Written on November 17th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia28 zone.at 04:11 am by Darren Rowse
Attending Underground Seminar in March 2007
A few months ago I received an email asking me to speak at a conference (Underground Seminar) in Washington DC in March next year. It was a little different to most other speaking opportunities that I receive in that it wasn’t actually for a blogging specific conference - but instead for an internet marketing crowd.
I’ve always been intrigued by the internet marketing scene - actually I’ve had a love hate relationship with it and have wondered how blogs can intersect with it.
As a result, after doing a little checking into it’s organizer I accepted the offer to speak for a couple of reasons:
- I love talking about blogging - any opportunity to do so is something I’ll take up
- I am interested in interacting with Internet Marketers and to see what I can learn from them
- I was already planning a US trip in 2007 and this fits well timing wise
I’m not going to sell this conference hard here at enternetusers as it does have a slightly different focus to ‘blogging for money’ but I do think that it’ll be something some of you will be interested in - so you can check it out at Underground Seminar (aff).
A little info on the Seminar:
- This is the third year that Yanik Silver has run the Underground Seminar. The last two sold out quickly and received great reviews.
- There’s 67 seats available at early bird discounted rates
- Yanik’s put together a list of speakers who are trying a variety of online entrepreneurial activities - ie it’s not just blogging but includes other successful internet entrepreneurs - Yanik’s added up the earnings of everyone speaking and collectively it was over $57M in the last 12 months. I feel like a small fry in this line up.
Having chatted to a couple of last year’s attendees and seeing a little video of the event I’m looking forward to being there.
Yanik is promoting me as ‘GoldBlogger’ - it’s a ’spy’ theme.
Plenty more info at the Underground Seminar site. Yep - it’s a pretty long and hyped sales page but if you’re interested I’ll see you there! If it’s not your cup of tea - no worries at all. Just wanted to let people know the option.
Written on November 17th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia28 zone.at 02:11 am by Darren Rowse
How to Choose a Profitable Topic for AdSense
This post is part of the ‘Fine Tuning Your Blog for Christmas’ series. In reality this topic probably is a little late for THIS Christmas - but as I’ve been looking at AdSense optimization I thought I’d include it anyway for those of you looking to start a new blog that might be ready for next year.
Last week I was chatting with one reader who was asking for advice on a new blog that he was starting. He wanted to know if it had commercial viability - particularly if he used AdSense.
The idea for the new blog was good - however if he wanted to monetize it using AdSense I told him that it wouldn’t do too well - unless he had ALOT of traffic. The reason for this was his topic - Religion.
Now I don’t have anything against religion as a topic for a blog (I’ve written on Spirituality for many years myself) - however it’s a difficult topic to monetize with AdSense for two main reasons:
1. Price per Click - in comparison to other topics with a more obvious commercial edge, religion (and other topics like politics) don’t tend to pay much per click. This means to make the same amount as other blogs you need a lot more clicks - which means you need a lot more traffic.
2. Dual Edge of Topic - some topics (like religion and politics) have what I call a ‘dual edge’ to them. For example when I wrote a post a few years ago that mentioned in passing the topic of ‘divorce’ on my Christian blog I noticed the next day two quite different AdSense ads being served. One was for a Christian Law firm offering their services for Christians getting divorced and the other was a book about how people shouldn’t get Divorced. The ads had quite different ideologies behind them - AdSense knew what the topic was but as it was a machine that was looking for the context it couldn’t discern my ideology/theology/arguement. I find that many religious and political bloggers end up not using AdSense because of this - ie they end up getting frustrated putting ads on their site that they are ideologically opposed to.
I am not saying that bloggers shouldn’t write about low paying topics or topics with a ‘dual edge’ - however if you do write on these sorts of topics you need to realize that AdSense may not be the best way to monetize them (or at least that you won’t earn much unless you get a lot of traffic).
Tomorrow we’ll be turning our attention to optimizing Chitika Ads.
This post has been a part of the How to Fine Tune your Blog for Christmas Series.
Written on November 17th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia28 zone.at 01:11 am by Darren Rowse
Google, Yahoo, Microsoft adopt same Web index tool - Sitemaps
Quick news from today (thanks to Blaine for the tip):
“Search engine rivals Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are teaming up to make it easier for Web site owners to make sure their sites get included in the Web indexes, the companies are expected to announce Thursday.
The companies are adopting Google’s Sitemaps protocol, available since June 2005, that allows Web site owners to manually feed their pages to Google and to check whether their sites have been crawled. Web site owners have had to follow similar processes at each of the other major search engines separately.”
Read more at CNET
Looks like it’s going to become increasingly important to have Sitemaps set up on blogs.
Written on November 16th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia28 zone.at 09:11 pm by Darren Rowse
Feedvertising RSS Advertising Review
Six Weeks ago TLA announced their new RSS Advertising system - Feedvertising (aff). I was one of the publishers who had already been beta testing it for a couple of weeks and so have now been using it for two months.
I thought it was time for an updated review of it.
Since starting out with Feedvertising I am happy to report that it is the best performing and most effective RSS advertising system that I’ve come across.
I’ve been testing it solely on enternetusers’s feed for the time being but in the coming weeks will add it to a couple of my other WordPress based blogs (to this point it’s only available to WP 2.0 publishers - one of it’s few weak points).
A quick recap on what Feedvertising is:
- It’s a WP plugin based system
- It inserts text ads into your blog’s RSS (at the base of each post)
- It allows you to either sell ads yourself privately, run your own ads (ie to promote your other sites) or to sell ads through TLA’s marketplace
I’ve opted to run a few of my own ads and let TLA sell the rest to the advertisers already in their system.
Initially I set it to sell just two ads and ran six of my own (to promote my job boards etc) but once the first two sold in a matter of days released two more ad slots to advertisers. These two also have been filled and so now I’ve released two more spots for advertisers today.
The price of ads is determined by a combination of the category of your blog, your blog’s alexa ranking and bloglines subscriber numbers. As a result enternetusers does pretty well at bringing in a decent amount that far exceeds anything I’ve managed to earn from RSS advertising using other systems like AdSense or Feedburner.
Obviously the number of ads that you sell will depend upon the profile of your blog - but for me so far it’s been quite worthwhile.
A couple of weaknesses or suggestions for how Feedvertising could improve:
- stats on how the ads are performing - I’ve no way to know if my own internal ads convert at all
- it is only available to WP 2.0 users (I’m sure they’re working on expanding - I know I’d love to run it on my MT blogs also)
- demand of advertisers to impact pricing - ie when ads sell out it’d be nice to see the ad rate go up or for publishers to be able to override TLA’s pricing (similar to what Performancing’s Partners system allows). While there is scope to build your ad revenue by building the ranking of your blog and bloglines subscriber numbers it would also be nice to make more if there is demand.
- I’d love to be able to automate the ability to fill empty slots with your own ads. At present you nominate how many ads are for sale in the market place and how many are your own ads. If the ads in the marketplace don’t sell there’s no way to fill that ad rotation with an extra one of your own.
Overall the strengths of this system far outweigh the weaknesses. It’s easy to install, it’s very low maintenance to run and I really like the option to run your own ads through the rotation. They also don’t seem to have a minimum level of traffic for you to join up for it as a blogger - unlike AdSense and Feedburner’s RSS advertising options which are only for more highly trafficked blogs.
If you’re a WP blogger looking for a way to monetize your RSS feed I’d definitely recommend giving Feedvertising a go.
Written on November 16th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia28 zone.at 12:11 pm by Darren Rowse
Blogging in Bunches
The following reader quick tip was written by Mike Murray:
For bloggers just starting out, the hardest thing is to maintain the consistency that allows you to build an audience. The most helpful thing I have found that I do (which most successful bloggers do also) is to write a bunch of posts at a time, and queue them spread out over the coming week or so. It ensures that even if you have a bad day or two, your blog’s readers won’t go elsewhere, and you’ll continue to see readership stay, even if you take a few days off from blogging.
Now, if only that worked on going to the gym.
Written on November 16th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia28 zone.at 02:11 am by Darren Rowse
How to Improve AdSense Ad Relevancy
There is nothing more frustrating than getting your AdSense ads well positioned and designed and then having ads served up that have nothing to do with the topic that you’re writing about.
The importance of relevancy
- AdSense is a ‘contextual advertising’ program and when it is working at its best it is highly effective because it serves up ads that are highly relevant to the content on your site - this results (ideally) in a higher CTR (click through rate) (the way I describe it to friends is that if people come to your site looking for information on a particular product they are more likely to click an ad for that product than if they’d come looking for something else that is unrelated to the ad).
The problem is that AdSense doesn’t always get it right when assessing what your content is about and it will from time to time serve up irrelevant ads (although I’ve noticed less problems with this over the past 12 months in comparison to when I started out with AdSense).
There are a number of things you can do to increase the relevancy of your AdSense ads:
Section Targeting
AdSense acknowledge the problem of irrelevant ads and have come up with a way of helping their ‘bots’ determine what parts of your site you want the ads to relate to (section targeting).
In short - section targeting allows you to put code around the most important parts of your page (ie the bits that you want the ads to relate to) and also allows you to put code around parts of your page that you don’t want AdSense to consider when serving up ads.
When I use section targeting on a blog page I generally put the code that highlights the important bits from just before my post titles to the end of posts. I also tell the bots to ignore my sidebars and footers.
More on Section Targeting here.
Metatags
These ‘tags’ are a part of your page’s source code (the code that you don’t see that is the backend of your page. You can view them by using the menus in your web browser (on Firefox go View > Page Source for example). They are generally at the top of your source code with something like:
<meta name=”keywords” content=”page keywords“>
<meta name=”description” content=”page description“>
While many people debate the relevancy of metatags in modern day search engine optimization (I think it does have some - limited - relevance personally), there is some evidence to suggest that what you have in them has an impact upon the AdSense ads that are served to your site.
At the very least put in some generic keywords and a description that fits with the overall theme of your site. However if you want to get a little more technical there try tying your page title into your metatags. You can do this in some blog platforms by using the ‘title tags’ code or by using a plugin designed for manage your metatags.
Keywords
The main way of influencing the ads that AdSense serves to your blog is to think about the words you use on your blog. AdSense is not very good at reading between the lines of what your post is about - it needs to be explicitly told.
If your post is about digital cameras - use the words ‘digital cameras’ (and other associated with it including product names) throughout your posts. You don’t need to do it to the point of annoying your readers but do attempt to make it the dominant words on the page. Particularly pay attention to:
Content
It almost goes without saying but what you write in the main part of your post has an impact upon your ads. Don’t go over the top but use descriptive keywords in your posts that match the type of ads you’re looking for. Product names, brand names are particularly good.
Titles
Post titles are important for search engine optimization as the search engines assume that what you put in your titles tells your readers what your site is about. Similarly they are important for AdSense.
Sidebars
A common reason for irrelevant ads on blogs is that a blogger has a sidebar which has a high keyword density for an irrelevant term in their sidebar. One prominent example of this 12 or so months ago was that many bloggers had ads about ‘blogging’ appear on their sites even though they never wrote about the topic. Often this was a result of sidebars having ‘blog rolls’, introductory sentences telling people they were reading a ‘blog’, links to other blogs that contained the word ‘blog - etc.
Pictures
I’m not completely certain on this one - but it makes sense that if you are using pictures on your blog that you should name them with keywords that relate to your posts. This helps with SEO and I suspect would help with AdSense as it’s yet another word for the AdSense bots to analyze.
When I’ve done AdSense consulting in the past - one of the first things I’ll do when I come across a new page is check the source code of that page. It’s amazing what you’ll find when you do and it is particularly useful when looking at keywords.
Contact AdSense
If you’ve done all of the above and are still getting irrelevant ads served to your blog - consider shooting AdSense an email asking them to look into it. You might find it takes a little time for them to do it but I know of numerous examples of both big and small bloggers getting some results from this either with suggestions on what to do or with them flipping a switch somewhere at AdSense central that fixed the problem.
Tomorrow I’ll tackle AdSense and blog topics.
This post has been a part of the How to Fine Tune your Blog for Christmas Series.
Written on November 15th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia28 zone.at 10:11 pm by Darren Rowse
Toronto in the Autumn
Just a short note to say that last night I arrived in Toronto safely after 24 hours of flying and transit time. It’s going to take me a while to adjust to the new time zone, the ‘crisp’ weather and driving on the wrong side of the road but my first impressions of Toronto are positive.
I’ve already met some nice people including meeting Jeremy which was a surreal experience. It’s odd to meet someone for the first time that you’ve been working so closely with for 18 months).
Today we’ve got a slightly lighter day than normal before getting into a pretty heavy schedule of meetings.
Not much else to report at this stage - except to say that as usual - when I go away my blog traffic seems to go up. I should do this more often. Glad everyone seems to be enjoying the series of posts I’d prepared.
Written on November 15th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia28 zone.at 12:11 pm by Darren Rowse
Building Faithful Readership
The following reader ‘quick tip’ was submitted by Shawn Blanc from Fighting to Stay Awake
Something I’ve done and still try to do if I can is to send an email to those leaving comments for the first time.
When someone comments on my site for the first time I send them a thank-you email.
I say something like:
“Thanks for the comment on such-and-such post. I don’t know if you’re new to the site or if you’ve been reading for a while and this is your first comment but either way your feedback is apprecated and always welcome.”
This helps them feel noticed and part of the community; like someone is paying attention to what they have to say.
Written on November 15th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia28 zone.at 02:11 am by Darren Rowse
How to Design Your AdSense Ads
There is always debate about how to design your AdSense ads. Over the last few years there has been a real shift in thinking of what type of ads work best:
Grab Attention - When I first started using AdSense there was a school of thought going around that the best performing ads were those that stand out ALOT from the rest of your blog. The result was that there were a lot of jarring, headache inducing ads out there (I remember experimenting with bright red backgrounds and yellow titles - I’m getting dizzy just thinking about them).
Blend - In more recent times ‘blended’ ads have become all the range. This is predominantly what people are doing these days and the ads involve borders and backgrounds that are the same color as the background of your site and links and text that match the site as much as possible. In this way ads don’t attract a lot of attention but merge (in a sense) with content.
Integrate - In the last 6 months I’ve noticed another shift in the design of AdSense ads being used by some publishers. It’s a fairly subtle shift from the ‘blend’ approach and one where the ad units are integrated further into the site using visual elements around them that both ‘blend’ and ‘grab attention’. This has largely happened in two ways:
- Pictures Near Ads - This integration started with people experimenting with putting pictures above/below/next to ads (Google themselves even tested it). This technique has caused some confusion and debate within the AdSense community with different publishers being told different things about whether the practice was acceptable or not. The advice I’ve received from AdSense is that you may use images close to ads as long as there is some visual element separating them (a border around the ads or around the image). Having said this I see a lot of ads without such borders that seem to be allowed to remain.
- Designer Ads - Another integration technique that has been increasing in popularity is what I like to call ‘Designer AdSense Ads’. I pointed to one blogger who did this a few months back (with the approval of AdSense). Since then I’ve seen similar techniques used by others.
In the last week I even came across a product that you can buy that will give you over 100 designer ad borders for use within your site (aff). I bought it myself to try it out and have seen some improvement in the ads that I’ve used it with. The key with designer AdSense ads is to integrate with the rest of your site. I find that when you use such borders on a site where they don’t ‘fit’ that the results (both aesthetically and with CTR) are not great.
Take Home Advice - different techniques continue to work on different sites. I have some blogs where I go with a ‘blended’ approach (like here at enternetusers) whereas I have other sites which perform better with an integrated approach. I’ve had something to do with a couple of other sites that do better with the old ‘get attention’ approach (sites with a high loyal reader readership that suffer from ad blindness. My advice would be to start with blended ads (they are easier than integrated) but to then experiment with some of the designer ads that are coming out.
This post has been a part of the How to Fine Tune your Blog for Christmas Series.
Written on November 14th, surf Active Apparel website 1cecilia28 zone.at 08:11 pm by Darren Rowse
How to Position AdSense Ads
AdSense remains one of the main tools that Blogger use to earn money from blogging (although as I’ve written previously numerous other ways are emerging as alternatives and secondary methods).
However despite it’s popularity, many bloggers are using it in a ways that mean it is not earning them as much as it could.
Here are some of the AdSense mistakes that I see bloggers regularly making (some of which can be applied to other types of ads also):
Poorly Positioned Ads - the placement of AdSense ads will always be a somewhat personal thing and will emerge out of a variety of factors (and I want to be careful not to impose my own preferences and ethics on others in this post) - however one of the things that I see a lot of bloggers continue to do is put their AdSense ads in positions that are hidden away from the eyes of their readers. Two positions come to mind particularly:
1. Below the fold - ads that appear below the fold tend to do worse than those above it (the fold is that line on any website that is at the bottom of a browser until you begin to scroll). While there are positions under the fold that can work (for example around comments at the end of your article) in general ads above the fold get seen more by your readers and as a result they’ll be clicked upon more.
2. Sidebars - I totally understand why bloggers put ads in sidebars as it’s an ‘easy’ place to put ads and one where there is a clear designation between content and ads - however…. ads in sidebars don’t perform anywhere near as well as ads in the main body of your site. You might be able to get away with ads at the top of a side bar but much lower and they’ll not be looked at (which means they won’t be clicked).
Take Home Advice - I find that ads above the fold and close to content (in the main body of the site) do much better than ads out of site. Experiment with different positions to find what works for your blog (you’ll need to track your results using channels to do this).
Tomorrow we’ll take a look at AdSense Ad Design.
This post has been a part of the How to Fine Tune your Blog for Christmas Series.
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