Shaun Low

Anyone running Google Adsense on their site knows that there are many varieties of ad types and different ad placements you can do with your ads. Whatever the case may be, always ensure you are constantly tweaking your ads to find the optimum ad placements. Here are a few simple steps that will help you maximize your profits:

More ads does not mean more money

Many bloggers and web designers have been experimenting lately with different google ad placements and from what I have been reading is that if you run the maximum number of ads per page (Google currently allows 3 ads per page), the amount you make per click goes down. Google Ads works somewhat like a bidding system. The more ads you have per page, the less the advertisers must pay for the advertising space on your website. If you only run one adsense block per page then you will get more money per click from that adsense unit. If you run all 3 ads then each company on those ads will pay less to have their ad displayed on your site.

Note: if you run any other ads like Bidvertiser or AuctionAds you might start to scare your readers away. If your blog is cluttered with a bunch of different ad types your readers might start to question your credibility as a blogger and you will see start to see a decline in traffic.

Blend your ads with your content

When choosing your Google ad format you are given the option to pick the color scheme and your ad boarder style. To maximize your ad clicks you should choose colors that match your site. This will increase your click through rate (CTR) and will make your website more visually appealing. When selecting the ad format you are given the option between the following boarder types: square, slightly rounded corners, and very round corners. It’s probably a good idea to not even have any boarders on your ads that are placed directly in your content. The majority of your readers don’t care about the advertisements on your site and will probably refrain from clicking on your ads as much as possible. If you have ads placed anywhere else on your blog pick a nice boarder that goes nice with your blog. Google already has some pre-designed color palettes you can choose from, if you run a white background on your blog the “Open Air” color format is your best choice. This will not show any boarders on your ads and will nicely blend in with your site. You can change the color of the text, url and title of the ad to match your sit as well.

Ad placement

The best place to put your ads to ensure the most clicks would be right in your content.  The readers on your site are here to read what you have to say and will be heavily focused on your content of your blog. This explains why your ads are best placed directly in the body of your site where your main content is. If you have ads are on the side bar of your blog you might not receive as many clicks as the ads in your content. Remember that Google ads works like a bidding system so if you have 3 ad units on your site and some are out preforming others you might want to remove the under-preforming ads. If your blog becomes too crowded with ads you might want to shrink the size of your ads and even better remove some. As a new blogger it’s not worth worth crowding your blog with ads to make a few extra bucks per month. Keep your ads minimal as a new blogger and gain the trust of your readers. This will make you more money in the long run.

Experiment and play around with your ads

There is no right or wrong way to place your ads. Move them around and see which way works the best for your blog. Try giving it 2 weeks before you jump to any conclusions. Some days might have spikes blog income and some might have lows. Try different ad formats, colors and boarders to see which works best.

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Here is a list of really unfortunately named people that probably get a hard time just being who they are. I would go for a name change if I was stuck with any of these names… Yuppie Punk has gone one step further and gathered information about each of these people and linked to the source that he found them at.

Robert Fagot

Anurag Dikshit

Sally Mangina

Ben Dova

Dick Payne

James Niggermeyer

Kim Twatt and Jonathan Gash

Dr. Reinhardt Aldofo Fuck

 Dr. Richard Chopp

Lucious Pusey

Source: Yuppie Punk.

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Seth Godin has written an excellent article on some easy traffic generating tips for all blogs. Here are the first 10 on his list:

1. Use Lists.

2. Be topical…write posts that need to be read right now.

3. Lean enough to become the expert the expert in your field.

4. Break news.

5. Be timeless…write posts that will be readalbe in a year.

6. Be among the first with a with a great blog on your topic, then encourage others to blog on the same topic.

7. Share your expertise generously so people recognize it and depend on you.

8. Announce news.

9. Write short, pith posts.

10. Encourage your readers to help you manipulate the technorati top blog list.

If you are interested in the full post check it out here.

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I know it can be difficult to “get the word out” about your blog so I decided to come up with some simple steps in getting your blog some decent exposure to the internet.

1. Ping your site every day. Pinging your site notifies a bunch of search engines and blog archives that your site has been updated. When you ping you increase the amount of spiders and crawlers to your site. This will result in more of your content getting indexed by all of the search engines and archives which will give you more and more traffic.

2. Submit your site to all of the major search engines. You should manually go to Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask and submit your site to these search engines one at a time. After you submit your site to these search engines expect a few spiders to visit your site over the next week. They will be scanning all of your content and indexing your content accordingly.

3. Leave comments on other blogs. Get a good list of at least 15-20 blogs that are similar to yours and visit them everyday. Leave comments as much as possible but don’t spam your comments. If you have something worth saying then say it. If you don’t know anything about the topic that you want to comment on then you should try to avoid leaving a comment. Many blogs out there notice that you consistently visit their site and might start visiting your blog regularly and might even leave some comments on your blog. Also many other bloggers reward their regular readers by giving them some link lovin’.

4. Submit some of your good content to article directories. So far I’ve found that the best place to send your articles to is Ezine Articles. If you article gets approved it will be displayed on their high-traffic home page. This will result in many visitors to your article and will help spread the word about your blog. You might get some new readers to your blog through this service and will spread the word about your blog. At the end of your article it’s always a good idea to link to the source of the article (your blog), this will bring in some additional traffic and best of all, a high quality backlink to your site.

5. Submit your blog to as many directories as possible. Here is a huge list of free directories to submit your blog to. This will get you easy backlinks and might even bring in some traffic.

6. Use Submit Express. This is a free service which offers a free submission to your site of 40+ search engines. I just submitted my site which only took 3 seconds and I’ve already received a bunch of confirmation e-mails that my site has been approved by these search engines.

7. Actively participate in forums. Contribute to popular forums that get a lot of traffic. Find the “hot” topics and give your thoughts and opinions about the subject. Make sure you have something worth while to say and the other viewers will click on your signature. Make sure your signature has a link back to your blog so the other readers know where you come from. There is more information on participating on forums here.

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Well apparently the Google Page Rank update is coming up really soon and a bunch of link trains have been going around the blogsphere. I like participating in these events, it’s easy backlinks, free traffic, and best of all I get exposure to interesting blogs! A friend Leo Chiangadded me to this “Geek Train”. Also if anyone wants to exchange links or fave me on technorati I will always be up for that, just e-mail me letting me know your interested or leave a comment in one of my posts and I will always return the favor!

 Geek Train - All aboard!

1 - Write a short paragraph at the beginning of your post and linkback to the blog(s) that put you on the list in the paragraph. You MUST do this. No-one plans on getting slapped for duplicate content any time soon, do they?

2 - Next, copy the list of originals below COMPLETELY and add it to your own blog. If you’d like a different keyword for your blog then change it, when you do your post, and it should pass to most blogs with that keyword, provided the train keeps on spreading.

3 - Take the adds from the blog that added you and place them in the “Originals” list.

4 - Add at least three new favourite blogs of yours to keep the train going, e-mail the blog owners (or comment on one of their posts) and insist that they post.

The Originals:

(The kick-ass) Nate Whitehill
(The original) 13-Year Old Blogger
(The money-making) Affiliate Marketing guide
(The crafty two at) TechRave
(The AdSense ‘dude’) Michael Cheney
(The overclocker) Shawn Knight
(The incredible) Chris Hooley
(The rhetorical) Michael Kwan
(The talented) Leo Chiang
(The root of all evil) John Chow
(The business dude) Josh Mullineaux
(The brilliant) Shoemoney
(The absurdly loud) Ed Lau
(The mastermind) Jon Waraas
(The yaketty) Stephen Fung
(The wickedly cool) Everton Blair
(The uber blogger) Ms Danielle
(The enterprising) Matt Coddington
(The career minded) Jane May
(The legendary) Gary Lee
(The nifty) Dosh Dosh
(The ambitious) Jeff Kee
(The Down Low) Shawn Low
(The Reviewer) Thomas De Maesschalk
(The Post Whore) Derrich
(Life sux) AllSux.com

My Adds:

(The brown town) Brown Baron
(The hawk) Gregg Hawkins
(The sizzler) Sizzled Core
(The millionaire) Shaman

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Originally the domain name was purchased for 7.5 milllion. RH Donnelley purchased the domain name for a reported $350 million. There was a bid war between RH Donnelley, Dow Jones, and The New York Times but RH Donnelly in the end won and got what they wanted.

RH Donnelley is an online local commercial search company. Seeing that Business.com is a business search directory this will be a nice addition to RH Donnelley’s empire. Business.com has been reported to have an earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization (EBITDA) of an estimated $15 million per year. Finally it sold for 23 times the EBITDA for the grand total of $350 million.

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1. Beg for links. Literally find other blogs that are related to yours and simply e-mail them asking if they are interested in a link exchange. Don’t expect everyone you contact to say yes or even respond to your e-mail, just make sure you send out a few e-mails and someone would be happy to exchange links.

2. Guest appear on another blog. If the opportunity comes and your able to guest appear on another blog take it! Almost every guest post I read lets the audience know where the blogger is from and links to his or her own blog.

3. Be generous with your link giving. When you link consistently to other blogs your links won’t go un-noticed. All bloggers appreciate links from other sites and often times they will return the favor and link back to you!

4. Article Directories. Submitting your site to a directory such as Ezine Articles is an excellent way to gain exposure to the content on your site. When your article gets published you will get a direct link to your site and also get some traffic driven to your site. If your article is worthy it will also get some links.

5. I know we’ve all heard this over and over again but quality content will get noticed and receive links. If you have nothing worth linking to, then you won’t receive any links plain and simple. If your blog is filled with great articles you will notice more and more links coming in.

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Anyone else every play Halo 1 or Halo 2? Haha I love those 2 games and what’s even better is that someone took the whole “gaming experience” to the next level and brought a deadly vehicle from those games to life! Really scary huh. I don’t know how many people I killed in that game using the Halo Warthog and all of a sudden that killing machine has been brought to life. Who knows how much this killing machine cost to make in real life but I think it’s really cool because I was always a big Halo fan.

I found this cool picture over at Brown Baron. Bungie has the full story here.

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Here is this weeks list of interesting posts that I came across.

• The Tall Freak tells us how to make a Favicon for your site or blog.
• Jacob Dupont Knudsen wrote an excellent article saying how some blogs focus too much on stats like Alexa and Technorati while spending less time writing quality content. Check out the full post here.
• Blue Jar gives us 5 good reasons why we don’t need an iPhone.
• Tan-com has a list of 5useful wordpress plugins.
• Susan Suarez tells how to improve our websites ranking. Check that post out here.
• Tech Industry News has an interesting article called: Is stumble upon taking over Digg and Reddit?
• Gregg shares some blogging tips for experts and beginners.
• Sizzled Core shows us how some of todays most popular sites looked back in the 90’s. It’s really cool take a look.
• Christy over at Christy’s Coffee Break has a good post called The Power Of Comments.
• Idiot Affliate shares with us 11 Timeless Fill-in-the-blank headlines that will always work.
• EJ Cooksey shares with us 5 simple steps to earn $2.00 the quick and easy way.

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Often when I am looking for a new picture or image for my blog I just open up Google and do an Image search for whatever I am looking for. The images in Google weren’t very nice or fit the description that I was looking for so I decided to find an alternative to finding images and pictures for my blog.

Flickr

Flickr has lots and lots and lots of pictures. They have millions of pictures uploaded from it’s users every month. You should have no problems finding some pictures for your blog here.

Stock.Xchng

Stock.Xchng has a much smaller data base than the other photo sharing websites but I think the quality of the pictures make up for the lack of variety. You don’t have to sign up to start viewing photos from this site. Stock.Xchng offers special image formats as well to.

Yotophoto

Yotophoto is basically a search engine for pictures. When you search an image it checks many other photo sharing websites including Flickr, Wikipidia, Morguefile and others. You can most definitely find a picture your looking for using this site.

PhotoBucket

Right on photobucket’s home page you can see a real-time version of exactly how many pictures they have on their database. Currently as I sit here they claim to have 3,262,627,431 pictures available to the public. If there’s a picture you can’t find here, well I don’t know where else you could find it.

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