AdSense 911

How To Your Website Links

2012-03-24T04:08:00.002-07:00

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How To Properly
Optimize Your Website Links

Ultimately improving relevance on
Search Engines, Aggregation sites,
News Networks, and Blog Networks.

Personally, the most important factor when attempting at building On Page SEO Backlinks is to understand the major factors of how your website should be structured, the model of what it does when reader bots and humans visit the website. You don't want to turn off human readers with spammed out keywords and 100% focus on SEO, nor do you want to miss opportunities of showing the reader bots that you're the right website with authority and credibility for better rankings overall. !

TABLE OF CONTENTSSECTION 1 (Identifying Your Keyword Phrase):
SECTION 2 (Creating folder and file structures):
SECTION 3 (Title tagging your link):
SECTION 4 (Optimizing an images ALT tag):
SECTION 5 (Finding Niche Keyword Phrases To Use):
SECTION 6 (Closing Thoughts):
All Websites have one thing in common.
Links! Links! And more links.

Unfortunately a large majority of people miss out on the power of internal links by not taking the time to optimize them correctly.
If this has been you then these simple strategies will help you to take control of your internal linking processes.
We will start with the largely known fact of wrapping keyword phrases.

SECTION 1 (Identifying Your Keyword Phrase):
Keyword phrase: Hot Wheel Games
Given this as your keyword phrase, you need to wrap the words at least twice when they appear on your page.
Many people wrap words like “click here” instead, which is a very bad choice to make. Fortunately,
a large majority of people have now learned the secret and avoid such options in their projects.

GOOD: Linking the keyword you are targeting within your text.
<A HREF=”http://...”>Hot Wheel Games</A>

BAD: Linking words like “click here” instead of words related to your keyword phrase.
<A HREF=”http://...”>Click Here</A>

However this is just the start of building an optimized internal link.

SECTION 2 (Creating folder and file structures):
Assuming that the page you are linking to is about “Hot Wheel Games” which it should be since you are linking with those keywords
it is best to have those words identified within the folder or file structure of your site as this increases the value of your internal link.
GOOD: ''http://YourDomain.co...ot-wheels-games''
BAD: ''http://YourDomain.com/Folder/File.htm''
SURPRISE BONUS:

While talking about folder and file structures of your content a word about your domain
name is warranted since it is at the base of everything that you are attempting to accomplish.
Domain names are more important than people think.

Finding a good one involves research within your niche topic rather than knowing how to spell your name.
Let’s say you sell “weather widgets” online and your name is Jack.

BAD: WidgetsByJack.com
GOOD: Weather-Widgets.com

Weather Widgets provides a stronger base to build from, has very little competition and over
49,000 people searching globally each month. I’ll share with you exactly how I find that out later on in this report.

Also, the dash helps search engine spiders know where to break your words at. So you might even setup two URL’s.
Your base Website would be Weather-Widgets.com and then you can tell your human followers to check out your Website
at WeatherWidgets.com making it easier for them to remember by removing the dash. This would be done
by a simple redirect that most any good domain host (my favorite is GoDaddy) can help you with.

SECTION 3 (Title tagging your link):
Many people do not know or understand title tagging of internal links and how important it can be.
True, it takes time to get the work done, but it is really worth it in the long run.

The code you will add to you’re “A HREF” tag looks like this: title=”keyword rich phrase”
Adding that code to your project will further increase the value of the link you are building.
Given that let’s look at how the link is updated to add additional power.

GOOD: Your good code update for additional power.
<A HREF=”http://...” title=”Hot Wheel Games”>Hot Wheel Games</A>

BAD: In and of itself this is a good link, but it is not carrying the full power available.
<A HREF=”http://...”>Hot Wheel Games</A>

SECTION 4 (Optimizing an images ALT tag):
There are several distinct ways to optimize an image.

Way #1: ALT tag
An ALT tag for an image will display if the graphic itself fails to
display within a visitor’s browser. The difference will look like this.

Graphical Display
ALT Tag display
Image Appears Normally
Uncover electric bill & power bill savings now.

Developing this area as a keyword rich part of your ingredients will optimize your results with power.
CODE:
<a href="http://YourDomain.com”> <img src="Your-Graphics-Folder/Your-Graphic.jpg" alt="Uncover electric bill & power bill savings now." width="183" height="111" border="0"></a>

Way #2: Title Tag #1
There are two types of title tags available to use with an image. First, you can add a title tag that will display a short message when the user scrolls their mouse on top of it. This tag shows right after the ALT tag information.

<a href="http://YourDomain.com”> <img src="Your-Graphics-Folder/Your-Graphic.jpg" alt="Uncover electric bill & power bill savings now."title=”Electric bill saving tips” width="183" height="111" border="0"></a>

Way #3: Title Tag #2
If you hyperlink your image to another internal page in your site you will gain the opportunity of adding your second title tag which to my knowledge never actually display within the users browser.
<a href="http://YourDomain.com” title="Saving on city utilities.”> <img src="Your-Graphics-Folder/Your-Graphic.jpg" alt="Uncover electric bill & power bill savings now." title=”Electric bill saving tips” width="183" height="111" border="0"></a>

Way #4: Adding A Caption To Your Image
Another option for creating value for your image is in adding a caption below the picture.
If a search engine has the ability they will then rank the image in their directory giving you yet more power on the search engines.

Way #5: Folder and file structures for images
The naming conventions for filing purposes you use are also important to the
images you use on your page. For a review of this information please see section 2 above.
While there may be additional considerations for images, like using smaller sizes so that the page loads faster,
these above strategies will help you to gain great rankings on the search engines when it comes to internal link building strategies.

SURPRISE BONUS: Way #6: Images you don’t want to optimize
With all the talk of optimizing one would think it necessary to optimize every image on your Website.
Actually, this is not a good idea because search engines also do manual reviews of your Website.
When this happens, if they find optimized items not related to your niche topic you will actually be penalized.

Therefore, follow all the steps above to optimize images related to your focus while
handling non-related images like bullet points, logo’s and such in a very different way.
Simply name the non-optimized images a number. What the image is does not matter when it comes to ranking.

BAD: ThisIsMyNonOptimizedImage.JPG
GOOD: 1.JPG

When search engines and their reviewers see this they will understand that you were not attempting to
rank this image and as a result they will give you higher rankings for the optimized images that are part of your project.

SECTION 5 (Finding Niche Keyword Phrases To Use):
While keyword rich links ad a greater value to your projects it is also important to not use the exact same keyword phrase repeatedly
as this is seen as spamming the search engines. That’s why I use the following tools to uncover hot keywords that few others are targeting.

Tool #1: Google Keyword Finder (Please Google those words as the
link they provide is really long, it will likely be the top option provider).

With this tool you can quickly identify which niche keywords to your target
are receiving the greatest rankings as well as those that have the least amount of competition.
This allows you to quickly identify the best keyword phrases to use according to Google and proceed accordingly.

Tool #2: Google Wonder Wheel (Doing a Google on any keyword term will
provide you results for this by selecting options from the search results).
This tool allows you to see what Google believes would be closely related to your chosen keyword phrase.
While you don’t know how popular those phrases are, you do have firsthand knowledge of how Google is thinking at the moment.

There are other keyword tools that I personally use, but these are both free and powered by Google
which positions them in a very nice spot for gaining you the rankings you need on the search engines.

I’m not sure that I agree but I certainly cannot claim it to be an untruth either.

SECTION 6 (Closing Thoughts):
Search Engine Optimization is truly a science that takes time and talent to perform. Building in a viewer appreciation within that science becomes an
art form in and of its own right. This one aspect of search engine optimization is bound to help your Web success proceed forward in a positive direction.
Other issues to consider include but are not limited to:

Proper optimization of meta data on “description” and “keyword” information.
Optimization of page title tags, H1 & H2 tags, and contextual information within the page.
External link building strategies to empower Web results.
Best ways to streamline the marketing of your information on the Web.
Using social media platforms to increase your search engine optimization efforts.

2012-03-23T06:28:00.000-07:00

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How To Find Good Adsense Niches To Build Your Adsense Impair :-

The profitability of an Adsense niche is primarily based on the amount that Adwords advertisers are spending to compete in that niche.

Remember that an Adsense ad is only an Adwords ad that is appearing on your site and not Google. The amount that an ad generates per click is therefore directly related to the amount that Adwords advertisers are paying per click. Bottom line - if they are paying more we earn more.

So how can you find out which niches (and which keywords inside those niches) advertisers are spending more money on?

I use two different methods:

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1. Keyword Research With Keyword Country

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As you will have probably have started to gather I cannot lay enough praise on this tool. In fact I struggle to understand how I researched, chose and targeted niche sites before I got hold of it...it's that good. Aswell as being able to search by category or keyword you can also search by price range. For example, you can decide to find keywords that have an average cpc of say between $18 and $20. If you enter this price range it will return a list of keywords which fall inside that parameter - in this case - 3957 different keyword phrases.

The top 5 rated keywords in this cpc range were: "credit card", "free credit report", "mortgage rates", "consolidate debt" and "website hosting". All you need to do is go down the list work out which ones would be suitable for an Adsense monetized information site, extend your keyword research by taking your chosen phrase and entering it into the search box, build the content, integrate the Adsense and promote your new website.

This is a simple and effective way of finding out where the advertiser dollar is being spent and consequently where the Adsense dollar may be earnt.

As a side issue - with tools like Keyword Country available you should never pay for a keyword list. For less than their cost you can get access to a complete keyword database which includes extensive analysis and ratings in terms of profitability and potential for every keyword or keyword phrase entered into the search engines. Spend your money wisely.

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2. Affiliate Analysis With CJ

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A different method is to forget keywords for a minute and to focus on markets and their advertisers. Adwords advertisers are made up of two types of people - companies and affiliates. We can't easily find out how much companies are making but we can find out how much their affiliates are by joining up to a third part affiliate network likeCommission Junction (CJ), which connects companies that are selling products and website publishers like me and you who are willing to promote them for a commission.

My premise is that if you find the markets that are profitable for affiliates you will find the markets that are profitable for Adsense monetized sites. Why? Because a profitable market is one that you can spend a good sum of money on advertising and still make a healthy return.

Where the affiliates are earning good money, the companies and the affiliates will be spending big money on Adwords advertising.

You can find which markets are profitable in CJ by using their catrgory lists and sorting features. Once logged in simply follow this process:

1. Click on Get Links > this will take you to a categorical listing of all the advertiser programs.

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2. Choose A Market From The Category List > this will bring up all the advertiser programs inside that niche category.

************************************************************************************************************

3. Click "3 Month EPC" > this will bring the top performing affiliate programs in that niche to the top of the pile. EPC stands for "earnings per click" (at CJ this is earnings per 100 clicks) and illustrates on average how much affiliates are earning for each set of 100 people they direct to that program. For example, the top performer in the financial services niche is a company specialising in mortagage refinance and equity release, with a massive 3 month epc of $354.90.

Now I have my profitable niches - "mortgage refinance" and "equity release" - I go to Keyword Country to see if my theory is correct. If I type in those two keyword phrases, Keyword Country will return to me average cpc, number of searches, competition, number of Adwords advertisers and profitablity rating for every keyword related to those two seperate niches. If I'm right the average CPC for these two keywords will be very high.

This is what Keyword Country told me:

Mortgage Refinance - average cpc $27.17 across 823 related keywords.

Equity Release - average cpc $10.145.

The theory proved correct and I've found two profitable niches that I could build a mini informational site around. In addition, I would integrate the appropriate high paying affiliate program which would give me a second means of monetizing my traffic.

There are hundreds and hundreds of these niches you just have to do the research and find them. If you're using the correct method and know where and how to look you'll be able to build a targeted site around a profitable niche within a few days. Again, these type of mini targeted sites are best and most effectively built using XSitePro.

2012-03-23T06:19:00.002-07:00

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Increase your BlogSpot Traffic

If you have a blog on BlogSpot.com, you can see the title of your post comes after the main title of the blog

and this will hurt your blog rankings in search engines because search engines crawl the title from left to right.

I have searched for a solution to rearrange the order of the post title to get the post title before the blog title

and this will improve the rankings of my pages in search engines which will exactly increase the traffic. After

long time of searches I have found a solution by adding a simple code in your blog template.

1- Open your BlogSpot dashboard.

2- Choose "Layout" and "Edit HTML".

3- Find this code:

and replace it with this code:

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'>

<b:else/>

</b:if>

4- Save your template and see the new order of your posts title wich will be in the following form: Post Title - Blog Title.

2012-03-23T06:14:00.002-07:00

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How To Find Higher Keywords

Different keywords pay different amounts. Other things being equal a website based around debt consolidation will generate more revenue per Adsense click than a website based around football cards. This is why an industry built around selling high paying keyword lists to Adsense publishers has become so profitable.
But it’s more complicated than this as different keywords in different niche markets also pay different amounts. If your website is not targeting the “right” (as in profitable) keywords you will probably be earning less money per Adsense click than you should be.
For example – if you increase your average CPC (cost per click) from $0.20 to $0.30 you will increase your revenue by 33%. There are two ways of doing this on your already existing website and the best tool for doing the research is Keyword Country.

1. Better target your existing webpages:

Which words are you using in your Title Tag, Meta Tags, H1 - H3 Header Tags and inside the body of your content? Google's content matching technology generates ads related to the meaning of the words on your page. If the high paying keywords for that page topic aren't in those 4 hotspots I just listed the quality (relevancy) and CPC of your ads will be lower than if they were. Google wants to match their advertiser ads to the pages which are going to offer the greatest return otherwise their whole system collapses.
This means that you want to make sure the high paying keywords are included in your hot spots. If I use UnderstandingAdsense.com as an example I logged into Keyword Country with the intention of finding the highest paying keywords for the Adsense market. I typed in Adsense and was presented with a list. "Making Money With Adsense" has the highest average CPC of $0.73 so when I've finished building the site I will optimize the home page and several other pages for that keyword so as to generate the most relevant and high paying ads possible. I will do this by including that keyword phrase (and related ones like "make money with Adsense") into the four places listed above.

2. Add additional content to your website which targets relatedhigh paying keywords:

The most important word here is related. Don’t add content pages about Viagra to your website which is themed around motorcycles just because the average CPC for Viagra is very high. Instead do one of these two things:
1. Type your primary keyword, in this example, "motorcycle" intoKeyword Country, wait for the results to appear and then click on CPC. This will arrange all the related keywords by their CPC value bringing the most profitable to the top. I did this and found that -
“Motorcycle Insurance In Michigan” has an average CPC of $10.25
“Motorcycle Insurance” has an average CPC of $4.28
“Motorcycle Loan” has an average CPC of $3.34
These are very high average CPCs for which you could develop new content. These content pages would generate higher cost per click Adsense ads from your visitors.
2. Your second option is to type in keywords which are related to your principal topic. Continuing with the motorcycle theme you could type in Harley-Davidson a popular manufacturer of motorcycles. The results show that “Harley Davidson Boots” has an average CPC of $0.84. You could build a page today pre-selling Harley Davidson Boots and generate a nice Adsense stream from that page. Another extension would be the keyword “chopper”, a popular type of motorcycle enhanced by the big shows of the last few years. On Keyword Country a search for chopper brings up related keywords like West Coast Choppers, a famous chopper builder which has an average CPC of $0.95 – again a page or several pages around this topic would be a nice addition to a motorcycle based website.
Whatever your topic, virtually every website can incorporate new high paying content. So before you try and build a website in a new niche check that the website(s) that you’ve already put the groundwork into (link building and seo) can’t be better optimized for higher paying keywords and / or have additional high adsense paying content added to it. There will be at least five new pages of content that you could add to your existing website today that would create higher paying average clicks than what you are already generating.
The large majority of Adsense Publishers are still not taking advantage of these tools and are still working in the dark so to speak - unsystematically adding content, optimizing their pages and building new niche websites with no fore-knowledge of the value of a particular topic nor its potential profitability. I guarantee that if you test Keyword County for just a day you won’t want to unsubscribe - it makes our job of making money with Adsense that much easier.
They also have a free “sneak peak” tool whereby you enter your target keywords and it will give you the most high paying keywords related to that phrase. If you follow this link and click on the “try now” button in the top right you can test the three different parts of the application yourself.

2012-03-23T05:39:00.001-07:00

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How I Increased My AdSense Earnings by $500

SHAREBAR

What I did was so simple, I’m almost ashamed to dedicate a post to this.

I hope you forgive the simplicity of what I’m about to reveal, but sometimes the simplest changes make the greatest impact.

In early November I added a 728×90 unit to the header of my Site Build It! site, Flat Stomach Exercises. That unit began earning around $40 per day for the first few days and then leveled off to $30-ish per day.

I’ve also had decent success with the same unit on my forum, WebsiteBabble.com. The banner doesn’t convert nearly as well there, but it still does OK and is worth the placement.

Note: I attribute the lower performance to the fact that WebsiteBabble.com is targeted to Webmasters and Bloggers who often have ad blindness. So it’s no surprise that unit doesn’t perform quite as well there.

I had been reading about how well the 728 unit performs on many sites and thought of adding a unit to 2 Create a Website, but was afraid it would distract from my overall sales goals. However, I am less concerned about that on Flat Stomach Exercises (FSE).

FSE is primarily an Adsense site for me. As many of you know, I created that site to do a test run with Site Build It! so I could use it as a case study/example on 2CreateAWebSite.com.

To be honest, I’m not as passionate about fitness to work on the site frequently (not to mention I don’t have the time), so I just let it sit and earn passive income. I never dreamed that test/case study site would perform so well with limited content updates.

So I’m OK with being a little heavy on AdSense ads with that site. Not sure I would use that same strategy on 2 Create a Website because I have other goals, and I have to be careful AdSense doesn’t become a major competitor for the main products I promote.

Understand When AdSense Makes Sense for You

It’s tempting to read this post, dart over to your AdSense account and create a 728 unit for your site. That’s fine if the primary goal is to earn money with AdSense, but that may not be your best move.

AdSense may be the primary monetization option for some sites, yet more of a supplement for others. You have to decide which one it is for you. Adding more units to your pages may actually distract and compete with other products you are promoting.

For example, say you are earning $500/month in commissions by referring a product on a specific page. After adding the 728×90 unit, your AdSense earnings increase by $100/month, but commissions for the main product you promote drops to only $200 per month.

In this example, the AdSense banner probably hurt your net earnings. I say “probably” because it may be hard to prove that was the exact cause, but if you see drastic results after making a change like that, AdSense may be the culprit. That’s why you should test everything.

This is the very reason some people choose to only put AdSense ads on pages that have high bounce rates and pages that don’t promote their “important” products.

So you should always look at the big picture for your site. If your AdSense earnings are increasing rapidly, are sales for something else declining? These are statistics you should pay attention to, and it’s the reason some people don’t use AdSense on certain pages if at all.

Always know your individual site goals and make sure your monetization decisions support them. Believe it or not, a boost in your AdSense earnings may not always be a good thing for your bottom line.

Building an AdSense Business - Free Blogs

2012-03-23T05:33:00.002-07:00

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Building an AdSense Business With Free Blogs

When I first started out with AdSense, I had little money to spare on web hosting, and I knew nothing about how to get a site ranked in the search engines or to generate traffic. It took a lot of work, reading, experimenting and failure before I discovered great ways to build my AdSense business.

I feel like it’s about time that I paid back to the community for all of the knowledge and help that I received along the way. Hopefully this post will help you get started in the AdSense business even if you have little or no money to spare but desperately want to try your hand at it.

Normally Google won’t approve AdSense applications for free websites, but there is one exception. So if you're short on cash for hosting and are eager to get started, you might give this a try.

Blogger.com Blogs

Not long after Google bought Blogger.com, they made AdSense available to Blogger blog owners. Blogger is great because it has an easy interface, Google and Yahoo crawl the blogs quickly, and best of all if you're broke--they're free, and Google loves to give out AdSense accounts to Blogger owners. :)

So if you're looking to get started with AdSense and not spend much money, Blogger is a great way to get started.

Before I talk about how to setup a Blogger blog for AdSense, though, let me tell you what an RSS feed is and how it works. If you already know this you can skip ahead. I make reference to this in the setup instructions, so it’s important to understand.

An RSS feed (as it applies to a blog) is basically a list of all of the recent posts made to your blog. People can use “RSS Aggregators” (software that continually checks up on your RSS feed to see if there’s anything new) to keep up with new posts on your blog. Websites will also want to publish your RSS feed on their sites if your content is good. This gives them fresh content for their visitors. And we all know that content is King in the world of website building.

Blogger blogs come with an RSS feed built-in, and you can use this to your advantage to generate traffic to your blog. I’ll discuss that in a bit, but first let’s get into building the blog.

Create Your Blogger.com Account

Determine Your Blog Topic First

Before you create the blog, you need to figure out what topic the blog will focus on. Think about your skills or hobbies that you’re really good at. You might not be a mechanic, but if you’re really good at working on cars on the weekend, and you love to do it, that would make a great blog topic. Brainstorm your skills and interests to determine what you would enjoy writing about. It’s important that you like to write about it, since you will have to do so to build up the blog!

I will say this: If you have some knowledge on a commercial or industrial topic, this will usually get higher paying AdSense ads. But a hobby blog can do very well also (I know this from experience!).

Create the Blog

Once you have a topic chosen, it only takes about 5 minutes to setup a blog. From the Blogger homepage click the “Create Your Blog Now” link and follow the blog wizard instructions. I won’t get into detail about them because it’s pretty straight-forward, but there are a few points I want to make.

First of all, when you choose your blog URL, make sure that the URL contains the keywords for your topic. For example, if you’re creating a blog about health insurance, “healthinsurance.blogspot.com” is ideal, or “health-insurance” or even “health-insurance-blog” or “health-insurance-12345”. Just make sure that your keywords are in the URL, that will help you be found when people search for your keywords in the search engines.

Also, be sure to pick one of the professional looking templates. I suggest you just pick the plain-white one that is first in the list of templates when you're creating the blog. Once the blog is created, then click on the "Templates" tab and select one of the nicer ones shown there. I'm not sure why Blogger doesn't show you all of the available templates in the blog setup wizard, but they don't.

The Settings Tab

A discussion of the important points of each settings tab is outlined below.

Basic

On the "Basic" settings tab, set your blog title to the keywords you want to show up for in the search engines. That will help you get ranked.

Give a good, detailed description about the benefits of reading your blog daily. You want to get people to add your RSS feed to their aggregators and websites so you can get traffic, and this will help.

Answer “Yes” to the question “Add your Blog to our listings?”. This will have your blog appear on the main page of Blogger when you make new posts (albeit for a brief period of time), and allow people to search and find your blog using Blogger’s search tool.

One other, lesser known detail about setting that question to “Yes” is that if you set it to “No” Blogger will shove “nofollow/noindex” meta-tags into your blog template header, which will prevent your site from getting crawled or indexed. I believe this was done to fight what Blogger called “spam blogs”.

Publishing

Set the “Notify Weblogs” setting to “Yes”. This will send a notification to Weblogs every time you make a new post. Weblogs is a site that lets people (and search engine crawlers) know when new content appears on a blog. You want the crawlers (and visitors) to hit your pages when you add new content, so be sure this is set to Yes.

Formatting

You can do what you want on this tab–I personally set the number of posts on the main page to between three and five.

Comments

Allow comments unless your blog topic is really controversial and you’re likely to get a lot of flaming (people lashing out at you for what you have to say). Allowing comments is good because it gives more food to the search engines and keeps your blog updating and fresh even when you’re not posting to it.

I usually let anyone comment, and don’t limit it.

Don’t show the comments in a pop-up window, because that will prevent the crawlers from being able to get to the content since it’s javascript-based.

If you’re concerned that people might flame you, but you want to allow comments, enable comment moderation so that you have to approve each comment that is added before it goes live.

If you want to be notified when a comment is made, set the Comment Notification Address to your email address.

Archiving

Set your archiving to daily if you post every day, or weekly if you only post every few days. If you post every day daily is the best way to go, because it gives the search engines more unique pages to crawl and index. More unique content means more traffic to your blog and more clicks on your AdSense ads (I’ll get to adding your AdSense to the template in a bit).

If you don’t do a daily archive (and maybe even if you do), enable post pages so that each post will still have its own unique page even if multiple posts appear on the same archive page. Having multiple posts on one archive page is not a bad thing if you have post pages enabled, since the posts tied all together make for yet another unique page on the blog.

Site Feed

Definitely enable the site feed. If your posts tend to be very short, you might enable full descriptions. But if you have long posts (which I recommend), do not enable the full feed, use the short feed. Here’s why:

If you put the full post in your RSS feed, then the person reading the feed doesn’t have a reason to go back to your blog since they have already read the full post. No visitors to the blog means no clicks on your ads. AdSense has an “AdSense For Feeds” in beta testing, but it’s not open to all publishers yet, so at least for now you need to induce people to visit the blog.

If they can only read part of the blog post, then if they want the whole story they will need to go to your blog. You can plan for this by making sure that your title and the first 255 characters (about the first 50 words) really pull in the reader’s attention. You need to use those first 50 words to make them just have to read the rest.

Also, if your RSS feed appears on websites, you don’t want to give away the farm by showing the whole post. You’re letting websites use your feed so you can get clicks on the posts in that feed and get visitors to your site to build AdSense revenue.

So set the “Descriptions” to Short, write long posts and make the title and the first 50 words count.

The Templates Tab

If you haven’t already picked a nice template from the list, click on the “Pick New” link under the templates tab and select one of the templates that you like and that fits your topic.

If you don’t already have an AdSense account, you can click on the “AdSense” link and apply for one straight from the blog instead of having to go to Google.com to apply. That’s how badly Google wants Blogger blog owners to use AdSense on their blogs! :)

Once you’ve done that, it’s time to paste your AdSense code into your template. Click on the “Edit Current” link if you’re not already there.

There are two methods of setting up your template. You will generate the most clicks by doing the following:

1) Find the section of the template that looks like this:

<div id="main"><div id="main2">

2) Paste your AdSense code for a 336x280 large rectangle directly after the second <div> tag. Be sure to format the colors of the AdSense to blend in with the background of your blog for maximum results.

3) Optionally, if you want to show a second 336x280 block at the bottom of the list of posts, look for this code in the template:

</Blogger>
</div></div>

Put your AdSense code between the </Blogger> tag and the first </div> tag.

Click the “Preview” button to make sure the AdSense blocks look correct and did not mess up the look of the template. If all is well, click “Save Template Changes”.

Note: Once you’ve made changes to your template, if you go and select a different template with the “Pick New” link it will overwrite your changes and you will have to put your AdSense code back into the template.

Setup Your Profile

Once your blog is setup, you want to setup your profile. To do this, click the “Back to Dashboard” link at the top of the browser window. Once at the dashboard, click on the “Edit Profile” link in the right hand column.

Check the “Share my Profile” box, and the “Show my Real name” box, unless you have a really good reason not to. It helps build trust if you have this information showing on your blog because people can see you’re a real person and not some anonymous nobody. Your profile by default will be shown on your blog.

If you don’t mind people contacting you via email, you can select “Show my email address”.

Click “Select blogs to display” and make sure that your new blog is checked.

If you have a photograph somewhere on a website, you can point to it with the Photo URL. I recommend doing this because again, it builds trust and makes you more real and personal to your readers. If you don’t have a picture on the web, or don’t have a website, I’ll gladly host a picture of you on one of my servers for free. Sticky-mail me and we’ll arrange it. Just one of my little ways of paying back to the Webmasterworld community. :)

Go through and fill out the rest of the information. Focus on the “About Me” box, because that will show on your blog pages. Use that description to establish yourself as an expert on the topic that your blog is about. People like to know that they’re reading an expert opinion that they can trust. This box is your chance to prove you have an expert opinion!

Save your profile when you’re finished.

Getting Traffic to Your Blog

Once your blog is properly configured, spend about a week making a good, informative post or two per day. You don’t want to go advertising an empty blog, so it pays to make some good posts first.

You can post to the blog by clicking the “Posting” tab. Make your title be eye-catching while still containing the keywords that the post is most relevant to. For example, if your post is going to be about how to build blue widgets from scratch, and you want to be found when people search the engines for “Build blue widgets”, try and make your title at least start with those keywords. For example, “Build blue widgets – from scratch”. The dashes help the search engines differentiate the keywords from the rest of the title.

You might get some stray traffic from people searching for blogs on Blogger, and your posts appearing in the “most recent posts” list, so don’t be surprised if you get some traffic and AdSense clicks even before you start advertising.

Submit Your Blog to Blog Directories

To get the traffic rolling you need to submit your blog’s RSS feed to as many Blog Directories as you can. If you search Google for “RSS submission site”, the number one result as of right now lists off 55 directories that you can submit your feed to.

With a Blogger blog, your RSS feed is always your blog url plus “/atom.xml”. For example, if your blog url is:

[myblog.blogspot.com...]

Your RSS feed url is:

[myblog.blogspot.com...]

This is very important, because it will help attract the attention of the search engines as well as get your blog noticed by people who are searching for information and for content for their websites.

All of this will result in getting in-bound links to your site. Most people will use the title of your blog as the link text for the link to your site, and that’s why it’s important for your title to be the keywords that you want your blog homepage to rank for in the search engines. Having in-bound links that contain the keywords you want to rank for is a very powerful way to get ranked well. I have blogs that rank on the first page of search results for my keywords because of this (some even in the first or second position).

But you don’t want to sit around and wait for the links to start to gather. You want to…

Trade Links With Related Websites

Another thing I do to help get my blog ranked is to trade links with other webmasters who have sites on similar topics. I find them by searching for the keywords I want to rank for. If the blog category is not a competitive, commercial category, you can write directly to the webmasters of the top 20 - 50 results and see if they will exchange links with you.

If it’s a more competitive, commercial category, you can find out who links to the top websites for your keywords by searching for “link:http://www.YourCompetitor.com/”. That will show a list of URLs that link to your competition. Write to the webmasters who own those linking sites and see if they will trade links with you, too.

When you request a link exchange, be sure and make the request personal. Mention something that you like about the webmaster’s site and why you think that your blog is a good match for a link. You might even go a step further and put up a link to the webmaster’s site before emailing them. That way you can say “I’ve already put up a link to your site on my blog and wanted to see if you felt that my blog was a good match for a link back from your site”–or something like that. Take the first step, it’s a good gesture and it helps you get more links. Of course, if they don’t agree you can always take their link down. ;)

If they agree to exchange links, make sure that you have them link to your site using the keywords that you want to rank for. For example, if you want your blog to rank well for “Home Made Widgets”, be sure to have them use the link text “Home Made Widgets”.

You can manually insert the webmaster’s link and description text into your blog by modifying your template. I try to put it in the left or right hand column just below the archive links. To do this, modify your template and look for this code:

</MainOrArchivePage>

That tag marks the end of the archive list. Just below that code, add this code:

<h2 class="sidebar-title">[TOPIC] Links</h2>
<ul class="archive-list">

Where [TOPIC] is replaced with the topic of your blog.

Below the <ul> tag, add this code for each link you want to add:

<li><a href="http://www.website.com/" target=_blank>Link Text</a> - a short description about the site.

And finally, below the links, add this:

</ul>

Every time you make a new link exchange with a webmaster, just go in and repeat the <li> code with the new link and description just above the </ul> tag.

The more competitive your blog topic is, the more links you will need to get to rank well. But if your posts are informative, witty and humorous where appropriate, word will soon spread about your blog and your traffic will grow as people link to you without you even asking for a link. Growth in traffic means growth in AdSense revenue.

Concluding Comments

I hope this tutorial will help some of you who are on a restricted budget and just getting started with AdSense to start making some money by creating quality blogs at Blogger.

It takes some time and effort to make good informative posts, but once you have learned to create one successful blog you can repeat the process and create another, and another, until you achieve enough success to start putting up your blogs at your own domain name instead of “yourblog.blogger.com”. Blogger lets you do that, too, but that’s a subject for another post. :)

Here’s to your success!