Written on March 16th, 2005 at 09:03 am by Darren Rowse
Google Adsense Update Payment options
After months and months of lobbying by publishers Google Adsense have just announced changes to their payment system! Their site has just been updated with the new details. Now they offer checks to be sent in local currencies to 35 countries (listed below) and Electronic Funds Transfer to 15 countries (BETA).
For those receiving checks via mail they are also offering a Secured Express Delivery option that increases both the speed and security of delivery. Using this system will get your your check in 5-7 business days. This service will cost publishers if they choose it in many countries (ie in Australia it would cost me $24).
This is great news for publishers (of those countries included) and is long overdue. Funny how it comes out in the same week that Yahoo! seem to be on a publicity drive for their new contextual ad system for small publishers!
Countries included in the new local currency payment option are:
Australia
Austria
Belgium
Canada
China
Denmark
Finland
France
Germany
Great Britain
Greece
Hong Kong
India
Indonesia
Ireland
Italy
Japan
Luxembourg
Mexico
Morocco
Netherlands
New Zealand
Norway
Philippines
Portugal
Saudi Arabia
Singapore
South Africa
South Korea
Spain
Sweden
Switzerland
Thailand
Turkey
United States
Written on March 16th, 2005 at 12:03 am by Darren Rowse
How Much to Charge for Blog Ads
Over the past few days I’ve had a number of bloggers email asking for advice on how much to charge for advertising on their blogs. I thought I’d open the question up for some discussion.
How much would you charge for advertising on your site?
Of course the answer would vary depending upon traffic, topic, ad type - but let me throw out a couple of ‘hypotheticals’ - well they are actually real life examples from the readers emails.
a) an established site (blog and discussion forum) with 45,000 unique visitors per month (1500 per day) on a niche topic with loyal readership which is growing. How would you determine how much to charge for a banner (468 x 60) across the whole site?
b) a blog with a page rank of 5 with daily traffic levels of 500 unique visitors - mainly coming from Search Engines. How much would you charge for a text link high on the side bar with a title/link and a short description.
c) blog with 10,000 impressions per day looking to sell a variety of ads including the two above (banner and text) as well as skyscraper ads.
So how would you determine how much to charge for advertising? What factors would you consider, what is a reasonable rate to ask? I have my own ideas which I’ll be happy to share once we’ve had a bit of discussion - but I’m interested to know how others make these kinds of decisions. Feel free to contribute below as you feel you’d like.
Written on March 15th, 2005 at 04:03 pm by Darren Rowse
Switching from Movable Type to WordPress
Jesse Ruderman has a great post on Switching from Movable Type to WordPress for those contemplating the switch. The article goes through some of the advantages and disadvantages of WordPress over Moveable type and talks you through some of the problems encountered in the move (along with some solutions and fixes). Very worthwhile post for those tweaking and upgrading the back end of your blog.
Written on March 15th, 2005 at 01:03 pm by Darren Rowse
MSN Search Advertising
Microsoft will begin a beta search advertising program shortly says Bloomberg - no word yet on if they plan to extend this system into other websites as Google have done with Adsense and as Yahoo are expected to do shortly.
‘Microsoft Corp., which runs the No. 3 U.S. Internet search engine, plans to start a service where clients will pay to be listed alongside its MSN search results, people familiar with the plans said.
The service will be similar to competing programs from Google Inc. and Yahoo! Inc. Microsoft will announce a pilot program March 16, said the people, who asked not to be identified. These paid searches auction off placement next to Web search results to companies with related products.’
Written on March 15th, 2005 at 12:03 pm by Darren Rowse
AmazonAds
If you’re looking for a way to increase your Amazon affiliate sales you might like to check out AmazonAds - a textual ad system that puts Amazon Ads on your pages in a similar format to the way Google serves Adsense ads to your blog. I’m yet to use the program (I’ve signed up and will test it shortly) but it looks like a fairly professional package - and as far as I can see its free.
They let you customize the ads your serve to your site but you don’t have complete control over which ads will and won’t be served (all you can do is select if you want them to be ‘books’, ‘electronics’, ‘apparel’ etc). So its a basic system - but might suit some situations quite well - especially if you set them up as alternate ads for your Google ads.
They describe the system as follows:
‘AmazonAds is a fast and easy way for website publishers of all sizes to display Amazon unobtrusive product ads on their website’s content pages and earn money.
The ads can be categorized by Channels (Products Category) and so you can display only “Electronics” or “Books” ad and so are always related to what you want your users to looking for on your site. You’ll finally have a way to both monetize and enhance your content pages. AmazonAds is the program that can give you amazon product revenue from each page on your website—with a minimal investment in time and no additional resources.’
Read more at AmazonAds - Because Simplicity is the key
Update: Just had an email from AmazonAds who have just announced that you can now nominate a keyword to give the ads a topic to draw ads upon. Its not true contextual advertising (ie it doesn’t determine what to serve ads for based on what is on your blog) which is good for Adsense users as it means you can use it in conjunction with that program - you simply nominate a subject and home the system will find an appropriate ad for it.
Written on March 15th, 2005 at 12:03 pm by Darren Rowse
Frequently Asked Questions on ‘Links’
Wayne over at SEO Chat has a good article on Links - Links: Frequently Asked Questions. It might be of some use to those of you interested in optimizing your blogs for Search Engines. Don’t be put off by the basics at the start (ie first question is - ‘what are links?’) - it gets deeper than that (I guess you’ve got to take account for all stages of knowledge when writing these pieces). Here’s a snippet:
‘While quantity of links is important, quality is even more important. Some inbound links are simply given more value than others by the search engine algorithms. Links from pages deemed to be more relevant, in terms of topic and theme, are given more weight. Also given more value are links that are labeled with more keyword rich anchor text, links from pages with higher Google PageRank, and links that originate within content pages rather than from the ubiquitous “links pages.” There is even some evidence that linking out to other Web pages provides some benefit to the link sending page.’
Read more at Links: Frequently Asked Questions
Written on March 15th, 2005 at 05:03 am by Darren Rowse
Shiny Media Lands Blog Advertising Campaign
Shiny Media has landed a great ad deal with vacuum cleaner manufacturer Dyson who will be running an ad campaign at their blogs Shiny Shiny and Tech Digest for a new product. The ads look pretty cool too - based on the 70’s ‘computer/TV’ game ‘Pong’.
Just another example of blogging attracting some serious mainstream advertising dollars.
Read more about the deal over at Shiny Media: Dyson sponsors Shiny titles
found via The Blog Herald
Written on March 14th, 2005 at 10:03 pm by Darren Rowse
Spam Blogs
Dave Sifry writes about the increase in numbers of blogs over the past few months in State of The Blogosphere, March 2005, Part 1 and comments on a disturbing trend in the many new blogs that are starting - Spam Blogs.
‘There is a dark underbelly to these numbers, however: Part of the growth of new weblogs created each day is due to an increase in spam blogs - fake blogs that are created by robots in order to foster link farms, attempted search engine optimization, or drive traffic through to advertising or affiliate sites.’
Written on March 14th, 2005 at 08:03 am by Darren Rowse
AdSense Positioning Experiments
Wow - someone is actually reading what I write! Not only that - they are doing what I advise! Not only that - its paying off and they are getting RICH BEYOND THEIR WILDEST DREAMS!!!!!
OK - I might be exaggerating slightly on the getting rich beyond their wildest dreams - but Eoghann over at Blog World took some of the advice I gave (perhaps in my positioning Adsense series) and it seems to be paying off.
‘The initial results were depressing. Both my CTR and actual earning plummetted to the lowest I’d seen in about 2 months. I nearly lost my nerve and changed things back right then. Fortunately I’m too lazy to make that many changes so quickly.
Three days after I made the changes CTR began to pick up significantly as did my income. It reached a peak a couple of days ago with my highest paying single day from AdSense ever (I still can’t retire) and while it’s dropped again a little bit the CTR remains higher than previously and my daily income averages higher than prior to the changes.
I’m not sure why there was an initial decrease across the board, but it might be a good idea when you experiment to hold your nerve and let it run for at least a week to see how things pan out.’
Read more at AdSense Positioning Experiments
Way to go Eoghann - keep experimenting. The key I’ve found to Adsense is to try try and try again and track your results carefully.
The best way to track your ads is to utilize the channel feature that Adsense provides for free. Make each ad on your site a different channel so that you can isolate which one has the highest CTR and which one is not performing. Then as you move them around the site track the results. I’m currently doing this on one of my smaller blogs at the moment - trying some very different ad positioning and seeing some very interesting results. Its too early to share the results but initial indications are pretty interesting.
Written on March 14th, 2005 at 03:03 am by Darren Rowse
Google Looking Into Negative Adsense Ad Blocking By Keywords
Check out this quote from the forums at Search Engine Watch
‘It seems that Google is researching into allowing Adsense publishers to block ads by keywords, categories, and/or concepts. Currently you can only block ads by specific URL. If they go through with this it could be a great improvement on narrowing down the specifics for targeting. Also you would not have to research your competition as much. Only problem I can see is that some companies who do not compete with you yet have those keywords listed in their inventory could be mistakenly dropped.’
Bloggers everywhere would be rejoicing if this came to fruition - they’d be able to block those ‘blogging ads’ that tend to come up when you least want them. One of the most common questions I get asked here at Pro Blogger is ‘how do I stop my niche topic blog getting ads about blogging when its about <<insert topic here>>>’
There are things you can do (like remove every mention of the word blog from the text (and code) on your blog as well as increase the keyword density of the words you’re targeting - however sometimes no matter what you do you just keep getting ‘blogging ads’. Perhaps this new system is a solution to this!
Read more about it at Google Looking Into Negative Ad Blocking By Keywords
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