Google’s AdSense is a fascinating revenue-sharing opportunity for small, medium and large web sites. Some webmasters are designing brand new sites specifically for serving AdSense text ads, however it’s against the AdSense rules to design a site purely for AdSense, so you’ll want to include a few Affiliate links or sell your own product, too.
Steps
1. Determine a goal for what you want to earn using AdSense. Of course, you want to earn a lot, but make sure it's realistic.
* Consider that to earn $1 a day per page, you need, per page…
o visitors, 5% click-through rate (CTR) and average 5c payout.
o Or 200 visitors, 10% CTR and an average 5c payout.
o Or 100 visitors, 10% CTR, and an average 10c payout.
o Or 100 visitors, 5% CTR, and an average 20c payout
2. Consider whether these goals will be possible given your site. If it's too tough, create two sites, each attracting half the number.
3. Start building keyword-rich pages containing well researched, profitable keywords, and get lots of high quality links to your site. For example, if your site is about topics such as debt consolidation, web hosting or asbestos-related cancer, you’ll earn much more per click than if it’s about free things. On the other hand, if you concentrate only on top-paying keywords, you’ll face an awful lot of tough competition. What you want are keywords that are high in demand and low in supply, So do some careful keyword research before you build your pages.
4. you’ll face an awful lot of tough competition. What you want are keywords that are high in demand and low in supply, So do some careful keyword research before you build your pages.
Google is at least as interested as you are in having your ads perform well on your site and therefore provide the info you need to optimize your AdSense.
Tips
* Quality is the most important part of any web site. If your site does not contain the content of expected quality the visitor might not come back,
* A great resource for earning money is using traffic driving sites like Flixya[1]. You can sign up for Google Adsense and Flixya, without the costs or time needed to build traffic or your own site.
* Avoid non-English characters on English pages. There is a bug which can cause these pages to show irrelevant French ads.
* Although Google doesn't release exact details as to how they determine the ads to serve on a given page, they do say that it's the text content of the page that matters, not the meta tags.
Warnings
* If you don't have any content, Google will have to guess what your page is about. It may guess wrong, and so the ads that it displays may not be relevant.
* Do not click your ads. If Google catches you, they have the right and will close your account and retain any earnings you might have.
Expose Your Blog - To Your Target Audience!
There are two ways for people to get to your blogs – links or social media. These are the place to put your effort to build your blog’s exposure.
Links: There are two types of links:
1. Links you make in other blogs:
• Links from your comments in other blogs.
• Your forum or social media signature.
• Your by-line as guest-posts.
2. Links you get from other blogs:
• Write great articles that people will link to.
• Ask them to link to you or exchange links with them.
The most powerful links that you can make or get are from popular blogs, sites, and forums related to your blogging niche. Not all links are equal - some links are better (in sending readers to your blog) than others. But it’s better to have all these links than to have none or just a few good ones. It’s unmistakable that if you have great and valuable content, links will come naturally.
Try also to write as guest-posts especially in popular blogs. But first, show that your content is worth it.
Social Media: The tip on social media (Digg, StumbleUpon, etc) is simply to be an active user. If you vote for other posts, they tend to vote for your article as this is naturally the easiest way to repay the favor. Once your article has been voted, other people will easily build it up the ladder on.
Some principles that guarantees her success are to be friendly, treat every person you interact with respect, always help out in the best way you can, focus on mutual benefit, and give more than you take.
Other Little Things
Without all of the above, the little things won't work. But once you have the essentials covered, consider putting some effort on the extras
• Make your feed button easily visible (e.g. at the top part without scrolling)
• Add the option to subscribe at the end of each post.
• Put effort on blog design. Readers see that authors’ are more serious with their content if they are serious about their blog design.
Links: There are two types of links:
1. Links you make in other blogs:
• Links from your comments in other blogs.
• Your forum or social media signature.
• Your by-line as guest-posts.
2. Links you get from other blogs:
• Write great articles that people will link to.
• Ask them to link to you or exchange links with them.
The most powerful links that you can make or get are from popular blogs, sites, and forums related to your blogging niche. Not all links are equal - some links are better (in sending readers to your blog) than others. But it’s better to have all these links than to have none or just a few good ones. It’s unmistakable that if you have great and valuable content, links will come naturally.
Try also to write as guest-posts especially in popular blogs. But first, show that your content is worth it.
Social Media: The tip on social media (Digg, StumbleUpon, etc) is simply to be an active user. If you vote for other posts, they tend to vote for your article as this is naturally the easiest way to repay the favor. Once your article has been voted, other people will easily build it up the ladder on.
Some principles that guarantees her success are to be friendly, treat every person you interact with respect, always help out in the best way you can, focus on mutual benefit, and give more than you take.
Other Little Things
Without all of the above, the little things won't work. But once you have the essentials covered, consider putting some effort on the extras
• Make your feed button easily visible (e.g. at the top part without scrolling)
• Add the option to subscribe at the end of each post.
• Put effort on blog design. Readers see that authors’ are more serious with their content if they are serious about their blog design.
Free SEO Guide to Improve Your Search Engine Ranking
Traffic volume is the most important parameter when it comes to monetizing your blog (more visitors = more money). A large portion of traffic volume comes from search engines. To monetize efficiently, it's crucial to get your blog contents in the top list of any search engine result pages (SERP). Search Engine Optimization (SEO) helps you to achieve this goal.
There are two types of search results:
• Natural (a.k.a organic).
• Paid (e.g. sponsored links in Google SERP).
We'll focus on improving your ranking for the natural search results. Getting in the first few pages of the SERP will ensure that most people will find your content.
Search engines basically need one thing to know where to put your blog on their list - your rank on the keyword(s) used to search. For example, if your blog title is Tiki Tiki Guide to Making Money, you might be ranked high if people search for the keywords 'tiki tiki guide'. But you might be far beneath the thousands of other pages on the keywords 'making money online'. The question is, which of these two keyword phrases people will most likely search for. The answer is obvious.
The key to performing SEO lies in knowing what keywords to use and how to optimize their use. Be warned that heavily searched keywords are usually targeted by millions of sites and blogs, whom you have to compete against to move up the SERP. Finding a balance between highly competitive and highly searched keywords is a challenge.
Keyword and SEO research takes time. Even professional bloggers take a few months to move up the SERP right into the first few pages. Above all, content is the heart of a blog. If the content isn't good, no SEO research will do you any good.
Target the Right Keywords
Deciding what to blog is the most critical part. You must do research on keywords prior to deciding your niche. Here are some list of what to check on:
• Search volumes on those keywords.
• Number of competitors writing in the same niche.
• Ads served based on those keywords, so that you don't blog on the ones serving very low cost-per-click(CPC).
• Variations of these keywords: their synonyms and related words or phrases (see which get searched more with less competitor).
The best tool to help you with this is Wordtracker, available at a price. The site offers free trial and limited functions available for free. There are other keyword tools available with different functionalities.
Choose Suitable Domain Name
SEO keywords begin from the URL. The best domain name is the one with keyword(s) in it. It's great to have a URL like www.yourownname.com, but you'll loose out on getting better SERP rank if it doesn't contain any keywords. Isn't it obvious that www.iwanttomakemoneyonline.com helps SEO better than www.johnjohnnyjonathan.com. Unless of course, you've built some high reputation and your name gets searched a lot.
The other perspective on domain naming is that building a brand name is better in the long run, with something easy and catchy to remember. So there's two side of the coin: you might want to flip on it. But once you've built your blog to a certain level, it's not good to change the domain name. Having a URL that's both catchy and keyword-friendly is ultimately the best. Problogger.net is both catchy and keyword-friendly. Use whois lookup to check if a domain is available.
Use Keywords in Other Sections
The idea is to maximize the use of keywords wherever you can (don't overdo it though). These are the places that you must put keywords in them:
• Blog Title - Search engines weigh your blog title heavily. Again, it's best to find a name that is both catchy and keyword-rich.
• Blog Description - This is where you want to write phrases that catches attention, but rich with keywords too. If you're ranked even at No.1, but your description is as dull as a bull, nobody is going to click to your blog.
• File Names - Use keywords to name files, pictures, photos, graphs, videos, etc that you're using in your blog.
• Internal Links - Some sites use image maps with hotspot hyperlinks, images, or buttons to navigate within the sites. This works against SEO. It's better to use text links instead of images as text links carry more weight when getting ranked in search engines.
• Tags or Labels - Each posts should be tagged or labelled with keywords to help strengthen SEO. Some prominent blog directories, like Technorati, uses these tags to identify your blog for others to search.
Blog titles, descriptions, and keywords can be enhanced by using META tags. Here's an article on how to use META tags efficiently.
Use Keywords Often in Content
How do search engine algorithms decide what each post is about? They'll scan for the the most-used keywords in the post, with different weights given to different elements. To make your posts 'acknowledged' as being related to any particular keywords, use and repeat them often in the posts. But don't do this too excessively to the point of being straight-out blunt and annoying. Having the right keyword-density in your posts have two benefits:
• Draws in more related ads to the post pages. Related ads have better click-through-rates (CTR).
• Contributes more towards getting higher rank on those keywords.
Build Links from External Sites
One way to get linked to is by exchanging links, commonly done in Blogrolls. Higher-ranking external sites helps your blog more in terms of SEO. Another way to do this is to submit your blog to directories (here's a tool for an automatic submission for multiple directories). Another highly trusted free directory is DMOZ. Posts can also be submitted to social media directories (e.g. Digg, StumbleUpon) that get voted up/down. Two benefits of submitting to directories:
• You're building links on external sites to your blog/posts.
• Others may stumble on your blog/posts in these directories and visit your blog from there.
Use Keywords to Anchor Hyperlinks
Don't use the term 'click here' to anchor hyperlinks - use keywords instead. Hyperlinks are valued more by ranking algorithms than the normal content text. Keyword anchors contribute better to SEO compared to the clickhere anchors.
Create Efficient Site Navigation Map
How to influence your readers to stay longer in your blog? Make it easy for them to see what's in your blog. To do this is to build efficient site map, something like an Archives or Categories lists. Even better is to list Related Posts items at the end of each post. Use keywords to anchor all links. This practice helps SEO as it build links to your own blog using keywords, albeit internally, and helps spiders to crawl up your pages easily.
------------------------------
This article has been adapted from an article by Randy DuerMyer at About.com (Alexa rank: 144). The main key points was summarized to shorten the text and expanded to include new and valuable information not available in the original article. The new article (1134 words) is much shorter by 40% compared to the original article (1880 words).
There are two types of search results:
• Natural (a.k.a organic).
• Paid (e.g. sponsored links in Google SERP).
We'll focus on improving your ranking for the natural search results. Getting in the first few pages of the SERP will ensure that most people will find your content.
Search engines basically need one thing to know where to put your blog on their list - your rank on the keyword(s) used to search. For example, if your blog title is Tiki Tiki Guide to Making Money, you might be ranked high if people search for the keywords 'tiki tiki guide'. But you might be far beneath the thousands of other pages on the keywords 'making money online'. The question is, which of these two keyword phrases people will most likely search for. The answer is obvious.
The key to performing SEO lies in knowing what keywords to use and how to optimize their use. Be warned that heavily searched keywords are usually targeted by millions of sites and blogs, whom you have to compete against to move up the SERP. Finding a balance between highly competitive and highly searched keywords is a challenge.
Keyword and SEO research takes time. Even professional bloggers take a few months to move up the SERP right into the first few pages. Above all, content is the heart of a blog. If the content isn't good, no SEO research will do you any good.
Target the Right Keywords
Deciding what to blog is the most critical part. You must do research on keywords prior to deciding your niche. Here are some list of what to check on:
• Search volumes on those keywords.
• Number of competitors writing in the same niche.
• Ads served based on those keywords, so that you don't blog on the ones serving very low cost-per-click(CPC).
• Variations of these keywords: their synonyms and related words or phrases (see which get searched more with less competitor).
The best tool to help you with this is Wordtracker, available at a price. The site offers free trial and limited functions available for free. There are other keyword tools available with different functionalities.
Choose Suitable Domain Name
SEO keywords begin from the URL. The best domain name is the one with keyword(s) in it. It's great to have a URL like www.yourownname.com, but you'll loose out on getting better SERP rank if it doesn't contain any keywords. Isn't it obvious that www.iwanttomakemoneyonline.com helps SEO better than www.johnjohnnyjonathan.com. Unless of course, you've built some high reputation and your name gets searched a lot.
The other perspective on domain naming is that building a brand name is better in the long run, with something easy and catchy to remember. So there's two side of the coin: you might want to flip on it. But once you've built your blog to a certain level, it's not good to change the domain name. Having a URL that's both catchy and keyword-friendly is ultimately the best. Problogger.net is both catchy and keyword-friendly. Use whois lookup to check if a domain is available.
Use Keywords in Other Sections
The idea is to maximize the use of keywords wherever you can (don't overdo it though). These are the places that you must put keywords in them:
• Blog Title - Search engines weigh your blog title heavily. Again, it's best to find a name that is both catchy and keyword-rich.
• Blog Description - This is where you want to write phrases that catches attention, but rich with keywords too. If you're ranked even at No.1, but your description is as dull as a bull, nobody is going to click to your blog.
• File Names - Use keywords to name files, pictures, photos, graphs, videos, etc that you're using in your blog.
• Internal Links - Some sites use image maps with hotspot hyperlinks, images, or buttons to navigate within the sites. This works against SEO. It's better to use text links instead of images as text links carry more weight when getting ranked in search engines.
• Tags or Labels - Each posts should be tagged or labelled with keywords to help strengthen SEO. Some prominent blog directories, like Technorati, uses these tags to identify your blog for others to search.
Blog titles, descriptions, and keywords can be enhanced by using META tags. Here's an article on how to use META tags efficiently.
Use Keywords Often in Content
How do search engine algorithms decide what each post is about? They'll scan for the the most-used keywords in the post, with different weights given to different elements. To make your posts 'acknowledged' as being related to any particular keywords, use and repeat them often in the posts. But don't do this too excessively to the point of being straight-out blunt and annoying. Having the right keyword-density in your posts have two benefits:
• Draws in more related ads to the post pages. Related ads have better click-through-rates (CTR).
• Contributes more towards getting higher rank on those keywords.
Build Links from External Sites
One way to get linked to is by exchanging links, commonly done in Blogrolls. Higher-ranking external sites helps your blog more in terms of SEO. Another way to do this is to submit your blog to directories (here's a tool for an automatic submission for multiple directories). Another highly trusted free directory is DMOZ. Posts can also be submitted to social media directories (e.g. Digg, StumbleUpon) that get voted up/down. Two benefits of submitting to directories:
• You're building links on external sites to your blog/posts.
• Others may stumble on your blog/posts in these directories and visit your blog from there.
Use Keywords to Anchor Hyperlinks
Don't use the term 'click here' to anchor hyperlinks - use keywords instead. Hyperlinks are valued more by ranking algorithms than the normal content text. Keyword anchors contribute better to SEO compared to the clickhere anchors.
Create Efficient Site Navigation Map
How to influence your readers to stay longer in your blog? Make it easy for them to see what's in your blog. To do this is to build efficient site map, something like an Archives or Categories lists. Even better is to list Related Posts items at the end of each post. Use keywords to anchor all links. This practice helps SEO as it build links to your own blog using keywords, albeit internally, and helps spiders to crawl up your pages easily.
------------------------------
This article has been adapted from an article by Randy DuerMyer at About.com (Alexa rank: 144). The main key points was summarized to shorten the text and expanded to include new and valuable information not available in the original article. The new article (1134 words) is much shorter by 40% compared to the original article (1880 words).
How to Produce Persuasive Writing?
If you're blogging with a serious goal in mind - building reputation, making money, selling products - you'll want to be heard and trusted. To achieve this you must first be able to persuade your readers. Telling them what your ideas are seems pretty straight forward, but making them believe what you're saying is a completely different thing. It is this ability of persuasion that will put you ahead.
In essence, people tend to agree with others when it benefits them more. The challenge to writers when persuading audience is to create a win-win situation and to present their case well and clear. Below are guides to improve yourself to become a more persuasive writer:
• Repeat your ideas - Not everybody gets it the first time. Repeat your ideas, again and again. But do it in different forms so that it doesn't get boring. Use examples, stories, analogies, or rewording to restate your ideas.
• Give reasons - People will ask 'Why?' to anything. Support your ideas or products with good reasons why they're so or why they're built. This isn't as easy as it sounds. Reasons that make sense convince people. The ones that don't invite debate and trouble. Think carefully before giving any reasons.
• Be consistent - Inconsistent thoughts show confusion, uncertainty, hesitation, and many other bad things. Being consistent shows that you have sound logic, rational thinking, and believable character. A powerful technique to show you're consistent is to present your case at the beginning. Then, convince your readers by supporting your case with evidence, examples, and proof throughout your writing consistently, while repeatedly referring back to the initial argument at the beginning of the article.
• Support with authority - An idea that has been well accepted socially, supported with scientific facts, or backed by prominent figures with strong credentials will easily get accepted by others. Your challenge is to convincingly show them how your case is supported.
• Compare with established ideas - Comparing or relating your case to the ones already established can help convince people. It helps to use metaphors, similes, and analogies. Readers are convinced more easily this way as they only need to see the connection between your ideas to those already established as true.
• Relate to your readers - When you're posting an article as a solution to a problem, don't just solve it. Present the problems clearly and make your readers know that you know well the stakes at hand and empathize with their trouble. Your readers will likely be reading your post because they're facing that problem. They'll trust you more if you can show them that you've dealt with the same situation before and know exactly how to solve it.
• Belong to a group - When you're writing on articles that target specific demographics (group of people), get into their heads and be (or try to be) part of them. You'll be more persuasive if you understand the specific needs and wants of your target group. Then focus your writing to fulfill those needs, rather than trying to generalize your writing to target the whole masses.
• Address disagreements - Not everyone will agree with your ideas. There'll be objections, counter-arguments, and debates. Assessing what those disagreements are and addressing them immediately will save you some trouble and improves people's perception towards your credibility on the subject matter, which increases your persuasive ability. Of course, you can't always think of everything that people will object.
• Tell stories - Unfolding your ideas gradually by telling stories first and relating them back to your core ideas is an effective technique. People believes in stories much easier than they do with dreary arguments. The challenge is for you to tell good stories and to relate them to your ideas. The better the stories you tell, the easier it is to get people to believe you. Hope that you're telling them the right thing then.
In essence, people tend to agree with others when it benefits them more. The challenge to writers when persuading audience is to create a win-win situation and to present their case well and clear. Below are guides to improve yourself to become a more persuasive writer:
• Repeat your ideas - Not everybody gets it the first time. Repeat your ideas, again and again. But do it in different forms so that it doesn't get boring. Use examples, stories, analogies, or rewording to restate your ideas.
• Give reasons - People will ask 'Why?' to anything. Support your ideas or products with good reasons why they're so or why they're built. This isn't as easy as it sounds. Reasons that make sense convince people. The ones that don't invite debate and trouble. Think carefully before giving any reasons.
• Be consistent - Inconsistent thoughts show confusion, uncertainty, hesitation, and many other bad things. Being consistent shows that you have sound logic, rational thinking, and believable character. A powerful technique to show you're consistent is to present your case at the beginning. Then, convince your readers by supporting your case with evidence, examples, and proof throughout your writing consistently, while repeatedly referring back to the initial argument at the beginning of the article.
• Support with authority - An idea that has been well accepted socially, supported with scientific facts, or backed by prominent figures with strong credentials will easily get accepted by others. Your challenge is to convincingly show them how your case is supported.
• Compare with established ideas - Comparing or relating your case to the ones already established can help convince people. It helps to use metaphors, similes, and analogies. Readers are convinced more easily this way as they only need to see the connection between your ideas to those already established as true.
• Relate to your readers - When you're posting an article as a solution to a problem, don't just solve it. Present the problems clearly and make your readers know that you know well the stakes at hand and empathize with their trouble. Your readers will likely be reading your post because they're facing that problem. They'll trust you more if you can show them that you've dealt with the same situation before and know exactly how to solve it.
• Belong to a group - When you're writing on articles that target specific demographics (group of people), get into their heads and be (or try to be) part of them. You'll be more persuasive if you understand the specific needs and wants of your target group. Then focus your writing to fulfill those needs, rather than trying to generalize your writing to target the whole masses.
• Address disagreements - Not everyone will agree with your ideas. There'll be objections, counter-arguments, and debates. Assessing what those disagreements are and addressing them immediately will save you some trouble and improves people's perception towards your credibility on the subject matter, which increases your persuasive ability. Of course, you can't always think of everything that people will object.
• Tell stories - Unfolding your ideas gradually by telling stories first and relating them back to your core ideas is an effective technique. People believes in stories much easier than they do with dreary arguments. The challenge is for you to tell good stories and to relate them to your ideas. The better the stories you tell, the easier it is to get people to believe you. Hope that you're telling them the right thing then.
Guides to Building Quality & Original Content
The single most important aspect on your blog that affects everything else is its content. It has to be unique, original, of high quality, and gives value and meaning to its readers. There are some pointers that you can follow to guide you towards writing these type of contents:
• Add value - The most common ways of finding good topics to write about is by reading other blogs to see which topics create the most buzz. But rewriting it without adding new perspectives or new thoughts simply means that your post is valueless. So, be original, independent, and add something new.
• Add personal experience - Adding your own experiences relevant to the topics does not only add uniqueness to your posts, but also get your readers more interested to learn from it because the value is real. Draw conclusions from your experience and share them with your readers.
• Brainstorm - Writing post isn't simply about typing whatever crosses your mind. A good writing has good ideas, substance, and structure. To achieve any good writing level requires you to do some initial planning and brainstorming. Here's an article that discusses some brainstorming techniques for bloggers.
• Write a journal - Ideas doesn't only popup when you're sitting in front of your screen. It comes in whenever it wants to. If not recorded, it'll be gone, never ever to come back. Writing any ideas you have on a journal keeps you organized. Journal also helps you refine the many ideas you have into a few solid ones that can grow into valuable articles. A post is better written only with proper planning, brainstorming, and editing - which can systematically be done if you make writing a journal a habit.
• Be patient - Some ideas can grow into something complete easily, but not always. Whenever you have a writer's block or have some ideas that couldn't materialize into something meaningful, just be patient and write them in your journal. Small unfinished ideas can be combined into larger and more substantial ideas.
• Be unconventional - When writing on critical issues, there's always two sides to it. The easy way is to go with the flow. But if you can build your arguments to go against the conventional thinking, it'll have a greater chance to strike more interest and be remembered.
• Expand old posts - Looking at some of your old posts (or even other bloggers' posts as well), you'll find that there are a few more popular ones than others. Look back into it and think about how you can broaden its scope or solidify it into something more substantial.
• Add more details - There are many posts that cover only the general information and the basics of some topics, scratching only their surfaces. Try to build on these topics by uncovering more details about them. Put effort to provide in-depth explanations and higher-level knowledge to your visitors.
• Grow your knowledge - What separates you from other bloggers writing on similar niche are your knowledge. Target yourself to be an expert, otherwise you'll never stand out among others.
• Solve problems - People commenting on your blog doesn't just praise or critic your blog. Some presents problems to you, hoping that you might be able to help them out. Choose the right problems to tackle on, work on it, and publish it as a substantial article.
• Act quickly - If you have new great ideas, or think they're great, write and publish them right away. Original and new ideas have a good chance of pulling huge traffic. If you wait, others might write about them first. You'll then loose the only opportunity to be original and the chances of pulling any traffic.
My Comments
The heart of a blog is its content. Without it, it's almost impossible to get anything else: high traffic, large readership, top positions on social bookmarking and directories, and large monetizing revenues.
Question
I haven't encountered any discussions on the style of writing (writing technique, intonation, structure, etc). Does it have any influence on readerships? For example, is writing with straight-forward conversation-style writing better than proper textbook writing when it comes to writing blogs? What about broken English? Better means drawing more visitors, of course.
What do you think? Which style do you like best, or don't you have any preference at all?
-----------------------
This post is an adapted and summarized version from the original post at VandelayDesign.com (Alexa ranking: 24,520). The original article has been shortened from 1231 words to 615 words (50% less) with the main points kept intact.
Adsense vs. BidVertiser - Which is the Best?
>> Browse templates, Money tips, 1 comments
Rafael Enriquez wrote the pros and cons about using BidVertiser and compares it with Adsense to see which one is the best money-making contextual advertisement program online. Because BidVertiser ads are similar to Adsense ads, both of them cannot be run at the same time on the same page.
Using BidVertiser: Pros
• Adsense pays using check but BidVertiser pays through Paypal, which is faster.
• Adsense’s minimum payout is $100 but BidVertiser’s minimum payout is $10, which is quicker.
• BidVertiser allows you to choose the ads to open in a new window, which lets your web/blog stays open and hopefully to have visitors come back easily to your site.
• You can approve ads manually with BidVertiser, not with Adsense.
• You can test to see the final ads template with BidVertiser, not with Adsense.
• You can choose to display eBay auction ads with BidVertiser, but not with Adsense.
• With BidVertiser, you can see the amount of money advertisers are bidding on the ads that will be displayed on your site. With Adsense, you have to use other system (e.g. AdWords) which is not as easy.
Using BidVertiser: Cons
• There are complaints of slow page loads using BidVertiser, not with Adsense. This creates major problems for users.
• Adsense ads are more relevant and thus get higher click-throughs. This is because Adsense has more advertisers in their pool to offer the right ads for any keywords.
• Because there are more advertisers competing in Adsense, chances are ads in Adsense pays more per click.
• There complaints that BidVertiser doesn’t pay on time after reaching the min payout of $10. Adsense reputation in payment is better.
The decision which is better to use is left for individuals to take.
-----------------------
This post is a summary of an original post by Rafael Enriquez at AssociatedContent.com (Alexa rank: 2638). The original length of 578 words has been cut down to 294 words (50% less).
• Add value - The most common ways of finding good topics to write about is by reading other blogs to see which topics create the most buzz. But rewriting it without adding new perspectives or new thoughts simply means that your post is valueless. So, be original, independent, and add something new.
• Add personal experience - Adding your own experiences relevant to the topics does not only add uniqueness to your posts, but also get your readers more interested to learn from it because the value is real. Draw conclusions from your experience and share them with your readers.
• Brainstorm - Writing post isn't simply about typing whatever crosses your mind. A good writing has good ideas, substance, and structure. To achieve any good writing level requires you to do some initial planning and brainstorming. Here's an article that discusses some brainstorming techniques for bloggers.
• Write a journal - Ideas doesn't only popup when you're sitting in front of your screen. It comes in whenever it wants to. If not recorded, it'll be gone, never ever to come back. Writing any ideas you have on a journal keeps you organized. Journal also helps you refine the many ideas you have into a few solid ones that can grow into valuable articles. A post is better written only with proper planning, brainstorming, and editing - which can systematically be done if you make writing a journal a habit.
• Be patient - Some ideas can grow into something complete easily, but not always. Whenever you have a writer's block or have some ideas that couldn't materialize into something meaningful, just be patient and write them in your journal. Small unfinished ideas can be combined into larger and more substantial ideas.
• Be unconventional - When writing on critical issues, there's always two sides to it. The easy way is to go with the flow. But if you can build your arguments to go against the conventional thinking, it'll have a greater chance to strike more interest and be remembered.
• Expand old posts - Looking at some of your old posts (or even other bloggers' posts as well), you'll find that there are a few more popular ones than others. Look back into it and think about how you can broaden its scope or solidify it into something more substantial.
• Add more details - There are many posts that cover only the general information and the basics of some topics, scratching only their surfaces. Try to build on these topics by uncovering more details about them. Put effort to provide in-depth explanations and higher-level knowledge to your visitors.
• Grow your knowledge - What separates you from other bloggers writing on similar niche are your knowledge. Target yourself to be an expert, otherwise you'll never stand out among others.
• Solve problems - People commenting on your blog doesn't just praise or critic your blog. Some presents problems to you, hoping that you might be able to help them out. Choose the right problems to tackle on, work on it, and publish it as a substantial article.
• Act quickly - If you have new great ideas, or think they're great, write and publish them right away. Original and new ideas have a good chance of pulling huge traffic. If you wait, others might write about them first. You'll then loose the only opportunity to be original and the chances of pulling any traffic.
My Comments
The heart of a blog is its content. Without it, it's almost impossible to get anything else: high traffic, large readership, top positions on social bookmarking and directories, and large monetizing revenues.
Question
I haven't encountered any discussions on the style of writing (writing technique, intonation, structure, etc). Does it have any influence on readerships? For example, is writing with straight-forward conversation-style writing better than proper textbook writing when it comes to writing blogs? What about broken English? Better means drawing more visitors, of course.
What do you think? Which style do you like best, or don't you have any preference at all?
-----------------------
This post is an adapted and summarized version from the original post at VandelayDesign.com (Alexa ranking: 24,520). The original article has been shortened from 1231 words to 615 words (50% less) with the main points kept intact.
Adsense vs. BidVertiser - Which is the Best?
>> Browse templates, Money tips, 1 comments
Rafael Enriquez wrote the pros and cons about using BidVertiser and compares it with Adsense to see which one is the best money-making contextual advertisement program online. Because BidVertiser ads are similar to Adsense ads, both of them cannot be run at the same time on the same page.
Using BidVertiser: Pros
• Adsense pays using check but BidVertiser pays through Paypal, which is faster.
• Adsense’s minimum payout is $100 but BidVertiser’s minimum payout is $10, which is quicker.
• BidVertiser allows you to choose the ads to open in a new window, which lets your web/blog stays open and hopefully to have visitors come back easily to your site.
• You can approve ads manually with BidVertiser, not with Adsense.
• You can test to see the final ads template with BidVertiser, not with Adsense.
• You can choose to display eBay auction ads with BidVertiser, but not with Adsense.
• With BidVertiser, you can see the amount of money advertisers are bidding on the ads that will be displayed on your site. With Adsense, you have to use other system (e.g. AdWords) which is not as easy.
Using BidVertiser: Cons
• There are complaints of slow page loads using BidVertiser, not with Adsense. This creates major problems for users.
• Adsense ads are more relevant and thus get higher click-throughs. This is because Adsense has more advertisers in their pool to offer the right ads for any keywords.
• Because there are more advertisers competing in Adsense, chances are ads in Adsense pays more per click.
• There complaints that BidVertiser doesn’t pay on time after reaching the min payout of $10. Adsense reputation in payment is better.
The decision which is better to use is left for individuals to take.
-----------------------
This post is a summary of an original post by Rafael Enriquez at AssociatedContent.com (Alexa rank: 2638). The original length of 578 words has been cut down to 294 words (50% less).
What It Takes to Build a Successful Money-Making Blog
Is it possible to make a comfortable living from blogging? Steve Pavlina launched his blog on October 2004. Within six months, he made $120/month from it. A year and a half later, the revenues increased to $30k/month. It cost him only $9/year on domain, $149/month on hosting, and $0 on marketing or promoting. So, he is making a pretty good living from it.
He wrote a long 7000+ words article on how to build a blog capable of generating such income, added with some reality-check scenarios to caution some overly-optimistic minds of what to expect: only 1% will succeed. I've summarized the main points from the article into a much shorter post (62% less) for a lighter read.
Commit Yourself
The first question to ask yourself before diving down a blogger's path to monetizing is 'Do you want to do this?'. It's a simple question and the straight answer is simple too, but the reality isn't obvious. What people see is that making money from blogging is straight-forward and think that it can be done effortlessly with great result.
But what's not told are the challenges you'll be facing. To really achieve real success, you need to commit yourself fully to it. Do it or don't do it. There's no 'just try it and see what happens' approach. It's not gonna work that way and will just waste your time down the drain.
Decent Income from Blogging?
It's definitely doable to make great money from it and many bloggers have done so superbly. If it's done right, you can achieve 5 or 6 figures annual income from blogging. The difference is in how long it takes you to get there. Doing it part time will take you a while longer than if it's done full time.
The fact is that not everybody can achieve success doing it. 99 out of 100 people will fail generating any reasonable amount of income from blogging. Only 1% will make a healthy and even great living out of it. And the recipe for this success is very simple - you have to be smart in the web-savvy kind of way.
Know Enough About Web Technologies
If you are web-savvy, or can learn to become web-savvy, then you have a great chance of making a real amount of money from blogging. Web-savviness doesn't mean that you have to be a hardcore programmer. You just have to have a decent functional understanding of web technologies, particularly the ones related to blogging and monetizing blogs.
Some examples of these web technologies that matter are blog publishing software (e.g. Wordpress), HTML/XML/CSS, full or partial RSS feed + feedreaders, pings, comments & trackbacks, blog or post directories, search engine ranking and optimization (SEO), page rangking, social media & bookmarking, contextual advertising (e.g. Adsense), affiliate programs, and traffic statistics - just to name a few.
Being web-savvy in these areas doesn't necessarily mean that you are an expert or have an in-depth knowledge, but enough knowledge to understand the basics and apply their functionalities efficiently where needed. Even if you're hiring somebody to do the grunt work, you need to have enough savviness to make any strategic decisions.
If you don't know much about web technologies, then either blogging for money is not for you, or you need to spend some time first learning those things. It's not worth an effort to drag yourself into trying to make big bucks if you're not ready to pick up the skills required. Having no knowledge at all in, say SEO, will put you at a disadvantage to the bloggers who know better what SEO is and how to use it to get their blogs to rank much much higher than yours. But knowing just SEO is not enough. Other areas are important as well and must not be left behind.
What makes things more delicate is that monetized blogging is not just about being web-savvy but also about optimizing your effort to fulfill the needs of so many: you, your readers, advertisers, search engines, etc. Each of these entities may have the same but sometimes differing needs. For example, when giving a post its title, its best to give a title that reflects the whole content and easily and directly captured by your readers. Sometimes you'll want to give it a catchy title that best reflect your ingenuity and wittiness. But, to get the best from SEO or advertising, the title may have to be re-thought to incorporate some critical keywords in it that may skew your original title in the first place.
The whole process is a balancing act, to find what works for everybody. And you can only do this well if you have the functional understanding and skills of the right web technologies.
It may be great to be an expert, but in the case of maximizing your revenue from blogging, this isn't so. Time is better spent if you learn five things just enough to apply them than if you concentrate on one thing to become an expert of it (unless of course this is the topic that you want to blog about). You need to strategize yourself to learn as many things as you can within a short period of time.
Keeping Up with Web's Fast Pace
Web technologies evolve and grow at such a fast pace that it's challenging to keep up with it. New tools keep popping up, that if used, can put you at a serious advantage ahead of your competitors. New opportunities to monetize your blog keep showing up as well. What's hard is the decision to either spend some time learning these new opportunities and use them or forget about them and just focusing on building content. The growth is so rapid that to really learn the new things needs a full-time commitment.
When it comes to decide what's better to do, the ground rule is that you'll be taking a huge risk not to update yourself on what's new. Your success is measured on how well you compete with others (that's what Alexa ranking basically is). To do this well means to keep up with changes in the web and to take advantage of it while you still can. Making mistake isn't the one that will cost you, but missing opportunities is. Each missing opportunities means a lost chance of growing your traffic, audience, and revenues. A good practice is to subscribe to others who are consistently updating their blogs with new opportunities. Darren Rowse's Problogger is a great place to start subscribing as he keeps an update of new monetizing and blogging-related opportunities.
Strategize How to Generate Income
Monetizing blog isn't just about setting up Adsense and affiliate programs and then have a go at it, blindly, hoping you'll cash out in the end. You must have a strategy of how best to generate income from your blog, depending on your overall philosophy and goal of your blog. Blogs that focus more on building long term readerships may have less ads compared to blogs that provide infos on products with lots of ads to help readers choose the best offers.
It's not only the amount of ads that needs careful thinking but also the source of income. You have to think what's the best revenue source for your blog. Is it advertising, affiliate programs, product sales, donations, or any combinations of those? Decide which one is the most important and optimize your dentent, design, and layout around that. Each monetizing platform is unique and require different approaches. it's important that you recognize the differences.
Strategizing also means that you have to create concrete goals, or targets, that you want to achieve within a certain period of time. Once you've set your target, you have to work at it to achieve it. It may sound trivial but will keep you focused on achieving your targets, and know when to say no to new opportunities that doesn't match your blogging strategy. Here's a more detailed account on why creating concrete goals leads to successful blogs.
Learn from other established bloggers (that have similar niche to you) on how they strategize their site and monetization methods. Their technique must have worked well so it's a good hint for you to start there and even imitate their style. Of course, copying the template and content exactly as it is is wrong and will get you in trouble later on.
Traffic
Without doubt, traffic is the most important factor to monetize blogs. Stevepavlina.com's blog, for example, receives over 1.1 million visitors and 2.4 million pageviews a month (on April 2006). Traffic is important simply because it's a direct function of traffic: more traffic = more money (i.e. more clicks, more affiliate sales, more product sales, more donations, more consulting opportunities). It also means simply that your content do gives values to your many visitors.
The main focus of any beginners must be building traffic. Until you've got significantly large traffic levels, monetizing your blogs doesn't make much sense. It's even better not to work on putting ads at all on your blog for the first few months, so that you can focus a 100% on building traffic.
As your traffic level increases, your chances of monetizing your site gets easier. Why? traffic doesn't just mean there are more people coming to your blog, but also more links to your site, more votes to your articles, and more exposure to you and your blog at many levels, both online and offline. All this synergizes to bring so much more, even in terms of monetizing revenues, and it all starts from just building traffic. As the saying goes, 'the whole is greater than the sum of the parts'.
Here are 15 tips on how to build traffic to your site. In addition to this, Steve added that he uses the free service of Blog Carnivals, a kind of post directory, to submit his best posts, which eventually brings more links and visitors to his blog.
Blogging Facilities
In terms of what software to use to publish your blog, Steve highly recommends Wordpress. The reason being that it's free and has lots of features and a solid interface. The hosting and domain fees are relatively cheap, but the hosting needs to be upgraded to a dedicated server or a virtual private server (VPS) once the traffic grows that it's not capable to be hosted on shared accounts. The added benefit of running it under these types of server is that you can publish multiple sites under it without being charged extras.
To add more values to your blog, strategize to build a website from it. Stevepavlina.com gives the example that it's more than a blog. It has other sections as well: article section, audio content, forum section, etc. Many free blogging platforms, such as Blogger, don't provide this option.
Testing and Optimization
It goes without saying that the technique to know what works best is by testing trial and error. Do this when you want to know what monetizing programs (Adsense, Text Link Ads, Chitika eMiniMall, Amazon, Kontera, etc) work best for you. Do this also when you want to know the best layout for your blog (site design, colors, sidebars, ads position and configuration, etc). But, if you search well, you'll find some good tips already available on what people have experimented and what are their results. It's worth reading before you do some testing from scratch yourself. Here are some tips on the testing and optimization on Adsense.
Picking the Right Niche
Picking a niche is critical. For one, you have to have a sense that you can build a significantly large traffic from it. Choosing a niche too specific or too uncommon to have large followers would mean that in the end you can only build your traffic to a certain level only, no bigger than that. Basically, the target market is just too small. It maybe true that the number of competitors isn't large too, which is an advantage initially, but the opportunities to grow is already limited by its market size.
So, make sure that the niche you choose is broad enough to draw large traffic in. You surely have to compete with more sites and blogs, but if developed well, you have a chance to capitalize on its larger market. Broad enough topic also provide a larger pool of advertisers and advertisement to be served on your site.
When you have picked a niche, be clear up front to your visitors what your blog is about. There are blogs that worry too much on putting clever titles and description, but aren't direct and clear enough to provide meaning to visitors on a first glance. It's even worst if your title and description suggest to your visitors that your blog is just a personal blog, which is a drawback, when it's clearly not. Personal blog, while great on personal basis, aren't typically consistent on topics written, do not target specific readers, don't always provide valuable and meaningful content to others, and most of all, aren't capable of monetizing large income. But, as with anything in life, there's always an exception to this.
Picking a niche isn't just about capitalizing on its traffic size. The most fundamental issue of all is whether you are able to provide a quality content on it. Writing on something you're passionate or love will automatically be a driving force for you to be consistent, compared to writing on something that you don't have any feel for but want to write because you think you can make big money from it. A quick example, if you're familiar with high paying keywords, is writing on mesothelioma. It's by far is on the top list of highly paid keywords of cost-per-click ads, but how well can you write on that? Unless you're confident that you can pick up on the subject quickly, then by all means go for it.
Motivation
One of the biggest question during the early days of blogging when money doesn't come by quickly to drive you, is whether you can sustain your effort to write quality content for a long time. It's most sustainable if the topics are the ones you're most interested and passionate about. If your main motivation is money, then it'll be quite dragging for the first few months when money isn't big, yet. It might put you back even to a point of quitting. So, be realistic when choosing what topics to write about, and think whether it is something that you will have the heart and energy to write about for a long period of time.
Posting Frequency and Length
Which is better: long articles posted 3-5 times a week or short articles posted 10-20 times a week? Even top bloggers have different opinion on this. The basic rule is it depends on your type of information in your content. What you want is to give content of value and meaning to others. If short posts are sufficient to do it, e.g. specification on products which are preferred in short forms for quick reference, then by all means that's the best. But in other niches long posts are required for better explanation and in-depth scope of the subject, such as in the topics of personal development. If thought hard enough, frequency and length of posting are quite self-explanatory. If not, then experimentation with short and long posts are the way to go to figure them out.
Perks of Blogging
Given that your blog is successful, blogging is simply a great way to earn an income. For one, it's extremely cheap. you can work wherever you want, even from your home, which can be anywhere you want it to be. You can do it any time any day any hours you want. All that is within reach only if you put your energy in it and smart enough to learn and keep up with all the technologies that the web has to offer.
My Comments
I totally subscribe to his fundamental principle that to find success in blogging you need to be absolutely clear that you're in it for serious and need to commit to it. The fact that only a small percentage of people makes it through beautifully says that it's full of challenges but not often realized.
One thing that's clear here is that monetizing is not just about setting up blogs, putting some Adsense, and boom boom boom posting and posting. There's a definite philosophy and strategy to be thought out carefully, readiness to learn and absorb all old and new web technologies that keep popping up faster than a mushroom bloom. It's a whole new game, but a serious game notwithstanding. The fact that millions are doing it and millions more are just jumping in doesn't make it an easy toy to play with.
----------------------------
This article is an adaptation and summarized version from the original post by Steve Pavlina at Stevepavlina.com (Alexa ranking: 10,159). The original article is extremely long with a length of 7425 words. This adapted version has a much shorter length of 2815 (62% less) with most of the main points remain intact, added with some new insights based on other authentic tips.
He wrote a long 7000+ words article on how to build a blog capable of generating such income, added with some reality-check scenarios to caution some overly-optimistic minds of what to expect: only 1% will succeed. I've summarized the main points from the article into a much shorter post (62% less) for a lighter read.
Commit Yourself
The first question to ask yourself before diving down a blogger's path to monetizing is 'Do you want to do this?'. It's a simple question and the straight answer is simple too, but the reality isn't obvious. What people see is that making money from blogging is straight-forward and think that it can be done effortlessly with great result.
But what's not told are the challenges you'll be facing. To really achieve real success, you need to commit yourself fully to it. Do it or don't do it. There's no 'just try it and see what happens' approach. It's not gonna work that way and will just waste your time down the drain.
Decent Income from Blogging?
It's definitely doable to make great money from it and many bloggers have done so superbly. If it's done right, you can achieve 5 or 6 figures annual income from blogging. The difference is in how long it takes you to get there. Doing it part time will take you a while longer than if it's done full time.
The fact is that not everybody can achieve success doing it. 99 out of 100 people will fail generating any reasonable amount of income from blogging. Only 1% will make a healthy and even great living out of it. And the recipe for this success is very simple - you have to be smart in the web-savvy kind of way.
Know Enough About Web Technologies
If you are web-savvy, or can learn to become web-savvy, then you have a great chance of making a real amount of money from blogging. Web-savviness doesn't mean that you have to be a hardcore programmer. You just have to have a decent functional understanding of web technologies, particularly the ones related to blogging and monetizing blogs.
Some examples of these web technologies that matter are blog publishing software (e.g. Wordpress), HTML/XML/CSS, full or partial RSS feed + feedreaders, pings, comments & trackbacks, blog or post directories, search engine ranking and optimization (SEO), page rangking, social media & bookmarking, contextual advertising (e.g. Adsense), affiliate programs, and traffic statistics - just to name a few.
Being web-savvy in these areas doesn't necessarily mean that you are an expert or have an in-depth knowledge, but enough knowledge to understand the basics and apply their functionalities efficiently where needed. Even if you're hiring somebody to do the grunt work, you need to have enough savviness to make any strategic decisions.
If you don't know much about web technologies, then either blogging for money is not for you, or you need to spend some time first learning those things. It's not worth an effort to drag yourself into trying to make big bucks if you're not ready to pick up the skills required. Having no knowledge at all in, say SEO, will put you at a disadvantage to the bloggers who know better what SEO is and how to use it to get their blogs to rank much much higher than yours. But knowing just SEO is not enough. Other areas are important as well and must not be left behind.
What makes things more delicate is that monetized blogging is not just about being web-savvy but also about optimizing your effort to fulfill the needs of so many: you, your readers, advertisers, search engines, etc. Each of these entities may have the same but sometimes differing needs. For example, when giving a post its title, its best to give a title that reflects the whole content and easily and directly captured by your readers. Sometimes you'll want to give it a catchy title that best reflect your ingenuity and wittiness. But, to get the best from SEO or advertising, the title may have to be re-thought to incorporate some critical keywords in it that may skew your original title in the first place.
The whole process is a balancing act, to find what works for everybody. And you can only do this well if you have the functional understanding and skills of the right web technologies.
It may be great to be an expert, but in the case of maximizing your revenue from blogging, this isn't so. Time is better spent if you learn five things just enough to apply them than if you concentrate on one thing to become an expert of it (unless of course this is the topic that you want to blog about). You need to strategize yourself to learn as many things as you can within a short period of time.
Keeping Up with Web's Fast Pace
Web technologies evolve and grow at such a fast pace that it's challenging to keep up with it. New tools keep popping up, that if used, can put you at a serious advantage ahead of your competitors. New opportunities to monetize your blog keep showing up as well. What's hard is the decision to either spend some time learning these new opportunities and use them or forget about them and just focusing on building content. The growth is so rapid that to really learn the new things needs a full-time commitment.
When it comes to decide what's better to do, the ground rule is that you'll be taking a huge risk not to update yourself on what's new. Your success is measured on how well you compete with others (that's what Alexa ranking basically is). To do this well means to keep up with changes in the web and to take advantage of it while you still can. Making mistake isn't the one that will cost you, but missing opportunities is. Each missing opportunities means a lost chance of growing your traffic, audience, and revenues. A good practice is to subscribe to others who are consistently updating their blogs with new opportunities. Darren Rowse's Problogger is a great place to start subscribing as he keeps an update of new monetizing and blogging-related opportunities.
Strategize How to Generate Income
Monetizing blog isn't just about setting up Adsense and affiliate programs and then have a go at it, blindly, hoping you'll cash out in the end. You must have a strategy of how best to generate income from your blog, depending on your overall philosophy and goal of your blog. Blogs that focus more on building long term readerships may have less ads compared to blogs that provide infos on products with lots of ads to help readers choose the best offers.
It's not only the amount of ads that needs careful thinking but also the source of income. You have to think what's the best revenue source for your blog. Is it advertising, affiliate programs, product sales, donations, or any combinations of those? Decide which one is the most important and optimize your dentent, design, and layout around that. Each monetizing platform is unique and require different approaches. it's important that you recognize the differences.
Strategizing also means that you have to create concrete goals, or targets, that you want to achieve within a certain period of time. Once you've set your target, you have to work at it to achieve it. It may sound trivial but will keep you focused on achieving your targets, and know when to say no to new opportunities that doesn't match your blogging strategy. Here's a more detailed account on why creating concrete goals leads to successful blogs.
Learn from other established bloggers (that have similar niche to you) on how they strategize their site and monetization methods. Their technique must have worked well so it's a good hint for you to start there and even imitate their style. Of course, copying the template and content exactly as it is is wrong and will get you in trouble later on.
Traffic
Without doubt, traffic is the most important factor to monetize blogs. Stevepavlina.com's blog, for example, receives over 1.1 million visitors and 2.4 million pageviews a month (on April 2006). Traffic is important simply because it's a direct function of traffic: more traffic = more money (i.e. more clicks, more affiliate sales, more product sales, more donations, more consulting opportunities). It also means simply that your content do gives values to your many visitors.
The main focus of any beginners must be building traffic. Until you've got significantly large traffic levels, monetizing your blogs doesn't make much sense. It's even better not to work on putting ads at all on your blog for the first few months, so that you can focus a 100% on building traffic.
As your traffic level increases, your chances of monetizing your site gets easier. Why? traffic doesn't just mean there are more people coming to your blog, but also more links to your site, more votes to your articles, and more exposure to you and your blog at many levels, both online and offline. All this synergizes to bring so much more, even in terms of monetizing revenues, and it all starts from just building traffic. As the saying goes, 'the whole is greater than the sum of the parts'.
Here are 15 tips on how to build traffic to your site. In addition to this, Steve added that he uses the free service of Blog Carnivals, a kind of post directory, to submit his best posts, which eventually brings more links and visitors to his blog.
Blogging Facilities
In terms of what software to use to publish your blog, Steve highly recommends Wordpress. The reason being that it's free and has lots of features and a solid interface. The hosting and domain fees are relatively cheap, but the hosting needs to be upgraded to a dedicated server or a virtual private server (VPS) once the traffic grows that it's not capable to be hosted on shared accounts. The added benefit of running it under these types of server is that you can publish multiple sites under it without being charged extras.
To add more values to your blog, strategize to build a website from it. Stevepavlina.com gives the example that it's more than a blog. It has other sections as well: article section, audio content, forum section, etc. Many free blogging platforms, such as Blogger, don't provide this option.
Testing and Optimization
It goes without saying that the technique to know what works best is by testing trial and error. Do this when you want to know what monetizing programs (Adsense, Text Link Ads, Chitika eMiniMall, Amazon, Kontera, etc) work best for you. Do this also when you want to know the best layout for your blog (site design, colors, sidebars, ads position and configuration, etc). But, if you search well, you'll find some good tips already available on what people have experimented and what are their results. It's worth reading before you do some testing from scratch yourself. Here are some tips on the testing and optimization on Adsense.
Picking the Right Niche
Picking a niche is critical. For one, you have to have a sense that you can build a significantly large traffic from it. Choosing a niche too specific or too uncommon to have large followers would mean that in the end you can only build your traffic to a certain level only, no bigger than that. Basically, the target market is just too small. It maybe true that the number of competitors isn't large too, which is an advantage initially, but the opportunities to grow is already limited by its market size.
So, make sure that the niche you choose is broad enough to draw large traffic in. You surely have to compete with more sites and blogs, but if developed well, you have a chance to capitalize on its larger market. Broad enough topic also provide a larger pool of advertisers and advertisement to be served on your site.
When you have picked a niche, be clear up front to your visitors what your blog is about. There are blogs that worry too much on putting clever titles and description, but aren't direct and clear enough to provide meaning to visitors on a first glance. It's even worst if your title and description suggest to your visitors that your blog is just a personal blog, which is a drawback, when it's clearly not. Personal blog, while great on personal basis, aren't typically consistent on topics written, do not target specific readers, don't always provide valuable and meaningful content to others, and most of all, aren't capable of monetizing large income. But, as with anything in life, there's always an exception to this.
Picking a niche isn't just about capitalizing on its traffic size. The most fundamental issue of all is whether you are able to provide a quality content on it. Writing on something you're passionate or love will automatically be a driving force for you to be consistent, compared to writing on something that you don't have any feel for but want to write because you think you can make big money from it. A quick example, if you're familiar with high paying keywords, is writing on mesothelioma. It's by far is on the top list of highly paid keywords of cost-per-click ads, but how well can you write on that? Unless you're confident that you can pick up on the subject quickly, then by all means go for it.
Motivation
One of the biggest question during the early days of blogging when money doesn't come by quickly to drive you, is whether you can sustain your effort to write quality content for a long time. It's most sustainable if the topics are the ones you're most interested and passionate about. If your main motivation is money, then it'll be quite dragging for the first few months when money isn't big, yet. It might put you back even to a point of quitting. So, be realistic when choosing what topics to write about, and think whether it is something that you will have the heart and energy to write about for a long period of time.
Posting Frequency and Length
Which is better: long articles posted 3-5 times a week or short articles posted 10-20 times a week? Even top bloggers have different opinion on this. The basic rule is it depends on your type of information in your content. What you want is to give content of value and meaning to others. If short posts are sufficient to do it, e.g. specification on products which are preferred in short forms for quick reference, then by all means that's the best. But in other niches long posts are required for better explanation and in-depth scope of the subject, such as in the topics of personal development. If thought hard enough, frequency and length of posting are quite self-explanatory. If not, then experimentation with short and long posts are the way to go to figure them out.
Perks of Blogging
Given that your blog is successful, blogging is simply a great way to earn an income. For one, it's extremely cheap. you can work wherever you want, even from your home, which can be anywhere you want it to be. You can do it any time any day any hours you want. All that is within reach only if you put your energy in it and smart enough to learn and keep up with all the technologies that the web has to offer.
My Comments
I totally subscribe to his fundamental principle that to find success in blogging you need to be absolutely clear that you're in it for serious and need to commit to it. The fact that only a small percentage of people makes it through beautifully says that it's full of challenges but not often realized.
One thing that's clear here is that monetizing is not just about setting up blogs, putting some Adsense, and boom boom boom posting and posting. There's a definite philosophy and strategy to be thought out carefully, readiness to learn and absorb all old and new web technologies that keep popping up faster than a mushroom bloom. It's a whole new game, but a serious game notwithstanding. The fact that millions are doing it and millions more are just jumping in doesn't make it an easy toy to play with.
----------------------------
This article is an adaptation and summarized version from the original post by Steve Pavlina at Stevepavlina.com (Alexa ranking: 10,159). The original article is extremely long with a length of 7425 words. This adapted version has a much shorter length of 2815 (62% less) with most of the main points remain intact, added with some new insights based on other authentic tips.
Factors for Success
There are 4 major factors to make Adsense more successful to bring money in:
• Traffic Levels - As the number of visitors increases, so does the total number of clicks.
• High Paying Ads - Ads that cost the advertisers $3 per click will add more to your revenue than ads that cost $0.01 per click. Finding the right keywords to be the niche of your blog that targets these high (or at least moderate) paying ads are very crucial before you start a blog. Targeting niche keywords that pay very little is not worth your effort.
• Relevant Ads - Ads that are more closely related to your blog are more likely to interest your visitors to click upon. 'Public Service Announcement' or ads that are not related to your content are less likely to be clicked upon because generally, they don't spark any interest in your visitors.
• Optimal Ads Position and Design - Ads position, colors, sizes, number of units, and borders do affect visitors' behavior in looking or clicking at them. Finding the optimal design and position is crucial to maximize your Adsense income.
Each one of these factors are as important as the other. Do not only focus on one or two of them and leaving the other parts weak. Your Adsense success is as good as the weakest part. This is a fact adviced by many probloggers. For example, having high paying ads served on your blog but with only a small number of visitors won't result in good amount of conversion. More details on these factors are explained below.
How to Increase Traffic
These are some practical tips to increase traffic levels that have worked well for many experienced bloggers.
• Build useful, quality, interesting and original content - Reflect on the blogs that you read often and think again why you read them.
• Good blog design - Do you tend to think that a blog has quality content if the design is terrible?
• Link to others - You'll only have others linking to you if you have shown your generosity in linking to others first. Linking helps in two ways: (1) Bring more visitors. (2) Increase your ranking.
• Comment on other blogs - Interact with others genuinely (not spamming) by giving thoughtful comments in other blogs. People will grow their interest in your blog as you interact more with them.
• Update frequently - a significant part of large traffic comes from frequent readers, who wants to see fresh contents all the time.
• Interact with readers - Interact with your readers actively. Answer comments, questions, create memes, games, etc.
• Optimize for search engines - Visitors that tend to click on the ads the most come from search engines. Doing SEO will increase your revenues and your rank as well.
• Add your blog add in your email signature - This can help increase visitor numbers to your blog too.
• Create RSS feed - Let your readers have the option to subscribe easily to your blog's content. Visit Feedburner.com for more details. This method eases their connectivity to your blog.
• List your URL in directories - This increases the chance for people of relevant interest finding your blog easier through many mediums and portals.
• Submit to search engines - Send your blog URL to search engines too and similar sites such as Technorati. Use the right and relevant keywords to describe your blog as this is the most crucial information that connects your blog to your visitors.
• Create a newsletter - This is another option to update your readers of new postings.
• Get involve in other blog projects - Make yourself visible in the blogosphere by actively participating in other projects or memes. The more visibility you have the better.
• Participate in forums - This are the places to find other with similar interest. You can draw visitors to your blog by making yourself visible through helping others in the forums.
• Promote your posts - Send your great posts to others or submit them in social media if you think they have a chance to get votted up. Be selective of which posts to promote to avoid being too annoying.
• Add an 'Email a Friend' button - Add this button below each of your posts to let your readers have the option to email their friends.
High Paying Ads
It's pretty obvious that you should target high paying keywords to get a higher money return from Adsense. There are some sites on the internet listing out a limited number of keywords that are high paying ones. The downside of targeting these keywords are that they are highly competitive too: others are doing it as well. It's now becoming more difficult to rank well in search engines on these keywords. But that this does not mean that you shouldn't do it if you're confident to write excellent and quality content on those keywords.
A more common high paying keywords are the ones related to technology products as those are expensive products and businesses are willing to pay more to get advertised. Examples of successful blogs running these types of contents are Engadget, Gizmodo, and PVRblog just to name a few.
Targeting these high paying keywords alone doesn't guarantee success. The rules of getting high traffic still applies - and you have to be able to build high quality content for that. If you're more comfortable writing on moderately paying content and get more traffic on these niches, then this is a better strategy to do.
There are some strategies and tools to use to find and research more on these high paying keywords:
• Do these keywords serve ads? - The first thing you want to check is whether the keywords you want to target serve ads. Simply type those keywords in Google and see if ads are served. If not, then your content related to those keywords are unlikely to serve ads too. By searching this way, you can also see other sites and blogs focusing on those keywords.
• Buy them - There are many professional tools available at a cost that gives you hundreds of thousands of these keywords.
• Use WordTracker - They have the best tool available related to finding and researching on keywords. They also tell you the number of other competing sites/blogs on any specific keywords.
• Use Adwords - If you are ready to invest some cash, try becoming the advertisers yourself and see how much people are bidding for any keywords and get a better feel how to optimize the keywords you use.
Remember again that you have to focus on building high traffic levels too. If you're not able to do this using the extremely high paying keywords, then they're not worth it. Try the more moderate paying ones, as long as you can build quality content on it. But at the other extreme, targeting those low paying ads is not worthwhile.
Relevant Ads
Imagine a blog that wants to target 'making money online' as keywords but have the word 'blog' or 'blogging' too many times throughout the content, even the title and URL. The keyword 'money' or its related keywords are not frequently used. As a result, the ads served are more related to 'creating blogs' and not entirely relevant to the whole content of making money online. This is one example scenario of irrelevant ads.
There are a few things that you can do to get more relevant ads served on your blog:
• Are there ads available? - Make sure the keywords you're targeting have ads available to be served on your blog. If not, look for other keywords or different keywords with similar meaning that serve more ads.
• Increase keyword density - Words that are used more frequently bound to be recognized as the main keywords of your blog. Try to increase the number of keywords in your content, title, header, URL, sidebars, footer, menus, outward links, bold text, etc. But don't repeat too much to the point that it becomes to obvious and annoying to the readers. Keyword Density at SEOChat.com is a good tool to use for this purpose.
• Reduce irrelevant keywords - Check for words that are not your keywords but have quite a high density in your URL, header, menus, content, sidebars, footer, etc. They may be recognized as important keywords by Adsense bots. Make sure that the ads served are not related to them. Otherwise, you have to change them a bit to reduce their density.
• One topic per page - Do not focus on too many keywords per page. This confuses Adsense bots to decide which keywords are the most relevant. If this happen to you, it's better to split the text into a few series in different pages.
• Block irrelevant ads - Adsense gives you the option to block ads unrelated to your blog content that may appear without you wanting it to be there.
Optimal Ads Position and Design
Adsense allows a number of different ads design and position to choose from. Depending on your blog design and content, some of these ads position and design work better than the others. Which ones the best for you?
One thing for sure, it work differently for different people and different blog. The best way is to test them all. But there are some pointers to follow to cut your work short:
• Blend content and ads - Most Adsense users found success when ads and content are blended together as if the ad blocks are not advertisements at all. A few tricks to do this is making the ads background and borders the same color as the content background, ads titles and links to be just like the content links. Many guides mention that blue is the best color for ads titles because they are the most common link color.
• Place ads in content - Ads will blend better with content if they are placed together with the content. For example, see this page where you have the ads wrapped with the content just below the Post Title. But too much ads wrapped with the contents can annoy your reader. So try to do this moderately. You can look for examples in well-established blogs and see how the pros do it and adapt those strategies into your own blog.
• Above the fold - Above the fold means that you put the ads where readers can see it without needing to scroll down the page. A substantial amount of visitors just check out sites for a few seconds only. Any ads that need scrolling would have missed their eyes.
• Follow the heat map - The heat map below has been produced by Google based on the statistics of visits to Adsense ads. Clearly, based on this map, the best place to put ads is just at the beginning of the post, blended with the content itself. The other good section is on the left and above/below the post.
• Not too much ads - The main purpose of a blog or site is to serve information to its readers. Crowding it with too much ads defeat the purpose, and people are not blind to see what you're trying to do. Avoid over-crowding yours with ads. Find a balance. There are other types of sites that are more commercial in nature - serving quick infos with lots of outward links. This maybe a place for you to place more ads to provide your visitors the option of finding the best products (i.e. ads) to go to.
• Keep changing ads position and design - Regular visitors and frequent readers to your blog are more 'blind' to your ads, meaning that they've seen it too often that they know where NOT to look at. Avoid this 'Ad-blindness' by frequently moving around the ads position and changing their designs. Many bloggers found that this technique improved their click-through-rates after the changes, until the next ads-blindness kicks in again.
Bringing All Together
The key to Adsense success is to work on all these 4 different areas. Working on only 3 and leaving 1 factor behind will mean that your return is as good as the weakest one that you leave behind.
There are other small things that you'll want to consider in addition to the core tips above:
• Not too much outgoing links - The less outgoing links you have, the less 'exit doors' your visitors have to leave. But not having any links at all would mean that you're not focusing on building quality informative site which is suppose to provide options for additional details. So, provide your readers with these outbound links but don't have them too excessively.
• Using frames - if you're using frames, place your ads and contents within the same frame. Otherwise, Adsense bots will not recognize the connection between the two.
• Don’t click your own ads - This is obvious. Google knows well. They'll even know if somebody else is doing this dirty 'deeds' for you. It's all in the IPs and correlating the click patterns. Don't even encourage your readers to do it by giving some incentives as this violates the rule and will get you banned from the program. Basic rule - don't do it.
• Monitor your statistics - One good tool to use is Adsense Tracker. This isn't a freeware. But, it does provide many options for you track your Adsense performance. It logs the performance of individual ad units, every pages, and basically answers the where, when and what ads are clicked. With this information, you'll be able to develop strategies to optimize your blog content and ads design and position.
• Use alternative ads - There may comes a time when Public Service Announcement (PSA) ads, that doesn't add to your revenue, are served on your blog. Get something more profitable to appear instead. In Adsense page, you can select alternative ads to be served, such as Amazon or other affiliate ads program.
Note: Here's a more compact tips on Adsense optimization based on an article by Sharon Housley at About.com. There are some additional infos not covered in this article.
----------------------
This post was written based on some of the major facts of Adsense optimization presented by Darren Rowse at Problogger.net (Alexa ranking: 3321). I've summarized his post, with some additional infos, into a more compact form to let you grasp all the important points within a quick read. The original post by Darren is 6922 words, cut 65% less down to 2425 words, with all the important facts remain intact.
• Traffic Levels - As the number of visitors increases, so does the total number of clicks.
• High Paying Ads - Ads that cost the advertisers $3 per click will add more to your revenue than ads that cost $0.01 per click. Finding the right keywords to be the niche of your blog that targets these high (or at least moderate) paying ads are very crucial before you start a blog. Targeting niche keywords that pay very little is not worth your effort.
• Relevant Ads - Ads that are more closely related to your blog are more likely to interest your visitors to click upon. 'Public Service Announcement' or ads that are not related to your content are less likely to be clicked upon because generally, they don't spark any interest in your visitors.
• Optimal Ads Position and Design - Ads position, colors, sizes, number of units, and borders do affect visitors' behavior in looking or clicking at them. Finding the optimal design and position is crucial to maximize your Adsense income.
Each one of these factors are as important as the other. Do not only focus on one or two of them and leaving the other parts weak. Your Adsense success is as good as the weakest part. This is a fact adviced by many probloggers. For example, having high paying ads served on your blog but with only a small number of visitors won't result in good amount of conversion. More details on these factors are explained below.
How to Increase Traffic
These are some practical tips to increase traffic levels that have worked well for many experienced bloggers.
• Build useful, quality, interesting and original content - Reflect on the blogs that you read often and think again why you read them.
• Good blog design - Do you tend to think that a blog has quality content if the design is terrible?
• Link to others - You'll only have others linking to you if you have shown your generosity in linking to others first. Linking helps in two ways: (1) Bring more visitors. (2) Increase your ranking.
• Comment on other blogs - Interact with others genuinely (not spamming) by giving thoughtful comments in other blogs. People will grow their interest in your blog as you interact more with them.
• Update frequently - a significant part of large traffic comes from frequent readers, who wants to see fresh contents all the time.
• Interact with readers - Interact with your readers actively. Answer comments, questions, create memes, games, etc.
• Optimize for search engines - Visitors that tend to click on the ads the most come from search engines. Doing SEO will increase your revenues and your rank as well.
• Add your blog add in your email signature - This can help increase visitor numbers to your blog too.
• Create RSS feed - Let your readers have the option to subscribe easily to your blog's content. Visit Feedburner.com for more details. This method eases their connectivity to your blog.
• List your URL in directories - This increases the chance for people of relevant interest finding your blog easier through many mediums and portals.
• Submit to search engines - Send your blog URL to search engines too and similar sites such as Technorati. Use the right and relevant keywords to describe your blog as this is the most crucial information that connects your blog to your visitors.
• Create a newsletter - This is another option to update your readers of new postings.
• Get involve in other blog projects - Make yourself visible in the blogosphere by actively participating in other projects or memes. The more visibility you have the better.
• Participate in forums - This are the places to find other with similar interest. You can draw visitors to your blog by making yourself visible through helping others in the forums.
• Promote your posts - Send your great posts to others or submit them in social media if you think they have a chance to get votted up. Be selective of which posts to promote to avoid being too annoying.
• Add an 'Email a Friend' button - Add this button below each of your posts to let your readers have the option to email their friends.
High Paying Ads
It's pretty obvious that you should target high paying keywords to get a higher money return from Adsense. There are some sites on the internet listing out a limited number of keywords that are high paying ones. The downside of targeting these keywords are that they are highly competitive too: others are doing it as well. It's now becoming more difficult to rank well in search engines on these keywords. But that this does not mean that you shouldn't do it if you're confident to write excellent and quality content on those keywords.
A more common high paying keywords are the ones related to technology products as those are expensive products and businesses are willing to pay more to get advertised. Examples of successful blogs running these types of contents are Engadget, Gizmodo, and PVRblog just to name a few.
Targeting these high paying keywords alone doesn't guarantee success. The rules of getting high traffic still applies - and you have to be able to build high quality content for that. If you're more comfortable writing on moderately paying content and get more traffic on these niches, then this is a better strategy to do.
There are some strategies and tools to use to find and research more on these high paying keywords:
• Do these keywords serve ads? - The first thing you want to check is whether the keywords you want to target serve ads. Simply type those keywords in Google and see if ads are served. If not, then your content related to those keywords are unlikely to serve ads too. By searching this way, you can also see other sites and blogs focusing on those keywords.
• Buy them - There are many professional tools available at a cost that gives you hundreds of thousands of these keywords.
• Use WordTracker - They have the best tool available related to finding and researching on keywords. They also tell you the number of other competing sites/blogs on any specific keywords.
• Use Adwords - If you are ready to invest some cash, try becoming the advertisers yourself and see how much people are bidding for any keywords and get a better feel how to optimize the keywords you use.
Remember again that you have to focus on building high traffic levels too. If you're not able to do this using the extremely high paying keywords, then they're not worth it. Try the more moderate paying ones, as long as you can build quality content on it. But at the other extreme, targeting those low paying ads is not worthwhile.
Relevant Ads
Imagine a blog that wants to target 'making money online' as keywords but have the word 'blog' or 'blogging' too many times throughout the content, even the title and URL. The keyword 'money' or its related keywords are not frequently used. As a result, the ads served are more related to 'creating blogs' and not entirely relevant to the whole content of making money online. This is one example scenario of irrelevant ads.
There are a few things that you can do to get more relevant ads served on your blog:
• Are there ads available? - Make sure the keywords you're targeting have ads available to be served on your blog. If not, look for other keywords or different keywords with similar meaning that serve more ads.
• Increase keyword density - Words that are used more frequently bound to be recognized as the main keywords of your blog. Try to increase the number of keywords in your content, title, header, URL, sidebars, footer, menus, outward links, bold text, etc. But don't repeat too much to the point that it becomes to obvious and annoying to the readers. Keyword Density at SEOChat.com is a good tool to use for this purpose.
• Reduce irrelevant keywords - Check for words that are not your keywords but have quite a high density in your URL, header, menus, content, sidebars, footer, etc. They may be recognized as important keywords by Adsense bots. Make sure that the ads served are not related to them. Otherwise, you have to change them a bit to reduce their density.
• One topic per page - Do not focus on too many keywords per page. This confuses Adsense bots to decide which keywords are the most relevant. If this happen to you, it's better to split the text into a few series in different pages.
• Block irrelevant ads - Adsense gives you the option to block ads unrelated to your blog content that may appear without you wanting it to be there.
Optimal Ads Position and Design
Adsense allows a number of different ads design and position to choose from. Depending on your blog design and content, some of these ads position and design work better than the others. Which ones the best for you?
One thing for sure, it work differently for different people and different blog. The best way is to test them all. But there are some pointers to follow to cut your work short:
• Blend content and ads - Most Adsense users found success when ads and content are blended together as if the ad blocks are not advertisements at all. A few tricks to do this is making the ads background and borders the same color as the content background, ads titles and links to be just like the content links. Many guides mention that blue is the best color for ads titles because they are the most common link color.
• Place ads in content - Ads will blend better with content if they are placed together with the content. For example, see this page where you have the ads wrapped with the content just below the Post Title. But too much ads wrapped with the contents can annoy your reader. So try to do this moderately. You can look for examples in well-established blogs and see how the pros do it and adapt those strategies into your own blog.
• Above the fold - Above the fold means that you put the ads where readers can see it without needing to scroll down the page. A substantial amount of visitors just check out sites for a few seconds only. Any ads that need scrolling would have missed their eyes.
• Follow the heat map - The heat map below has been produced by Google based on the statistics of visits to Adsense ads. Clearly, based on this map, the best place to put ads is just at the beginning of the post, blended with the content itself. The other good section is on the left and above/below the post.
• Not too much ads - The main purpose of a blog or site is to serve information to its readers. Crowding it with too much ads defeat the purpose, and people are not blind to see what you're trying to do. Avoid over-crowding yours with ads. Find a balance. There are other types of sites that are more commercial in nature - serving quick infos with lots of outward links. This maybe a place for you to place more ads to provide your visitors the option of finding the best products (i.e. ads) to go to.
• Keep changing ads position and design - Regular visitors and frequent readers to your blog are more 'blind' to your ads, meaning that they've seen it too often that they know where NOT to look at. Avoid this 'Ad-blindness' by frequently moving around the ads position and changing their designs. Many bloggers found that this technique improved their click-through-rates after the changes, until the next ads-blindness kicks in again.
Bringing All Together
The key to Adsense success is to work on all these 4 different areas. Working on only 3 and leaving 1 factor behind will mean that your return is as good as the weakest one that you leave behind.
There are other small things that you'll want to consider in addition to the core tips above:
• Not too much outgoing links - The less outgoing links you have, the less 'exit doors' your visitors have to leave. But not having any links at all would mean that you're not focusing on building quality informative site which is suppose to provide options for additional details. So, provide your readers with these outbound links but don't have them too excessively.
• Using frames - if you're using frames, place your ads and contents within the same frame. Otherwise, Adsense bots will not recognize the connection between the two.
• Don’t click your own ads - This is obvious. Google knows well. They'll even know if somebody else is doing this dirty 'deeds' for you. It's all in the IPs and correlating the click patterns. Don't even encourage your readers to do it by giving some incentives as this violates the rule and will get you banned from the program. Basic rule - don't do it.
• Monitor your statistics - One good tool to use is Adsense Tracker. This isn't a freeware. But, it does provide many options for you track your Adsense performance. It logs the performance of individual ad units, every pages, and basically answers the where, when and what ads are clicked. With this information, you'll be able to develop strategies to optimize your blog content and ads design and position.
• Use alternative ads - There may comes a time when Public Service Announcement (PSA) ads, that doesn't add to your revenue, are served on your blog. Get something more profitable to appear instead. In Adsense page, you can select alternative ads to be served, such as Amazon or other affiliate ads program.
Note: Here's a more compact tips on Adsense optimization based on an article by Sharon Housley at About.com. There are some additional infos not covered in this article.
----------------------
This post was written based on some of the major facts of Adsense optimization presented by Darren Rowse at Problogger.net (Alexa ranking: 3321). I've summarized his post, with some additional infos, into a more compact form to let you grasp all the important points within a quick read. The original post by Darren is 6922 words, cut 65% less down to 2425 words, with all the important facts remain intact.
Advice on Promoting Blog
To make money from blogging demands you to have large traffic, and to have large traffic demands you to work on promoting your blog early on. Here are some pointers on promoting your blog.
1. Search Engines Take Time
New blogs will take a few months to get significant traffic from search engines. Doing SEO is one way to improve on this. Other traffic sources, such as networking or social media, can boost up your visitor numbers quickly if you have the right strategy – so don’t focus on search engines only.
2. All Traffic Are Not Equal
Responses from visitors to your blog in terms of time spent, depth of pages, interest in content are best if they found what they’re looking for. Generally, these kinds of visitors arrive at your blog from either search engines, subscribers, and from recommendation from other blogs with similar niche. Traffic from social media has been commented to be less responsive and even unlikely to return back to their blogs. Try to consider what type of traffic is best for you when promoting your blog.
3. Post Consistently
Most successful bloggers post consistently and regularly even when they already have large search engines traffic drawn to their older posts. The reasons for posting new content consistently are to grow the number of subscribers, get new pages in search engines, and keep the blog fresh to get votes in social media. So why stop when you can get more?
4. Traffics Are Inconsistent
There are days that traffic goes up, and at times down. It’s natural. Be ready for anything or you might get upset. The most important thing is to get your mindset focused and not let down by a few hurdles.
5. Get More Repeat Visitors
The heart of successful blogs is repeat visitors. Unique visitors are great too, but nothing can guarantee they’ll be back. So, it’s good to really focus on getting more subscribers. They are also the most responsive in terms of giving comments, votes, etc.
6. Get Inbound Links
Having other blogs link to you helps in many ways. They bring visitors in, expose your blog more, and boost your search engine rankings. These links also signify that your content is valuable, trusted, and worthy to pay a visit to. Not only they help with search engine traffic but also build your credibility.
7. Get Traffic from Multiple Sources
Getting huge traffic from one type of traffic, say search engines, doesn’t guarantee it will always stay that way. For example, Google penalizes blogs that violated their guidelines. Likewise, other types of traffic can’t guarantee giving you consistent traffic all the time. So, diversify your traffic sources.
8. Don’t Ignore Small Traffic
Traffics that come from resources such as your comment or forum links are relatively small. But most of the time those visitors find your blog to be very relevant to what they’re searching for and are likely to become loyal readers. So, keep them coming.
9. Build Your Network
To be successful in blogging, you must have strong network. People in your network can provide you valuable advice, link to you, vote for your posts, inspire and encourage you, and even become partners in future projects. To build a strong network you must first be proactive and willing to meet and help others.
10. You Can Buy Traffic
You can buy advertisement to drive traffic to your blog quickly. PPC ads can be efficient and inexpensive if you bid on the right keywords. StumbleUpon also offers an advertising option where you buy traffic at $0.05 per visitor. Running these ads for a few months will drive significant traffic and give you good exposure at low costs.
1. Search Engines Take Time
New blogs will take a few months to get significant traffic from search engines. Doing SEO is one way to improve on this. Other traffic sources, such as networking or social media, can boost up your visitor numbers quickly if you have the right strategy – so don’t focus on search engines only.
2. All Traffic Are Not Equal
Responses from visitors to your blog in terms of time spent, depth of pages, interest in content are best if they found what they’re looking for. Generally, these kinds of visitors arrive at your blog from either search engines, subscribers, and from recommendation from other blogs with similar niche. Traffic from social media has been commented to be less responsive and even unlikely to return back to their blogs. Try to consider what type of traffic is best for you when promoting your blog.
3. Post Consistently
Most successful bloggers post consistently and regularly even when they already have large search engines traffic drawn to their older posts. The reasons for posting new content consistently are to grow the number of subscribers, get new pages in search engines, and keep the blog fresh to get votes in social media. So why stop when you can get more?
4. Traffics Are Inconsistent
There are days that traffic goes up, and at times down. It’s natural. Be ready for anything or you might get upset. The most important thing is to get your mindset focused and not let down by a few hurdles.
5. Get More Repeat Visitors
The heart of successful blogs is repeat visitors. Unique visitors are great too, but nothing can guarantee they’ll be back. So, it’s good to really focus on getting more subscribers. They are also the most responsive in terms of giving comments, votes, etc.
6. Get Inbound Links
Having other blogs link to you helps in many ways. They bring visitors in, expose your blog more, and boost your search engine rankings. These links also signify that your content is valuable, trusted, and worthy to pay a visit to. Not only they help with search engine traffic but also build your credibility.
7. Get Traffic from Multiple Sources
Getting huge traffic from one type of traffic, say search engines, doesn’t guarantee it will always stay that way. For example, Google penalizes blogs that violated their guidelines. Likewise, other types of traffic can’t guarantee giving you consistent traffic all the time. So, diversify your traffic sources.
8. Don’t Ignore Small Traffic
Traffics that come from resources such as your comment or forum links are relatively small. But most of the time those visitors find your blog to be very relevant to what they’re searching for and are likely to become loyal readers. So, keep them coming.
9. Build Your Network
To be successful in blogging, you must have strong network. People in your network can provide you valuable advice, link to you, vote for your posts, inspire and encourage you, and even become partners in future projects. To build a strong network you must first be proactive and willing to meet and help others.
10. You Can Buy Traffic
You can buy advertisement to drive traffic to your blog quickly. PPC ads can be efficient and inexpensive if you bid on the right keywords. StumbleUpon also offers an advertising option where you buy traffic at $0.05 per visitor. Running these ads for a few months will drive significant traffic and give you good exposure at low costs.
Best Tips to Generate Money from Adsense
Sharon Housley gave out top Adsense tips to help webmasters or bloggers profit from Google Adsense to generate money online using websites. The main ideas of these tips are summarized here.
• Sites rank better on search engines if they have specific niche and clear theme and therefore will get the best revenue out of Adsense if the topics targeted have sufficient number of ads available.
• Target decent or moderate paying keywords as your specific niche. Sites targeting highest paying keywords will find it difficult to rank well because of the high competition from established sites.
• Older websites generate better ads revenue simply because it will rank better in search engines and the ads will become more relevant (relevant ads have better click-throughs).
• Use Tracking Channels in Google Adsense program to study the ads that make the most money, best performing sites (if you have more than one), and ads placement. Make sure to let those ads run for a week and compare results on a weekly basis to see what ads work best.
• Blend ads with site content (e.g. create ads without borders close to content). It's best that ads links should be different from the content colors to increase click-throughs. Randomizing ads link colors frequently is also a good practice so that frequent readers don't filter the ads.
• To serve the most expensive ads on your site, compromise with the number of ads displayed. This is because the value per ads decreases as you increase the number of ads displayed (up to a max of three ads units).
• Ads placed on hot spots and without scrolling will generate higher click-throughs (according to Google). Based on this hot spots map, the best place is near the beginning of the content. Experiment with the type of ads (text or image) to see which works best.
• According to Google, the best ads sizes with highest click-throughs are the 336 x 280, the 300 x 250, and the 160 x 600, but these may be different for different web layout. Again experiment with these yourself to see which works best.
My Comments
These tips look very compact and may not seem to contain much detailed explanation, but these tips cover everything possible in general for you to know to get the best out of Adsense. It’s easier for you to study all of these in more detail later on than not having a compact and complete list like this to give you an overview. I’m sure some of the tips above are easy enough for you to experiment with right away on your blogs without having to study them in more detail.
Note: A more detailed guide on Adsense optimization has been posted based on an article by Darren Rowse at Problogger.net.
------------------------
This post is a summary of an original post by Sharon Housley, a guest author at About.com (Alexa rank: 138). The original length of 876 words has been cut down to 355 (60% less).
• Sites rank better on search engines if they have specific niche and clear theme and therefore will get the best revenue out of Adsense if the topics targeted have sufficient number of ads available.
• Target decent or moderate paying keywords as your specific niche. Sites targeting highest paying keywords will find it difficult to rank well because of the high competition from established sites.
• Older websites generate better ads revenue simply because it will rank better in search engines and the ads will become more relevant (relevant ads have better click-throughs).
• Use Tracking Channels in Google Adsense program to study the ads that make the most money, best performing sites (if you have more than one), and ads placement. Make sure to let those ads run for a week and compare results on a weekly basis to see what ads work best.
• Blend ads with site content (e.g. create ads without borders close to content). It's best that ads links should be different from the content colors to increase click-throughs. Randomizing ads link colors frequently is also a good practice so that frequent readers don't filter the ads.
• To serve the most expensive ads on your site, compromise with the number of ads displayed. This is because the value per ads decreases as you increase the number of ads displayed (up to a max of three ads units).
• Ads placed on hot spots and without scrolling will generate higher click-throughs (according to Google). Based on this hot spots map, the best place is near the beginning of the content. Experiment with the type of ads (text or image) to see which works best.
• According to Google, the best ads sizes with highest click-throughs are the 336 x 280, the 300 x 250, and the 160 x 600, but these may be different for different web layout. Again experiment with these yourself to see which works best.
My Comments
These tips look very compact and may not seem to contain much detailed explanation, but these tips cover everything possible in general for you to know to get the best out of Adsense. It’s easier for you to study all of these in more detail later on than not having a compact and complete list like this to give you an overview. I’m sure some of the tips above are easy enough for you to experiment with right away on your blogs without having to study them in more detail.
Note: A more detailed guide on Adsense optimization has been posted based on an article by Darren Rowse at Problogger.net.
------------------------
This post is a summary of an original post by Sharon Housley, a guest author at About.com (Alexa rank: 138). The original length of 876 words has been cut down to 355 (60% less).
Methods to Make Money Online from Blogs
Darren Rowse has written a long article describing methods available for bloggers to earn money online directly from their blogs. The essence of this guide to making money online, added with some entry of my own, is summarized below.
A number of different monetizing methods are available for bloggers to use. Selection of which methods to use depends on blogs' niche, number of visitors/subscribers, impressions and expertise, among other things.
1. Advertising
• Contextual Ads - This is a pay-per-click (PPC) or cost-per-click (CPC) ads system based on blog contents (e.g. Adsense, YPN). It is a good system for blogs with specific niche topic. General blogs or blogs without any niche will not work well because the systems do not have any context to 'lock' on to when selecting what ads to display (resulting in displays of some very general ads).
• Non-contextual CPC ads - Display ads without having to relate to context, such as Chitika’s eMiniMalls.
• Impression-based ads - Payment are made based on the number of people viewing the ads; only good for blogs with large traffic). Examples: Fastclick and Tribal Fusion.
• Text Ads - A text-link on your blog sold as ads by text-link ads programs (such as AdBrite, Text Link Ads, and Bidvertiser). These programs sell your text-links to their own pool of advertisers; the benefit is that you don’t have to go through the hassle of finding your own advertisers. You also have a degree of control over what ads to run and what prices to set.
• RSS Ads – Many ads programs display ads in RSS feeds. Some programs only offer this option to blogs with a certain number of traffic, impressions, or subscribers.
2. Sponsorship
Well established blogs with large traffic have better chances of directly finding their own advertisers or sponsors to display ads. Typically, blogs with specific niche have more chances of getting sponsors with the same niche (e.g. blogs about camera getting Nikon or Kodak as sponsors). Ads are sold in the form of banners, text-links, buttons, or newsletters. Another type of sponsorship is sponsored posts: bloggers are paid to write specific posts as required by sponsors, or posts reviewing sponsors’ own blogs (positively I suppose).
3. Affiliate Programs
Affiliate program providers (e.g. Amazon, eBay, Linkshare, Commision Junction, Clickbank) pay you commissions for sending readers to purchase their products/services. Participating in these programs may require you to put more effort (than needed to setup ads in your blog) to influence readers to buy the products or services.
4. Selling Blogs
Well established and profitable blogs may be (and have been) sold at lucrative prices. An example is Weblogs Inc. which were sold to AOL for $25 million. But, to reach that level of success is extremely difficult and rare. Some smaller blogs have been sold at auction sites like eBay and SitePoint.
5. Donations
Only a very small number of blogs have been successful at making profitable income through donations. Most of them have large number of loyal readers.
6. Merchandising
Successful bloggers have used their influential blogs as brand names to be sold as merchandises (T-shirts, mugs, stickers, etc).
7. Paid Subscriptions
Selling blog contents to subscribers is an option to bloggers but a difficult one to profit from because similar contents are available free online. Bloggers would need a certain degree of expertise or exclusivity to have readers wanting to pay for these contents.
8. Blog Networks
There are two ways to profit from these methods: (1) Start your own network and pay bloggers to write in your network while profiting from the seven methods above. (2) Join other networks as a paid writer.
My Comments
If you're new to this, getting too excited to try everything on the list at the same time would be a big mistake. Building your blog from the basics up the ladder - with patience - is the key. It's tempting to try all the different monetizing methods and see if it works more than others, but you'll end up wasting your time too much learning on how to get the most out of the different methods. It's best to start from the most common ones (most likely Adsense) and build up your experience getting the most out of it. Your experience then will make it easier for you to learn other new methods in time. Anyway, Adsense has been reported to bring in the biggest chunk of revenues to many popular bloggers.
------------------------
This post is a summary of an original post by Darren Rowse at Problogger.net (Alexa rank: 3185). The original post length of 1993 words has been cut down to 624 words (69% reduction).
A number of different monetizing methods are available for bloggers to use. Selection of which methods to use depends on blogs' niche, number of visitors/subscribers, impressions and expertise, among other things.
1. Advertising
• Contextual Ads - This is a pay-per-click (PPC) or cost-per-click (CPC) ads system based on blog contents (e.g. Adsense, YPN). It is a good system for blogs with specific niche topic. General blogs or blogs without any niche will not work well because the systems do not have any context to 'lock' on to when selecting what ads to display (resulting in displays of some very general ads).
• Non-contextual CPC ads - Display ads without having to relate to context, such as Chitika’s eMiniMalls.
• Impression-based ads - Payment are made based on the number of people viewing the ads; only good for blogs with large traffic). Examples: Fastclick and Tribal Fusion.
• Text Ads - A text-link on your blog sold as ads by text-link ads programs (such as AdBrite, Text Link Ads, and Bidvertiser). These programs sell your text-links to their own pool of advertisers; the benefit is that you don’t have to go through the hassle of finding your own advertisers. You also have a degree of control over what ads to run and what prices to set.
• RSS Ads – Many ads programs display ads in RSS feeds. Some programs only offer this option to blogs with a certain number of traffic, impressions, or subscribers.
2. Sponsorship
Well established blogs with large traffic have better chances of directly finding their own advertisers or sponsors to display ads. Typically, blogs with specific niche have more chances of getting sponsors with the same niche (e.g. blogs about camera getting Nikon or Kodak as sponsors). Ads are sold in the form of banners, text-links, buttons, or newsletters. Another type of sponsorship is sponsored posts: bloggers are paid to write specific posts as required by sponsors, or posts reviewing sponsors’ own blogs (positively I suppose).
3. Affiliate Programs
Affiliate program providers (e.g. Amazon, eBay, Linkshare, Commision Junction, Clickbank) pay you commissions for sending readers to purchase their products/services. Participating in these programs may require you to put more effort (than needed to setup ads in your blog) to influence readers to buy the products or services.
4. Selling Blogs
Well established and profitable blogs may be (and have been) sold at lucrative prices. An example is Weblogs Inc. which were sold to AOL for $25 million. But, to reach that level of success is extremely difficult and rare. Some smaller blogs have been sold at auction sites like eBay and SitePoint.
5. Donations
Only a very small number of blogs have been successful at making profitable income through donations. Most of them have large number of loyal readers.
6. Merchandising
Successful bloggers have used their influential blogs as brand names to be sold as merchandises (T-shirts, mugs, stickers, etc).
7. Paid Subscriptions
Selling blog contents to subscribers is an option to bloggers but a difficult one to profit from because similar contents are available free online. Bloggers would need a certain degree of expertise or exclusivity to have readers wanting to pay for these contents.
8. Blog Networks
There are two ways to profit from these methods: (1) Start your own network and pay bloggers to write in your network while profiting from the seven methods above. (2) Join other networks as a paid writer.
My Comments
If you're new to this, getting too excited to try everything on the list at the same time would be a big mistake. Building your blog from the basics up the ladder - with patience - is the key. It's tempting to try all the different monetizing methods and see if it works more than others, but you'll end up wasting your time too much learning on how to get the most out of the different methods. It's best to start from the most common ones (most likely Adsense) and build up your experience getting the most out of it. Your experience then will make it easier for you to learn other new methods in time. Anyway, Adsense has been reported to bring in the biggest chunk of revenues to many popular bloggers.
------------------------
This post is a summary of an original post by Darren Rowse at Problogger.net (Alexa rank: 3185). The original post length of 1993 words has been cut down to 624 words (69% reduction).
Making Money Efficiently from Blogs
Articles Related to Monetizing Blogs
Here's the list of articles I've posted that can help you learn the tips and tricks to make money using your blogs. The essence of these articles come from the best tips out there written by successful bloggers. They're not listed in particular orders but the top one, 'Methods to Make Money Online from Blogs', is a good place to start. The rest of the articles covers most of the big topics in monetizing blogs as listed above.
- Methods to Make Money Online from Blogs.
- Adsense Smart Pricing is Bad but How to Avoid It?
- Amount of Traffic Social Media Sites Can Send You.
- How to Produce Persuasive Writing?
- Free SEO Guide to Improve Your Search Engine Ranking.
- Guides to Building Quality & Original Content.
- What It Takes to Build a Successful Money-Making Blog.
- Optimizing Adsense for Higher Money Returns.
- Advice on Promoting Blog.
- How to Reduce Ad-Blindness.
- Great Money Making Schemes for Your Blog.
- SEO-Related Mistakes You Must Avoid.
- Adsense vs. BidVertiser - Which is the Best?
- Best Tips to Generate Money from Adsense.
- Tips to Increase Your Blog's Traffic.
- How to Get 1000+ Subscribers in 3 Months?
- How to Get 2000+ Subscribers in 3 Months?
The chance is that you know about Adsense and how to make money from it using your blog. If you haven't heard about it, well, you can generate money from your blog and the most popular way of doing that is using the Google Adsense Program. In fact, successful bloggers earn more than $100,000 per year from their blogs.
In this blog I've posted some articles to guide you generate money from blogs. Most of the tips come from extremely long articles of successful bloggers that I've comp
ressed to make the readings much much shorter for you. Trust me, if you have no idea about monetizing blogs, learning to do it from the basics can take a really long time. Having short articles that compresses all the important points can help you a lot, because you don't want to spend too much time on learning how to do it. There are 3 basic questions you should be asking yourself when learning to build a monetizing blog:
- How to get more visitors to your blog?
- What's the best programs to monetize your blog?
- How to optimize your blog and ad designs to maximize your earning?
If you're a first timer on this, I'll give you some quick pointers on what are some of the major things you should know if you want to successfully monetize your blog. It can hurt you a lot if you don't know these things (hurt = cost you time and energy with little in return). This list isn't the most comprehensive ones on the subject, but will give you the big picture on what to learn.
- Adsense - Know Adsense and learn how to optimize its use in your blog. Using Adsense isn't just about putting the codes in your blog. There are tips on how to maximize your earnings by optimizing you Adsense placement, colors, and overall design.
- SEO - Learn Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This is needed to help you get your blog to rank high on search engines, e.g. Google. In other words, you'd want your blog to be in the first page of Google search result when somebody googles keywords related to your blog.
- Keyword Research and Niche - Think carefully on what niche area you want to blog about and what keywords are the best for your blog URL, titles, descriptions, and post titles. Simply using www.yourname.com as a URL will put you at a huge disadvantage at getting rank well, unless your name is Paris Hilton, which gets search the most (to learn from what she has to say about life, I guess).
- Blog Promotion - Money only comes in when there are visitors to your blog, thousands of them. How to get them to your blog isn't easy. You have to learn how to promote your blog.
- Monetizing Programs - Bloggers out there don't just use Adsense. There are tons of other programs, affiliates, and sponsorships. The trick is to know which is the best for you and how to optimize their use in your blog.
- Quality Blog Content - Anybody can write anything on their blogs. But what articles attract the most readers? Blogging isn't just about posting articles. You have to learn the tips and tricks to get others read what you write.
- What NOT to do - There are things that if you do will hurt your monetizing effort. For example, if you have Adsense put in blogs that are 'smart-priced' by Adsense, you'll earn very little. Read also the Adsense Terms and Conditions so that you don't do anything that'll get you banned from the program. 'Smart-pricing' is explained below.
- Social Media - One way of promoting your blog is through networking inside social media networks, such as Digg.com, StumbleUpon.com, etc. There are tricks to get the most out of them.
- Getting Visitor Traffic - How to bring visitors to your blog? And how to get more and more of them, over time? There are many ways to get people to your blog - social media, search engines, word-of-mouth, recommendations. The more you know about this the better.
- RSS Subscribers - People will subscribe to your blog if you have good contents, which means you'll get more readers, more visitors, and most importantly more exposure. Are there tips out there how to increase the number of subscribers? Yes, there are (read some of the articles below).
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