Adsense | InvestorBlogger

After years of blogging at my old address, I’ve decided that it’s time for a change. In the five months since I created the Blogging Travails sub-blog at InvestorBlogger Dot Com, I’ve come to realize that it’s been really coming on strong as a blog in its own right.

Having a much more focused blog has helped me to concentrate my writing on blogging, making money online, and marketing. As such, I am setting up a whole new blog at this address:

Welcome to my new blog EeeBlogger Dot Com, where I will attempt to take on these three might topics more fully, as well as much more.

The Network

It’s apparent to me that I’m now firmly in front of a large network of sites that range from Education to Photography to Finance.

While my relationship with each of these sites/blogs is quite different, in fact some of them are customer blogs, it’s fascinating that since establishing my first website I’ve gone onto create over 18 different sites (including this one).

Many of the sites are now using WordPress in its latest incarnation (2.6.5) and the installs are a pleasure to use. Unfortunately, there’s no automated way to set up the standard defaults that I suggested earlier in 30 Install Tips. But at the very least updating plugins and removing unnecessary ones has become much easier than ever.

EeeBlogger Dot Com

InvestorBlogger made several mistakes that impacted its performance over the past few years; one of which was an irregular posting schedule – sometimes I’d post 4 a day; sometimes none for weeks; I got caught short by the Google RankSpank in November of 2007 with a pagerank that has stagnated there despite an ever increasing depth and range of backlinks; InvestorBlogger also had an unclear niche that encompassed too many different kinds of topics, making it difficult to retain readers and keep up visit times – it was only after setting up the sub-blogs, I saw that my more focused approach resulted in much better retention rates, visitor satisfaction, and quality of clickthroughs.

Posting Schedule and Content

The posting schedule is going to be quite simple. One long and detailed post each week, posted on Tuesday around lunchtime. The topics are included as above, but the author will feel free to explore related (and sometimes unrelated) issues as well. I will consider adding more posts later, but don’t expect anything yet. Once a week on Tuesday pm. That’s it. The archives are all from the Blogging Travails blog and are posted here (and there) to provide you with a backdrop to my current situation.

Whither Google?

I’m glad to see that Google is now also suffering for its own hubris, it’s no accident that Google’s stock reach its heighest point just shortly before the Rank Spank. In recent months, some easing of Google’s position has taken place; but Google really damaged itself as a reputable source of information… one that it has not recovered from. In fact, John Chow’s omission from Google’s index for searches for his own name highlights the ongoing partisanship that Google displays.

I will however be following a different path with EeeBlogger and its siblings than before. I have not kowtowed to Google on InvestorBlogger, but I would like to explore a different path to making money online than the one I pursued at InvestorBlogger Dot Com.

AdSense, PayPerPost and TLA

Of Adsense

It’s unlikely at this time that I will be using Adsense on this blog simply because I’m winding down my account. Once my account is inactive, I’ll be selectively adding AdSense to make sure that my AdSense doesn’t get such poor click throughs or pricing. In fact, I’ve been getting many false positives that I never see a dime for, my click through has been very poor over the course of my account (0.5% in total), and the CPC has been a little over 25c per click. But I know that the number of clicks is vastly undercounted. I’m hoping that more selective use of Adsense on my sites might help me avoid being smartpriced. My first indications of more selective use have helped to increase AdSense returns, though.

PayPerPost

In the same breath as PayPerPost, I’ll be including SocialSpark. In fact, I’m planning to publish a review of these Paid Posting Sites next Monday (Stay Tuned!). I’m not planning to use any paid blogging on this site at all. The rates and availability of such posts are just not worth it any more. And the hypocrisy of many of the main actors in the blogging scene is just frightful. PayPerPost drops blogs that don’t meet its strict requirements (despite those requirements resulting in poor or no-PR), refuses to allow no-follow on its primary site as a default, and promises (but fails to deliver) that it will overhaul their PR ranked system in PPP. That was more than 16 months ago. Todate, nothing has changed. SocialSpark started out as a promising alternative, but I now only use it as a convenient way to maintain objective stats for my blogs. I haven’t had a successful deal in several months. The posting schedule on this blog would make it irrelevant for PPP as I’d have to post at least every three and a half days – and that’s not going to happen!

Text Link Ads

TLA has had the most successful program that I’ve been involved in, out of these three. The money has come in consistently for months and been increasing until the latest downturn in the market. I’m not sure where it will go from here, but I’ve been very surprised at the success of the TLA program since I started using it in October 2006. Be warned: TLA can seriously impact your PR ranking, if Google catches you. I’m not currently enrolled in TLA for this site at all, and it remains to be seen whether this site will be a suitable candidate for TLA. I’ve had several sites enrolled but only one site managed to become a regular candidate for advertisers. The others were a total flop. It’s unlikely that I will bother.

Recommendations – Text Link Ads is one of my most successful income streams for one of my blogs. Only one! Remember that.

A different blog: A different focus

For those blogs in the network, I’ve noted how each has developed and grown in its own direction. Some sites are hosted as clients sites, some are personal blogs, some make money from paid blogging, some make money from TLA, some make money from advertisers, some don’t make any money. Some attract large but loose audiences, some narrow and motivated readers.

Each blog seems to be different in its audience, and that is the most interesting aspect. I didn’t intend to set up so many different sites or monetize in so many disparate ways: but somehow this is turning into a strength. Strength in variety.

News on a different front – Google Friends Connect

And just in: I’ve been whitelisted to use Google Friends Connect so here goes. I’ll focus on just using this blog alone.

AdWords is quite a learning curve, but Google breaks it down nicely into chunks with the Starter Edition. When I wrote and told my friend, Steve from AgentsChat, he immediately offered some great advice. In his email, he wrote 9 useful tips to get me started.

I’d like to share them with you.

Nine Tips for Getting Started with AdWords

Great. I have a great book on the subject called Ultimate Guide to Google Adwords – I can lend it to you next time I see you if you want.

Things to remember -

1. Look into ‘Exact Match’ and ‘Phrase match’ options (heaps of info if your Google for ‘Adwords matching options’ etc) – you may be throwing away money on using the default ‘broad match’ if you are not careful with it.

2. Google automatically give you Pay Per click ads on their search results pages and the content network (Adsense on sites – Contextual network I think they call it now). Some people prefer to turn off the content network and just focus on the search results – you can test both. You can even target specific sites with the content network if you want.

3. Look into the ‘insert keywords’ option – you can set it so that if the user types in ‘investing’ then that word will show up in your heading or ad – when the word shows up it will be in bold and thus get more attention and more clicks – more clicks = cheaper bid prices.

4. The other factor for bid prices is ‘quality score’ (should be no problem for your home-page) – to get the best quality your keywords should be in your ad, and on your landing page.

5. Grouping keywords into tight Adgroups gives more flexibility to meet quality score – don’t just do one big Adgroup as the ads you write won’t be relevant to all the keywords.

6. Go through your Analytics account to get an idea of terms that people used to find you – you can then target these terms in your keywords.

7. Investing keywords will be expensive so you could take quite a different approach and choose other keywords that are cheap (Taiwan blog, is one idea)

8. Your ad structure looks good – many recommend the pattern

Catchy heading (with keyword)
Stress a benefit (possibly with keyword)
Call to action (possibly with keyword)
URL

9. Run two ads together – the one with better CTR will be cheaper so go with that then test another if you have time.

Hope that helps. this turned into a rather long email – you can turn it into a blog post if you like.

Steve

Unfortunately, I’ve not had great results yet, but I’m still working on the early stages. It’s not difficult to get started. I did have one problem with an affiliate page that I wanted to market because Google Adwords TOS didn’t permit my initial efforts, so I’m still struggling with the affiliate side of the effort.