Written on March 11th, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 03:03 pm by Darren Rowse

Reflections from an ‘unlikely media magnate’

enternetusers Site News 20 comments

Today’s been a fun day as a result of the Sydney Morning Herald article (it didn’t appear in the Age for those asking). I finally managed to get a copy of the hard copy and was amazed to see it as a half page spread on page 3. I was half expecting it to be buried in the technology pages (must be a slow news day in Sydney).

The results of the story are quite interesting so far. I was awoken this morning by a call from a TV station wanting to run a story on b5media (probably Monday) and have a lot of positive feedback via email from new readers during the day.

There’s also been a bit of a buzz around the Australian blogosphere as a result also today which is nice (here, here, here and here for starters).

I should also mention the author of the piece - Tom Burton - who I spent a couple of hours with this week in my favorite cafe. My time with Tom was probably one of the more enjoyable interviews I’ve done over the last year or two. He was genuinely interested in the whole topic of New Media and Web 2.0 and while he said he didn’t know much he has obviously done some pretty good research on the topic and knows his stuff.

It was a refreshing conversation having had seen a couple of instances recently where well known and respected Australian journalists have blown off New Media as insignificant. Perhaps these two people are in the minority they left a somewhat sour taste in my mouth. Tom’s approach to this article (and hopefully more to come) was quite the opposite and went a long way to restoring my believe that Mainstream Media and New Media can both exist side by side - and perhaps even work best together (as Reuters head Tom Glocer said a day or two back).

PS: A few people have asked about the picture. It was taken yesterday by photographer Justin McManus in the hallway of our house (lucky we finished the painting last week).

Share This

Written on March 11th, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 12:03 am by Darren Rowse

Welcome Sydney Morning Herald Readers

enternetusers Site News 13 comments

Welcome to readers of SMH who may have found themselves here after the article printed there today.

If this is your first time to enternetusers.net then let me give you a quick tour of my virtual space. Grab a coffee and make yourself comfortable while I show you around.

Firstly, enternetusers is a blog that is devoted to helping bloggers improve their blogging and explore ways to earn an income at the same time by writing about topics that they love - here’s a couple of links to give you a little information about me and about this blog.

If you’re new to blogging you might find this ‘what is a blog?‘ article and my recent series on Blogging for Beginners helpful.

If you’re interested in blogging for money here’s one on how bloggers are making money from blogging.

If you like what you read here you can follow my future entries (I write several times per day most days) in two ways - firstly I send a free email newsletter every week which you can subscribe to and secondly if you read RSS feeds you can subscribe to mine here.

The article also mentions my Digital Camera Blog and Church (LivingRoom) Blog (a bit out of date) which you might be interested in reading more of.

Lastly the article in the SMH today mentioned b5media - a blog network that I am a part owner of. You can find it b5media.com where you’ll find the our central page. In the right hand sidebar there you’ll find the 85+ blogs in the network which should keep you busy for quite a while - have fun!

Thanks for stopping by - I hope you enjoy your stay at enternetusers and b5media.

Share This

Written on March 11th, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 12:03 am by Darren Rowse

Introduction to Advertising Optimization - High Paying Ads

Chitika eMiniMalls, Advertising, Adsense 16 comments

The last element of the mix to consider as you look to optimise your Advertising revenue on your blog is the actual amount that the ad will pay.

As we’ve discussed earlier in this series, there are many different advertising programs out there for bloggers - but most fall into three camps in terms of revenue. Firstly there is Cost Per Click (CPC) advertising, secondly Cost Per Impression (CPM - the M stands for the Roman numeral for one thousand and these ads are calculated on what you’re paid per one thousand impressions rather than per click) and thirdly there are programs that allow you to choose your own rates per time period (like BlogAds, Adbrite and private sponsorships).

CPM Ads - When it comes to CPM advertising programs it is pretty difficult to have much impact upon the ad value being paid. A program like Fastclick (aff) does let you specify which ads run on your site (or rather it lets you block some of the campaigns that it offers) and thereby you do have some impact on the level of income on your blog - but the process is reasonably messy and in my experience not really worth messing with (the tailoring of campaigns that is).

On the other hand the other two types of ads give you much more control over your ad values.

Time Related Ads - Obviously the ads you set the price on yourself is a matter of finding a price in the demand and supply spectrum that advertisers are willing to pay. This is not always easy and from my experience it can take a little time to hone in on the right figure to charge. For BlogAds and Adbrite ads for instance I usually just come up with a price that is similar to what others seem to be charging in my niche (BlogAds lets you look at what others charge) and then adjust it up or down over time depending upon how many people buy ads. If no one is buying I reduce the price, if people are buying lots I increase it.

When it comes to private ads it gets more tricky. I always struggle to know what an ad is worth and generally try to enter into a conversation with the advertiser to sound out their budget before coming up with a price. Again it’s about negotiating and seeing what others are paying. Over time you’ll get more of an idea on how to set your prices.

CPC Ads - These ads are usually more of an art form in systems like AdSense, YPN and Chitika. Different ads pay different amounts - largely dependent upon the keywords that triggers that advertisement. For instance in an ad program like AdSense if you have a blog about financial related products, the ads that appear on it are likely to pay more than a blog that is on the topic of pencils. The reasons are pretty obvious really - advertisers are going to be less likely to pay big dollars for ‘pencil ads’ than they are for ones advertising financial products.

What follows are some tips on how to maximize the amount that AdSense and Chitika ads will pay per click (I suspect that YPN will be similar to AdSense).

Finding High Paying Ads in AdSense

I’m often asked (weekly) by readers what keywords they should target on AdSense to maximize their income. My answer is always the same - target keywords that you’re writing about - relevant ads will always pay much better than irrelevant high paying ads (simply because people won’t click irrelevant ads).

Having said this - it can be worth doing some investigating around keyword value in AdSense because there can be significant differences in payouts on very similar words.

Finding high paying AdSense words isn’t always an easy thing though. 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 (aff). I know of a number of enternetusers readers who use it although have never felt the need to use it myself. I’m much more into the next method.
• 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!
• 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).
• Overture offers 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 that I use a lot to check keyword values. You do need to remember that the results you get with them are not for AdSense but another ad system and that they are what advertisers are willing to pay for words - and not what publishers get (ie the middle man always takes a cut). I do find it useful to compare keywords though.
• 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 a good tool to help find 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.

Finding High Paying Ads for Chitika eMiniMalls

Probably the best advice that I can give with choosing the right keywords for your Chitika eMiniMall ads is to use trial and error and to track your experiments.

Ideally you’ll want to target keywords that are relevant to your content as much as possible (relevancy is crucial with these ads) but having said that if you want to go after higher paying ads I’d suggest setting up a channel for your test and to choose a keyword to test over a day or two and to run it exclusively on that channel (ie don’t rotate words). You’ll see very quickly (in that days statistics) by monitoring that channel what the keyword is paying. The next day try another word and see how it goes.

In this way you can not only track how much words are paying but also what kind of Click Through Rate the ads are getting.

I’ve also heard a number of bloggers say that if you search the ‘best selling buys’ in the different categories of these online stores that you will find higher paying ads. I’m not sure if this is the case - but there is some sense in this. In any case with the coming of channels we’ll soon know what type of keywords trigger what level of click values.

For example, on my digital cameras site, I visit the digital cameras section of shopping.com, and know that the results of that search generally pay pretty well as keywords in comparison to other cameras.

Ad Value isn’t everything

I want to finish by re-emphasising that with CPC ads that high paying ads are not everything. In fact you can have VERY high paying ads and not earn a cent if your ads are irrelevant and are poorly positioned and designed.

To maximise your ad performance you need to bring together all of the elements covered in this series - Traffic, Ad Position, Ad Design, Ad Relevancy and High Paying Ads. Become obsessed by any one of them and your overall earnings will suffer.

Share This

Written on March 10th, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 09:03 pm by Darren Rowse

Social Networking Video

Social Media, Blogging Tools and Services 8 comments

I just watched this very amusing video on Social Networking (particularly MySpace).

Found via Small Business Trends

Share This

Written on March 10th, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 01:03 pm by Darren Rowse

Blogger achieves 5000% ROI from Blogging

Business Blogging 14 comments

Debbie Weil writes that Charlene Li has apparently brought in close to one million dollars in business to her employer, Forrester, in the last year - all through her blogging.

That’s a 5000% Return on Investment!

‘That’s based on her calculation that her $14.95 / month account with TypePad triggered $1 million in new business for Forrester last year.’

If that’s not the best argument for business blogging going around at the moment then I don’t know what is!

Share This

Written on March 10th, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 11:03 am by Darren Rowse

2web - Australian Web 2.0 Bloggers and Entrepreneurs

Pro Blogging News 3 comments

Some Aussie bloggers and webby type entrepreneurs have started to self organize over the last couple of weeks and have decided to come together for conversation and a bit of evangelization under the name 2web. There’s only 8 of us at this stage and I’m sure others will join our number. To this point it’s just a site which aggregates our content but I’m excited about some of the conversation we’ve been having via email and the possibilities for collaboration and jointly promoting some of the emerging ideas around new media, blogging and dare I say it - Web 2.0.

Nik Cubrilovic talks a little more about how it’s come about on his blog. Others who are part of the fun are Ben Barren, Cameron Reilly, Martin Wells, James Farmer, Alan Jones and Richard Giles.

If nothing else it’s a great group of people to hang out with and it’s great to see the Aussie voice emerging.

Share This

Written on March 10th, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 01:03 am by Darren Rowse

Performancing Metrics Review

Blogging Tools and Services 46 comments

As I mentioned earlier today, I’ve been one of the alpha testers of Performancing’s new Metrics tool. We’ve been using it on a number of b5media blogs over the past couple of weeks (including enternetusers) since Nick approached us with the opportunity.

I’d actually heard of the package previously in chatting with Nick a number of months back and from that time was very excited by what they were proposing to include in it for a number of reasons:

1. It’s Blog-centric - While there are a number of free statistics packages out there I don’t know of too many comprehensive ones that are tailored specifically for blogs. This one is designed with bloggers as the primary user.
2. It’s Light weight yet comprehensive - Google Analytics excited me as a package when it was first announced - but quickly disappointed me because of it’s slowness but also it’s complexity. I’m a simple guy and I like to be able to get a quick and easy picture of what’s going on in my blogs without having to go too deep. I do occasionally use Google Analytics for more in depth analysis but have found myself using SiteMeter more on a daily basis.
3. It can integrate multiple blogs and networks - At b5media we’ve struggled with statistics packages from a network perspective. We want our bloggers to be able to view their stats but we also don’t want to overwhelm them with too much (ie they don’t need to see everyone’s stats). Also as network owners we want to be able to view everything at once. Performancing’s Metrics answer some of these issues.
4. It integrates a variety of different types of statistics - I currently use Sitemeter to measure incoming metrics, MyBloglog to measure outbound metrics (ie where people are leaving my site to go to - this is a paid service) and have experimented with different scripts to measure how my readers are interacting with my AdSense (again these generally cost). Performancing’s Metrics attempts to bring these things together into one package - for free!

So when Nick asked us to test their alpha version I jumped at the chance. Here is my first impression review:

Get more blogging news and reviews like this via our RSS feed or free weekly email newsletter.

Installation

My initial installation experience of the package onto enternetusers was pretty easy. All you have to do is copy and paste some code into your template and it will kick in.

My only problem with installation has been on getting it up and running on my MovableType blogs which are running on an older version. I’m yet to get them up and running - but this is partly due to my own time constraints.

Usability

With any new statistics package (or any blogging tool for that matter) there is always a period of acclimatization where you need to get into the rhythm of using it.

I’d be lying if I said I found my first impressions of Performancing Metrics as being ‘easy to use’. It has taken me some time to dig around and find out what everything does.

This is partly because it is in alpha and to this point there are no tutorials or help links to explain what it is that I’m looking at (hopefully these things will be added). I think a brief description (a sentence or two) on each statistic page might be useful in explaining what each page does and means for newbies - however even a tech dummy like me quickly worked out what everything did and meant (and that’s saying something).

The layout of the tools are pretty easy to use.

The statistics are broken down into the three main categories of ‘Visitors’, ‘Activity’ and ‘Marketing’. Each of these has a summary page and is then broken down into sub categories of statistics - each with their own page.

Most of these pages have the option for you to view statistics in a number of date formats (ie by ‘today’, ‘last week’, ‘last month’ or a date range etc). Some pages have graphs associated with them, others are more text based.

I’ll now turn to each page of statistics in turn and describe each one:

Dashboard

Once you enter a blog’s metrics page you’re confronted with the dashboard for Performancing’s Metrics. I’ve included a screen shot (click to enlarge) of enternetusers’s dashboard below (note it is part of b5media’s stats - hence the ‘b5media tag top right).

The Dashboard is basically a summary page of the blog’s key statistics and includes three graphs (Visitors, Comments and Adsense Clicks) which can be viewed as 1, 2, 3 or 4 week’s stats.

Under the graphs are the three areas of statistics with hyper links to each sub page of statistics as well as details of your top 5 posts statistics on the blog (I’ve blurred those details - a guy has to have a few secrets :-) )

Visitors Category

The ‘visitors’ summary page shows three bar charts that graph ‘Visits’ (total number of visitors), ‘Repeat Visitors’ and ‘New Visitors’ (screen cap below - click to enlarge). Each of these graphs show a number for today’s total visitors as well as the option to view the graph as 1 week, 2 weeks, 3 weeks or 4 weeks of stats. Under the graphs are details of your last 5 visitors by IP address, Geography, Language, Browser, OS, Screen Resolution and referrer. All of this information is expanded in the following pages of stats.

visitor stats - on this page you get a graph that looks at a summary of your stats for what ever date period you’ve selected. It has a graph (a simple line graph) which plots ‘total views’, ’sessions’, ‘repeat visitors’ and ‘new visitors’ over the time period selected.

Under this graph is more summary information for the date range selected in the following areas:

Visits (Sessions)

Average per Day

Average Visit Length (measured in minutes)

Return Visitors (a total number and a percentage of your total number of visitors)

Geography - this page has a bar graph that shows the top five countries from where your visitors have come from over the time period selected.

Underneath you’re given the same information in text statistics with both total numbers for each country and the percentage of the total statistics that this country represents. You are given the choice of viewing different numbers of countries in this section ranging from the ‘top 5′ through to ‘all’ (options are top 5, 10, 20, 50, 100 and all).

Languages - This page functions exactly the same as the ‘Geography page’ except that it tracks the languages of readers.

Browsers - This page functions exactly the same as the ‘Geography page’ except that it tracks the browsers being used by readers (40% of you are using IE 6.0, 35% are on Firefox 1.5).

Platforms - This page functions exactly the same as the ‘Geography page’ except that it tracks the platforms being used by readers (88% of you seem to be on Win32 and only 9% have taste (Mac users :-) ).

Screen Resolution - This page functions exactly the same as the ‘Geography page’ except that it tracks the screen resolution that users are viewing your site with.

Activity Category

The Activity summary page gives some summary activity stats from the different sub categories. It has three bar charts across the top that plot ‘Post Views’, ‘Comments’ and ‘Posts Commented’. Each one can be viewed in a number of time frames ranging from 1 week to 4 weeks (screen cap below)

Under this is a summary of your last 5 comments by date/time, email of commenter, the post it was on and the author’s name (I’ve blurred details of those leaving comments below).

Post Views - This page has a line chart at the top which plots the total page views of your blog over the time period. Under the graph you get to track which posts are being viewed most. You have the option to see the Top 5, 10, 20, 50, 100 or all posts by total views and them as a percentage of total views. So as I look at this today I can see that 6% of page views at the moment are on my Blogging for Beginners series of posts with 5% viewing a post on my recent DoS attack.

Comments Posted - This page again has a line chart that tracks the numbers of comments left on your blog over a period of time. This is great to see as I’ve never had a visual on this before. Under the graph is a summary of the stats on your comments with a total number of comments for the period - your average per day and your average per post.

Comments by Post - Similar format here to the ‘Geography’ page in that it has a horizontal bar graph that shows the top 5 posts on your blog ranked by the number of comments (for the period of time selected). Under the graph is the option to view the ‘top’ posts (from top 5 to all again). So at a glance I can see that over the last week my post ‘Which Statistic is Most Crucial to Your Blogging’ has had 26 comments (7% of the total comments for the week just gone by).

Categories - This is the same format of page again. The graph plots which categories on your blog have had the most traffic in the period and the information underneath gives this information in text. Most popular category at enternetusers is ‘Pro Blogging News’ (23%)which is where the majority of posts go. Second most popular is the AdSense one (16%).

The statistics in the ‘activity’ category are very blog specific as you can see. While you can get some of them from other stats packages or from your blog’s stats (if you use WordPress for instance) to have them side by side other stats is fantastic. For instance the comments stats are something you couldn’t ever get from SiteMeter. Very nice.

Marketing Category

Like the other category summary pages this page has three verticle bar graphs across the top that track three stats from the category over 1, 2, 3 or 4 weeks. These are ‘Adsense Clicks’, ‘Search Engines’ and ‘Outbound Links’. They also tell you the figures for ‘today’.

Under this you get the top 5 (also viewable in other numbers) referrers to your blog.

Here’s a screen cap from the Marketing page:

AdSense Clicks - This is a page I’m sure many will love as it tracks the pages on your blog that generate the most clicks via AdSense. The overall amount of AdSense clicks are tracked on a line chart at the top of the page and underneath you can view which pages (posts, front page, category pages - everything) generate clicks. So I can see that my front page actually gets more clicks than any other page on the blog (no surprises there) but that the number two ranked page is actually a single post that is quite old (it generates 22% of my blog’s clicks! ). That is very handy information to have!

These AdSense stats are pretty basic when you compare them to other tracking scripts that track not only pages of clicks but ad sizes and design etc - but this is a good start (I hope they add more features here later and am pretty sure taht they will).

Referrers - This page tracks how people come to your blog (ie the referring sites). This is graphed in a bar chard (ie the top 5 referrers) and then you have the option to view the top 5, 10, 20 etc by total numbers and percentages.

Search engines - This page tracks information on how people arrive to your blog via search engines. Graphed are the top 5 search terms people come to you looking for and under the graph are two types of information. Firstly you get a list of the top keywords and secondly you get a summary of which search engines are sending you traffic. ie here at enternetusers 69% of SE traffic comes from Google.com, 6% is from Google.co.uk, 3% from Yahoo! etc.

Outbound Links - This last page looks at how people leave your blog. It graphs the top 5 links that they click on to get out (not including AdSense from what I can see). Under the graph is the normal ‘top’ list of links that they click. These are hyper linked so you can click them and visit those sites yourself.

These links include affiliate links that you might have linked to which is useful. I find that tracking outbound links is a very useful statistic on a number of fronts but mainly to track which positions on your blog work best for placement of key outbound links. ie I know on one of my blogs that one of the links in my sidebar gets a large percentage of clicks - obviously it’s in prime position and is using words that trigger action. As a result I’ve placed other important links in a similar position.

Overall Impressions

• I am impressed - especially considering that Performancing Metrics is in alpha! The basic feature set is great and will server bloggers well. The tools are quick to load and easy to navigate (once you get the hang of them).
• Stats seem to be updating every hour (so it’s not quite real time like SiteMeter - but it’s better than Google Analytics).
• I’m almost certain that they’ll add more features and suspect that they’ll open up the API for developers to come up with plugins.
• Areas that I’d love to see statistics added in include the ability to track RSS feeds, a more extensive AdSense tracking (and tracking of YPN, Chitika etc would be great of course too). These would make this package very well rounded and would mean that many bloggers could stop using a number of statistics packages and roll all their metrics into one.
• I’m also looking forward to seeing how they develop some overall stats for blog networks. At present all the blogs in our network have their stats sitting separately and there are no overall stats - but I can’t see why they can’t aggregate them together and give network wide stats for all of the above (which will be very handy).

I think this is a system that many bloggers are looking for and am certain it will be very popular. Well done to the team at Performancing!

update: Ahmed has written a preview of Performancing Metrics also.

Share This

Written on March 10th, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 12:03 am by Darren Rowse

‘Old media must embrace the amateur’ says Reuters Head

Pro Blogging News 16 comments

There’s a fascinating article over at the Financial Times by Tom Glocer of (head of Reuters) on how Old media must embrace the amateur which has a lot of talk about new media. Here are a few snippets:

‘There were indications last year that a significant shift in the balance of power between professional content companies and home-based creators lay ahead….

It is important to understand what has changed. Bloggers, after all, have always been a part of history – read Daniel Defoe, Samuel Pepys or James Boswell. The same is true for citizen journalists: just check out first-hand accounts of any big historical event. The difference now is the scale of distribution and the ability to search. Because of this, we in the media industry face a profound challenge, as significant and transformational as Internet 1.0. So how should we respond to and control content fragmentation in this era of two-way flow?…

First, media companies need to be “seeders of clouds”. To have access to high-value new content, we need to attract a community around us….

Second, we need to be “the provider of tools”. This means promoting open standards and interoperability, which will allow a diverse set of consumer-creators to combine disparate types of content….

Third, we must improve on our skills as the “filter and editor”…

In the news industry, professional and “amateur” content combined creates a better product. It tells the story at a deeper level….

dofoslr0sf0Es0*

You have to be open to both amateur and professional content to tell the story completely. I believe that professional articles and photographs, if available, will generally be authoritative. But, in the first instance, they can be complemented by content created by amateurs….

We are now at our crossroads. Old media – and I now would include the first wave of online publishing – have a choice: integrate the new world or risk becoming less relevant.’

That’s one of the more insightful and progressive pieces I’ve seen for a while when it comes to Mainstream Media interacting with new media. Nice work Tom - you should start a blog!

Share This

Written on March 9th, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 11:03 pm by Aaron Brazell

How to: Placing Adsense Strategically Between Posts

Miscellaneous Blog Tips, Blog Design 65 comments

Greetings, fellow enternetuserss (and those who aspire to be enternetuserss). It’s somewhat surreal to be posting here. Darren’s highlighted who I am pretty well (though I’m not sure where he dug up that photo!), so I’ll simply add that my strength lies in WordPress. I have been an Active part of the WordPress development community for some time, so it will be natural to pass along some things I know from my experience with the platform. Some of the tips I write about will be very easy for some, and hopefully there will be entries that challenge even the most advanced. As long as someone is learning, I’m happy.

A few days ago, Darren posted an entry about ad placement that took an interesting turn in the commentary that followed.

Commenter Tom asked:

What is the plug in that you use to put the ads between the 2nd and 3rd post, or do you do so manually?

That, my friends, is the tip of the day. WordPress is a very flexible platform that allows for quite a bit of “munging” to make things work right. For starters, the basic building block of WordPress is a block of code called “The Loop”. It is called that because, literally, it is where the posts for a given page are “looped” through repeatedly to be displayed on the blog.

The standard Loop in the index.php file, is a block of code that might look a bit like this:

if (have_posts()) :
   while (have_posts()) :
      the_post();
      the_content();
   endwhile;
endif;

A basic explanation of this block of code is:

• If there are posts to display on a page, then
• We begin processing the posts one by one as long as there are posts to display

This is, in fact, the absolute minimum that a Loop requires and it will get the job done. The blog won’t be much to look at, but it will display entries successfully. But how do we know where to put the Adsense code?

Here’s the trick: We can actually count how many times Loop has cycled and use that information to our benefit. That same block of code with a counter might look something like this:

// Set Counter to 1, First Post
$counter = 1;
if (have_posts()) :
   while (have_posts()) :
      $counter = $counter + 1;
      the_post();
      the_content();
   endwhile;
endif;

Here we’ve dropped a variable, $counter, into the code, set its initial value to 1 and simply incremented it by 1 after every pass through the Loop.

Now we can worry about determining where to put the Adsense code.

// Set Counter to 1, First Post
$counter = 1;
if (have_posts()) :
   while (have_posts()) :
      $counter = $counter + 1;
      the_post();
      the_content();
      if(2 == $counter)
      {
         echo ‘Adsense code’;
      }
   endwhile;
endif;

Bam Bam Bigelow. That’s all there is to it. Drop your own Adsense code in there and you’re off to the races. Just as a precautionary note, make sure you place the if conditional and Adsense code before the end of the Loop. Most forms of the Loop end before endwhile, but there is a chance that your Loop doesn’t use this same format.

I hope this helps. Feel free to drop requests here in the comments. I’d love to tackle the issues that you as bloggers face and see if we can’t discover more ways to make our blogs sing.

Share This

Written on March 9th, surf Active Apparel website Sell Homemade Video zone.at 10:03 pm by Darren Rowse

Aaron Brazell - New enternetusers Columnist

enternetusers Site News 19 comments

One of the things I’ve enjoyed about enternetusers in the last 12 months has been that I’ve ‘met’ (virtually of course) a large number of amazing bloggers who know a whole heap more about blogging than I do in a variety of areas. I’ve been experimenting with finding ways to highlight some of them lately in a number of ways other than the traditional linking up way.

For example during my Blogging for Beginners series I had approached a few good bloggers to contribute pieces. I was very happy with what they came up with - so much so that it made me realize that there are some aspects of blogging that others are probably better positioned to write about here at enternetusers than myself. I see my own strengths as lying in monetization, SEO and in some of the conceptual stuff - but am weaker when it comes to the technical side of things.

As a result today I approached Aaron Brazell with the idea that he start a weekly (at this point) column on enternetusers that tackles some of your more technical questions.

Aaron won’t be a stranger to many of you - he’s already written three popular posts here (10 things you should know about WordPress 2.0, Tag, You’re It! Leveraging Tagging for Your Blog and Kick Your RSS: Jumping on the Syndication Bandwagon) he’s also the blogger behind and is one of our b5 bloggers (editing our Sports Channel).

So expect to see Aaron’s first post shortly (within the hour). As I say he’ll be looking at more technical aspects of things and will be posting on a weekly basis to start with. If you have questions/suggestion for him to write about feel free to leave a comment in his first post and if you have comments on the idea of adding a second blogger to enternetusers I’d love to hear them.

Share This