Advises for Adsense

Amazon Associates

2011-09-17T07:18:00.002-07:00

Hello to my blogger friends, i'v just added Amazon Associates to my.

I advise all my friends to use it.

How To Use Amazon Associates On Blogs & Websites To

Maximize Your Internet Earnings

Amazon Associates is the latest major affiliate programme designed to monetize your blog or website. How does it work and how simple is it to use? How can you maximize your online earning potential? This article answers these questions.

The Google Adsense affiliate programme has been around for years and there are already several competitors in activity, particularly for those resident in the US. However, there’s now a completely new affiliate programme for bloggers and website owners all over the world to mazimize their chances of earning money online.

Amazon Associates is similar to Adsense in that adverts will appear on your site, but gives you far greater freedon over which products you choose to display and how you can actually display them. This may prove very beneficial to bloggers, who are now able to promote products specific to their blog’s content (i.g. if you have video games realated sites amazon will display gaming consoles and video game products).

You are able to sign up to whichever Amazon Associates programme you prefer – US, UK, Europe, etc – or you can sign up for mutiple accounts in different currencies, which is very useful for those whose traffic is international. This means you can promote the best books available on blogging (if that’s your blog’s main subject matter) from various countries, ensuring visitors from all over the world will find your blog equally helpful. However, when advertising products in a currency other than your own you will be paid by cheque, so will require a bank account that accepts foreign currencies (usually a business account). Alternatively, you can choose to be paid in vouchers to spend on the appropriate site, but this isn’t going to boost your earnings so should be avoided if possible.

To benefit fully from the system you will need to spend some time choosing exact products, relevant to your blog content, then adding them to widgets and installing the widgets to your blog or website; if you don’t Amazon will automatically choose your products (in the way adsense chooses your ads) and will often repeat the same products in several widgets or posts, thus minimising your potential earnings. You can also add individual products (as many as you wish) to each blog post, in the form of a text link, an image, or both.

You are also able to add a full Amazon store to your site, filling it with individual proucts or choosing entire categories you believe will interest your readers. This store can be set to open in a new window or can be embedded into your website so it looks laike a part of your webpage. Setting up and maintaining the system is far more time consuming than running adsense ads, but I can see the potential for far higher earnings if the programme is used carefully and the blog or website recieves enough traffic.

Amazon has created all sorts of wonderful widgets to maximise you internet earning, from banner ads and favourite product collections to flash slideshows, and you can often change the size to help you integrate the widgets to your particular website/blog in a professional-looking manner. You are also able to add simple text links which display pop-up product reviews when hovered over. This means any product you might mention when blogging (book or album tiitle, or virtually any other product you care to think of, from Amazon’s vast selection) has the potential to become a link with all the information required by a buyer – price (new and used), average customer rating, stock level etc. – and a button to add the item to their basket without leaving your blog or website. As long as they pay for it within 90 days you get 5% commission, and this rate will increase as you provide more referrals. Brilliant!

Setting up an Amazon Associates account through Blogger is very simple: you simply click on the ‘Monetize’ tab as if you were about to create an adsense account, but choose Amazon Associates instead. Here you’ll be directed to set up an Amazon Associates account in your chosen currency in order to get started adding products or widgets to your site. If you’re not using Blogger you should visit Amazon Associates and set up an account. Full instructions will then be given as to how to proceed.

To see for yourself how the Amazon Associates product adverts look on a Blogger blog please visit the blog address on my profile page, where the programme is already installed and fully functioning. use this as it will help earn a lot more revenue.

2011-09-17T00:43:00.000-07:00

Earn more by promoting Google Affiliate Exclusive Opportunities

2011-09-16T21:31:00.000-07:00

Earn more by promoting Google Affiliate Exclusive Opportunities

With the arrival of fall, the holiday shopping season begins. Give your readers an early start by posting Google Affiliate Network Exclusive Opportunities on your site, and also earn additional revenue. Over 40 great shopping opportunities will be available exclusively to Google Affiliate Network publishers. In addition, special opportunities will be live for one weekend only, from Friday, September 23 through September 26.

This limited time offer enables you to add a variety of great consumer opportunities to your site and earn a performance fee from orders that originated from your links.

Here are just a few examples of exclusive opportunities that you can post:

$15 Off $50

Free Shipping on all orders

Get $15 off Your Next $125 Purchase!

How do I promote these opportunities on my site?

To promote any of these exclusive opportunities, youâ€™ll first need to be an approved publisher in Google Affiliate Network. Google Affiliate Network is available to all AdSense publishers, and while most advertisers in the program are based in the US and Canada, many have international shipping capabilities. For more details, view all Google Affiliate Network opportunities available.

1. Apply for Google Affiliate Network with your AdSense Publisher ID (or sign in if you're already a Google Affiliate Network publisher).

2. Once approved, review the opportunities available (link to GAN Blog Post to be added once live) and click the "Apply Now" link for everyone that you wish to promote.

3. Tracking links will be available in your Google Affiliate Network account by viewing the Home tab. You can also search for â€œSeptember Exclusive Opportunitiesâ€ links in the Links section on September 23.

Need help applying or want more information? Review the Getting Started guide today.

When can I post these opportunities on my site?
All opportunities will be available on September 23, and all will expire at midnight September 26. Please note that it wonâ€™t be possible to post any of these exclusives until September 23.

Important Adsense Tips for Bloggers.

2011-09-16T10:00:00.000-07:00

Adsense Tips for Bloggers 1

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.

Adsense Tips for Bloggers 2 – Is Your Blog Suitable for Adsense?

This is Part 2 in a series on using Adsense on your Blog

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.

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.

Adsense Tips for Bloggers 3 – An Equation for Success

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 documentedthat 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.

Adsense Tips for Bloggers 4 – Increasing Traffic

This is part 4 in a series of posts on maximizing adsenserevenue for bloggers.

I have argued the case for our equation for increasing Adsense Revenue

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

I now will turn my attention to each of the four elements of good Adsense revenue in turn and give some practical easy to implement tips to improve each from my experience.

Increasing Traffic Levels is a key component to increasing Adsense revenue. As I wrote previously, ‘The more people that see you Adsense Ads, the more likelihood there is that someone will click on them.’

Increasing the readership of your blog is not as simple as it sounds, it takes time, patience and hard work (and sometimes a bit of luck) Having said that there are many things you can do to get your blog in front of a wider audience and there exposing the adsense messages on your site to more potential ‘clickers’. Here are a few tips…

These are just some of the ideas that I’ve used and seen others use to increase the readership of a blog and thereby increase the exposure of Adsense ads to a wider audience.Many of the above tips were taken from my Blog Tips Series including the ‘Finding Readers’ Series.Quality, Interesting, Useful and Original Content – What are the blogs that you read the most? If you’re anything like me they are blogs that have quality content that ‘scratches me where I itch’. This is essential to increasing your readership unless you have a pretty amazing ‘gimmick’ to bring readers in.
Good Blog Design is really important if you want your blog to create a good first impression. With millions of other blogs and sites out there its worth some effort to make yours stand out. Also worth a read is Good Weblog Design and Layout.
Link to others – be generous with your links to other bloggers big and small. You’ll be surprised how many links come back your way. This not only brings traffic from their sites but doesn’t hurt your ranking in Google.
Comment on others blogs – Some of my most loyal readers came to my blog because I genuinely interacted with them on their blogs through comments. Hear me now, I say genuinelybecause its easy to spam in comments, but this will have the opposite effect of generating readers to your blog.
Update Frequently – There is nothing that turns me off a blog faster than seeing that it hasn’t been updated for a month or more. Keep it rolling over with interesting content.
Interact with Readers – Having an interactive blog that invites the involvement of readers is one way of generating repeat visitors. I’ve written a tip on Interactive Blogging including a number of interactive tools that you can use on your blog. Also check out this tip on using comments effectively to increase interactivity on your blog.
Optimise for Search Engines – I can’t stress enough how important Search Engines are to increasing traffic, especially traffic that will click on your ads. I find that 95% of my traffic comes from Google and have found that anecdotal evidence suggests this traffic clicks through on Adsense ads at a higher rate than traffic from links on other blogs and sites. So work hard atgetting listed and highly ranked on Search Engines.
Add a signature to your outgoing email – Learn a lesson from Hotmail who have used signatures on the bottom of their users emails for years to promote their home page and generate interest in their product. Be careful though if you don’t want your worlds to collide!
Web Rings – There are literally thousands of webrings that you can sign up for. I’m not sure how effective they are these days, but some people still swear by them.
Add an RSS feed to your blog – more and more people are reading blogs without ever visiting them through News Aggregators that pick up information using RSS. Whilst this does not guarantee those reading through aggregators will visit your blog (and therefore see your Adsense Ads) it certainly increases the chances of them dropping by, especially if you invite comments and have internal links on your posts.
List your site on Portals – There are a growing number of sites which exclusively list blogs. If you want people to find you its worth submitting your blog to be listed on them. Some focus on specific topics while others list blogs on a wide variety of topics (like Eaton Web and Globe of Blogs). Other portals like BlogShares and Blog Street also list a lot of blogs in different ways which might increase your blogs profile.
Blog Search Engines and Indexes – Get yourself registered on sites like Blogdex, Technorati,Popdex and Daypop (they require RSS I think). These sites have features that allow people to search for blog entries via topic and keywords. They also list the most popular recent topics and each have other interesting features which can enhance your blogging experience.
Start a Newsletter – Offer your readers a newsletter service to keep them up to date with your latest posts. I’ve found since adding a free weekly newsletter to my digicam blog that hundreds of readers have signed up for regular updates of my latest posts. Think about this – hundreds of people have given me permission to invite them to come back to my blog – every week!
Get Involved in Blog Projects and Memes – From time to time other bloggers will invite your participation in a blog project of theirs. Get involved, support their project and you might find it pays off. On the flip side start your own blogging project or meme. Do something that is of service to other bloggers. I tried something like this with Underblogs and Blogger Idol.
Get involved in other web forums – Genuinely participate in web forums and discussion pages on topics related to your blog. Many of these allow you to add a signature to your posts which raise your blogs profile.
Promote your Posts – If you think you’ve written something worthwhile spend a few minutes letting others know about it. I regularly shoot other bloggers to notify them of what I’ve written if I think it will interest them. Think about it before you send the email and don’t bombard the same people constantly with every topic you write on – be selective, concise, polite and helpful with your emails but don’t be afraid to promote yourself.
Add a ‘Email a Friend’ Option to your posts – make it easy for your readers to tell others about what you’ve written. I know this function gets used regularly on my blog and brings in new readers that I would never otherwise have been able to reach.

What methods have your found to be effective at increasing the readership of your blog? What works for your and what doesn’t? What tips would you add to this collection?

Of course increasing traffic alone won’t greatly increase your Adsense revenue, but it can help! In our next Adsense Tip for Bloggers we will explore ways to generate High Paying Ads – the second component in our Adsense Revenue Equation.

Adsense Tips for Bloggers 5 – High Paying Ads

This is part 5 in a series of posts on maximizing AdSenserevenue for bloggers.

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 Adsrunning 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 Adsense 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 aservice 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.

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 6 – Relevant Ads

This is part 6 in a series of posts on increasing AdSenserevenue for bloggers.

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.

Adsense Tips for Bloggers 7 – Well Placed and Designed Ads

This is part 7 in a series of posts on increasing AdSenserevenue for bloggers.

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

The forth element of our Adsense Equation is that of having well designed and optimally placed Adsense Ads. I’ve found that ad positioning is incredibly important. I remember shifting the ads on one of my blogs a while back and being over the moon to discover the next morning that the move had doubled the click through rates that I’d had over night! Its worth doing some tweaking.

Let me also share a few other tips that you might like to experiment with.

Adsense Ad placement and design is an issue that is often hotly debated in Adsense discussion forums. It seems that each Adsense user has their own strategy – some like ads that blend in, others like ads that stand out from the rest of the page. Some like ads in banner positions, others in skyscrapers, others like to put them right in the middle of content. In my experience, different strategies work on different blogs at different times. The key tip I’ll give you is to experiment. Try new positions and design and track your results. One of the best ways you can do this is by using Adsense Tracker which is an amazing tracking package for adsense which gives you much more control over what and how you track your adsense performance. It does cost to purchase the tracker but in my experience you’ll make your money back pretty quickly by using it to adapt your Adsense strategies.

Blend – Most successful Adsense users seem to be taking the approach of blending their ads into the overall theme of their page. This often means making the ad’s background (and often border) the same (or similar) colour to the background of the page and making the title and URL the same as links of the rest of the page. In this way the ad does not stand out as being ‘ad-like’. Having said this I know of a few bloggers who take the opposite approach and make their ads as bright and ugly as possible in the hope of attracting the attention of their readers. I don’t subscribe to this because I think it cheapens the overall feel and look of a page.

In Content – More and more bloggers (and webmasters) are putting their ads inside the main body of their posts. In this way the ads are prominent and more likely to be seen by readers as they read your content. If your text wraps around the ads this can be quite effective. On the flipside of this argument is that you may run the risk of frustrating your readers with dominant ads. People reading content online are a fickle bunch and get easily turned off by blatant advertising.

Above the Fold – it is generally accepted that your Adsense ads should be placed towards the top of your page and be visable without your reader having to scroll down. Studies show that blog visitors stay on average for only 60 or so seconds, many without scrolling down. If you ads are hidden towards the bottom of your page you decrease the likelihood of them ever being seen let alone clicked.

Left is Best – Google has put together a ‘heat map’ which is probably the best thing that you can look at when thinking about the positioning of your ads. You’ll see from it that they have found that ads on the left hand side of the page do much better than those on the right hand side.

Too Dominent? – The position and design of your Adsense ads needs to be balanced with the overall purposes and design of your blog. What is the priority of your blog – is it to make money or is it something else. I have a number of blogs – and place ads differently on each depending upon their purposes. For example this blog is not a commercial blog – I’m more interested in building relationships, sharing and hearing others ideas and updating those interested in what I’m doing with my life. As a result my Adsense Ads are in a less prominent banner position and are designed to fit with the overall theme of the blog. However on my Digital Photography Blog there is obviously a more commercial intent (as well as it being something of a passion and hobby). As a result I experiment with more prominent Adsense ads (usually skyscraper and within content).

I cannot stress enough how useful it is to experiment. What works on one blog doesn’t always work on another. I’ve also noticed that if you have a blog with regular and loyal readers that it is good to keep things changing as your readers tend to get used to the way your blog is and become blind to things like Adsense Ads. I notice that when I move my ads around that it often creates higher click throughs for a few days – until the blindness kicks in again. Joel Comm’s What Google Never Told You About Making Money with Adsense is an excellent E-book written with lots of good tips on positioning your adsense ads if you’re wanting to get another person’s opinion on this topic.

Adsense Tips for Bloggers 8 – Miscellaneous Adsense Tips

This is part 8 (and the last) in a series of posts on increasing AdSense revenue for bloggers.

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 theChitika 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.

10 Little-known Ways to Get Traffic to Your Blog

2011-09-16T02:19:00.000-07:00

10 Little-known Ways to Get Traffic to Your Blog

Getting traffic to a blog is the major challenge a blogger faces. Many have read about various traffic generation strategies, but they find it difficult to get traffic to their blogs because these tips are no longer as effective as they once were. For example, guest blogging used to be very effective, but now that a lot of people are doing it and talking about it, it’s no longer as effective as it used to be.

Here are ten little-known tips to get traffic that I’ve discovered from my own experience. Implementing all ten tactics at the same time isn’t that effective; the way to get the best from these tactics is to choose two or three tactics that you think you like, and focus all your efforts on them for a period of time. You will be amazed at the results you will get.

1. Secret blogging clubs

A major and underutilized way to get traffic to a blog is by joining secret blogging groups or clubs. Very few people are using this particular method, but it can be very effective if you focus your efforts on it.

Secret blogging clubs consists of a group of bloggers with one aim: to help each other spread the word about their blogs with a view to generating traffic for each others’ blogs. The concept is simple: you join a club with around 50 members, share each others’ post with your fans and followers (around once a week), and this will generate more traffic, since it exposes your blog to a wider audience.

You dont need to worry about spamming and the likes, because groups like these are heavily moderated. Also, it is not necessary to share every link that is posted to the group—you only need to share the links related to your niche, that you feel are valuable.

A great example of an effective secret blogging club is the DailyBlogTips Retweet Club by Daniel Scocco. A post of mine that went viral through a secret blogging club was my guest post on getting more blog comments—it presently has 97 comments and 87 retweets on a site that averages 15 retweets and 40 comments per post.

2. Social blogmarking sites

Another underutilized but effective way to get traffic to your blog is by making use of social blogmarking sites. Even though this concept looks similar to social bookmarking sites like Digg and Reddit, it operates differently.

A social blogmarking site can be useful irrespective of whom you are and your status on the network. All you need to do is write your best post and give it the best title. Submit it to your favorite social blogmarking site and, if it’s voted onto the site’s homepage, it will send a stream of traffic to your blog. The articles that make it to the front page are not determined by the authors who submit them, or dependent on the domain name of the author’s site. The quality and title of the article is all that matters.

I also respect social blogmarking because of the quality of traffic it sends. The visitors that come from the blogmarking site I’m involved with (Blokube) spend an average of ten minutes on my blog. Presently, this is one of my best traffic sources, as far as traffic quality is concerned.

3. Ning communities

Getting traffic to your blog through Ning communities is a great way to get traffic to your blog, yet few bloggers use this method. I learned this formula from Kim Roach and it keeps on sending me traffic, even months after I use it.

Like blogging, a lot of people have a version of themselves or their business on Ning.com. You can create a portal in the form of yourusername.ning.com, which can also be a great way to get traffic to your blog.

All you need to do is help community members with their questions, and reference your blog if necessary. There is also a place where you can submit your blog posts for the whole community to see—another great traffic source. If you plan on doing this, you don’t necessarily need to write new posts: you can submit some of your old posts with a link back to your blog.

Not all Ning communities bring results. Some communities will send you zero visitors, while some will send you hundreds, so it’s important to be wise when choosing a community you want to join. I have discovered that what works is to make sure you join a Ning community that’s related to your niche, and has over 5000 members.

4. Free, no-catch ebooks

This is another powerful but underutilized tactic to get more traffic to your blog. I didn’t use this strategy until recently, but when I did, I got awesome results.

To use this technique, write as many free reports as you can. A report is a simple, seven-to-ten-page ebook. Make sure you embed links to your blog in the ebook, and encourage readers to visit your blog. Then, distribute the ebook to free ebook directories, post it to your favorite forums, ask other bloggers to help you share it, and do as much as you can to spread the word about it.

What has worked best for me is sharing it on my favorite Internet marketing forums, like Digital Point Forums. After utilizing this particular strategy, I saw a spike in my traffic: I got an additional 60-80 visitors per day for some days, and over 100 new blog subscribers.

5. Content syndication

I’ve noticed that a lot of people are not using this particular strategy, but it can be highly effective to syndicate your blog content to big online portals in your niche. Most of these portals are visited by countless people every day, and syndicating with them will go a long way to give your blog a traffic boost.

Great examples of some of the best content syndication sites I’ve found are Alltop and The Daily Brainstorm.

6. Blogging collaboration

It pains me to see that this particular traffic strategy is not better utilized. In 2010 I collaborated with a lot of well-known and respected bloggers to give my readers some entrepreneurial advice.

I was able to work with 24 successful online entrepreneurs, who contributed to the post, and shared it with their Twitter followers and Facebook fans when it went live. This sent me double my usual number of daily visitors and, eventually, more subscribers and followers. It is also one of the most shared posts on my blog.

Collaboration is a great tool and every wise blogger will use it sometime. Try to get some of the top bloggers in your niche to contribute to your blog; once the contribution is live, encourage them to share it.

7. Online podcasts

This is another great and underutilized way to get traffic to your blog. Pat Flynn from Smart Passive Income is very popular for his podcasts, and has been able to build a successful blog based on this and other methods.

While the podcasting technology is not new, very few people utilize it. Yet you can get more eyeballs to your content by creating a great and informative podcast relating to your blog. Submit it to the iTunes podcast directory and as more and more people search for podcasts relating to your topic area, they will end up discovering yours and, if it’s good, might end up visiting your blog.

8. Online groups

This particular approach is almost as old as some of the biggest websites on the Internet, so I’m amazed to see that very few people use it. I didn’t realize the power of this tactic until the day I woke up to see a spike in my website traffic generated by a LinkedIn group.

A lot of people still congregate and look for solutions to questions in online groups; many of these groups are also highly respected by Google, so they are indexed and ranked quickly. Thus, you have a great potential of getting traffic to your blog by utilizing good groups. The post I published to the LinkedIn group I mentioned attracted over 200 visitors from that group in the week it was published.

Two of the most popular online groups are Yahoo groups and LinkedIn groups—check them out.

9. Authority sites

I didn’t realize how powerful authority sites were until I interviewed successful entrepreneur Raymond Lei. He wrote a Wikipedia page in which a link to my interview with him was listed as one of the resources. This link sends me continuous traffic from Wikipedia even today.

You can use this strategy with some of the biggest websites on the Internet; since most of these sites find it easy to rank for competitive keywords in the search engines, you may find it easy to get traffic from them. For example, you can read and review some of the top books in your niche on Amazonwhile including a link back to your blog. Or interview the top bloggers in your niche, then include your link as a resource in their Wikipedia page.

10. Webrings

This is also a very effective traffic generation strategy that many people overlook.

A Webring is a collection of websites that are linked to each other. A major advantage of using a Webring is that it also helps you get high quality links which means both short term direct traffic and long term search engine traffic for you. Probably the most popular Webring is Webring.com.

These are my favorite little-known traffic tactics. What are yours? How have you got traffic to your blog? Share your thoughts in the comments section.

Visit YoungPrePro.com to learn how Onibalusi makes over $3000 online monthly and how he gets over 10,000 visitors to his blog every month. Download his guest blogging guide to learn how to get thousands of visitors from guest blogging. Also, make sure you follow him on twitter @youngprepro.

20 Blogger Header Banner

2011-09-15T23:48:00.000-07:00

1] Creative Banner Designs :

2] Green Background Banner Designs :

3] Fantasy Header Designs :

4] Blue Background Header Designs :

5] Black Banner Designs :

View your top channels on the new interface homepage

2011-09-15T23:13:00.001-07:00

View your top channels on the new interface homepage

You’ve been asking, and today we’re excited to announce that you can now view your top 10 performing custom and URL channels directly on the homepage of the new AdSense interface. We understand that many of you log in frequently throughout the day to check in on your stats, and this latest change will allow you to get a quick snapshot directly from the new interface.

When you log in to the new AdSense interface, you’ll see your top channels by estimated earnings along with the percentage change for the selected time period. So if you’ve chosen to view the last 7 days, you’ll see your top performing channels for that time range along with the percentage change they experienced compared to the prior 7 day period.

Thanks for all of the feedback you provided about bringing this report to the new interface -- you can check out this update by logging in to the new AdSense interface today. As a reminder, we’re gradually moving away from the older version and focusing on building improvements like these in the new interface. We encourage you to continue familiarizing yourself with the new interface, and as always, please feel free to leave us a comment with your thoughts and suggestions.

Examples of Ad Formats

2011-09-15T07:46:00.001-07:00

Examples of Ad Formats

Third-party ads

2011-09-15T07:44:00.001-07:00

Third-party ads

How ads are targeted

2011-09-15T07:43:00.000-07:00

How ads are targeted

Improving performance

2011-09-15T07:42:00.000-07:00

Improving performance

Filtering and blocking ads

2011-09-15T07:41:00.000-07:00

Filtering and blocking ads

Ad formats

2011-09-15T07:38:00.003-07:00

Ad formats

Managing AdSense units

2011-09-15T07:38:00.001-07:00

Managing AdSense units

One Click Optimizer

2011-09-15T07:37:00.000-07:00

One Click Optimizer

Presentation

Here you can find best practices for choosing AdSense the best ad locations and formats specifically for your website. It’s a quick and easy way to improve your ad performance and revenue. Try it now by selecting your type of site!

News Site

Classifieds Site

Game Site

Forum

Blog

Optimization Lab

2011-09-15T07:36:00.000-07:00

Optimization Lab

Overview

Get simple and effective optimization suggestions in the lab to boost your ad performance and revenue. Try it now!

Increase CTR

Boost Impressions

Lift the CPC

AdSense for search Optimization

More Resources

Troubleshooting

2011-09-15T07:34:00.001-07:00

Troubleshooting

Search box implementation

2011-09-15T07:33:00.002-07:00

Search box implementation

Ad implementation

2011-09-15T07:33:00.001-07:00

Ad implementation

Cancellation

2011-09-15T07:24:00.001-07:00

Cancellation

Privacy and security

2011-09-15T07:23:00.003-07:00

Privacy and security

Updating account information

2011-09-15T07:23:00.001-07:00

Updating account information

Login Troubleshooter

2011-09-15T07:21:00.002-07:00

Login Troubleshooter

This page is designed to help you troubleshoot common problems signing in to your AdSense account. At each step, we'll provide instructions or further questions to help narrow down the issue you're facing. Following the instructions exactly will help ensure the best results.

Adding more websites

2011-09-15T07:21:00.001-07:00

Adding more websites

Problems applying

2011-09-15T07:11:00.003-07:00

Problems applying

Disapproved applications
- My application was disapproved. What do I do now?

Advises for Adsense

Amazon Associates

How To Use Amazon Associates On Blogs & Websites To

TOP 10 PAYING TOPICS ON ADSENSE

Earn more by promoting Google Affiliate Exclusive Opportunities

Important Adsense Tips for Bloggers.

Adsense Tips for Bloggers 1

Adsense Tips for Bloggers 2 – Is Your Blog Suitable for Adsense?

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

Adsense Tips for Bloggers 3 – An Equation for Success

Adsense Tips for Bloggers 4 – Increasing Traffic

Adsense Tips for Bloggers 5 – High Paying Ads

Adsense Tips for Bloggers 6 – Relevant Ads

Adsense Tips for Bloggers 7 – Well Placed and Designed Ads

Adsense Tips for Bloggers 8 – Miscellaneous Adsense Tips

10 Little-known Ways to Get Traffic to Your Blog

10 Little-known Ways to Get Traffic to Your Blog

1. Secret blogging clubs

2. Social blogmarking sites

3. Ning communities

4. Free, no-catch ebooks

5. Content syndication

6. Blogging collaboration

7. Online podcasts

8. Online groups

9. Authority sites

10. Webrings

20 Blogger Header Banner

View your top channels on the new interface homepage

View your top channels on the new interface homepage

Examples of Ad Formats

Examples of Ad Formats

Third-party ads

Third-party ads

How ads are targeted

How ads are targeted

Improving performance

Improving performance

Filtering and blocking ads

Filtering and blocking ads

Ad formats

Ad formats

Managing AdSense units

Managing AdSense units

One Click Optimizer

One Click Optimizer

Presentation

Presentation

Optimization Lab

Optimization Lab

Overview

Troubleshooting

Troubleshooting

Search box implementation

Search box implementation

Ad implementation

Ad implementation

Cancellation

Cancellation

Privacy and security

Privacy and security

Updating account information

Updating account information

Login Troubleshooter

Login Troubleshooter

Adding more websites

Adding more websites

Problems applying

Problems applying

Application tips

Application trouble

Disapproved applications