Archives for February 2008

A couple of months ago Google made some significant changes to their AdSense program when they re-did the clickable area, which caused a lot of people to lose money. I know personally that my AdSense income dropped by at least $70.00 a month as a result of this change, and I’ve heard from several others that are have had the same problem.

Anytime there is a change, it is only natural we take the time to step back and look over the situation in the hope of finding a way to improve it. One post I ran across recently was written by Josh titled 10 Ways to Increase Your AdSense Income. In his post, Josh covers a bunch of methods people should consider when trying to maximize their clicks.

Two important tips:

2. Target competitive niches! I don’t care what anyone says about MFA sites, they work! I’m not talking about spam sites, I’m talking about high-quality, informative sites that are in a high paying market! Some of these niche sites can bring in $5-$10/day after only a couple days. When you’re making over a $1 per click you don’t need much traffic to make money.

3. If a site has a CTR of 1% or less, remove it from your site. Although there is some controversy as to whether or not CTR causes “smart pricing” to kick in, it’s just not worth risking. At least remove Adsense for a few weeks and see if your overall adsense income rises. If so, you were probably hit with Google’s Smart Pricing. If that site in particular was causing smart-pricing to kick in, consider a different monetization model.

And one tip I’m not so sure about:

8. Do not go by Google’s heat map. It’s a good visual aid for some layouts, but there are just too many variables. The effectiveness of any layout will be determined by color, style, niche etc. so testing is always your best bet!

Click over to check out the rest of the list!

Whenever you start a new blog, it is extremely important to spend a little time researching before purchasing a domain name, picking a design, and launching the blog.   Before getting started, you’ll first need to find the right niche for your blog.   This is often easier said than done.  Even if you know what you want to talk about, sometimes you are better off looking for a more focused keyword within the same niche.

If you are interested in learning more about how to research your niche, Copyblogger has posted some great tips on niche keyword research and provides some examples of a keyword hunt that was recently done.  This is probably one of the better write ups covering niche keyword strategy.

How much research do you do before launching a new blog?

With the size of the world wide web, it seems impossible to think that Google could manually monitor their search results, but a recent post over at SEOBook.com titled Mom and Pop Websites?  Is Your Brand Big Enough? really got me thinking about whether this is possible or not, and how this will effect small sites designed to snipe certain keywords.

In Aaron’s post, he mentions that someone he knows was banned from Google because his blog used the default WordPress template.   This got my attention.   Even though I’ve never used the Kubrick theme or a variation of it on any of my sites, I think the fact that Google looks at things like this makes me wonder what else they would look at if they are human editing their search results.

Apparently human editing will be more common in 2008 and here are the signs that Aaron recommends you make sure your site does NOT exhibit to help it look authentic:

• has a default Wordpress design
• has multiple hyphens in the domain name
• exclusively monetizes via Google AdSense, placed top and to the left in the content area of the page
• does not have a clear way to contact you
• lacks an about us section
• is registered with fake whois

For keyword snipers, this is something to pay attention to.   Where are your ads positioned?  Do you have an About/Contact page?