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.
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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.
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Saturday, January 24, 2009
Optimizing Adsense for Higher Money Returns
Having Adsense setup in your blog doesn't guarantee great success generating money with it. It needs to be optimized and tweaked accordingly to ensure that you get the best outcomes from it. There are many factors determining Adsense success, or its failure. In this post, you'll learn what all these factors are and what to focus on when optimizing Adsense. All the materials are presented in a very compact form to help you learn the most important points fast, quickly, and easily found if you want to come have a look at it again.
Before reading through them, it's best if you have already understood what Adsense is and what its policies are. Also, be sure that your blog is acceptable by Adsense.
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.
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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.
Before reading through them, it's best if you have already understood what Adsense is and what its policies are. Also, be sure that your blog is acceptable by Adsense.
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.
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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.
Guides to Building Quality & Original Content
he 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.
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.
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.
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.
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