Written on August 6th, 2005 at 01:08 pm by Darren Rowse
AdSense to Vary Number of Text ads in Ad Units
Jen noticed that Adsense have made another change and now will serve less ads per unit if they feel that it has a better chance of making you (and them) money. Googe’s description of this change is:
‘To increase monetization on your site and improve the relevance of ads, AdSense now varies the number of text ads that appear in a given ad unit. In cases where we determine that increasing the size of the most relevant ads will improve performance, we’ll drop the lowest-performing ad or ads and expand the remaining ones to fill the entire unit. Showing fewer ads works to your advantage, allowing the better-performing ads to draw more user attention and click-throughs. Google AdSense technology will automatically determine the optimal number of ads to display on any page and will only show fewer ads when doing so will make you more money!’
In other Adsense related news - Google are also making changes to Adwords (the Advertisers side of Adsense) and will test longer descriptions on ads (up to 200 characters). Read more about this at Search Engine Journal.
Written on August 6th, 2005 at 10:08 am by Darren Rowse
Taughnee’s Start Up Tips
Taughnee Stone continues to write about her experiences of starting a new blog - the Alaska Blog which continues to grow after just 12 days of existence. Interestingly she’s chosen to use Blog Explosion to drive traffic to her site. This is not a method I’ve tried as my initial exposure to it left me feeling it was not a wise move. As Taughnee writes - the traffic that comes is not really interested in your blog - they are directed to it as part of a program to build up their own blog’s traffic. To me this is a rather ‘empty’ approach which means the stats you end up with are quite meaningless.
However as I read Taughnee’s post I realized that perhaps in the start up phase of a new blog that this type of traffic might actually have some use. You see Taughnee writes that as a result of this traffic a small number of those who surfed in have linked to her. One would think that a small percentage would become regular loyal readers also. So perhaps it’s not a complete waste of time (although I would still avoid it as I’ve had feedback from a couple of bloggers that it’s a waste of time).
Anyway whilst I would suggest caution with Blog Explosion - Taughnee’s post has some interesting stuff in it from a blogger in start up mode. Hopefully it helps some.
Written on August 6th, 2005 at 08:08 am by Darren Rowse
The Dangers of Niche Blogging
There is a helpful article over at on Niche Markets the Entrepreneurial Mind where Jeff Cornwall posts about the dangers of Niche strategy. Of course Jeff is writing in a broad sense for all businesses that target Niches but his theories are particularly relevant for those of us working on niche blogs with tightly focused topics. Jeff’s four main points are:
- Entering a niche requires adaptability in your plan.
- Niches Change. Even if you get the market right in the beginning, niche markets (like any market) will change over time.
- Niches Can Go Away. No market is forever. Niches are the type of market that can dry up, sometimes quite suddenly.
- Niches Can Grow. While significant growth in your market may not sound bad, it can attract more competitors.
He concludes by writing:
‘So is a niche a good place to enter the market? Absolutely. However, change is inevitable and even in a niche market an entrepreneur needs to be able to adapt to survive over the longer-term.’
This is so true for blogging. I often look at my successful blogs and wonder how much longer they will be as profitable as they currently are. Whilst I presently do well in many of the niches that I operate in I’m constantly reminding myself to look out for the next project.
It’s tempting to settle down and to just keep the 15 or so Active blogs that I currently have ticking over - but whilst this would be comfortable to do I’m aware that within a year or two many of the niches I’m operating will be a different scene to now. The key is adaptability and the ability to change courses quickly as the opportunity arises.
found via Business Opportunities Weblog
Written on August 5th, 2005 at 11:08 pm by Darren Rowse
31 Days to Building a Better Blog - Day 5
Well I’ve left this post until the last minutes of day 5 due to it being a rather full day - I hope no one was missing it.
The 31 Days to Building a Better Blog project has definitely been worthwhile so far. Traffic levels have been up the last few days and there has been some rich discussion going on in the comments section of many of the last few posts.
A few readers have submitted more blog tips that they’ve written (although less today - so hopefully there’s more to come - don’t make me do all the writing!). Here’s the two tips submitted today by readers:
- Syntagma writes the second post in the Blog Tips for Writers mini series.
- IO Error has let us know about a useful script for Firefox which prevents publishers clicking on their own Adsense ads and risking getting in trouble with Google.
Don’t forget to write your own blog tip/s on your blog and let me know about them and I’ll link up to them. Similarly you might want to suggest the best blog tip article you (or someone else) has written previously and I’ll add it to the collection.
Written on August 5th, 2005 at 09:08 pm by Darren Rowse
Interview with Jason Calacanis
Jen from Jensense has a good Interview with Jason Calacanis about Weblogs Inc’s experience with Adsense. There’s lots covered but here’s Jason’s main piece of advice:
‘Jen: What is the best piece of advice you have for a publisher brand new to AdSense? What would you have done differently when you started with AdSense, knowing what you do now.
Jason: I would have run four ads per page, taken off the borders, and made the links the same color as the links on the blog. I would have also made channels for each position and blog so I could track things better.’
Written on August 5th, 2005 at 05:08 pm by Darren Rowse
SEO Tip 1 - Use Keywords in Titles
One of the things I’m constantly amazed at is how many web publishers miss one of the easiest ways to maximize their positioning in Search Engines by simply including the keywords that they’d like to be found for in their post titles.
I spend a lot of time looking at online articles written on blogs, newspapers and websites and some days it seems that every second or third one has a title that is either cryptic, clever or cute at the expense of Search Engine Optimization (SEO).
To put it bluntly - when it comes to blog SEO I believe that your page and post titles are incredibly important. Google in particularly seems to value the words in your title incredibly highly.
Whilst I too feel the temptation to be clever with my post titles from time to time (and sometimes give into it) - I know that if I don’t get traffic from search engines then a fairly significant part of my income will disappear.
So if you’re writing about a new ‘Pink Widget’ have a think about the words that a potential reader will use to search for in Google to find the information you’re presenting. How would you search the net for information on ‘Pink Widgets’?
Without a doubt we’d all include ‘pink widget’ in the search we did. We might refine it by including a third word like ‘price’, ‘review’, ‘advice’, ‘problems’ etc (which may be worthwhile words to include either in the title or body of content) but the best words to include in the title are ‘pink widgets’ - if you don’t you’ve got virtually no chance of being found for that search term unless no one else is writing about them.
Keep in mind that research shows that people search the web a lot for names of products and people and that they are often quite specific their searches. If you’re writing about something specific make your title reflect this.
Of course it’s worth saying that it’s not as simple as just stuffing your titles with keywords - for one they need to make sense (no one will click on a link in Google if its a collection of unrelated words), secondly if you put too many words in your title you run the risk of decreasing their power and confusing the search engines and thirdly you’ll disillusion your regular readers if you mess with stuffing titles with too many words.
My advice is to keep it simple - get to the point with your titles and try get into the shoes of your reader.
Written on August 5th, 2005 at 11:08 am by Darren Rowse
Business Blog Consulting Revived
I’ve been watching Business Blog Consulting with interest over the past few days - its gone from a blog that had become a little quiet to something that has now got a lot more activity due to Rick’s decision to make it into a group blog and include some excellent business blogging types. Look at the list of bloggers now involved!
La Shawn Barber of The Language Artist -Toby Bloomberg of Diva Marketing - Bob Bly of Bly Blog - Steve Broback of Avondale Media - Rich Brooks of Flyte - DL Byron of Textura Design - Paul Chaneyof Radiant Marketing - Henry Copeland of BlogAds - Jill Fallon of Estate Vaults - Josh Hallett of Hyku - Kevin Holland of Air Conditioning Contractors of America - Wayne Hurlbert of Blog Business World - Tris Hussey of Larix Consulting - John Jantsch of Duct Tape Marketing - BL Ochman of What’s Next Online - Michele Miller of Wonder Branding - Lee Odden of Top Rank Results - Steve Rubel of Micro Persuasion - Todd Sattersten of A Penny For… - Stephan Spencer of Netconcepts - Dave Taylor of Intuitive Life for Business - James Turner of One by One Media - Dana VanDen Heuvel of BlogSavant - Des Walsh of Thinking Home Business - Debbie Weil of WordBiz and BlogWrite - Andy Wibbels of Easy Bake Weblogs - Jeremy Wright of Ensight
That’s quite a list of very talented bloggers. So if you’re interested in Business Blogging (and even if you’re just into any sort of blogging) you’d do well to add it to your RSS feed. I just hope that they can keep the blog ticking over after the initial excitement of the new approach wears off because it would be a shame to lose this conversation.
Written on August 5th, 2005 at 10:08 am by Darren Rowse
Declaring War on Blogger Apathy VI
This is the 6th and final post in a mini series on combatting Blog Apathy
• New Stimuli - one of the best ways to get your creativity levels up is to expose yourself to new stuff. Buy a book, watch a movie, meet someone new, go for a walk, spend time with your family, listen to some music - get out of your normal daily rhythm and expose yourself to some new sights, sounds, tastes, touches and smells. Remember that what you put into your life has a direct baring on what comes out.
• Just Write - it’s amazing what comes when you just start writing sometimes. Some of my bests posts emerged out of really dry patches when I forced myself to sit and write. The first few paragraphs might end up being scrapped - but if you keep writing you’ll eventually hit gold.
• Get a Coach - I’ve talked a few times here recently about how I’ve found myself a business coach. Whilst the two of us don’t catch up heaps these days - every hour I spend with him is invaluable. He forces me to take a step back from what I do and look at the big picture, he keeps me accountable to the direction I’ve previously set, he asks the hard questions and he encourages me when I’m in a slump. The great thing about him is that he has a very limited understanding of blogging and sees things from quite a different perspective. So get a coach or a blogging partner (you can coach each other). You might consider paying someone to do it or just find another blogger/friend/business person/family member to fill the role. Give them permission to ask questions and give you a kick in the pants if you need it.
• Take a Break - as many people have said in the comments of previous posts in this series - taking a break is often just what a blogger needs. We all need a holiday from time to time so I suggest bloggers build into their yearly rhythm extended periods of non blogging as well as shorter ones on a weekly and even daily basis. I would suggest that if you’re taking a break that you set an end time and date for it - this is important for a couple of reasons, firstly it gives your readers a sense of where you are and when you’ll be back (I find it frustrating as a reader when a blogger disappears for an extended period without warning) and secondly it puts a boundary at the end of you break which will help you to start up again.
I’m sure between us we can come up with many other strategies for breaking the back of blog apathy - I’m interested to hear the suggestions and experiences of others in comments below.
Written on August 5th, 2005 at 07:08 am by Darren Rowse
Declaring War on Blogger Apathy V
This is post 5 on a mini series on combatting Blog Apathy
• Meme it Up - another way to get yourself a little more interested in and energised by your blog is to start some sort of Meme. Run a competition, start a blogging project, add a quiz or survey - do something fun, creative and interActive to get other bloggers involved in what you’re doing. To be honest this is why I started the 31 Days to Building a Better Blog project - seeing the wonderful response from readers has definitely lifted my blogging spirits this week.
• Subscribe to a new Source of Information - sometimes it’s easy to get into a rut when you feel like you’re just seeing the same sorts of information on your blogs topic over and over again. So subscribe to some new keywords on Google News Alerts or Topix RSS feeds or find some new blogs to follow. If you put fresh content and ideas into your head hopefully some fresh content will come out.
• Short Posts - if you don’t have much to say - don’t say much. Keep your posts short and to the point. Even if they don’t feel profound to you, just the act of posting something might loosen the blogging creativity within you. Short posts can actually be incredibly effective communication tools also so it might just add something special to your blog.
Written on August 5th, 2005 at 03:08 am by Darren Rowse
Blog Case Study - Is it time to Quit?
I just stumbled upon an interesting post by Jack Krupansky who will celebrate his first six months of blogging by quitting his blogging activities (on 18 August). Jack writes:
‘I’ve put a huge amount of work into my FIVE blogs and gotten next to nothing in return. Sure, I’ve made a few good contacts, but I was doing that with email and my five web sites before I even started blogging.
In fact, since I could have been doing things that might have been more productive during the past six months, my lost opportunity cost is quite high.’
Jack will also stop commenting on others blogs and will kill off his blog aggregator and stop monitoring other’s blogs - again because of the unproductiveness of these endeavors.
Since I saw Jack’s post earlier today after a link from Business Week’s blog I’ve been pondering why it is that some blogs do well and others don’t. I’ve got nothing really profound to say and don’t want to come across as knowing anything much about Jack’s blogging (although I’ve followed a couple of them via RSS this past two months). I will make the following observations though about his approach that perhaps might shed a little light on the unproductiveness of his six months.
I want to do so not to attack Jack but in the hope that perhaps it helps us all learn something about blogging on a professional level. I do so respecting his decision to pull out of blogging - I’m never going to argue that people should blog on at all costs - as I’ll say later - there is a time and a place to stop blogging and perhaps for Jack that time has come. However here are a few things I notice about his blogs.
1. Posting Levels - the first thing I was curious about was how many posts Jack had done in his six months of blogging. I took a quick look through his blogs and found that since February across his five blogs he’s posted 407 times at an average of 2.43 posts per day for the 167 days that he’s been blogging so far. These posts have been distributed over the months as is shown in the above chart. Obviously things started well (he started half way through Feb) and have tapered off in the past three months.
407 posts means his blog’s have 407 pages on them (plus a handful of category pages/front pages etc. Although this sounds a lot its actually a reasonably small website in comparison to many that are out there. While his posts are of a good quality I would suggest that 2.43 posts per day means the blogs will only ever grow by 870 or so pages each year - this sounds a lot but again if you compare it with many successful commercial sites I’m not sure it could compete.
As I’ve written before - if you expect to earn a good income from your blogging (or anything else) you need to put a significant amount of time into it - 2-3 posts per day is probably not going to cut it.
2. Endurance - We all know of websites that shoot to fame and popularity just weeks or months after launching - but the fact is that the majority of sites (blogs or not) take time to develop, mature and find a readership. As a result profits are often low (if existent at all) in the first months.
Jack comments in his post that he’s only earning enough from Adsense on his blogs to buy a coffee once or twice per month. It’s a disheartening thing - I know I’ve been there.
I looked back over my Adsense figures yesterday and went right back to the beginning of my relationship with the contextual ad system. I added Adsense to my blogs (I had two at the time) in October of 2003. At the time I’d been blogging for just under 12 months and had written around 600 posts on a personal blog and a fledgling digital camera blog.
Even though I already had 600 posts and was getting 1500 or so visitors per day my first month or two of earnings averaged at about $1 per day.
My advice to Jack (and other bloggers) is that it takes time to build a blog up in terms of both traffic and earnings. My earnings have of course exponentially increased since that time as I’ve added more content, started new blogs, grown my blog’s rankings in search engines and learned about how to use Adsense more effectively on my blogs.
3. Use of Adsense - the first thing I noticed when I looked at Jack’s five blogs is that the placement of his Adsense ads is perhaps not very well optimized. Jack’s chosen to use the default color scheme running across the top of his blog as a banner ad. It’s great that Jack’s got his ads above the fold in the top half of the screen, however I’d suggest that both the positioning and colors are letting him down.
I’d recommend blending the ads more into content and positioning the ads inside or closer to the content itself. I guarantee this would increase the rate of click through that the ads get considerably.
4. Use of Blogger - I’m a blogger snob - I’ll admit it. Although I know some blogs that do pretty well on Blogger’s free blogging service I rarely recommend to new bloggers that they use it. When I started my first blog I did so on Blogger and within a month knew that I’d soon have to move to my own domain with a proper design and a better blogging platform.
My choice was Movable Type at the time and I noticed a marked difference in the performance of my blog within days of making the switch. Not only was the system more reliable (blogger can be slow or even out of order at times) my site’s got indexed much better in search engines and readers seemed to respect me more because I looked like I knew what I was doing due to having a unique design (I got it done by a blog designer).
I don’t want to knock Jack’s design - but I do find his blogs rather template like and without character. They have no branding or visually pleasing elements.
5. Blogspot Domain - Jack observes in his post that his five blogs are not as productive as his five websites. I don’t know how long his sites have been going in comparison to his blogs or what his stats are like but I do notice one thing about his sites - they all have their own unique.com URL.
I’m no search engine optimization expert - but I do know that search engines seem to like real domain names.
Each of Jack’s blogs is hosted on a free.blogspot.com domain - I suspect this has some consequences for his SEO.
Now by this point of the post I’m starting to wonder if I should hit ‘publish’ on this post. I’ve never taken the liberty to critique another person’s blog before - but I do so in the hope that it will help Jack and other bloggers in the same sort of position.
I will say that Jack has a few things going for him (to balance my critique above). For one he can write clear and helpful posts, secondly he’s a prolific commenter on other people’s blogs and seems to work on getting himself out there and getting to know other bloggers (an important part of being a good blogger) and thirdly he seems to have a good handle on researching his posts and using technology like RSS to find content. Lastly he seems to have a good handle on some worthwhile topics - topics which can be quite valuable in Adsense, but topics that also can be incredibly competitive to become established in (perhaps another thing going against Jack).
The last thing that I’ll say is that there ARE times to quit a blog or even blogging altogether. I’d suggest that 6 months is too soon and not long enough to give a new blog - but that really the length that you give it is not just about giving it time - it’s about your own situation and the other opportunities that you have. Like Jack has said in his post, the opportunity cost of blogging is too big for him to continue to ignore it - if there are things that he could do with a better long term return then he’d be silly not to do them.
On the surface I’d advise taking a little more time to implement some of the changes above to see what impact they might have. Of course I say this with no knowledge of Jack’s situation and don’t know if he has the luxury to be able to do this. I guess it’s really something for a blogger to decided for themselves.
Update: Jack’s posted another post with some Additional points (warning - there’s 27 of them) regarding his pulling the plug. I have to say that much of what he says is incredibly depressing and I kind of want to run over the pull the plug now myself.
Maybe I’m in a more cynical mood than when I first started writing this post now - but reading Jack’s 27 points actually makes me feel a bit peeved off. Maybe I’m reading it wrong but there is a sense of ‘whoa is me about it all’ - and a something about the way he writes that makes me wonder if Jack thinks he deserves to be raking in the cash.
He indicates he’s moving on to the next thing - but I wonder when he gets to it if he’s going to pull the plug again in another 6 months if it doesn’t suddenly go brilliantly. I know lots of people like this that run from one thing to the other looking for the next big thing, looking for the quick dollar that will solve all their problems - I just hope that they stick at something long enough to enjoy the rewards.
Although I hate to think what rewards Jack wants - he says he’d yawn if Jason Calacanis sent him a $20,000 cheque to be one of his bloggers - he wonders if a 10,000 fold increase in traffic would really achieve anything.
He then posted a post saying he’s grateful that no one has left any encouraging words to keep blogging - he writes:
‘The only way that I would continue is if somebody can show me how with half the effort I can get twice as much done and have 200x the results. ‘
I’ve got news for Jack - actually its news for all of us - making money from blogging is not fast money, its not easy money and its not quick money. Yep there are a handful of people out there saying that it is (they usually want you to buy their book) - but there is no escaping the fact that blogging for a living is hard work and can take a long time to build. If you’re not willing to wait and put in the hard yards you’re probably in the wrong business (although I strongly doubt that there are any businesses that you can double your work load and see 200 times the reward).
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