Written on September 23rd, 2004 at 09:09 pm by Darren Rowse

Page Rank Explained

Search Engine Optimization 1 comment

If you’re wondering how Google works out how to rank search results on their search engine - and are also curious about how to climb the rankings with your blog or site then you might like to head over to Page Rank Explained which gives a pretty comprehensive outline of Page Rank.

‘PageRank is one of the methods Google uses to determine a page’s relevance or importance. It is only one part of the story when it comes to the Google listing, but the other aspects are discussed elsewhere (and are ever changing) and PageRank is interesting enough to deserve a paper of its own.

We can’t know the exact details of the scale because, as we’ll see later, the maximum PR of all pages on the web changes every month when Google does its re-indexing! If we presume the scale is logarithmic (although there is only anecdotal evidence for this at the time of writing) then Google could simply give the highest actual PR page a toolbar PR of 10 and scale the rest appropriately.’ Read more at Page Rank Explained.

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Written on September 23rd, 2004 at 08:09 pm by Darren Rowse

Blogging for Dollars

Advertising, Adsense 42 comments

Will blogging produce millionaires? Can blogging financially provide people with a full time earning capacity? Will we see more and more professional bloggers blogging for dollars? Can and should blogs earn money?

An increasing amount of people are writing about making money from Blogging. There is a quite a bit of debate about the legitimacy of doing so.

Megnut wrote an interesting article titled Blogging for Dollars: Giving Rise to the Professional Blogger. She writes:

‘Most financial discussions focus on blog content and explore donations, advertising, or some type of sponsorship/patronage model as the means to compensate bloggers. Very little progress has been made towards finding viable economic models because people still think of Weblogs as personal sites. If you aren’t Andrew Sullivan (who purportedly makes $6,000 per month on his site through donations), it’s hard to imagine how you’d get the traffic and donations to generate such revenue….

By paying great bloggers to produce Weblogs, we remove economic constraints and enable them to devote their energies full-time to producing compelling content and creating outstanding Weblogs.’

Whether you agree with it or not - here are some of the ways bloggers are going earning money from their blogs.

Advertising - An increasing number of bloggers are running advertisements on their blogs. Programs like Blog Ads have popped up around the place which help you find advertisers. Of course these programs generally take a cut of the revenue earned. Other bloggers (often the bigger ones) find their own advertising or use a combination of their own and other programs. Nick Denton from Gawker Media is one person who seems pretty good at doing this on his numerous successful blogs.

Market Banker is another program similar to Blog Ads that lets you sell ads through their system automatically. They allow both banner and text ads. I have used these successfully on my Digital Camera site. You do give up a cut of the revenue to Market Banker, but for ease of use and the receiving of smaller payments this is a good option. Another text link option that I’ve used with quite a bit of success lately is Text Link Ads.

Programs like fastclick.com also offer to serve ads to your site. If you have a lot of traffic this is a great option definately worth considering as many of their ads pay per impression. I’ve reviewed the fastclick system here.

Also worth checking out is the Chitika eMiniMalls system which have become my biggest blog income earner. You can read my review of Chitika eMiniMalls here.

Adsense - Google Adsense is one advertising tool that many are using (including me). Ads are run depending upon the content of the page. If you flick through my individual archives you’ll see that each page has a different focus of ad.

Google pays people who run their ads per click on the ads. Payments vary on the type of ad. I started using this two months ago. Part of the agreement in signing up with the program is that you don’t talk about your specific results and figures so I’ll refrain from that except to say that I’ll never become rich through it - but that I’ll continue to go with it. To do well with this program you either need to have very high traffic or blog on topics that pay well. Some of the following links talk about using adsense and other such programs.

- Adsense Tips for Bloggers (a series of posts about maximizing the potential of Adsense on your Blog).
- Blogging for Dollars with Adsense
- How to Boost your Adsense Revenue
- Introducing Google Adsense
- Nick Denton on Adsense

Amazon Associates - Other bloggers are Amazon Associates. In this program bloggers link (either via text, images or actual advertisements) to Amazon products or pages. If people purchase after following these links they take a small comission from Amazon, either for cash or gift vouchers. Blogs liks Blogcritics use this very intentionally. It is a system I’ve been trialing (mainly on my digital camera blog) recently. I have found it to be a worthwhile move to be an Amazon affiliate - its not my biggest revenue stream, but supplements Adsense nicely and is growing with my blog. I like it because you have complete control over what products you will promote and can tailor ads to fit exactly with your content.

Other Affiliate Programs
By no means is Amazon the only affiliate program available to bloggers. There are many affiliate programs that focus on different regions and products. Some pay a percentage of income generated from those being referred from your site, others pay on a per click basis, others pay for leads. The success of such programs tends to vary depending upon the match between your blog and the type of product your affiliate is offering. I’ve tried a number of programs but am yet to find them to be overly successful to this point.

Some affiliate programs that you may wish to experiment with include:
- Clix Galore
- Affiliate Sensor (I’ve found this one works pretty well for me so far).
- LinkShare.com - This one works well for me also.

Business Blogging - An increasing number of people are starting ‘business blogs’. These take a variety of forms but generally are blogs about a particular service, product or business/organization. Check out the following articles on the topic.

- Blogs may be the cheapest way to communicate with your customers.
- New biz on the blog
- Business Blogs - The Big List
- The Small Business Blog

Tip Jars - Other bloggers have decided to simply ask their readers for donations. I know of many bloggers that do this through a variety of tools - the most popular of them being ‘PayPal’. I surveyed a few this week and most have never or only rarely had donations - but for others like it is a major source of income. Andrew Sullivan is said to have made $80,000 in his last pledge week through donations. Here are some links that talk about it.

- Tip Jars
- Andrew Sullivan - Will Blog for Cash

Other Interesting links that talk about different approaches that you might want to check out might include:

- Gold Blogger - How to Make Money from your Blog
- Blogging Network - get paid to blog
- Blogging for Bucks - an interview with someone who does
- The rise of professional bloggers
- Paid Content
- Fame vs Fortune: Micropayments and Free Content
- Blogonomics - Making a living from Blogging
- Jeff Jarvis - The Free Me

Different earning methods will suit different blogs depending upon content, readership levels and the goals of the blogger concerned.

Predictions & Observations

Is it possible to make money from blogging? I believe so. Will there ever be ‘millionaire bloggers’? I suspect it will happen in the next few years. Will people earning a living from blogging be as common as people earning livings from plumbing, stock brokering or gardening? I’m not so sure.

Blogging has the potential to generate income - but I believe it will only be a select few who will be able to make their fortune (or even earn a full time income) purely through blogging. A few very creative entrepreneurs, good marketers and powerful communicators will make it big but the average joe shouldn’t expect to set themselves up for retirement through blogging.

I think we’ll see the rise of people who are able to supplement their income through the medium. Personally I would love to be able to get to the stage or earning a day or two a week from it (anyone want to advertise in this space?) to support my other work in the community. I also think that we’ll see more and more people earning enough to pay their blogging costs through some of the above means.

I suspect we’ll also see more people earning money off blog related tools and products. They may not technically be blogs as such - but if blogging continues to grow at the rate it has been (and as it is predicted to) a ‘blogging industry’ (of sorts) is likely to emerge. This will include blog consultants, blog tools, blog search engines, blog designers etc. (all of these things already exist - but with increased numbers of bloggers they are likely to start paying off). This will probably distress some blogging purists but it will happen.

Clusters/colonies of bloggers working together in alliances will emerge - not just because they have common interests to blog about - but so that they can work together to market and promote one another.

Dangers - In summing up my thoughts I think it worth saying that there are perhaps some dangers in blogging for dollars. The concern that I share with others is that in the quest to earn money from blogging that content could suffer. Balance is needed to keep advertising from dominating and setting the agenda for content.

Blogging for dollars is here to stay - it will continue to stay on and climb the agenda for bloggers everywhere. Its therefore something that I feel is important to discuss and I’m interested in what others might think about it - please feel free to critique or add to this post in comments - your opinion is highly valued.

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Written on September 23rd, 2004 at 07:09 pm by Darren Rowse

Where do your Blog Readers Look?

Blog Design 2 comments

I just found this fascinating article that has been written about some research into where web page readers eyes go when reading online news sources. I need to digest it a little more yet - however there are some interesting findings in the research that I’m sure would apply to us as bloggers as we consider the layout of our blogs. Here are a couple of snippets from the article.

Now also consider another Eyetrack observation: Dominant headlines most often draw the eye first upon entering the page — especially when they are in the upper left, and most often (but not always) when in the upper right. Photographs, contrary to what you might expect (and contrary to findings of 1990 Poynter eyetracking research on print newspapers), aren’t typically the entry point to a homepage. Text rules on the PC screen — both in order viewed and in overall time spent looking at it.”

Read more at Eyetrack III - What You Most Need to Know:

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Written on September 23rd, 2004 at 07:09 pm by Darren Rowse

How to Get your Blog Discovered

Blog Promotion 1 comment

Scobleizer has a good post on how to get your blog discovered. Most of it is the kind I’ve stuff I’ve already got in the Blog tips section but this one was a tad different:

‘Hang out with smart (or at least interesting) people. For instance, Alex Mallett is working in Drew Endy’s lab at MIT. Now, Drew is the guy who blew us all away at FooCamp last weekend. Just the fact that Alex can hang out with Drew and understand what Drew is asking for makes him far more interesting. Subscribed without even reading another post. Figure out who the “connectors” in your community are and find out how to hang out with them. If they get to know you, chances are they are looking for new people to link to. For instance, if you’re a political blogger I’d be trying to figure out how to meet Glenn Reynolds or Andrew Sullivan. These two guys alone have hundreds of thousands of readers per day.’

Scobleizer also links up to Biz Stone’s latest post on the topic of Promoting your Blog also. Again its nothing most of us havn’t already read and it is targetted mainly at blogs that use Blogger - but its a comprehensive summary of some good tips.

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Written on September 23rd, 2004 at 07:09 pm by Darren Rowse

Successful Blogging - Lessons Learned from an Olympic Experiment

Miscellaneous Blog Tips 3 comments

A few people have emailed and asked for more information about the Olympic Blog we’ve run. Phil asked - “what lessons did you learn about running a successful blog through the process.” I thought it might make an interesting Blog Tip post.

1. Think Ahead - The whole Olympic Blog experiment emerged in my mind a number of months back when a smaller experiment paid off. Back in February I posted a post titled ‘American Idol 3 Winner’. Now that might seem like a crazy post to do back in February when the winner would be announced in May - but the whole point was to post something in advance of the event to let Google index it and rank it highly so that when the day came it would be the first thing people would see when they searched for the term. The experiment paid off - to this day we’re still number 1 on that post (which now has up to date relevant news of the winner) and more importantly on the day when one of the biggest search terms on the web was ‘American Idol 3 Winner’ we had 10s of thousands of visitors.

After this little experiment I began to wonder what other events I could anticipate. One of the looming world events was obviously the Olympics and so we resolved to expand the experiment.

2. Think Search Terms - Our American Idol 3 experiment would never have worked if we’d chosen to call the post virtually anything else. I guessed correctly (it was a no brainer really) what people would be typing into Google the day the winner way announced and optimized the page accordingly with title and keywords repeated throughout the information posted on the site. The same thing was a key to our success with the Olympic blog. What would be key search terms for people seeking Olympic information? Obviously words like ‘Athens’ and ‘Olympics’ were good starting points. ‘Opening Ceremony’ was a good one ‘Medal Table’ was a better one and ‘Jenny Finch’ (US soft baller) was a smart bet (even though her name is actually spelt Jennie - we figured people would get it wrong). You get the idea. The key was to be among the highest ranked results on Google for these highly searched for terms. Again its about ‘thinking ahead’ but its also about getting in the shoes of the potential reader of your site and anticipating their next move.

3. Make your Site Virus-like - I’ve written previously written about a great book called Unleashing the Idea Virus (by Seth Godin) on this blog. He argues that for any idea to spread that you need to think of it as a virus and make it as easy as possible for other people to spread the virus for you. It is much more effective to let others ’sneeze’ (or promote) your site into the web than to do it all yourself. This is not as easy as it sounds but the way we did it was to devise a little mini medal table for bloggers and other web masters to put on their websites. The table had the top 10 medal winning counties listed as well as a link to the main site, to a full medal table and at the time a link for bloggers to get their own free medal table. This could have been the most successful thing that we did.

We are not exactly sure of how many people used the medal table but it numbered over 100 in my guesstimate. This had a twofold benefit for our site. Firstly it brought direct traffic to us. A number of big sites used the medal table on their sites which brought a lot of visitors but secondly it helped our Google ranking also as they saw us suddenly being linked to by 100+ sites with keywords that we’d determined. We also made a lot of bloggers happy in the process by giving them a fun, topical and cool feature for their blog.

4. Get permission to market your site - Another Seth Godin strategy is to get permission from your customers (readers) to promote your product to them. With the advent of SPAM people are not really open to the idea of getting emails promoting your blog - but if you get their permission first then you’re onto a good thing. We simply added a link at on every page of the site inviting people to submit their email address to receive a daily update during the games on the latest Olympic news. Thousands of people gave us permission to send them an email each day inviting them to pop by the site to read articles we’d put up in the previous 24 hours. Again - this is about providing people with a useful service that also has some big payoffs for your blog.

5. Content - Quantity of content is important. We worked very hard in the weeks leading up to the Games to have around 3000 pages of relevant content on the site. Over the weeks of competition this built to over 4000 pages. They covered as many keywords as we could think of so that Google could do its job and bring us visitors. I talked to a blogger recently about how to get more visitors to his site and one of the biggest problems he has was that he only had 80 pages of content. It takes time to build your archives up but it is a natural way to build visitors. Of course quantity is not everything - relevant, quality content helps heaps too with building repeat readers and also with Google rankings - but in this case quantity was probably more important. One strategy we used for getting as much content up as quickly as possible was to invite contributions of other people. We were fortunate to have a small number of dedicated bloggers help us out with this - although between Regan and myself we did around 95% of the content added.

5. Work Hard but Have Fun - I guess the last thing I’d say is that the whole process was a lot of work but also heaps of fun. We enjoy sport and so an Olympics blog was a natural blog for us to run. If the topic had been something we had little or no interest in I’m not sure we would have put in all the work that we did. There is no escaping the fact that it took a lot of effort to run the show and some real sacrifice from us and our wives who put up with us pulling all nighters (thanks Rachel and V!) but overall it was really enjoyable and a rewarding experience.

That is just scratching the surface on the lessons learned - I could probably write another 20 but that will have to do for today. Along the way we did make a lot of mistakes but in the process we learned heaps that we would do quite differently next time - bring on Beijing!

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Written on September 23rd, 2004 at 07:09 pm by Darren Rowse

Everything you wanted to know but were afraid to ask about Blogging

Miscellaneous Blog Tips 1 comment

Simon World has a good post titled Everything you wanted to know but were afraid to ask. Its got some great advice on blogging for anyone starting out….or continuing in blogging.

Here is a couple of his tips:

4. Prepare for the reality that the rest of the world may not share your high opinion of yourself and your site.
5. You know that movie where the guy built a baseball field and waited for some dead folks to turn up and play ball? Blogging’s like that. Prepare to slog at putting up brilliantly crafted, accurate and to-the-point insights that will proceed to make no difference to anything at all….
7. The big bloggers (in terms of readership, not size. I’m sure at least some of them are thin) are big for a reason. They fill a niche, they have interesting opinions, they’ve been doing it for a long time. Whatever it is, you need to realise that overnight success can take years to create.

There is heaps more there to look over.

On a similar blogging theme - Rachel has a great collection of thoughts on Business Blogging.

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Written on September 23rd, 2004 at 07:09 pm by Darren Rowse

How to Start a Blog

Miscellaneous Blog Tips 1 comment

Jonny Baker has an Idiots Guide to Starting a Blog which is well worth the read if you’re thinking of starting one but don’t know how. I’m going to add it to my Blog Tips Central Register.

Other good ‘How to start a blog’ type articles include:

• Weblog Primer
• Choosing a Blog Interface
• Starting a blog (with Moveable Type)
• How to Start a Blog
• Creating a blog with Moveable Type
• How to: Start a Blog
• Introduction to Blogging
• Blogging 101 - An Introduction to Reading and Writing a Blog
• Introduction to Blogs and Blogging

An Introduction to Weblog Terms

If you’ve written any material that would help a blogger just starting out (or know of any) please feel free to add them in comment below.

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Written on September 23rd, 2004 at 07:09 pm by Darren Rowse

Adsense Tips for Bloggers 8 - Miscellaneous Adsense Tips

Adsense 30 comments

This is part 8 (and the last) in a series of posts on increasing AdSense revenue for bloggers. The full series is Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7 and Part 8.

We have unpacked our Adsense Equation in detail and have given numerous tips for maximising Adsense Revenue. Whilst there are occasions that Adsense doesn’t perform as well on some websites for no particular reason as others we can safely predict that if you work on each of the four areas you should see an increase in the amount of the cheque that Adsense sends you at the end of each month. Remember though that your revenue will only be as high as your weakest link - work on all elements of the equation - not just one or two.

As well as the proceeding tips there are a number of other things that might be helpful to know in using Adsense that we couldn’t find a place for in previous posts.

Outgoing Links - One theory going around is that pages with fewer outgoing links result in higher click-throughs. Give your readers fewer options of links to click on and they are more likely to click on your ads. This MAY be true, but don’t let it determine your content. My Digicam site has many outward links because it is a page that acts as a hub of information from around the web. I’ve not noticed that this makes my revenue levels suffer - in fact I suspect its because of these helpful links that people come to my site.

Using Frames - If your site uses frames I’m told you should make sure your ads are placed in the frame where you content is or else it will not provide relevant ads for your content. Thanks Greg for this tip.

Don’t click your own ads. - It might be an obvious way to get a few click throughs and increase your Adsense revenue - but Google is very clever at working out if your clicks are genuine or not. Its not hard to track IP addresses and to see patterns emerging between where clicks are coming from. It is not worth the risk of being banned from the program for a few cents per click. Especially don’t click ads from the same IP address that you check your stats from - this is asking for trouble.

Don’t encourage your readers to click on your ads. Its against the agreement that you enter into with Google. Once again they will track you down if you break these rules. I’ve seen a number of people who have been banned from Adsense for this. Let your ads speak for themselves.

Monitor your Statistics. Many adsense users check their stats all day everyday. Whilst this might be overkill (its like watching grass grow) it is useful to track what is happening at this end of your campaign. Use channels to monitor which pages are doing well and which are not. Tweak pages that are not doing well and make more pages similar to those that do.

Alternative Ads - Use alternative ads for when Adsense cannot serve ads to your page. When they cannot find a suitable ad for your page Adsense will serve you with a ‘Public Service Announcement’ (PSA). These ads may be for a good cause, but they will not relate to the content of your page and will not earn you any money. Instead Adsense allows you to nominated an alternative ad that they will serve into the position instead of the PSA. I use Amazon for this, but also have experimented with affiliate alternative ads Affiliate Sensor which I find works really well as it lets you choose from a wide range of affiliate products and still target them to your site.

That is the end of our Adsense tips for Bloggers series. Feel free to submit your own Adsense tips and strategies in comments below. You also might like to check out some of the following alternative Adsense Tips pages for more tips from around the web. You might also like to check out the the Chitika eMiniMall Ad system which I make most of my income off these days. I reviewed it here and have a series of tips for getting the most out of your eMiniMalls.

Adsense Tips from around the Web
- Google’s Official Adsense Tips
- What Google Never Told You About Making Money with Adsense
- Google Adsense Information, hints, tips and examples
- Adsense Tracker

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Written on September 23rd, 2004 at 07:09 pm by Darren Rowse

Adsense Tips for Bloggers 7 - Well Placed and Designed Ads

Adsense 14 comments

This is part 7 in a series of posts on increasing AdSense revenue for bloggers. The full series is Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7 and Part 8.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read the rest of this series at Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7 and Part 8.

update: For even more reading on positioning your Adsense ads see a mini series of three posts that I wrote on the topic here.

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Written on September 23rd, 2004 at 07:09 pm by Darren Rowse

Adsense Tips for Bloggers 6 - Relevant Ads

Adsense 12 comments

This is part 6 in a series of posts on increasing AdSense revenue for bloggers. The full series is Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7 and Part 8.

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

The third element of our Adsense equation is that of relevant Adsense ads. It is all very well to rank high in search engines to generate high levels of traffic, but without relevant ads that relate to the content of your blog you are not likely to generate much in the way of click throughs.

Let me give you an example. Recently I was asked to help a fellow blogger who has struggling with his Adsense ads because whilst his content largely focused upon the topic of ‘health care’ - most of the ads being served to his blog were focused upon ‘blogging’. He was getting quite reasonable traffic levels and had a reasonably high paying topic (there are some good health care ads out there) but as you’d expect, people coming to a blog about health care did not click on ads for blogging software and services at a very high rate. The challenge was to get his ads reflecting the content of his blog.

Another fellow blogger had the problem of not getting ANY ads being served to his site. Instead of paying ads all he was getting was the public service ads that Adsense serves when they couldn’t find any relevant paying ads (these pay nothing).

How do you get relevant ads? Here are a few things to try.

Make sure there are ads available - My friend who didn’t get any paying ads served was focusing on a key word for which there was no or very few ads. A simple way of checking this is to do a search on Google for the key word you are targeting. If they don’t serve ads on their own search results page its an indication that such ads are scarce - if not non existent. They way we got ads on my friends blog was to experiment with other related keywords. He didn’t have to change the focus of his blog - just the way he described his topics. For example if there are no ads for ‘bed linen’ try ‘blankets’, ’sheets’, ‘quilts’ etc. Experiment with different combinations until you find something that works.

Increase your Keyword density - The more you use your keywords the more likely you are to get ads on those topics. Its not common knowledge exactly how the Adsense bot decides what ads suit your content best (if someone knows feel free to post it in comments below) but it’s a pretty safe bet that if you put you keyword in your title, at least once in your first paragraph and then scatter it throughout the rest of your page that you’ll convince the Adsense bot of what your topic is. It MAY also be helpful to include your keywords in the URL of your page (Moveable type can let you do this - ie look at the URL of this page - it incorporates my title and therefore some keywords). It MAY also be worth putting your keywords in outward links, bold, italics etc. All of these strategies also help optimise yor blog for search engines which won’t hurt either.

Examine your Sidebars, menus, header and footer - It is not just your main content that the Adsense bot searches to find the topic of your page, but also your other areas. When I looked at the healthcare blog that was getting ‘blogging’ ads I noticed that he had the word ‘blog’ in his title, three times on his sidebar and once in his footer. It was also in his URL and he also used the word quite often in his content. My recommendation was to remove the word from as many of those places as possible and to increase his health care keywords. The ads improved their relevancy almost immediately.

Stick to one topic per page - Obviously this may not be feasible on your front page - but attempt to keep each individual blog entry/post as highly targeted as possible. I’ve noticed that some people often include two or three topics in one entry - this will confuse Adsense’s bot so split them up into two entries.

Block irrelevant Ads - Sometimes despite your best intentions Google just gets it wrong and serves your ads that have nothing to do with what you write. If you’re getting some repeating irrelevant ads block them. Adsense lets you do this to quite a few sites and its easy to do. I have a number of ads blocked, some because they are philosophically not consistent with what I write about, but mainly because they just are not relevant to the topic of my blogs.

Ask Adsense - If all else fails notify Google Adsense of your issue. Of course they are busy people - but Google prides itself on being responsive to its users. I’ve emailed with queries a number of times, once on an issue of irrelevant ads, and every time I’ve had positive results from my query. You’ve got nothing to loose - shoot them an email!

If you do all of the above you SHOULD find Adsense serves you with relevant ads. In conjunction with the other elements in our equation this will contribute to increased click throughs and hopefully higher Adsense revenue. Next in this series on maximizing Adsense revenue is a post on Well Placed and Designed Adsense Ads.

Read the full series at Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7 and Part 8.

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