AdSense Case Study: Captioning pictures with CSS
Although I promised I'd talk more about page layout for my AdSense case study, I'm going to defer the general discussion and focus in on one specific topic: creating captioned pictures using CSS. It isn't nearly as easy as you'd think, unfortunately, because of bugs with Internet Explorer. (Purists would argue that you should ignore IE and its poor implementation of Web standards, but from a pragmatic viewpoint you want your site to look well enough to IE users because they are still the dominant part of the market and a large part of your revenue stream.)
Take a look at the pages in Stage 4 of the Invisible Fence Guide. If you've been following along with the case study, you'll remember that I added pictures to each page as part of Stage 3. Immediately below each picture was a short caption, which may or may not have been obvious to you because there was no real way to distinguish the caption from the surrounding text. So one of the goals of our CSS work in Stage 4 was to make the captions look like, well, captions.
In a perfect world, this wouldn't be very hard. All you do is wrap the image and the caption with a <div> tag to which you assign a CSS class, like so:
<div class="figure"> <img src="/someimage.jpg" border="0" width="480" height="360"> <p>This is the caption</p> </div>
Then in your CSS style sheet you'd define styles like this:
.figure {
background-color: #666666;
margin: 5px;
float: none;
padding: 2px;
min-width: 484px;
}
.figure img {
margin-bottom: 0;
}
.figure p {
color: white;
text-align: center;
font-size: 80%;
margin: 0px;
}
What does this do? Well, it gives the <div> a dark grey background with a small margin and an even smaller bit of padding. The <img> inside the div gets its bottom margin set to 0 while the <p> inside the div gets its color set to white, a smaller font, and centered text. Simple stuff, the end result is that the image and the caption get put into a simple grey box and move together on the page as the page reformats itself.
The key to making it work, of course, is the min-width property, which says that the width of the <div> shouldn't go any smaller than the size of the image plus the padding. This avoids some really bad reformatting of the middle column when the user resizes the page. (It's not pretty, trust me.)
Unfortunately, Internet Explorer doesn't support min-width, one of the many bugs in its implementation of CSS. I scratched my head on this one for a while, but I found the solution after an extensive Google search: the minmax.js script by Andrew Clover. This is a hunk of JavaScript code that you insert into your page. When the page is loaded by Internet Explorer, the script goes and replaces all the min-width (and min-height) properties on the page with an IE-only equivalent that mostly works in all versions of IE. Truly a hack, but one that works well enough.
To run this script, you just copy the minmax.js file onto your web server and add the following statement at the bottom of the HTML file:
<script type="text/javascript" src="minmax.js"></script>
I only made one change to this. Although the script doesn't actually run if loaded by a non-IE browser (it checks the browser type), I thought it wasteful to load the script if it isn't actually needed. So I used a “feature” of IE called conditional comments to wrap the <script> tag so only IE sees it:
<!--[if IE]> <script type="text/javascript" src="minmax.js"></script> <![endif]-->
Kind of a messy solution, that's for sure, but I ended up with what I wanted on the big three browsers I use (Firefox, Opera and IE). Which brings me another point: always test your site with another browser, preferably 2 or 3 different browsers. You can't test the site with all browsers, of course, but try to get it looking good with more than just your usual browser.
Did I say CSS was easy? What was I thinking! 
Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book. Or add it directly to your Amazon shopping cart!
Extending RSS to support monetization
Steve Rubel observes that it's only a matter of time before Web-based news aggregators wrap content with text ads. Actually, I'm surprised that hasn't happened already. (Well, it has in some sense: many, many splogs these days are built by taking RSS feeds and wrapping them with ads. But that's different.)
As I've mentioned before, monetization of syndicated content poses an interesting conundrum for AdSense publishers. From all accounts, the ads inserted in feeds by programs like AdSense for feeds don't make a lot of money; the best way to make money is still by getting people to visit your site. So you offer truncated feeds in the hope that the article summaries will entice people to hop over to read the full articles. You end up making a trade-off between readership and earnings.
Perhaps what we need to do is to extend syndication formats like RSS and Atom to support monetization. It could be as simple, for example, as embedding your AdSense publisher ID in the feed. The news reader would grab the ID and use it to show ads using some kind of revenue-sharing model — say half the ads would have the news reader's ID, half would have the feed's. There is precedent for this already, of course. Registered members of the DigitalPoint forums can already participate in a revenue sharing program. This isn't against the AdSense terms and conditions as of yet, though there are some potentially prickly issues with letting someone else use your publisher ID on a site that you don't control.
Of course, the readers from the Big Three (Google, Yahoo and MSN) would potentially benefit the most because they could allow feeds to keep all the revenue made from displaying ads served from their own ad programs — because they make money from the ad clicks no matter what. This would give publishers added incentive to recommend those readers to their visitors. I can even see sites serving up different versions of their feeds to the different crawlers — like the full version to the GYM crawlers and the truncated version to other crawlers.
It should be interesting to see how this develops.
Reminder: today's the last day to sign up for my new AdSense newsletter and be entered into the November draw for a signed copy of my wonderful (ahem) book.
Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book. Or add it directly to your Amazon shopping cart!
Subscribe to my AdSense newsletter and win!
Tomorrow is November 30, and it's your last chance to sign up for my AdSense newsletter (”Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense” is its title) and get a chance at winning a signed copy of the book. (Or, if you'd prefer, you can have a signed copy of one of my other books… but they're very techie, unlike Make Easy Money with Google.) All you have to do is subscribe. Plus, as mentioned before, subscribers also get a free AdSense traffic tip sent to them by mail a day after they sign up. Well worth your while… One of my subscribers just sent me mail: “Thanks for this very useful tip…. at the end will benefit us.”
Sign up now, because there are only about 50 verified email addresses on the list so far — I lost a lot of addresses when I switched to the new mailing list provider, as I expected. So your chances are pretty good. (And if you did sign up but didn't confirm your subscription by responding to the email from AWeber.com, please not that I'll only be including verified names in the draw, so you need to verify your subscription before December 1 to be eligible.)
If you have the chance, check out the latest version of the Invisible Fence Guide, which now has a complete CSS-based layout. I've even thrown in some Chitika ads. I'll be writing about the whole design in detail tomorrow, though I still have some tweaks to do. This, of course, is part of an ongoing AdSense case study I'm running.
Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book. Or add it directly to your Amazon shopping cart!
Google Toolbar and Firefox referrals now available to non-US publishers
Those of you who, like myself, are not based in the US will be happy to know that Google has finally made its Firefox/Toolbar referral program available to non-US AdSense publishers. This program allows publishers to earn money (up to a maximum of $1 per referral — but note it can easily be less) when someone downloads Google's version of Firefox with the Google Toolbar preloaded.
An example of a typical referral button is shown on the right, and you've no doubt seen these pop up all over the place on various websites. You can place a single referral button per referral program on your pages. Right now there are two referral programs available: one for AdSense itself, and one for the Firefox/Toolbar combo. So you can place one button for each on the page.
One thing I wish Google offered was a text-only link for the referrals. Not everyone wants to put a big fat button on their pages.
To get your referral button, just log into the AdSense management console. You'll see a new “Firefox” tab under the “Referrals” section of the console. Select the button format you want and paste the code (as always, you can't change the code Google generates for you) into the appropriate spot on your web page.
You may find my articles How to Detect Internet Explorer and Masquerading Your Browser useful for conditionally showing the referral button.
Don't let the referrals distract you too much; you still need to concentrate on content creation and traffic generation to make real money with AdSense.
Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. For more information, subscribe to his AdSense newsletter and get a free bonus AdSense traffic tip just for subscribing. Or add the book directly to your Amazon shopping cart for easy ordering!
Googling for Gold
This isn't really AdSense-related, but interesting to most AdSense publishers anyhow. This week's BusinessWeek magazine has two stories about Google:
Read them while they're still available online for free; these things tend to disappear into a “subscriber-only” section once the new edition of the magazine's out. (Another example of the Long Tail at work.)
Coincidentally, one of Google's early funders, now a billionaire thanks to his GOOG stock, just donated a whack of money to my alma mater, the University of Waterloo, and they're renaming the computer science school in his honor.
How many three-cent clicks does it take to make a billion, anyhow?
Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. For more information, subscribe to his AdSense newsletter and get a free bonus AdSense traffic tip just for subscribing. Or add the book directly to your Amazon shopping cart for easy ordering!
AdSense Case Study: Basic CSS
First, let me thank Jeremy Schoemaker (aka Shoemoney) for mentioning that he just bought 5 copies of my book to distribute to friends and family. What a great idea, I hope others use my book as a stocking stuffer. Plus he could get several copies of a real book for the price of just one of those AdSense e-books you see advertised all over the place, so I'm sure he thought it was a great deal.
Anyhow, we're back to the AdSense case study that I've been working on with you over the past few weeks. We're now on Stage 4 of developing the Invisible Fence Guide, and our topic today is beautifying the site using CSS. I'm assuming you've already read my previous posting on this, Understanding CSS.
Now that you've got your content up and the site is organized, you want to work on making the pages look better. Note that “better” means different things to different people, but in general I'm talking about making a professional looking site that is both readable and leaves some room for the advertisements.
So before we get into specifics, let's talk about layout in general. If you've been reading at all about AdSense I'm sure you're familiar with this diagram:
This the famous AdSense “heatmap” released by Google in answer to AdSense publishers' questions about where they should place their ads. Ads in the darker-colored areas generally do better than ads in the lighter-colored areas. As you can see, the traditional spot for ads on the righthand side of the page (as you see on Google's own search results pages) is not a particularly good spot to place the ads, which may surprise some people.
That said, site readability is also important. Do you really want the ads to interfere with someone's viewing of your content? What's optimal according to the heatmap — and remember that the heatmap is a generalization — may not be optimal for your site, for a variety of reasons. So don't follow the heatmap blindly, experiment and see what works best for you and meets your overall goals (which are often more than just plain monetization) for the site.
So what about the layout? As it happens, most sites that use AdSense follow a fairly standard three-column format, with a navigational menu on one side, the content in the middle, and ads on the other side. Whether your show ads on the left or the right doesn't really matter to the layout, of course, either way you're talking about three columns.
Here's where things get tricky. You can use CSS to do three-column layouts, but there are all kinds of tricks and gotchas to it because of various issues with CSS support in all browsers. Doing a three-column layout with tables is trivial, of course, because you just define a table with (duh!) three columns. My personal site, which is so old and crusty I really haven't had the heart to redo it from scratch, uses tables extensively for its layout. That was before I found the “CSS religion”, so to speak. There's just something so elegant about using CSS and having a nice, simple HTML file that I really think you should stick it out and try to do the three-column layout with CSS, not with tables.
Luckily, you're not alone in your quest for three-column CSS layouts. I suggest you visit these sites to learn about the problems and to find templates to help you build your site:
Some of you may find this all a bit overwhelming, but there are many tutorials available to explain this problem and the various fixes. Ultimately, the solution lies in better CSS support across all browsers. Things are much better in that respect than they were before.
We'll continue our discussion of layout shortly. In the meantime, take the time to visit those pages I mentioned above and learn about three-column layouts with CSS.
Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. For more information, subscribe to his AdSense newsletter and get a free bonus AdSense traffic tip just for subscribing. Or add the book directly to your Amazon shopping cart for easy ordering!
AdSense e-books reviewed
You may want to add Andrew Bourland's blog to your list of “must-read” blogs. The blog's title is “A Closer Look at 'Get Rich Quick' eBooks”. Andrew is going to look at the various (mostly AdSense-based) “get rich quick” e-books (I still prefer the hyphen) that generate a lot of hype. See Andrew's introduction for the explanation of what he's doing and about his background, and for an interesting quote from “The Rich Jerk” system. First up in his sights, though, is the “AdSense Gold” system. I'm definitely going to keep an eye on this blog. I must admit to being curious myself to what these people are actually promoting, because I do think I know a bit about the subject at hand and I can't see most of these doing anything but promoting spammy website/blog creation. In other words (as I wrote recently in How to make a fortune with AdSense) basically you create umpteen websites/blogs stuffed with keyword-rich content that ranks decently for well-paying keywords and make your money on sheer volume. But I just can't get myself to spend the money to buy these books to find out what they're specifically saying… Luckily, it looks like Andrew's going to do the research for me!
Actually, Andrew didn't mention one of the other ways these e-books make money, which is the inclusion of affiliate links in the text to “recommended” books and software. I'm thinking that must be a great source of income, given the typical payout on those programs. Check out this ClickBank page that shows the payouts for the top-ranked “Marketing and Ads” products available for sale by ClickBank affiliates. The affiliate payouts range from $20 to $50, so it only takes a few sales to make some good money.
Don't expect Andrew to review Make Easy Money with Google, because it doesn't fit either of his criteria: it's not a “get rich quick” book and it's not an e-book. Perhaps I was stupid not to publish it as an e-book, but I think I'm also able to reach many more people in my target audience by having it come out as a conventional book. And no, there are no affiliate links in it, they'd be kind of hard to click!
P.S.: The long-delayed AdSense case study is about to restart. I had a bit of a hiccup there doing all the groundwork for my new AdSense newsletter and related mailing lists. I'll be writing about all that stuff later, too, once things settle down.
Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. For more information, subscribe to his AdSense newsletter and get a free bonus AdSense traffic tip just for subscribing. Or add the book directly to your Amazon shopping cart for easy ordering!
New review of Make Easy Money with Google
The reviews of Make Easy Money with Google keep popping up. Will Stuivenga just published a review of my AdSense book in his Tillabooks book review blog. Thanks, Will!
Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. For more information, subscribe to his AdSense newsletter. Or add the book directly to your Amazon shopping cart for easy ordering!
Plumbing your blog for articles and an article example
Speaking of article writing for traffic generation, there are two short items I'd like to talk about:
- One of the hardest parts about writing articles is coming up with good content. The article can't be too long and it has to be fairly self-contained. If you have a blog, though, you're probably writing that kind of text on a regular basis. So why not plumb your old blog entries for article topics and starting points? After a few months of blogging you'll have a large selection of topics to choose from, believe me!
- For another example of an article, see my sister's just-published double stroller selection article. It's up on EzineArticles.com and she now has links back to two of the pages on her site from a PR6 (PageRank of 6) page, which will help her pages rank better in the long run.
I haven't published nearly enough articles myself, and I have a lot of content to plumb given all the postings I've made to this blog!
Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book. Or add it directly to your Amazon shopping cart!
AdSense traffic tip: Article writing (combined version)
I've gotten some good feedback on the article writing series I published last month in this blog (see the archive for the originals). As you may recall, the series was about how writing and distributing free articles was a great way to get some well-targeted traffic back to your site. And the more traffic you have, the higher your AdSense earnings — especially with targeted traffic.
Because my newest AdSense traffic tip (only available to those who subscribe to my AdSense newsletter) refers back to that series, I decided to combine the three parts into a single longer article:
If you missed the original series, take a few minutes to read the new article.
Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book. Or add it directly to your Amazon shopping cart!
New AdSense Newsletter with bonus AdSense traffic tip
The first issue of my new newsletter, Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense, will be published sometime new week. (As you can see, I'm following my own advice about how to generate some more traffic to your site.) This is part of a concerted effort on my part (along with the podcast I announced yesterday) to reach a broader audience for my book and for my AdSense-related writings in general. Yes, the blog has a good readership and has slowly been climbing the Technorati rankings, but you can still reach a bigger set of people by email than you can with blogs. That's why it's important to build a good mailing list.
As part of this effort, I'm discontinuing the mailing list I had hosted on Google Groups. Those of you who subscribed to it will shortly get an email from me confirming this. While Google Groups was easy to use, I also found that the response rate was poor — neither name I drew for the free signed copy of my book elicited a response from the emails I sent them. Obviously, they just signed up and weren't reading the postings to the list.
So what I've done is used a professional mailing list firm to create a new mailing list for my newsletter. Subscribe to this list and you'll get a chance to win a signed copy of my book.
As a bonus for signing up, you'll also get a free unpublished AdSense traffic tip sent to you by mail in two parts.
To join, use the form on my new newsletter signup page.
Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book. Or add it directly to your Amazon shopping cart!
New Podcast: Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense
I've finally gotten around to putting together my first podcast! Episode 1 of the Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense podcast is now available. To listen, use the RSS feed or one of a a number of different formats.
Episode 1 is about, well, my book, and is over 17 minutes long. I run through the chapters and talk about the ideas behind the book. I even play a few musical interludes — the podcast is recorded with me sitting at my piano. (I still need to practice talking and playing at the same time — it's very hard!)
Further episodes will come out at irregular intervals. Let me know if you'd like to have a specifc topic discussed. For details on how I do the podcasting, see my AdSense podcast page.
Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book. Or add it directly to your Amazon shopping cart!
Angel funding? How about devil's playground!
Kevin Burton is asking other sites to donate their AdSense revenues to him as a form of “angel” funding. The use of AdSense for startup funding is not new, of course. In a recent interview, Google search expert Matt Cutts said that he was “struck by how many tiny companies were able to put AdSense on a site to defray their costs.”
Well, I hope Kevin doesn't get burned by his funding attempt. What he's asking others to do is to place his AdSense code — or, more precisely, AdSense code with his publisher ID — on their sites. The AdSense terms and conditions don't forbid this, but note the following clause:
4. Parties' Responsibilities. You are solely responsible for the Site(s), including all content and materials, maintenance and operation thereof, the proper implementation of Google's specifications, and adherence to the terms of this Agreement, including compliance with the Program Policies.
There's the problem with his scheme. By asking everyone to place his AdSense code on their sites, he's placing his account in jeopardy. The AdSense program policies have some strict rules as to what kind of sites are allowed to display AdSense advertisements and how those ads are to be displayed. To be safe, Kevin will need to personally check out each site using his publisher ID.
Then there's the click fraud issue. By publicly stating that AdSense is going to be a funding model, Kevin may unwittingly encourage others to click on ads for the purpose of increasing his earnings. The intentions of the clickers may be good, but the end result may do the advertisers a disservice.
Let's hope Kevin doesn't lose his AdSense account because of this. You might argue that anyone can go and copy anyone else's AdSense code and place it on an inappropriate site. But Google can filter those out if there's a problem. The difference here is that someone's actively encouraging people to do it.
Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book. Or add it directly to your Amazon shopping cart!
AdSense publishers look closely: Amazon tags and wikis its way to stickiness
As a (printed) book author, I have an unnatural interest (compared to most of you) in what Amazon does in its ongoing efforts to sell books. Usually that just means fretting over my book's Amazon ranking (see What Amazon Sales Ranks Mean if you're curious) and the comments (mostly good!) by those who bought the book (thank you!).
Still, there are things that AdSense publishers can learn from Amazon in general, though, and that has to do with creating a “sticky” site with few exit points.
Recently, Amazon introduced some new features to enhance the buying experience they provide. First came the ability to tag product entries.
Now they've just added product wikis.
At first glance, these seem like concerted efforts by Amazon to get on the social tagging and community-built content bandwagons, but of course Amazon always puts its own twist on these things.
What Amazon is really doing is providing more ways to attract and keep visitors on its site. If you look closely at one of Amazon's product pages, for example, you'll see that every link on the page goes back to an Amazon site. The only real exception are the sponsored links, which are ads provided by Google:
But even these links first get redirected through Amazon (they can do that because they're an AdSense Premium Publisher) and then open a new window to display the ad.
If you look closely at the tags and the product wikis, you'll see that, again, there's no linking to anything outside the Amazon family. A product wiki page can have links, yes, but only to customer-defined terms on special pages hosted by Amazon. No external links to anywhere, not unless there's some special syntax I haven't found to allow it (I've tried!).
Is this keeping within the true spirit of social tagging? Of wikification? No, of course not. But Amazon is running a business, and it's in their best interest to keep the eyeballs on their site, not someone else's.
As you implement AdSense on your own site, think closely about your external linking strategy. Instead of linking to every site you can think of, minimize the number of external links you have on any given page. This increases the chance that the ads will be used as an exit point from your site (unlike Amazon, your relationship with Google doesn't permit you to keep the visitors you send to advertisers). It may also improve the readability of your pages, because paragraphs full of links can actually be harder to read.
This strategy doesn't necessarily work for all sites. My personal site, EricGiguere.com, is full of external links. I'm not going to change that. But the Invisible Fence Guide currently has none, although I may yet add a links page at the end of the page sequence. Only you can decide what works best for your site, and to some degree that depends on what your monetization goals for the site.
Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book. Or add it directly to your Amazon shopping cart!
Chitika rebound or seasonal variation?
Rick Blythe is reporting that his Chitika earnings are on the rebound after Chitika's recent changes that caused much consternation among publishers who had been used to Chitika's high earnings when compared to AdSense.
I have to wonder, though, if the upswing in earnings is due to changes that Chitika is making or if it's just a seasonal effect. Let's not forget that Americans are about to celebrate their Thanksgiving holiday, which for many is the real start of the Christmas buying season. Product-oriented services like Chitika would naturally benefit from the seasonal shopping fenzy that is upon us, whether or not Thanksgiving is a big deal where you are. It will be interesting to see what happens to the Chitika earnings in January and February. Traditional retailers suffer sharp drops in sales during those months, so I wouldn't be surprised to see the same thing happen with Chitika. I hope the Chitika publishers are ready for it!
A side note about Chitika: I have to agree with Shoemoney's comments about the Chitika blog being so amateurish. Why doesn't someone there spend a few hours and create a custom theme for their official blog? Yeah, it takes time, but it's all part of the branding exercise. You may not like the colors you see on this site, but they're intended to match the cover of my book and to make the site look somewhat distinctive. They should do the same to their own blog.
Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book. Or add it directly to your Amazon shopping cart!
AdSense earnings aren't always updated in real time
Just a quick note: Some AdSense publishers panic when they open up the AdSense management console and see no clicks or earnings for that day. While it's true that the AdSense earnings reports are updated almost on a real time (i.e. immediate) basis throughout the day, there are times when there are “hiccups” in the system and the updating slows down or stops entirely. This often happens near the end of the month, for example, when Google's computers are busy generating payments for the last month's earnings. There's no reason to panic, in a few hours things will usually be back to normal. And remember that the reporting is done separately from the tracking, so ads will still be showing on your site and clicks will still be counted as they happen. Don't forget that Google itself won't get paid if there are no clicks!
Also, sometimes the information in different reports is updated at different times. You may have noticed the occasional difference between the earnings you see on the overview page when compared to what's reported in the monthly report. Again, these are normal discrepencies that happen because Google's computers (there are several involved) update their information at different times. The differences get ironed out as time goes by and all the computers are in sync with each other.
Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book. Or add it directly to your Amazon shopping cart!
AdSense Tip #11: Plumb AdWords for keywords
Hopefully you've been following my ongoing series of Google AdSense Tips in your quest for better earnings with AdSense. This tip is for those who followed my advice in AdSense Tip #10: Join the AdWords program. If you're not an AdWords customer, you can't do this.
AdWords customers have access to a number of useful tools, including the following:
- Keyword Tool to build keyword lists and do keyword comparisons
- Traffic Estimator to see how well certain keywords perform
Now while these tools are designed for advertisers to use, they're also extremely useful for us publishers. Particularly in finding the right keyword combinations for attracting more visitors (and ideally more clicks) to our site.
Here's what you do, it's all very simple. First, log in to your AdWords account. Then click on the Tools link in the Campaign Management tag:
Next, click on Keyword Tool:
Now type in the main keyword/keyphrase for your site and press the Get More Keywords button:
Scroll to the bottom of the page and click the Additional keywords to consider link:
Scroll back to the top and select Cost and ad position estimates in the Show columns drop-down list:
You won't see any estimates until you enter a value in the Calculate Estimates using Max CPC field. Use the maximum value for the currency you're working with, which in my case is CA$120 (approximately US$100), and press Recalculate:
Now you'll see estimated average cost-per-click values for each of the keywords in the list. Click twice on the Estimated Avg. CPC link to sort the list in descending order (highest to lowest value):
And presto!, you have a list of potential keywords showing what it would cost you on average to get top billing for your ad:
AdSense earnings are based on what the publisher pays per click, so this handy tool gives you a good idea of which specific phrases are good ones to target. That said, be aware that the price you see listed here is only the maximum bidding price and that most advertisers will in fact pay less. That and Google's smart pricing algorithms will all conspire to reduce the amount of money you actually earn on a per-click basis. So don't treat the values you see here as the Gospel truth — but they're good for judging the relative worth of different keyword combinations. See my high-paying keywords page for more information.
Once you've looked through your list and identified promising keywords, head back up to the Show columns drop-down and select Keyword popularity to see which keywords are the most searched for and which how popular they are with advertisers. If most of your traffic comes from search engine traffic, you'll use this information to further refine the list of keywords you should target.
As you can see, AdWords is a great way to plumb for keyword information! Now I need to revise my
Invisible Fence Guide (or maybe I should be calling
it the PetSafe Invisible Fence Guide) to take
advantage of some of these keyphrases… Well, maybe after the AdSense case study is done…
AdSense Case Study: Understanding CSS
As I mentioned before, Stage 4 of the AdSense case study is all about using cascading style sheets (CSS) to make a site look better and more professional. CSS will also figure prominently in our positioning of the AdSense advertisements, but we'll defer most of that discussion to Stage 5, which will focus on ad placement and layout. With that said, be sure to keep the ads in mind when you're deciding on the layout of your site. (And yes, the Invisible Fence Guide already has some ads on it, but what you see today isn't what's going to be on the final version of the site. I figured I might as well place some ads now to take advantage of the search engine traffic I've been getting due to the emphasis on good search engine optimization techniques from the beginning. For the term “invisible fence”, the Guide currently ranks #10 on Google and #11 on MSN, with higher rankings for more specialized phrase variations.)
Now, I'm not going to pretend to teach you CSS. There are many books and tutorials available that go into all kinds of detail about CSS. Here's a sampling of some useful sites:
- The CSS Property Index lists all the major CSS properties and shows examples of how they are used.
- The Web Design Group's Guide to Cascading Style Sheets has some good tutorials.
- Eric Meyer's CSS Work contains links to all kinds of neat examples of and articles about CSS. Meyer is one of the big names in CSS.
In general, though, what you want to do with CSS is define an external style sheet that defines what your web pages are going to look like in general: what fonts to use, what colors, what background images, etc. Each of your web pages will then link to that style sheet (you can link to more, but one is usually sufficient) in order to share the definitions in that file. (It's usual to store them in a text file that ends in a “.css” extension. You place the file in the root folder of your web server.) You can then change the way your site looks just by changing one file.
That said, it's also useful to be able to use “inline” style definitions on your web pages for specialized effects. For example, when I insert a Chitika ad unit into a blog entry (which is rare, because I'm not really pushing any products) I'll wrap it with a <div> tag with an inline style that looks something like this:
<div style="margin-left: 1em; margin-bottom: 1em; float: right;"> insert your Chitika ad code goes here </div>
This was all discussed in detail in Embedding Chitika eMiniMalls code into your postings, but I wanted to point out how I'm using the margin-left and margin-bottom CSS properties to ensure that there's a nice amount of whitespace between the text of the posting and the Chitika ad unit. It's easy to do, and I wish more people would do it on their pages, as little things like this can improve readability immensely.
Next time, I'll talk about some of the basic layout decisions you're going to have to make and how to implement them with CSS.
Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book. Or add it directly to your Amazon shopping cart!
Using Alexa to rank Google vs. MSN?
Previously, I've talked about the relevancy of Alexa rankings as a way to determine how popular a site is. I see that someone takes them seriously enough to track the Alexa rankings of Google.com and MSN.com to notice that Google is about to overtake MSN. Is this cause for excitement?
Probably not. Surely it's already happened. Surely regular users of Google are more likely to use the Google Toolbar and not the Alexa Toolbar. Surely regular users of MSN are more likely to do the converse. So the Alexa MSN numbers are probably skewed up and the Google ones are skewed down.
The blog has a good title, though!
Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book. Or add it directly to your Amazon shopping cart!
AdSense Traffic Tip: Start a newsletter/ezine
Running a blog can obviously be a profitable endeavour, either directly or as a way to drive more traffic to your site. Despite what you might think, though, the number of people who regularly read blogs are dwarfed by the number of people who only read email. Think of the people in your circle of friends and family who use a computer. I bet they all have email access — that's often the reason some older people get on the Internet in the first place. But how many read blogs? (For similar reasons, I decided to write my AdSense book as a printed book, not an e-book, so that I could reach a larger audience than I could by focusing my efforts solely online.)
Another way to drive traffic is to create a newsletter, sometimes called an “e-zine” or “ezine” (both are short for “electronic magazine”) in industry parlance. A newsletter is basically a longish email that you compose and send out at regular intervals to the subscribers on your list. In each newsletter is at least one link back to your site so that readers can go and get more information about the material mentioned in the newsletter or its author (you). Readers can easily forward the newsletters they get to friends, who may then discover your site that way.
Note that your blog and your newsletter can be related. You can distribute some (but probably not all) of the same content on both. You'll have to think about what's best for your audience, how much overlap there is between the people reading the two.
To get started with a newsletter you don't need much, really. If you're already blogging regularly it's not a big deal. What's harder to do, though, is to stay in compliance with all the anti-spam laws and to get people to subscribe and unsubscribe from the mailing lists you maintain. That's why almost every book that talks about this subject recommends that you use a professional mailing list service to run the lists for you. After my initial experience with getting people to sign up to my mailing list with Google Groups, I'd have to agree — a professional service is the better way to go. (The two top providers seems to be GetResponse and AWeber, by the way. At least they're the ones that every book mentions. Though their affiliate programs may skew those results, of course.)
You can even use one of those subscribe-by-email services for blogs to make it even simpler, but I think a conventional newsletter works better.
So I'm going to be moving my mailing list shortly, watch here for the details, and put some more effort into my “non-blog” marketing.
Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book. Or add it directly to your Amazon shopping cart!