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

Adsense Tips for Bloggers 5 - High Paying Ads

Adsense 30 comments

This is part 5 in a series of posts on maximizing 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.

Adsense Revenue = Traffic Levels + High Paying Ads + Relevant Ads + Optimally Positioned and Designed Ads

The next element of this Adsense equation to be examined is how to get high paying Adsense Ads running on your site. Obviously in any business one way to get higher profits is to charge more for your product - whilst you have no direct say in how much is charged for ads run on your site - there are ways of targeting types of ads that might bring in a higher return than others.

As we mentioned in our initial explanation of the equation, the PVR Blog is one example of a blog that targets a well paying ad type - ads for PVR technology. Whilst I do not know specifics of earnings I would suspect blogs like Gizmodo who run Adsense ads would also be generating a higher paying ad, due to their focus on technology.

The lesson we can learn from blogs such as these is that they attract specific ads (that presumably are well paying) by keeping their content targeted on the same topics. To over simplify what we’re saying - if you want ads about Camera Phones blog about Camera Phones.

Finding High Paying Ads is not as easy as it sounds (is anything?). Do a search for Google on High Paying Adsense Ads and you won’t find too many sites listing the best keywords for Adsense. The top Adsense users in Adsense discussion forums tend to be pretty secretive about not only what keywords they focus on, but also what sites they run. I don’t blame them either - its good business sense really.

Having said this there are a number of strategies and tools that you might like to employ to help find high paying keywords.

• Buy them - Finding high paying keywords for your blog is possible by yourself for free - but as with everything a few entrepreneurial types are willing to do the leg work for you to save you some time and give you a comprehensive result. One service that you might like to try to find good keywords is Top Paying Keywords.
• Trial and Error - I know this will frustrate some of you who want a nice and easy quick fix but overall it is one of the best pieces of advice I can give. Try writing on a topic - track the results - if it pays off do it again….lots. Adsense allows you to track specific pages or sections of your blog using its ‘channels’ feature - if you’re smart you’ll watch which sections of your blog are generating the highest ads by dividing your overall earnings by the number of clicks and comparing it to other channels. Keep trying new topics until you strike gold and then dig in like crazy!
• Are there Any Ads? - This is a good first question. Despite the many thousands of advertisers using Adsense there are some topics where the answer to this question is no. A simple way to check is to head to Google and do a search for the key words you’re wanting to blog about. The results page will bring up not only a list of other sites writing about that key word (they are you competitors) but on the right hand side there will be a list of ads - these are the same sorts of ads you’ll get on your site if you write on the topic. If there are ads there, it is a good sign. If there are not - maybe its worth finding another topic to write on if you’re hoping to attract ads.
• 7 Search has a list of the 100 of the top paying keywords (in their advertising program - not Adsense) at the moment. Its a bit depressing actually to see a list like this because you’d have to sell your soul somewhat in order to go with many of them. Its an interesting site to check out though.
• Also from 7 Search (and more useful) is their Keyword Suggestion Tool which gives you an idea of what people are paying per click on different tools (again this is not specifically for Adsense but it will give you an idea of what the going rates are). Find What also has a similar service.
• Google Adsense’s biggest competitor are Overture (they run the ads on Yahoo) - they offer a service where you can enter your keywords and they will not only tell you how much advertisers are paying for the words but also how many people are searching for the term. This is a very useful tool.
• Sign up for Adwords - One way of getting a feel for how much people are willing to pay per click is to sign up with Google as an advertiser yourself. It doesn’t cost much to start a mini campaign and do some research this way. You’ll get a feel for what people are bidding on different words very quickly this way.
• Word Tracker is the best tool I’ve seen to help in finding keywords that people are searching for in the major search engines. The excellent thing about Word Tracker is that they also tell you how many other sites out there are targeting the same words! This is very handy as it will stop you targeting ‘Britney Spears’ as a Keyword phrase even though its one of the most searched for keywords on the web because literally hundreds of thousands of other sites have beaten you to the punch. Word Tracker has a free version to trial it and their paying version is even better - well worth the investment.
• I’m told Keyword Sleuth is a similar program to Word Tracker however I am yet to trial it.

Targeting High Paying Adsense Ads is an important aspect of generating an income from Adsense. It is not enough in and of itself however. You can have $10 per click ads (I’ve not found any of these yet) but without generating any traffic your research into the right ads will be useless. Likewise it is one thing to identify which ads you want to target - but it is another thing to actually get these relevant ads showing on your site. It is to this topic which our next post in this series will head - Finding Relevant Adsense Ads.

The full series is at Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7 and Part 8.

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

Adsense Tips for Bloggers 4 - Increasing Traffic

Adsense 48 comments

This is part 4 in a series of posts on maximizing 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.

I have argued the case for our equation for increasing Adsense Revenue

Adsense Revenue = Traffic Levels + High Paying Ads + Relevant Ads + Optimally Positioned and Designed Ads

I now will turn my attention to each of the four elements of good Adsense revenue in turn and give some practical easy to implement tips to improve each from my experience.

Increasing Traffic Levels is a key component to increasing Adsense revenue. As I wrote previously, ‘The more people that see you Adsense Ads, the more likelihood there is that someone will click on them.’

Increasing the readership of your blog is not as simple as it sounds, it takes time, patience and hard work (and sometimes a bit of luck) Having said that there are many things you can do to get your blog in front of a wider audience and there exposing the adsense messages on your site to more potential ‘clickers’. Here are a few tips…

• Quality, Interesting, Useful and Original Content - What are the blogs that you read the most? If you’re anything like me they are blogs that have quality content that ’scratches me where I itch’. This is essential to increasing your readership unless you have a pretty amazing ‘gimmick’ to bring readers in.
• Good Blog Design is really important if you want your blog to create a good first impression. With millions of other blogs and sites out there its worth some effort to make yours stand out. Also worth a read is Good Weblog Design and Layout.
• Link to others - be generous with your links to other bloggers big and small. You’ll be surprised how many links come back your way. This not only brings traffic from their sites but doesn’t hurt your ranking in Google.
• Comment on others blogs - Some of my most loyal readers came to my blog because I genuinely interacted with them on their blogs through comments. Hear me now, I say genuinely because its easy to spam in comments, but this will have the opposite effect of generating readers to your blog.
• Update Frequently - There is nothing that turns me off a blog faster than seeing that it hasn’t been updated for a month or more. Keep it rolling over with interesting content.
• Interact with Readers - Having an interActive blog that invites the involvement of readers is one way of generating repeat visitors. I’ve written a tip on InterActive Blogging including a number of interActive tools that you can use on your blog. Also check out this tip on using comments effectively to increase interactivity on your blog.
• Optimise for Search Engines - I can’t stress enough how important Search Engines are to increasing traffic, especially traffic that will click on your ads. I find that 95% of my traffic comes from Google and have found that anecdotal evidence suggests this traffic clicks through on Adsense ads at a higher rate than traffic from links on other blogs and sites. So work hard at getting listed and highly ranked on Search Engines.
• Add a signature to your outgoing email - Learn a lesson from Hotmail who have used signatures on the bottom of their users emails for years to promote their home page and generate interest in their product. Be careful though if you don’t want your worlds to collide!
• Web Rings - There are literally thousands of webrings that you can sign up for. I’m not sure how effective they are these days, but some people still swear by them.
• Add an RSS feed to your blog - more and more people are reading blogs without ever visiting them through News Aggregators that pick up information using RSS. Whilst this does not guarantee those reading through aggregators will visit your blog (and therefore see your Adsense Ads) it certainly increases the chances of them dropping by, especially if you invite comments and have internal links on your posts.
• List your site on Portals - There are a growing number of sites which exclusively list blogs. If you want people to find you its worth submitting your blog to be listed on them. Some focus on specific topics while others list blogs on a wide variety of topics (like Eaton Web and Globe of Blogs). Other portals like BlogShares and Blog Street also list a lot of blogs in different ways which might increase your blogs profile.
• Blog Search Engines and Indexes - Get yourself registered on sites like Blogdex, Technorati, Popdex and Daypop (they require RSS I think). These sites have features that allow people to search for blog entries via topic and keywords. They also list the most popular recent topics and each have other interesting features which can enhance your blogging experience.
• Start a Newsletter - Offer your readers a newsletter service to keep them up to date with your latest posts. I’ve found since adding a free weekly newsletter to my digicam blog that hundreds of readers have signed up for regular updates of my latest posts. Think about this - hundreds of people have given me permission to invite them to come back to my blog - every week!
• Get Involved in Blog Projects and Memes - From time to time other bloggers will invite your participation in a blog project of theirs. Get involved, support their project and you might find it pays off. On the flip side start your own blogging project or meme. Do something that is of service to other bloggers. I tried something like this with Underblogs and Blogger Idol.
• Get involved in other web forums - Genuinely participate in web forums and discussion pages on topics related to your blog. Many of these allow you to add a signature to your posts which raise your blogs profile.
• Promote your Posts - If you think you’ve written something worthwhile spend a few minutes letting others know about it. I regularly shoot other bloggers to notify them of what I’ve written if I think it will interest them. Think about it before you send the email and don’t bombard the same people constantly with every topic you write on - be selective, concise, polite and helpful with your emails but don’t be afraid to promote yourself.
• Add a ‘Email a Friend’ Option to your posts - make it easy for your readers to tell others about what you’ve written. I know this function gets used regularly on my blog and brings in new readers that I would never otherwise have been able to reach.

These are just some of the ideas that I’ve used and seen others use to increase the readership of a blog and thereby increase the exposure of Adsense ads to a wider audience.Many of the above tips were taken from my Blog Tips Series including the ‘Finding Readers’ Series.

What methods have your found to be effective at increasing the readership of your blog? What works for your and what doesn’t? What tips would you add to this collection?

Of course increasing traffic alone won’t greatly increase your Adsense revenue, but it can help! In our next Adsense Tip for Bloggers we will explore ways to generate High Paying Ads - the second component in our Adsense Revenue Equation.

The full series is at Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7 and Part 8.

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

Adsense Tips for Bloggers 3 - An Equation for Success

Adsense 27 comments

This is Part 3 in a series for Bloggers on how to use the Google Adsense Program. The full series is Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7 and Part 8.

There are many factors that impact the level of revenue generated from a blog using the Google Adsense program. Books have been written explaining expert strategies for Adsense - However for the purposes of this series we’ve boiled it all down into four elements that we believe impact your Adsense earning capacity the most. Speaking in general terms here is a simple equation that illustrates how the factors each contribute to Adsense Revenue.

Adsense Revenue = Traffic Levels + High Paying Ads + Relevant Ads + Optimally Positioned and Designed Ads

Its not Rocket Science. Each of the above four elements contribute directly to the total revenue that your Adsense Ads will produce. Don’t just work on one of them though because if any one is weak it will hold your potential earnings back. Lets break each factor down….

Traffic Levels - The more people that see you Adsense Ads, the more likelihood there is that someone will click on them. As I examine the statistics provided by Adsense that report my daily earnings I notice that my earnings in the past 8 months have increased considerably as my total page impressions have increased. For example earlier in the week when Slashdot linked up to this post I had an influx of 50,000 visitors in 24 hours to my blog - it doesn’t take a genius to work out what this did to my Adsense earnings that day! Work on increasing your traffic levels and you should see an increase in your Adsense Revenue.

High Paying Ads - Once again I’m stating the obvious, but if the content you provide on your blog attracts high paying ads you’re going to do significantly better. For example it has been documented that the PVR Blog is doing pretty well when it comes to high Adsense earnings - the secret of its success is partly due to it being served with ads that are high paying. The topic of the PVR blog is, as you’d expect, PVR technology including TiVo, Replay TV etc. This is cutting edge technology and therefore advertisers are willing to pay top dollar to get their products and services out there! In comparison if a person was to start a blog on ‘toothpicks’ I suspect the ads are not likely to pay very much. It would take very high traffic levels to earn as much from a toothpick blog as it would the PVR blog.

Relevant Ads - A second reason the PVR Blog is successful is that it servers relevant ads. To put it simply people looking for information on PVR technology are confronted by Adsense ads for PVR technology. I recently visited a blog that was having trouble getting relevant ads - they had a blog on Tourist destinations in Australia - but unfortunately they were getting Adsense ads for remote control cars. You can guess what their revenue was like. Increase the relevancy of your Ads to your content and you are one step closer to increasing your Adsense revenue.

Optimally Positioned and Designed Ads - One of the coolest things about the Adsense program is that they give you freedom in choosing the best position and color scheme for your ads. Just like in the wider world of advertising - positioning is a key element to an ads success. A Billboard positioned on a road where no one drives is not likely to get the same results as one positioned on a busy intersection. The position and design of your Adsense Ads is critical - if they are out of site they’ll never get clicked on.

Bringing them Together - The above four elements are in many ways pretty obvious when spelt out like this - the challenge comes to improving each to optimize Adsense revenue.

Your revenue will only grow as high as the weakest one of these factors on your blog. For example if you have high paying, relevant, well designed and positioned ads but no traffic you’ll not do well. Likewise if you have high traffic, high paying and relevant ads but they are poorly designed an in a position where they’ll never be seen - you’ll waste all your other hard work. Its not enough to work on one element.

How do we improve each? In the next four posts we’ll examine each area in turn and suggest a number of ways that you might try tweaking them to increase your revenue.

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

Adsense Tips for Bloggers 2 - Is Your Blog Suitable for Adsense?

Adsense 34 comments

This is Part 2 in a series on using Adsense on your Blog - The full series is Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7 and Part 8.

Is your blog suitable for Adsense? - Before you rush into signing up for Adsense expecting it to earn you a million dollars it is worth asking the question of whether Adsense is the right revenue strategy for your blog. By no means is it the only option - you might like to check out this tip on other ways of making money from blogging.

Whilst there are some amazing success stories about earning big dollars with Adsense out there, it is worth taking a realistic look at some cold hard truths about the Adsense program.

Google does not accept every site that applies to the Adsense program.

• Google Adsense Program Policies indicate that the content of sites must not contain things like excessive profanity, pornography, illicit drugs etc. Basically your blog needs to have content that is reasonably ‘family friendly’.
• Also in their policy document is a reference to them not normally accepting pages of a personal nature. This is the topic of discussion in many Adsense forums and is obviously open to different interpretations. Many (if not most) blogs are personal in nature - however to maximize your chances of approval by Adsense a blog should be targeted on a particular topic/s. For example whilst this blog is often personal in nature - most of my individual posts (pages) focus on very specific themes which are repeated throughout the blog. update - this may have changed recently with Blogger now allowing blogger blogs to use Adsense.
• Sites accepted into the Adsense program are also required to be easily navigable, have an adequate quantity of text based content (don’t apply if you’ve been blogging a week) and be written in English, French, German, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Japanese, or Spanish. They may not to have excessive advertising or other contextual/competing advertising.
• Whilst not stated in the Adsense Policy document, many also believe that sites accepted into the program also need to have reasonable levels of traffic. If your blog is new, it may be worth waiting a few weeks or months before applying to build up traffic and content levels. Others speculate that a professionally designed, well-organized and privately hosted blog has a better chance of being accepted. The more professional and successful your blog appears the more likely it is to be accepted by Adsense.

If still in doubt after reading Google Adsense Program Policies you can email Google for clarification or just apply and see how you go.

Of course, acceptance by Google into the Adsense program does not guarantee your success. The fact remains that certain blogs will always be more successful than others at generating income.

Future posts in this series will focus upon strategies and tips for increasing your revenue but it should be stated here that the most successful sites are generally sites with very high traffic levels and/or content that is directly related to a particular product or service (the more targeted and niche-like the better).

It is also worth saying that Adsense works best on pages with lots of text content. It only reads text in determining ads, not images so make sure you have enough relevant content.

The next posts in this series will expand upon these aspects of successful blogging with Adsense with our Adsense Equation.

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

Adsense Tips for Bloggers 1

Adsense 185 comments

How do you make money from the Google Adsense Program? What AdSense Tips can you share with us?

I have been asked this question so many times in the past few weeks that I thought I should write something on the topic. It seems increasingly bloggers want to try to cover their hosting and ISP costs with some revenue from their blog - and increasingly they’re doing it and are able to make a few (or quite a lot) dollars on the side. Many are turning to Google’s Adsense program.

Covering costs of my Digital Photography Blog is why I originally signed up with Google Adsense - blogging can get expensive when you have high levels of traffic and a lot of pages.

Whilst the agreement you sign with Google stresses that you are not allowed to give specific information about your earnings from the program I can say that I’m glad I’ve signed up because its well and truly covered my costs - and then some. In fact I think its quite feasible to expect that Adsense coupled with other strategies for making money from Blogging could quite easily generate a decent living. It takes time and hard work, but I think its very doable. (Update: Since writing this series I’ve revealed that I am now looking at making over a six figure income this year in 2005 from blogging).

So how do I make money from Google Adsense? Let me share some AdSense Tips that heve helped me.

This will be the first in a series of posts on this topic. Let me say up front I’m no expert - there are a lot of people out there making a lot more money than I am using Adsense - however most of them are not telling their secrets - well not for free anyway. I’ve got no secrets to hide and am willing to share what I’ve learnt since I signed up for the program 8 months ago. If you want a REAL expert’s opinion on Adsense I’d recommend buying Joel Comm’s What Google Never Told You About Making Money with Adsense E-Book. Joel earns $15,000 per month from Adsense and has some good things to share.

I know some bloggers are put off or offended by the idea of making money from blogging so I’ll try not to let these posts dominate my blog - however if you are not interested in the topic, simply skip over these posts.

I am going to assume a few things in this series to cut down the amount of introductory comments I have to make. Here is what I am assuming:

• You have a blog. Whilst most of the following tips will apply to other types of websites I run Adsense on blogs and will speak from that experience.
• You have (or will) read a basic overview of Adsense and have some understanding of what it is.
• You have(or will) read the program policies as outlined by Google. These give details of site eligibility, ad placements and other requirements for using the system.

Enough introductory comments - lets get stuck into the Adsense Tips for Bloggers!

The full series of AdSense Tips is Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7 and Part 8.

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

Blog Tips - Getting Comments

Miscellaneous Blog Tips 7 comments

What is your experience with Blog Comments? Do you use them? How do they enhance or hinder your blogging experience? How do you suggest bloggers starting out approach the issue?

One of our citywide papers has a section on a Thursday dedicated to Media and Technology. One of the writers there has started his own blog - The Bleeding Edge. Its got some good posts on it and as with most new blogs its being updated many times per day.

Today they wrote a post about the lack of comments on their blog. As they put it, its a bit of a ‘No Comment Zone’. I decided to leave my thoughts and then after rambling on a bit decided to add them to my Blog Tip Collection.

Here is what I wrote…

No comments eh…. I remember that problem well. Can I make a few observations?

1. Your site is rather difficult to leave a comment on. Its just taken me 5 minutes to go through the process of registering, then finding I couldn’t have a space in my login name, re-registering, waiting for the email with my password, finding the post I wanted to comment on again, then after clicking ‘comments’ having to click another ‘post comments’ button. Now unless I really wanted to leave a comment and let you know that I’m enjoying your blog I would have given up on leaving my two cents worth long ago. The average person stays on a blog for less than 2 minutes (we found it was 96 seconds in this informal study). So if you want them to interact with you its got to be easy to do. Of course with ‘easy’ comes issues of spam comments - but I’d rather delete a few comments than not have any. I find sites that make people register to leave a comment generally don’t get as many unless their content is very controversial or they get a lot of traffic.

2. Different Content = Different Comment Levels - I’ve noticed in my own blogs that one gets a lot of comments (an average of 5 per post) and the other gets virtually none (1 comment for every 10 or so posts) despite it getting more traffic. Why? The nature of the content is different and will illicit different responses from readers. The one that gets a lot of comments is more personal, occasionally controversial, talks about ‘deeper issues’ and asks readers for input. The other one (with few comments) is technical in nature and gives more information that it asks for.

3. Sometimes it is better not to have comments at all. One of the ways a lot of blog readers gauge the value of a blog is to look at how many comments there are. If you blog says ‘0′ comments under each post its not that inspiring for your readers to want to interact.

4. If you’re interActive your Readers will be - I’ve found more people leave comments when they get a personal email or reply comment that engages with their comment. It gets a little hard when you have thousands of visitors coming to your site a day, but if you’re seen to be interActive then people will interact with you.

5. Give your readers some incentive to leave a comment. Blogs that let their readers make a comment with a link back to their own site give their readers not only a way to interact but also to do a little self promotion. Again this can lead to spam but there are ways around it if you use Moveable Type which has spam blocking features that don’t require registration.

By no means is the above all that can be said about blog comments - you might also want to check out some of my earlier Blog Comments Tips and some other tips on ways of making your blog more interActive. I’d love to get others thoughts on their experience with and tips on getting comments on their blog.

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

Weblog Primer

Miscellaneous Blog Tips 2 comments

Franois from padawan.info has just written a great Weblog Primer.

‘Since I’ve sold the idea of weblogs within my company, I’ve been charged with the task to explain what are weblogs to people who haven’t heard of them yet. I wrote this primer as a starter. This is a work in progress, with probably more to come. I’d love to have your feedback on it.’

Its a great piece that I’m going to add to my blog tips collection. Thanks to Presurfer for the link.

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

Moveable Type - Individual Archives Titles

Writing Content 2 comments

This week’s Blogger Idol topic was one dear to my heart - Blog Tips. Some of the tips there are excellent (its never too late to submit yours). One in particular has been valuable to me as a Moveable Type user. In fact just one of his tips might have doubled the number of visitors of my blog today. Nicholas submitted Optimizing your MovableType blog for Google.

His post is longish and a tad technical but it is well worth a look if you’re using MT. (If you don’t use MT you might not find the following that helpful) Most of it I’ve already incorporated into this blog previously (a lot of it by fluke) but of particular use to me was this short paragraph:

‘While I’m on the subject, my recollection is that, by default, the title of an individual entry archive with MovableType is the name of the blog, followed by the name of the entry. Get rid of the blog name part of this - it’s dead weight that will drag down your relevancy quotient with Google.’

Before the redesign of this site a few months back I had made this change - ie I had taken my overall blog title ‘LivingRoom’ out of the title of my individual archives. In the redesign it resorted back to the default without me realizing it. As a result my post titled William Hung - She Bangs was being listed by Google as ‘LivingRoom >> A Space for Life >> William Hung - She Bangs’.

As it happens that page already ranked pretty highly for a search for ‘William Hung’ on Google (36th yesterday).

Nicholas’s article reminded me that I needed to get rid of the title from my Individual archives and so I did so two days ago. So now the words ‘LivingRoom >> A Space for Life >>’ do not appear in the title of any of my individual archives. All the google bot sees and lists when it comes visiting my site is the title I give each post. Today that post is simply called ‘William Hung - She Bangs’. It is now a lot let cluttered and more direct.

So What? - Ok, so what is the difference? Surely my page’s title doesn’t make a difference to my ranking on Google!

An hour ago I logged onto my stats page and noticed my last hour’s hits were around double what they normally are. I thought I must have gotten a link from a big site. Referral stats showed this was not the case - the increase was largely due to an increase in Google hits on a variety of pages (including the William Hung page).

Google has picked up the change to the way I’m titling my individual pages already (it has only made the change of some pages so far - it takes time for it to filter through the system) and the difference is significant enough to them to increase my page rankings from 36 to 20 on the William Hung post. I can only presume the same thing is true on other individual pages also. It will be interesting to note the changes on other posts over the next few days as Google continues to index the rest of the site.

Google takes notice of the titles of your pages. It treats them as keywords and will archive them accordingly. If the name of your site has keywords in it that relate to every post on your page it might be worth including them in the title of every page (ie if my site was about living room furniture I’d keep it in) - however if your blog’s name is more generic or cryptic in the way it relates to your site it might be worth jettisoning it from your individual (and maybe category) archives titles.

Disclaimer - I’m not saying you’ll double your readership with this tip - you might, but it takes a lot more than this to find readers. Rather it might be helpful as part of a wider strategy. I once wrote a series of posts on Finding Readers for your blog that might help develop such a wider strategy. Hope it helps.

Related Links
- Titles are Everything
- Getting Listed by Search Engines
- Mention Google often and Prominently And Watch the Google Traffic Arrive! And Other True Myths!

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

Blog Design - Choosing Colours

Blog Design 1 comment

One of the most important decisions you can make when it comes to designing your website is to think about your colour scheme. One of the more useful articles I’ve read on this topic is Choosing Colour for your Website

‘For most people, colour is something taken for granted. It is all around us. Yet, when we come to use colour, in paintings, in design, in our furnishings and clothes we often make mistakes because we don’t understand what is going on.

Some people will say that this colour goes with that colour and that “blue and green should never be seen.” They will even try to make up complex tables and formulae for combining colours in pleasing ways. I’m not going to do that!’

Its nice to read a site on the topic that actually uses colour beautifully in their writing. If you want to think more about the colour of your blog you might aslo want to check out some of the following colourful resources.

- Web Accessibility - Part 3 - Type and Colour - a good article that talks about colour from a perspective of colour blindness and visual impairments.
- Choosing The Perfect Colors for Your Web Site - Good Advice.
- Web Advice 101 - Color suggestions to consider when designing a site - Moregood advice.
- Jonas Web Web Design - Colour Wheel - an online tool for choosing colours.
- Choosing Colors for a Website - complete with colour wheels and loads of practical advice.
- Choosing The Perfect Colors for Your Web Site - 6 simple tips.
- How to Choose Website Colors - The Psychology of Color and Internet Marketing.
- How to Choose Your Web Site Colors - Perhaps the most colourless website in this collection of useful sites about colour.
- Color Scheme Adviser - An interesting online tool that suggests what colour goes with what.

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