daily, monthly or custom defined.

Second tool (as you might have guessed by now) is Google Analytics. While Google Analytics serves a lot of purposes, we have two main intents for its use here. It will help us understand our visitors better. And hidden deep within the various views is the site overlay view under click patterns to help you see the clicks as GA sees it. This does not show the clicks over regions where Adsense is installed. But it is perfectly usable and will work in tandem with the above mentioned tools to point out the anomalies if any.

Questions you need to ask yourself

Now that you have a heatmap of the site, its will guide you in finding the locations which are best suited for ad placement. It is now time to focus on the other aspects of revenue generation. Before you begin, there are several questions you need to answer:

• How old is your site or blog?

If you have a new site that means you may be having less visitors and will also be trying to build a rapport.

• What kind of audience does your site cater to? The average or the ones following your niche?

If you cater to a generic audience, there are higher chances of visitors interacting (read clicking) ads. Visitors following a niche could be too smart to interact with ads against their choice.

• What’s the design or theme and the layout of your site? Is it a dull generic theme or a more polished and professional theme?

If you have a generic theme or less styled HTML, blending the ads is easier and they could very well be taken for content by the casual reader. A professional theme’s elegance will make the ads stand out more (as compared to the unstyled content).

• What would be high on your priority? User-experience or revenue?

This could be a tough one especially if you are starting out. Its an art to make user-experience and revenue go hand in hand.

When to Blend

Most of the publishers who do well with AdSense are those with a generic unpolished theme on their site with ads blended and obfuscated in the content. You may notice that these publishers form a considerable majority of those featured on the “Inside Adsense” blog in the success stories. This is one reason why blended ads work so very well with the unsuspecting visitor and another reason for the high popularity of the large rectangle format - it just looks so much like the actual content. Link ads could go into the site navigation and referrals in the left sidebar top section.
On the flip side, this strategy will certainly cost you the visitors and subscribers while setting an example of bad user experience. So my two cents, balance it out. Leave a generous margin around your ads if you are blending. As you continue to make revenue and draw more visitors on your site, you will transition into the next level (that everyone aspires to).

When to make the ads stand out

Generally speaking, if your site has been around for a while, it must be getting visitors (depending on how much time you spend sharing your passion with them). The majority of the visitors would be the ones following your site on a regular basis. Getting these visitors to interact with blended ads usually doesn’t work since they are familiar with the site and can differentiate between the ads and the content. These visitors are the loyal ones, are the biggest asset of your site and have to be cared for. Its time to evolve your strategy and take a wise decision.

An easier thing would be to just keep changing layouts every once in a while. But a wise decision would be to take your user-experience and monetisation strategy to the next level. Time to give your site a much deserved redesign. Design your site for the smart visitors and target premium advertisers. And while you are doing so, make the ads noticeable (and standout as ads instead of content). This translates into higher user experience and more subscribers while being more appealing to the first-time visitors. Visitors will have a choice to interact with the ads since they recognize them and do so by choice. And this will in-turn mean higher conversion rate for the advertisers. Theme your text ads to compliment the theme. Its a win-win situation for everyone. The big difference now is that you are ready to pitch to advertisers directly.

Mistakes

Both the above strategies worked for me but your mileage may vary. So post regularly and keep your site updated. As a bonus I’d share with you a few mistakes I made to learn things the hard way to help you make a better decision.

I started my site with a polished and elegant theme. Visitors were few and they could make out the ads. Thus there was no revenue at all. I continued to create good content and revenue increased marginally. I then changed over to a minimalist theme with a raw, newspaper like look and feel. It worked like a charm.

Almost six months down the line while the visitors were glued to the content, I redesigned the site and now I have a more professional look to the site. The number of visitors and subscribers has increased substantially and I’m ready to pitch to advertisers directly.

Conclusion

There though are a few things that can’t be left unsaid before we conclude. The only thing that will continue to invite visitors and advertisers is the content and its inflow. Good content once in a blue-moon is not enough and so is average content at regular intervals. In order to make money you need to set out to make meaningas Guy Kawasaki pitches for in The Art Of The Start.

Image Courtesy (Creative Commons) : Akira Ohgaki

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What sort of ads does your blog have? Let me guess… It’s an odd combination of AdSense, Kontera, AdBrite, and other ad networks, which add clutter to your blog and straddle the border between “tolerable” and “That’s it, I’m installing AdBlock.” Sure, it’s easy to slap some JavaScript snippets into your template and be done with it, but it’s not the best way to handle things. If your blog is new, then you won’t have much choice but to go with AdSense. But as the site grows, you may find it limiting, as you may with most ad networks.

• The ads are often for spammy sites, or of otherwise low quality.
• Ad networks take a cut of the profit. AdSense doesn’t disclose their cut, though most networks range from 25%-50%. (It’s suspected that Google takes roughly a 20% cut.)
• With Pay-Per-Click networks, you’re depending on people clicking on the ads in order to get any money. This often leads to the ads becoming more intrusive than necessary as they must be placed inside content areas in order to achieve a descent click-through rate.
• PPC ad blocks, Kontera links (shudder), and other ad network units get in the way and clutter things up.

In contrast to network-based advertisements, you have what are called “direct-sale” ads. The general idea of direct ads is that you’re cutting the “middleman” out of the equation by selling ads directly to businesses instead of relying on a network.

This isn’t a passive solution, like AdSense, though. You have to actively seek-out businesses and ask them if they would be interested in advertising on your site. You can email companies that fit your blog’s topic, and you can post advertisements that you have ad space available (what a concept! ) on marketplaces such as SitePoint.

After nuking your network ads, you will hopefully have a nice, clean blog. The next step is to decide what ad formats you’ll offer, and where they will be positioned. A popular ad format among tech blogs is the 125×125 ad. It’s compact, it doesn’t look too “ad-like,” and people tend to look at them. You can also fit 4-6 of them in a fairly small space. I have a few on Webmaster-Source, and I like they way they’re noticeable, yet out of the way.

Then you have the classic 468×60 banner, which could be the oldest ad format on the internet. Designers Toolbox has a list of standard banner sizes, or if you have sizable enough traffic levels, you could invent your own custom format, like Smashing Magazine has done.

Put some dummy “Your Ad Here” images up where the ads will be, and link them to a static page with some site statistics (traffic, subscribers, any notes of interest) and contact information. Oh, and your rates, of course. Note how many ad slots are available, what formats they are, etc. How much should you charge? There isn’t a magic formula to calculate that, unfortunately. It depends on your niche, the age and traffic of the blog, the size and position of the ads, and probably other factors as well. You may find it useful to know that

• Bigger = more money. Charge more for a large banner than you would for a 125×125 button ad.
• Position is key. An ad is “better” if it’s above the fold (visible on screen without scrolling) than if it’s lower down.
• Less is more, quality over quantity. The more ads you have, the less they’re probably worth. If you have less ad slots (say four 125×125 ads and a banner rather than two standard banners, a 300 pixel wide square ad, and a “leaderboard” banner) they will have a higher value, theoretically. Also, you want to avoid having too many ads anyway. Otherwise you end up with a cluttered blog.

You’ll have to experiment with pricing. It helps if there are other blogs in your niche direct-selling ads. That way you can check their prices and traffic statistics, and factor them into your fuzzy math as you try to decide how much to charge.

Direct-sale ads aren’t new, as some may suspect. Back in the early days of the web, before there were any ad networks, that was how online advertising was done. Direct sales are a great way to monetize your website without looking like someone who has just discovered the wonders of Google AdSense. I’ve been selling direct ads on my blog for a few months now, and I’m seeing good results. If you want to learn even more about direct ad sales, I encourage you to read my post 125×125 Ads: Monetize Your Blog With the Bloggers’ Ad Format. Consider it your obligatory “further reading” section.

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So for now, in order to keep things fresh, I’m opening the doors of Blogging Bits to guest bloggers.

If you want to reach 700+ subscribers, send me your post or post idea to the.syed {at} gmail.com. If your post is published, you’ll be given proper credit at the start of the post with a permanent link to your blog. Or we can discuss the detail in email.

Thank you for your interest, and thank you for being a reader of Blogging Bits!

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The reason why many, or should I say most, people don’t make money from blogs is that most of the easy ways to effectively make money from blogging are considered somewhat bad, unethical, user-unfriendly and so on.

So bloggers who have worked hard to build a community around their blog, stay well away from money making practices that may harm their reputation and put off their readers. They happily choose the community over money.

I, too, fall in the same category of bloggers. I could run AdSense and plethora of other types of ads to monetize my blog, but I consider this to be bad from user experience perspective as well as an ineffective monetization strategy.

Ineffective? Sure, in my case, my readership consists mainly of bloggers and web masters who are pretty tech savvy and immune to advertisements. They either ignore the ads, or are turned off by them because they come here for information, not to see ads, especially when they can tell an ad from the real content.

So if you are one of the bloggers who don’t make money blogging, here’s good news for you. You don’t have to monetize your current established blog with evil ads to make money. There are other ways to make money from blogs. Some of these are really tough ones. For example, creating a product and selling it on your blog, or using your blog to promote your expertise a.k.a services.

The good news is that you don’t have to use any of the above methods to make money from blogs. Instead, take a look at the following ways.

Start a blog just for PayPerPost and text link ads

The problem with the easiest money making techniques like selling links and writing sponsored posts is twofold 1) your readers can smell a sponsored post from two miles’ distance, and they don’t really like it 2) you’re always in danger of getting penalized by Google for selling links.

However, you don’t have to endanger your established blog to make money with above mentioned services. What you got to do is: start one or more blogs just for writing sponsored posts and selling links. Trust me, there are countless marketers out there dying to buy links from you if you are willing to sell them.

To add content to your blog, you can post just about anything. Post news, excerpts from other blogs, or republish free articles (of course with proper credit and link to the original source). Once it has been indexed by search engines and is a few months old, you can start writing sponsored posts, selling links, and promoting affiliate products. Possibilities are endless.

Start as many as you want. Domains are cheap, and almost all major hosts allow multiple domain hosting.

Interlink your blogs to increase their pagerank

While you are at it, you can use all your new blogs to link to one another, and most importantly, link to your main sites and blogs. It never hurts to get an extra keyword rich link to your main site to boost its search engine rankings!

Do it with caution. Use different locations for links and different keywords in link text to avoid getting penalized by Google.

Create an aggregator blog for organic traffic and monetize it with AdSense

Whatever people may say about AdSense, it’s still a major player in advertisement industry. And it’s always been one of the biggest earners for me.

The problem with AdSense is that it’s difficult to optimize your content so you can get the most out of every click. You also got to have a lot of traffic to make more than a few pennies a day with AdSense.

Considering this, if you monetize a blog with AdSense, you need to have plenty of consistent traffic, and good amount of fresh content to keep the traffic coming.

Social media is not the answer to the problem of consistent traffic. Social media traffic comes in spurts, and is almost useless when your sole purpose is to get your visitors to click on your AdSense ads.

The answer is organic search traffic. Once search engines start sending you traffic, it invariably builds up, and rarely comes down. Organic traffic is the kind of traffic you should be aiming to get on your AdSense monetized blog.

Keep in mind that you shouldn’t run any other ads that compete with AdSense, as it will not perform very well in the presence of competing ads, or sell links or sponsored posts as it will jeopardize your Google rankings.

Now to keep on churning out good content without scraping other blogs, this is where you have to do some research and find the proper niche.

The aggregator blog that I referred to in the heading is the blog that aggregates any and all information in a particular niche. Don’t confuse it with a scraper, as the content is written manually, proper credit is given, and the traffic is actually directed to the original source of information. Think of this blog as a forum where members post news articles with a link to the original source, and no attempt is made to take credit for the article.

For example, your blog could be about Windows Vista sidebar gadgets (here’s a free idea for you!) where you gather all new gadget downloads. What you do here is, copy/paste the widget description by the author, write the author’s name, and give a download link that points to the original widget page. Nothing wrong with that, right?

When choosing the niche for your aggregator blog, try to think outside the box. Don’t go for a usual all things tech blog. You won’t make a penny with that as it’s already an over-over-saturated niche. Go for a smaller niche where there’s less competition but plenty of information to gather.

Again, create as many as you want!

Use a blog + online shop + a forum combo

While blogs always attract more search engine traffic, blogs are not the only way to get good amount of traffic.

Forums, for example, not only grow quickly if you have a few active members, but also attract a lot of long tail search engine traffic. You can’t optimize a forum for a particular keyword, but over time, as the forum grows, you’ll notice that many threads rank top in SERPs for many frequently searched for terms.

Having a forum with your blog is a good way to add more fresh content to your site and get repeat visitors. You can link to your blog from forum threads, and promote your forum in blog posts and share the traffic between the two.

If your niche is such that your visitors are looking for, or are willing to buy something, then it’s not a bad idea to add an online shop to your blog.

Amazon and Chitika offer the publishers customizable online stores that can be integrated with your site. It’s a one-click way to quickly add an online store, but if you want full control over what you want to sell and how, you can manually create a store with your chosen affiliate products. You can get the product link, banners, etc. from Commission Junction.

Did I say start as m any as you want? You can also add more goodies to pimp up your site further!

Well, there’s one more evil way to make money from blogging.. and that is:

Start a make money online blog to loot your audience

Why not? Everyone and their grandpa has a make-money-online these days!

Seriously, that’s how John Chow, his pals, and his followers make money, so why not you! After all we are talking about evil ways to make money online, eh?

And for god’s sake, don’t start as many as you want. There are already too many of them!

So there we are. I haven’t even scratched the surface of what’s possible to do with blogs, but I’m sure once you apply all, or any, of above methods, your brain will be teeming with more of our own evil schemes!

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Do you make money blogging? I, for one, don’t.

It may seem like a a strange question, but do you really blog for money? Will you stop blogging if you don’t make money with your blog?

When I started this blog, I wanted to make money from it. But slowly, as time passed, my perspective changed. My blog became my identity, and people who read me (yes, you!) became my friends.

Now I don’t blog for money. I blog just to share my take on different issues in internet marketing, blogging, and web design world. And I really love doing it.

Note: I’m not averse to money. And I certainly wouldn’t reject it if a money making opportunity arises!

In my observation, most bloggers start blogging for money, but as time passes and they don’t make more than a few pennies, they either give up, or persist - just for the fun of it!

Those who persevere, gain new insights into their target market, and actually find out how to monetize their blog, directly or indirectly. Those are the ones who really make money blogging, and become an inspiration for a new generation of bloggers.

Well, see, I’m still here. And I don’t make money from blogging (though in my case, it’s intentional). I’m in the second phase of blogging.

Now the real question (and please answer) Do you make money blogging? What phase are you in? How long have you been blogging? Do you plan to keep on blogging no matter what?

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The biggest impediment in the way of everything we don’t achieve is the lack of courage to actually do it. Heck, we can’t even fail if we don’t attempt to do it.

When it comes to blogging and working online, most of us tend to be passive learners. It’s easy to read all the information and feel all wise and knowledgeable, but any information that is not put to any use is, well, useless.

In fact, I read two kinds of books/blogs/anything readable. 1) That is practically useful. 2) That is absolutely useless but has high entertainment value, e.g. fiction.

The problem starts when I read something that I mean to read for its practical value, but instead I reduce its value to mere entertainment. Reading information gives me the satisfaction that I’ve done something useful, but if I do nothing to incorporate this new information into my blogging/webmastering activities, I might as well have read another one of those John Grisham’s legal thrillers.

So here’s the best nugget of advice anyone can ever give you to transform your life: Try all of your ideas, and don’t be afraid of failure, for if there is anything worse than failure, it’s not even trying.

If you are held back by the excuse that you are not yet ready, you’ll never be ready. There’s always more to learn, isn’t it? And what you learn from experience far outweighs what you learn from passively observing. If you want to know how to swim, you’ll have to read the instructions manual. But if you want to swim, you have to take the plunge once!

Oh and I’ve been thinking of writing smaller (Seth Godin style) posts, and see, I’ve done it!

Update: Oh scary! Many bloggers have covered different angles of the same point today: Do what’s important and do it now! Brian recounts how he went through a life-threatening accident to realize he needed to do what he loved. Dave talks about the importance of spending time with people you love and urges us to do it right now. Meryl gives tips on balancing your work and personal lives by, again, doing what’s more important rather than what you mindlessly do.

Do you have any insights to share with us too?

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Blogging and misc

Using Trends In Google Reader To Manage RSS Overload by Abhijeet

To Tweet or Not to Tweet? 50+ Links & Tools by Tad

How Social Proof Can Kill or Fill Your Blog by Jonathon

8 Ways To Add Value With Link Roundup Posts by Tay

How to Show You Care About Your Customers by James

Design

19 Visual Effects That Entertain And Amuse by Brian

A Comparative Study of Logo Design between the 70s and 90s. by Jacob Cass

A Plea From 16 Most Overused Fonts by Vivien

10 tips for writing graphic design briefs by David Airey

45 Photo Editing Tutorials for Photoshop by Steven Snell

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I noticed yesterday that Google, that had been sending me 200+ visitors daily, started pretending as though I didn’t even exist. I can’t figure out why it happened. Maybe it’s just some algorithmic change and I’m just making a mountain out of a molehill, but it’s equally possible that Google thinks I’m selling text link ads.

I’ve been creating web sites for four years, and I know if a site all of a sudden drops from all its rankings, there’s definitely something wrong.

So maybe Google thinks I’m selling links below the deceptively titled heading “Top Commenters”?

It’s not very unlikely as recently some folks have been trying to misuse my Top Commenters list by putting keywords where they should be writing their bloody names.

Right! That’s what you give a good guy in return for him giving his precious readers some link love. I’ve now decided to remove the Top Commenters list so all you spammers can go find yourself.. err.. another good guy?

But losing Google rankings is not the only reason I’ve removed Top Commenters widget.

One quality comment > a lot of useless spammy comments

I’m beyond that phase now when I wanted anyone to comment even if they mildly spammed. It happens. When you start a new blog, you desperately want people to drop by your blog, and want even more desperately to have someone leave you a comment.

However, as a blog evolves, the blogger gains more experience, and realizes the value of having a quality readership, he/she stops caring about numbers alone. Increasing subscriber count and comment count by any means possible aren’t important to them anymore.

Well, I think I no longer welcome useless junk in comments anymore, left only to get some link juice from my blog. I still welcome each and every comment, but if you want to advertise your keywords, please.. here’s the door.

Ah… I feel much better now!

For now, I’m showing my Twitter updates in place of top commenters list. Be sure to follow me on Twitter so we can chat in the best open messenger in the world!

I still feel I should reward all of you who take the time to write comments on Blogging Bits. So if you have a suggestion as to how should I do that, please chime in.

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Many bloggers use Twitter as a platform to promote their own blog. That’s an easy concept, no need to waste our time there. Instead, lets focus on something that is under-utilized by most bloggers: promoting other blogger’s content by “retweeting.”

The art of “retweeting” is best described as taking a twitter message someone else has posted, and rebroadcasting that same message to your followers. When broadcasting this message, you should give credit to the original poster. While retweeting sounds great for the original tweeter (since there is usually a link involved), retweeting can actually benefit you just as much if not more.

How to Properly Retweet

Before we get into the greatness of retweeting, it would probably be a good idea for you to understand how to properly retweet.

The common syntax starts off with the use of a label. My favorite label to use is “Retweet:” - the label “Retweeting:” and “Reading:” work as well.

Next comes the crediting. You can credit the original poster by simply using the @reply syntax, for example: “@originalPoster”.

Lastly, you should add the link along with a quick note about the link and why it is relevant. Here is a full example of retweeting:

Retweet: @originalPoster The 5 Best Blog Tips http://is.gd/56f - great tips

Now that you understand how to properly retweet, lets move on to some basic concepts of retweeting.

Only Retweet Content You Find Truly Interesting and Relevant

The natural instinct many of you will have is that if you retweet another individual’s content, then there is a better chance that the original poster will retweet your content in the future. While this holds true (and I will cover that in a minute), you should not simply retweet everyone’s content for your own personal gain. You must be selective when you retweet since the whole point of this practice is to benefit your followers.

Retweeting Provides Value to Your Follower

There is a reason why people follow you, value. If you can provide value to your follower you will not only make that individual happy, but you will most likely attract more followers. Providing quality content is always a great way to provide your followers with value. The first thing that comes to mind is writing up a great blog post, and linking the post in a tweet. While this is one way to approach this concept, it is not the only way. Another way to provide your followers with great content is to link to other relevant and interesting content.

Retweeting Will Benefit Your Personal Brand

Retweeting will most likely build your personal brand as well as your follower’s loyalty. If you point a reader to an external source that is truly relevant and beneficial to them, the amount of trust that individual has in you will increase. The next time you post a link, whether it be to your blog or to another source, the chances of that individual clicking that link are higher than before.

Retweeting Will Help You Build Relationships With The Original Posters

As mentioned previously, the likelihood of being on the other end of a retweet increases as you retweet. Retweeting someone else’s content is an act of kindness, and for the most part bloggers like to return such acts. This isn’t to say that you should expect someone to retweet your content just because you retweet theirs. Again, retweeting is all about providing value to your followers, and an individual isn’t going to retweet a post of yours if it is not top notch.

A Concern: Doesn’t Retweeting Steer My Followers Away From Me?

Actually no. In my opinion retweeting will never lose you a follower or reader (unless you send them to some sort of spam, or even worse you RickRoll them!). Why would someone stop reading your blog or following your twitter because you sent them off to another website? Keep an open mind when it comes to your readers, they are usually smart and good people.

Conclusion

Retweeting is a great way to add quality and value to your Twitter. If used incorrectly retweeting can actually hurt your personal brand and future traffic. If done right, retweeting can help you educate your followers, build your personal brand, increase future traffic, and connect you to other bloggers / content creators in your niche.

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Last week I wrote about different full screen text editors to choose from and (sort of) promised that I’ll expand on why writing in full screen is at least worth trying.

Well, there is no better time for it than now.

So, what are the advantages of writing in a full screen editor with no formatting options at all, when we have all kinds of word processors with the latest bells and whistles at our command?

The question would be only fair if you were writing a formal application for a new job. But here, we are talking about creative writing, and this beast is not easy to tame.

Most writing is creative writing as it requires you to choose your words and arrange your sentences creatively (not in poetic sense, mind you). And we all know, it is impossible to be creative without being fully focussed on our thoughts.

What’s great about a full screen editor is that it instantly removes distracting thoughts from your mind and connects you to your most important thoughts by clearing the writing field of visual distractions.

When typing in other editors with all other windows and toolbars and icons peeping into your peripheral vision, it’s all too easy to lose your train of thought and waste your brain’s energy processing other annoying matters such as why was your girl friend behaving so strangely last night!

You see, our mind is a whiny little baby. It uses up most of its energy worrying about frivolous things that need least of your attention right now. And ignores any demands of concentrating on the task at hand.

When there’s a lot of stuff going on around you when you need to concentrate on a creative task, it mucks around for something to interrupt your concentration, and as soon as it’s found something, all that has gone wrong in your life seems to run like a film before your eyes.

This, or something similar is bound to happen to you if you write in a noisy, distracting environment. A screen full of colors, toolbars, and windows is the sort of visual noise you can’t afford to have around when writing.

Writing on a black screen with only your thoughts materializing on it is truly a blissful experience.

But what about formatting?

I know the kind of perfectionists we all have become. If we don’t write perfect content with words bolded out and lists nicely bulleted right as we put them down, we consider ourselves to be lousy and incapable writers.

If you write with this approach in mind, I seriously ask you to reconsider your approach.

If you want to change your approach and become a really efficient writer, take some time to read this post that I wrote earlier.

Stephen King, a famous fiction writer, puts it more beautifully than I ever can:

Put away your dictionary, your encyclopedias, your World Almanac, and your thesaurus. Better yet, throw your thesaurus into the wastebasket. The only things creepier than a thesaurus are those little paperbacks college students too lazy to read the assigned novels buy around exam time. Any word you have to hunt for in a thesaurus is the wrong word. There are no exceptions to this rule. You think you might have misspelled a word? O.K., so here is your choice: either look it up in the dictionary, thereby making sure you have it right - and breaking your train of thought and the writer’s trance in the bargain - or just spell it phonetically and correct it later. Why not? Did you think it was going to go somewhere? And if you need to know the largest city in Brazil and you find you don’t have it in your head, why not write in Miami, or Cleveland? You can check it … but later. When you sit down to write, write. Don’t do anything else except go to the bathroom, and only do that if it absolutely cannot be put off.

Customizing your full screen editor for best results

Here’s a screenshot of my customized Dark Room.

• The page is 600px wide, centered, and with margins set to 10px. This gives the page a more ‘roomy’ feeling which is helpful for concentration.
• The general background is black which is least distracting of all colors.
• The page background is a dark gray with white text on it so it doesn’t pierce my eyes.
• The font is Times New Roman because I’m still used to reading Serif fonts in print. The more familiarity = the less distraction.

But this is not the end of all configurations. Do what suits you best.

If you have used a full screen editor for writing before, please share your experience in comments.

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