Couple minutes ago, I published some small tips on writing good contents to get nice amount of Organic Traffics. But what are Organic Traffics?

Quoted from Wikipedia:

Web traffic which comes from unpaid listing at search engines or directories is commonly known as “organic” traffic. Organic traffic can be generated or increased by including the web site in directories, search engines, guides (such as yellow pages and restaurant guides) and award sites.

Sure! We have Wikipedia translated that for us. But what does Organic Traffic really meant to us, the bloggers?

Here’s the translation from FlikTeoh as a blogger’s view:

An Organic Traffic means an individual that searches for something they are interested with and reached our site to get what they were looking for.

It also means that, If you know what people are looking for (done your research), and you write good blog posts about it (good content writing). People will eventually reach your site via search engine (proper keyword targeting in title) to get what they were searching for on the search engine.

Then the best part, if you done things right (like reading my Ad Placement tutorial). This Organic Visitor of yours will eventually saw the advertisement served on your blog and ended up interested with it and went out from your site. Thus generated you the income you were hoping for.

In this way, we are thinking of how our readers will reach us, and what they’ll do on our site and how should we drive them into contributing to our advertisements. See why am I telling you to write good contents in the previous post?

I created a new blog just 7 days ago, which was the previous Monday. This new blog basically serves as my experiment-writing blog. Its mainly about Mobile Reviews. Other than being a Mobile phones review blog, I’ve also wanted to show you how I manage to drive 1,600+ Unique and Organic Traffics to my new blog within 7 days.

If you have followed my Beginner Blogging Guide that I’ve written awhile ago on this not quite active blog, you probably remember Step 4: Writing good contents. I’ve mentioned that Contents is king on that particular blog post, and would like to add on a little bit about it in this post. Here you go!

Know Your Audience

Other than a lot of passion are required when writing a blog, it is also important to do research on what readers would love to read about. I’ve spent at least 3 days on the researching before I actually started this Mobile Review blog.

Know what your reader wants. Write for them, not the search engines!

Keep it Short – The 8 seconds rule

There were surveys conducted which shows that people hate waiting for slow websites to load and will likely leave your page within 8 seconds. I don’t think people would actually wanna spend half their day waiting for your site to load up with some crazy amount of photos. So, keep it short! Photos are good, but not excessive photo spamming!

Straight to the Point

Just give them what they want already! You wrote a nice, attractive title and it attracts people to come into your site. Then they dig through a 324029428 paragraphs of blabbing around with loads and loads of garbage words before they can get the actual point of what you’re trying to say. Would you even bother reading that? Will you still come back?

Make it Scannable

Often a short introduction with keywords on what people are likely looking for makes the reader happier than long, annoying posts. Most, if not all blog readers would only scan through a portion of your blog post to read only the interesting parts they were attracted to from your post title. So write in a natural way of saying what you have to say, like what you’ve said in your title.

Don’t keep the readers’ eye scanning nonstop over something you could have shown them right away and make them happy!

Coming up next, I’ll be showing you the end result of my Google Adsense through good content writing. So you should probably subscribe to my RSS or at least follow me on Twitter/Facebook to keep yourself updated.

The name Aquila is named after a star, a WordPress Theme that makes things simpler for bloggers.

This powerful WordPress Theme is packed with an additional admin panel where you can control your Google Adsense and Google Analytics codes without having to manually edit and mess up your WordPress Theme codings.

Aquila is designed to optimize your Google Adsense. It is able to help your Adsense to target relative and quality advertisements.

Unlike other WordPress Themes, Aquila does not let your Google Adsense display advertisements related to your menus or sidebars. Instead, it’ll aid Google Adsense to crawl the correct section of your contents and display relevant advertisements which then converts to higher CTR.

Aquila is currently designed with General suggested Google Adsense Placement. You only need to paste your Adsense code in the admin panel of this WordPress Theme and it will automatically display them at correct placements.

(As of version 1.0, Aquila still do not support Adsense Placement on the Front Page of the blog because it looks really pointless if we’re targetting search engine traffics for Google Adsense Performance. P/S: Adsense are not able to target content keywords on multiple post page.)

The Aquila WordPress Theme, is also built under the best possible Search Engine Optimization practices. It meets all requirements for the crawlers to get the contents based on their priorities respectively.

Finally, a built-in bookmark-alike plugin is packed together with this Aquila WordPress Theme to ensure all the recommended well-known bookmark sites are shown to your readers on the single post pages. While you’re building your backlinks, your readers can help you best too!

Although the sidebar is able to support 125×125px adspace selling, this middle ranged WordPress Theme is recommended for those new bloggers or semi-beginners who’re trying to start up with Google Adsense.

Cut the long story short, if you think that this theme is just what you’re looking for/suitable for you, you can get it here!

Since the update from Google on the 29th of April 2009. we’re now able to integrate our Adsense account with Google Analytics. The integration process is very simple.

How simple is simple?

1. Log in to your AdSense account.
2. Click the link the “Integrate your AdSense account with Google Analytics” displayed on the Reports > Overview tab
3. Create your Google Analytics account if you didn’t already have one/follow the on-screen instruction to the next step if you do.
4. If you only have one domain/site, you can just simply click the “Finish” button and you’re done.
5. For those who have more than one domain/site, you’ll need to choose one of your domain as the primary domain. (note: Primary domain do not need to add in any extra tracking code, other domains will be required to add in extra tracking code)
6. The Adsense-Analytics tracking code must be added in before the </head> tag of your themes/templates while the Google Analytics tracking code should be added before your </body> tag of your themes/templates. (These steps can be made easier if you’re using a WordPress theme developed by FlikTeoh)
7. Now that you’re done with the integration, you should wait a couple hours/days before you can see the tracked data in your Google Analytics.

When you’re done linking your Adsense account with Google Analytics, you should find a new menu named “AdSense” under the “Content” section of your Analytics sidebar.

Integrating your Adsense with Google Analytics allows you to see more details on the performance of your Ad Units at every pages of your site.

From the Top Adsense Content menu, you’ll be able to find out which content is generating the most income and which content of your site is requires improvements.

I personally think that this is a very useful feature if you’re making money from the Internet. The integration of Adsense + Analytics will help guiding you through to maximize the Ad unit performance and your content quality.

The Top Adsense Referrers menu will show results of all the referrers to your sites and their contributions to your Adsense revenue while the Adsense Trending page will tell you the time on which day of the month your Ad units are performing well in generating the Adsense revenue.

This new features from Google will definitely help us, the online money makers to get more accurate data when we’re creating our own heatmap on our blogs. It’ll be able to help tracking down the effectiveness of our Ad placements on different contents.

To date, there are thousands of web hosting companies on the Internet. How should we know which web host is reliable? Which one should we use?

Understanding the “needs”

• What kind of contents are you writing? Does it involve a lot of media files like photos, videos or Flash presentations? (Bandwidth, Disk Space)
• Do you have multiple domains/sub-domains? Do you plan to expand it in a few months time? (Domain limits)
• Who are your targeting audiences? Are you targeting only traffics from your country? (Server location)
• Is your content suitable for all kind of audience? Is it an adult content site? (Web Host limitation)

Bandwidth Limit

When I first started hosting my website on the Internet, I had totally no clue what bandwidth means. I bought a web hosting plan with low bandwidth offered. I started running my PPC Ad Campaign to drive traffics to my sites.

At the beginning of the campaign, I managed to generate quite a bit of income from sales. The second week onwards, there were no sales flowing into my account. I’ve had no idea what went wrong, so I visited my own website and found an error page saying “Bandwidth Limit Exceeded”.

I had to email my web host to find out what does “Bandwidth Limit Exceeded” means. Days later, I was told that I need to purchase extra bandwidth to bring my site back online. You could imagine the loss on my potential customers and ad campaign during my website downtime.

Since that incident, I’ve realized the importance of getting enough bandwidth for my hosting packages.

Domain Limit

As a blogger that makes money from the Internet, sometimes we write more than one niche blog. It is important that we have a relevant domain name before we start writing a blog. If you’re one with wide knowledge on several niche, you certainly need a web hosting packing that offers reasonable amount of add-on domains. Unless you want to end up paying the cost for multiple web hosting services.

Server Location

If your contents are mainly targeting a particular region/country, choosing a stable web host near that region will surely help giving your audience a better reach/loading speed of your website. For example, if your contents are only mainly for Malaysians. Then you probably want to have a web host located in either Singapore or Malaysia that provides a smooth connection within the content and your audiences.

Web Host Limitation

There are many web hosting companies that limits your contents and activities on their server. If you’re writing adult related contents or doing some ’spam marketing’ , it is advised to find an appropriate web host for it. If you breached the terms and conditions of certain web host, they might remove your access and usage on their server. So think carefully before you pay.

Don’t be fooled by big numbers

Nowadays web hosting business has become even more competitive. Most the web host companies started to offer ‘unlimited’ amount of disk space or bandwidth. Huge amount of disk space is useless if your blog isn’t that huge. Believe me, I had six blogs hosted in one of the web hosting package I bought. I hardly used more than 500mb of the disk space considering some of my blog are media rich(lots of files and photos).

Knowing the different between direct web host company & reseller web host

There are mainly two types of web hosting companies. One being the web hosting company that sells their services from the hardwares they own while another is simply a ‘reseller’ of services from the previous mentioned web hosting company.

It’d be a better choice to use a direct web hosting company than a reseller web hosting company. Although there are some reliable web hosting reseller, there are still many web host reseller who does not know what they are doing. They don’t usually put much efforts in supporting their customers when problems occurs.

I once encountered a reseller of the Exabytes Malaysia who’s totally not supportive towards their customers. During the hosting period with them, I had my sites going offline very often. Their responds to the server issues was very unclear and irresponsible. I once even had my website down for more than 10 days and their support crews claim that there were no issues with their server. (note: I had emails from visitors of Singapore, Australia and US complaining that my sites were unreachable since the 28th of February, and it is still unreachable up to date.)

Supportive web host

So, it is wiser to use an actual web hosting company than a reseller web host. (note: I’m still using reseller web host though)

When you’re looking for a web host, always make sure that they do provide 24/7 phone support if possible. You wouldn’t know what to do when problems occurs and the hardware server itself isn’t right beside you. Please be reminded that we cannot afford downtime on our webserver when we make money online.

Conclusion

I hope this guide on choosing a reliable web host will be helpful for you. You wouldn’t want to lose your readers due to the webserver downtime! So good luck and do leave me a comment if you have questions!

I’ve previously shared some of the commonly used techniques to optimize your Google Ads in my beginner blogging guide. If you have followed those basic practice to optimize your Google Ads, you should be able to make some decent income from your contents.

In this post, we’ll further discuss the Google Ads Placement strategy.

Although Google has provided us an adsense heatmap for blogs, it does not guarantee that our Adsense performance will be improved by following exactly the suggested positions. Performance of the ads may differ from your contents and readers as I’ve previously suggested. So it has come to the need for us to conduct our own research to find out the best suitable position to place our Google Ads.

We should put ourselves on a readers’ view when it comes to Ad placements. It is very important to understand that an organic visitor came to our site because they were looking for some information. If we placed the advertisement at the right spot which are not too obstructive/intrusive in our content, it might attracts the readers if the showing advertisement was related to what they were looking for.

So how should we find out where’s the heatzone in our site?

Finding out the heatzones in our own site is fairly simple process.

1. We just need to start creating two identical Ad units(same size, colors, text/image).
2. Assign them with different channels(make sure your channel name is descriptive).
3. Place them in different positions on your contents.
4. Have them running for certain period of time and keep track of their performance(amount of clicks and impressions tells how well the ad position is performing).
5. Continue more testing with different positions, ad color templates and types of ads.

From my experience, placing Google Ads in the middle of our contents non-obstructively would improve the ad performance. By what I said non-obstructive, it means that your readers did not actually clicks your ads by accident and it’s not actually disturbing your readers view.

Secondly, you’re advised to place an “advertisement” tag above your Google Ads if you’re placing it below your post title. You do not want to mislead your readers into clicking the advertisement as though they are part of your content. It is also against Google’s policy to place advertisement in misleading position. So unless you indicate clearly to your readers that they were advertisements.

Different types of Google Ads has their own performance when they’re placed correctly in our contents. Finding the correct positions is the important key to generate more incomes. Of course this also depends on our keyword targetting strategy. If your Google Ads isn’t showing the relevant ads in your content, then it’s for sure not to perform well at all.

Try experiencing different types of your Google Ad units then share with us your best performing positions ok?

P/S: Do keep track with our blog as we’ll be sharing reliable Adsense heatzones for different types of blog niches in the near future. (subscribe to our updates)

Before I go about telling you how to optimize your Google Ads, let’s take a little basic understanding of how Google Ads works.

For easier understanding, I’ll explain in simple point form. (If you have a question, ask away in the comment section)

• There are a few different crawl spiders used by Google. (ie: Googlebot, Google Adbot)
• Googlebot is mainly the spider that crawls your contents to be indexed to their directory.
• Google Adbots are basically the one we care for Google Ads Optimization.
• All of them share the same similarity of “Crawling for keywords“.
• Google Adbot crawls for ‘paid keywords’ and compares your ‘content relevancy’.
• It then decides which Google Ads to be shown by weighting your keyword value.
• Relevant Google Ads will then be served to your readers.

Have you got the basic picture of how Google Adsense works yet?

So, how do we make sure that our contents are relevant to certain Google Ads that you want them to be served?

Easy! You write good quality contents that are highly related to your topic title.

A post with relevant title and high keyword density in your content is the key to decide what Google Ads will be shown and where your contents will be displayed on Google SERP.

When we mention ‘Keyword Density’, it means the amount of times the related keyword being used wisely in your post title and contents.

So, don’t stuff your keywords blindly in a post. Express them wisely using different methods. Sometimes less is more.

What keyword should I use?

Every keyword/phrase has their own value. When you plan to write a new post, try doing some research on how much do they worth. Once you’ve decided the keywords, write good contents with them.

The keyword tool by Google Adwords is a good place to start. Although there are many other keyword tools on the World Wide Web, I still recommend using the one by Google. After all, we’re working on Google Adsense aren’t we?

How do we use the Keyword Tool by Google Adwords?

1. Type in the keywords or phrases that you plan on writing. (Note: one keyword or phrase per line)
2. Choose “Display Estimated Avg. CPC” under the “Choose columns to display” drop down list.
3. Sort the values by clicking the column names.
4. Look for the keywords/phrases with high Search Volume and CPC value that are related to the topic that you plan to write.
5. Start writing your contents with multiple related keywords/phrases that you found wisely.

Making good use of the Section Targeting:

If you have not heard anything about this, now it’s time.

Section targeting allows you to suggest sections of your contents that you want the Google Adbot to emphasize or downplay when matching ads to your contents. It helps better in targeting Google Ads that are relevant to your contents.

You can suggest as many sections as you prefer by placing your contents in between the <!– google_ad_section_start –> and <!– google_ad_section_end –> tags. (Note: These tags must be inserted under HTML mode if you’re using WYSIWYG editor)

You can also suggest Google Adbot to ignore certain content sections that you don’t wish to be crawled for Google Ads by placing your contents in between the <!– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –> and <!– google_ad_section_end –> tags.

Note: Section Targeting may take up to two weeks before you can see the actual result of changes you made.

Google Ad Placement:

The placement of your Google Ads are often the reason of your income being good or bad.

Although Google do provide an Adsense Heatmap for blogs, but it may vary by the types of contents and readers. The best way to find out which ad placement works best is by doing a frequent change of your ad placements and tracking them with your Google Adsense Channel in your Google account.

It is also advised that you make changes to your ad placement once awhile to ensure better performance. (To reduce visitors’ Ad-blindness)

We’re now done with the basics of optimizing your Google Adsense, this shall conclude the last part of the Beginner Blogging Guide.

I wish you well in the journey of making money online by blogging. Do share with our readers about your experiences and thoughts about making money online.

I don’t think I have to keep repeating some paragraph to remind you that this is one part of my Beginner Blogging Guide. So if you missed something from my previous steps, you can always get back to it from the link above.

So, when your blog is actually filled up with quality contents, it’ll eventually reach your audience. Your audiences can be either from referral traffic(links), direct traffic(loyal readers) or organic traffics(search engine).

The moment your blog start generating traffics from these sources, it is obvious that your visitors are interested in certain contents you’ve written. They’re probably looking for something from your site. Thus it tells you that, it is time for you to promote some related products or info to them. And this is where the advertisement comes in.

There are many different types of advertisements you can place on your site. Each and every companies has their very own policies to protect their advertisers. I wouldn’t recommend stuffing too many advertisement into your contents. By doing so, you might often annoy your readers and at the same time violate the advertisement policies that you might not be aware of.

Here’s a little breakdown for a few ways to monetize your contents.

1. Placing 3rd Party Advertisements(content based) – Serving advertisements of products or information related to your contents. Recommended: Google Adsense, Chitika.
2. Placing 3rd Party Advertisements(non-content based) – Serving advertisements for ongoing events or promotions. Recommended: Nuffnang(only for Asian countries)
3. Selling Adspace – Serving advertisements that your interested visitors bought from you. You can either sell it on your own(ie: setup an “Advertise here” page) or through BuySellAds site, Project Wonderful.
   
4. Affiliate Programs – Earn commissions from related products that might interest your readers into buying them. Recommended: Amazon.
   
5. Writing Paid Post – Writing products and services reviews for advertisers. Recommended: Sponsoredreviews, PayPerPost. WARNING: Writing Paid Post will get your site penalized by Google.
6. Selling Text Links – Selling links for some keywords in your contents that might be valuable. Recommended: TextLinkAds. WARNING: Selling links will also get your site penalized by Google.

Of course there are many other ways to monetize your blog. You’ll find more opportunities to monetize your contents as your blog is growing bigger.

I shall end this post here while preparing more to discuss on Optimizing your Google Ads for contents on the next post. For those who are using WordPress and Google Adsense, you might want to take your time playing around with your WordPress themes and Google Adsense account before we proceed to a much deeper understanding on Google Adsense in the next post.

By now, I’m pretty sure you’ve already found your ways in writing good contents . Next, we’re gonna make sure that our good contents can be found and shared with the others over the Internet by informing all the major search engines like Google, Yahoo or MSN. This process is called “Site submission”.

The quickest and most effective way to bring traffic to your site is to first inform these major search engines that your site exist. The search engines will then start crawling and indexing your contents so that they can presented when related keywords are being queried.

There are many free or paid site submission services on the Internet. Although these are the easiest way to submit your site to multiple search engines, there are no confirmations that your sites were really submitted. On the other hand, it might even lead to subscribing unwanted email spamming services(most site submission services require an email address for confirmation).

So on the safer side, I still prefer submitting my sites manually. Manual submission means that you’ll have to visit each of these site submission pages to fill in your site details. Usually, I’ll start with just Google, Yahoo and MSN since they’re the major search engines.

Google Site Submission

For submitting your site to Google search engine, there are basically 2 simple steps. These steps can be easily done since their step by step manual is very well written. Once you’ve done adding the site URL and information, you’ll be suggested to start using the Google Webmaster Tools.

Google Webmaster Tools comes in very handy to help optimizing your site traffic performance. Before you get started with the Webmaster Tools, you’ll first need to verify that you’re the owner of the submitted site URL.

The Google Webmaster Tools has provided two simple options to do the verification. You can either add a simple meta tag(provided by the Webmaster Tool) to your theme’s header file, or upload a small html file to your web server.

Once you’ve verified your site ownership, you can now start adding your Sitemaps. In simple terms, a Sitemaps is a list of the pages on your website. The Sitemaps will help providing URLs of all the pages on your website to the crawler.

If you’ve chosen to use WordPress as your blogging platform in the beginning, I’d recommend that you download and activate this Google XML Sitemaps Generator. It’ll automatically keep track and update your Sitemaps whenever you added new content or made changes to your blog.

Once your Sitemaps has been created, you just need to submit your Sitemaps’ URL to the Webmaster Tools and you’re done. The Google bots will be informed and start crawling your site for contents.

For Blogspot users, you’ll have to inform the Webmaster Tools your feed URL(comes with your blogspot when you register it). The correct path to submit your Sitemaps would be “http://example.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/full” which usually means that you’ll only need to add in “/feeds/posts/full” to the Sitemaps submission box.

You’re now done with Google Site Submission.

Yahoo Site Submission

For submitting your sites to the Yahoo directory, you’ll first need to have registered a Yahoo account. Once you’ve done entering your site URL, you’ll be sent to a login page. Fill up all the required information and you’re done submitting your site to the Yahoo Directory.

MSN Site Submission

Submitting your site to MSN directory is so far the easiest of all. You just need to enter their verification code and your site URL then click the ‘Submit’ then you’re done!

Note:

By submitting your site to these search engines does not mean that you’ll be indexed immediately and getting those organic traffics. Depending on your site contents and quality, some sites might often get indexed within an hour or two while some might have to wait for days or weeks.

Search engine like Google handles millions to billions of websites every hour, thus the crawling and indexing process takes time. You can always check if your site has been indexed from the Google Webmaster Tools or just run a search query on Google with “site:www.example.com”

Once you’ve done the first five steps of this Beginner Blogging Guide, you’re good to go with Monetizing your contents. (Of course, you still need to keep writing with good contents)

Once you’re done choosing the blogging platform and setting up your blog with proper desired theme. The next most essential part about blogging is about writing good contents.

What does it mean, when I talk about ‘good contents’?

Be it you’re writing a personal blog or a niche blog(blog that discuss about specific topics), the blog posts you wrote should be relevant to your topic and should always be informative.

You might say “But this is my blog, I write whatever I like!”

Yes! You can write whatever you like since it’s your blog! But you need to always respect your readers when it comes to writing good contents. Often when you write contents that are irrelevant to your topic, you leave bad impression to your visitors. Some visitors would never visit again if they found your blog uninteresting due to the irrelevant contents.

Other than leaving bad impression to your visitors, your blog will also end up with ‘high bounce rate’ which won’t do you good on your site ranking. Search engines like Google, takes content qualities very seriously. So think properly before you start writing ok?

I’d rather not write anything if I’m not sure of what I’m going to talk about. I’d rather spend my time thinking about it for days than having to annoy my readers with something uninteresting!

So, what makes a good content then?

A good content always starts with a good, descriptive post title. Your post title is the one that summarize what you’re about to say in your particular post. When you have something interesting that you want to share with your readers, always inform them by making the good use of your post title.

Once you have decided your interesting post title, you’ll then move on and stick to the topic you’ve decided. Your content should always be straight forward and easy to understand by your readers. Make them feel the same like they’re in your shoe.

A little sense of humor are always good to gain loyal readers. Nobody likes reading some boring posts even if they’re very informative about the topic you’re trying to share. A blog, is a REAL opinions/thoughts of a REAL person. Always write them with your passion, allow yourself to write some garbage to entertain your readers.

The traffic/readership of a blog is all depend on your content. No matter how good your SEO skills are, you can never reach the top without good contents. Like said,

Content is King!

Lastly, always find out what your readers want from you. You could ask them by starting a poll or simply a question at the end of your post. Make your readers want more from you!

Conclusion:

Find out what you’re interested in, and stick to that topic. Write your blog posts with passion. When you write on something you’re good at, you’ll eventually have a lot of good content to write about it.

When you’re done with at least 4-5 posts on your blog, proceed to Informing major Search engines about your existence.