Brand Your Blog From Day 1

This posting is in response to Darren Rowse's group writing project about what you'd do differently if you had to start your blog all over again. I have a list of things I'd do differently, and I'll list them later in this post, but first a short discussion of what I did correctly from the beginning, and that's brand my blog.

Branding Your Blog

In marketing terminology, a brand is something distinctive (usually a name, but it can also refer to colors, designs, etc.) that identifies a particular product, service, or business. Branding refers to the things you do to develop a brand. If you need to know more, the Wikipedia entry for brand has a good discussion about the subject.

Blogs can be branded just like any other product or service. A number of factors play a part in establishing your blog brand:

Brands don't happen overnight, but you need to start working on your brand from day one of your blog.

Now, everyone won't agree with some of the choices you make to establish your brand. I've had a few people say they dislike my choice of colors for this blog — but of course, I chose them deliberately to match those of my book. Same for the name of the blog — it's almost identical to the title of the book (which wasn't my original title, by the way, but one the publisher came up with). I've been very careful to tie things to the book and develop a brand around quality AdSense advice from day one. But there have been mistakes.

My Blogging Mistakes

Forget the name and colors. My biggest regrets with this blog are:

Other things are more minor. One is not developing a mailing list from day one, instead I waited a good six months before putting together my newsletter and offering the ability to read this blog by mail (see instructions below). Another is spending too much of my time with this particular blog, to the detriment of my other money-generating projects. But you don't necessarily blog for money, so I think that's a common “regret”. Sometimes, though, I feel I should just take most of my postings and convert them into a PDF called “The Best of Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense” and sell them as an e-book for $97.

Any takers? :-)

Sponsored Link: Sign up for my free Profitable Niche Discovery course… it's up to 10 lessons so far, with no end in sight yet.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

July 27, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Drought-Order.com: New reader-built site

Haven't done this in a while, but today I'm pleased to announce another new site from a reader of Make Easy Money with Google. Drought-order.com is a resource for UK homeowners looking to find out more about drought orders. A drought order is the British term for what we North Americans would call a watering ban. It's a very simple site, but there's lots of useful information about saving water, how to keep your garden alive during a drought, and so on.

One thing that's interesting for me about this site is being exposed to new British terminology. Terms like hosepipe instead of garden hose, water butt for water tank, and so on.

The owner of the site had this to say about my book: “Thanks for writing such an informative book on the subject. It greatly helped in constructing my fledgling site.” I love to hear from happy readers. I'm no Joel Comm, but it's good to know that what I write is helping others succeed in their own online ventures.

One piece of advice for the site owner: you need to settle on which form of the domain you want to use as your website address. Is it “drought-order.com” or “www.drought-order.com”? They both provide the same content, but one should redirect the visitor to the other. You can follow the advice in The AdSense-ready WordPress Blog (Part 1) in the section Prefixed With “www” Or Not? to fix this, assuming of course that the site is using an Apache web server.

Beyond that, you might consider branching out and building a more generic site about water conservation that would appeal to North Americans. But one step at a time!

P.S.: Part 4 of my blog series is coming shortly. It just takes time to write those posts because they're full of screenshots.

Sponsored Link: Looking for advice about affiliate marketing? Visit GeekAffiliate today! Another proud site in the Synclastic Network.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

July 27, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

MEMWG helps with 50% AdSense CTR!

After my post yesterday reviewing HyperVRE, longtime reader Ed pointed me to some site generation software he's been using called SEO smArticle Composer. Now, before we go any further with this, go to the sales page and watch Video #2. Does any part of it look familiar? See those red boxes he's using to highlight the ads? Looks like the creator of SEO smArticle Composer found a good use for my Highlight Google AdSense ads Greasemonkey script! Kinda funny to be indirectly promoting someone's product like that.

I must admit, the sites generated by this software have the cleverest placement of AdSense link and ad units that I've seen in a while. There are links to some sample sites on the page that demonstrate what the software generates from articles or text you provide it. Go take a look for yourself and see if you can figure out what it's doing. Hint: look at where the link units are and then look closely at the text ads — they're not all what they may seem to be.

The sales page claims that these sites have a high clickthrough rate (CTR), some of them getting up to 50% CTR. That's very high, but I can see how it might happen… get a few pages into the site and you'll soon discover that the only way to get out is to hit the back button several times…. or click an ad. Clever indeed. It's like taking the single-page AdSense site to the next extreme.

Sponsored Link: If you use AdWords to send traffic to your site, you might want to read Landing Pages and Pay-Per-Click: A New Content Outlet.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

July 26, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Auto-Termination for AdSense Publishers: The Click Fraud Report

AdSense publishers should take the time to read Professor Alexander Tuzhilin's evaluation of Google's click fraud detection techniques, a 47-page PDF document filed as part of a lawsuit settlement. You might want to start reading on page 37, specifically section 9.3.2, Auto-Termination System for AdSense Publishers. To quote Tuzhilin:

Auto-Termination System is an automated offline system for detecting the AdSense
publishers who are engaged in inappropriate behavior violating the Terms and Conditions
of the AdSense program. It examines online behavior of various publishers and either
immediately terminates or warns the publishers who are engaged in the activities that the
system finds to be inappropriate.

Many AdSense publishers have complained about being terminated with no notice from Google — no warning, no explanation, no chance to explain. Well, now we know why… I also like the Classifier described in the next section:

Classifier: Google has an automated system that examines publishers’ behavior,
as described in Section 9.3.2 and classifies publishers as possible spammers or
“clean” publishers. If a publisher is classified as a spammer, that publisher is
subsequently being investigated.

I'd love to see the percentage of publishers that are classified as possible spammers vs. those that are clean. It would tell us a lot about the current state of the Web, wouldn't it?

Sponsored Link: Looking for help on article writing? Turn Words Into Traffic is a great e-book with practical advice to get you going.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

July 25, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Review: HyperVRE, a free AdSense site builder

I was planning on continuing with my AdSense-friendly WordPress blog series, but Saturday a new product called HyperVRE came out. Since it looked to be a competitor to Desktop AdSense Cash Machine (see my review) I thought I'd try to be one of the first out with an objective review of this “exciting” new product. (The “VRE” stands for “virtual real estate”, BTW, which is a code name used by Internet marketers for “niche content site”.) It's free, so you can't really beat the price. But, not to get ahead of myself, you do get what you pay for. Before I start the review, however, some thoughts about the whole business of building AdSense sites.

The Ethics of AdSense Site Builders

I've had some readers of this blog react with dismay when I talk about AdSense site builders, private label content, templates, and the like. While I can understand their reaction, my mission with this blog is to inform my readers about all parts of the AdSense ecosystem, good and bad. Because you need to know what you're up against.

I don't think me talking about these things is going to suddenly cause a huge rush of people going over to the “dark side” of AdSense.

One conclusion I've come to with these site builders is that putting together a decent site still takes work on your part, despite what the promotional materials say. If you really want less work, you're better off buying and deploying one of the many sets of pre-built sites, which you can easily find by doing a search for adsense sites in Google to find this, this or this among others.

And now, the review.

HypreVRE

HyperVRE is a free Windows-based tool for building “virtual real estate” sites that embed AdSense ads (or YPN or Chitika ads — it's really not specific to AdSense) and affiliate links into keyword-based content (articles and RSS feeds).

Now you might be wondering why HyperVRE is free. It's because there are actually two versions of the application available, the regular HyperVRE and the paid HyperVRE Gold. The latter offers more functionality. In particular, the affiliate links (to Amazon, ClickBank and
PayDotCom) generated by the free version are branded with the affiliate ID of the HyperVRE Gold member who referred you to the HyperVRE site (or, failing that, of the Hyper VRE creator). You see, this is one of those viral marketing schemes that entices you to upgrade so that you can make money from getting others to download a copy of HyperVRE — you either make money from them through affiliate links on the sites they create (if they use the free version) or you get a commission (from HyperVRE) if they themselves upgrade to HyperVRE Gold.

With that in mind, let's get started. Installation is simple and painless. A manual in PDF form is included, but it mostly consists of screenshots with a few explanations. I decided to just run the application without reading the manual, there's context-sensitive help available from the application itself.

The application is a wizard consisting of a number of steps. The first step is to create a new project: [These screenshots are large, so I've shrunk them a bit. Click an image to see it in its full glory in a new browser window.]



Now you enter the main keyword for the site you're about to create:



You can enter keywords manually, from a list, or have the application suggest them. Let's do the latter:



If you're wondering where the suggested keywords come from, I ran a few tests and determined that they came from the free Overture Keyword Suggestion Tool, which is pretty much what everyone uses (see my review of Keyword Niche Power, for example).

After selecting all the keywords we want and removing duplicates and long phrases we enter in the locations of the templates to use when generating the pages:



Although HyperVRE itself doesn't come with any templates, there's a “bonus” set of templates available on the HyperVRE membership site that you can download, so I just used one of those templates.

As an aside, there's an extensive set of placeholders documented in the HyperVRE manual for articles, feeds, PPC codes, etc. You would paste these into the templates you create and then HyperVRE will replace them with the appropriate bits when it generates the site.

Next you choose what kind of content to place on the generated pages:



Well, lots of options to choose from, too bad there's no real documentation on these things. Where do the articles come from? Where do the definitions and descriptions come from? Notice also that some features are only available if you upgrade to HyperVRE Gold.

Next you select the RSS feeds you want to use:



I couldn't find any feeds related to “AdSense” (what, they don't use this blog as a feed like so many other scrapers do?) so I had to settle for “online marketing”.

Now some more customization of the generated pages:



Next, enter in the AdSense code. I was really flying blind here because I hadn't looked at the template I selected, so I had no clue what formats to use for my ads, so I just chose some at random:



If I was a Gold member I'd be able to fill in my own affiliate information here:



And only Gold members can use this page:



This page confused me enough to make me look at the manual. What it lets you do is change the affiliate links so that they display small popups when the user hovers over one of the links. Seems like a neat feature, too bad I can't try it! (But that's the point, isn't it, to entice you to upgrade…)

Now we're ready to generate the site:



And that's pretty much it, the final page just tells you to upload your site:



Since the site I had chosen to build had some dynamic elements to it (the RSS feeds — they have to be inserted by code on the server to be any use for SEO purposes) the pages that were generated had some PHP code, so to see the site in action I uploaded everything to a subdomain I created on one of my existing sites. You can see the pages yourself at adsensesite.synclastic.com (the link opens in a new window).

As you can see, the site it built for me has a number of problems. Some of them are my own fault because I didn't look at the template I was using to figure out what size ad units I should be using, and I didn't specify any header and footer images to use (those take time to create).

Other problems, though, are not of my own doing. Most of the links don't work — they use backslash ('\') characters instead of forward slash ('/') characters in the URLs. As for the article on the home page, I don't know where it came from, but in the resource box for the article it specifically stipulates that all links in the article must be live… and they're not. And generally the page just looks bad.

And here's the point I wanted to make again: tools like this will save you time in some ways, yes, but you still have to spend some time in learning the tool and creating and fine-tuning the templates it uses, otherwise the sites it generates aren't very good. If you're looking to crank out site after site, though, then that initial learning curve will probably be worth it — but only if you upgrade to HyperVRE Gold. Desktop AdSense Cash Machine is definitely simpler to use, though of course it's not as flexible.

The nice thing about HyperVRE is that it IS free, so it doesn't cost you anything to try it out. If I had the time, I'd work with the templates a bit and figure out how to generate a better-looking (and better-working) site, but I'm just too busy right now. I can't say I'm a big fan of having other people's affiliate links inserted into my own sites — if I were you I'd use search-and-replace tools to run through the generated code and insert your own affiliate IDs instead.

But that would take work.

(If anyone reading this builds some sites with HyperVRE, I'd love to hear your own comments on it. Perhaps I'm too cynical about these applications…)

Sponsored Link: Have you signed up for my AdSense newsletter yet? Why not, it's free and full of great information!

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

July 24, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | 1 Comment 

A Billion AdSense Dollars

Google's results for the second quarter of 2006 certainly make interesting reading. Not only is advertising the major source (one could say the only significant source) of revenue for Google (99% of its revenue), but the AdSense programs generated 41% of that revenue. AdSense revenue was $997 million dollars — just shy of a billion dollars!

Unfortunately, Google doesn't break down the numbers any further, so we don't know which AdSense programs are generating the most money for Google: AdSense for content, or AdSense for domains, AdSense for search (it's probably not big), or the custom/premium AdSense programs for large publishers.

Just as interesting is the “traffic acquisition costs” number, which is the money shared with Google's partners. At $723 million, this is almost 3/4 of AdSense revenues. I bet some of the larger partners get hefty percentages — 80% or 90% — of the AdSense revenue their sites generate.

What's even more interesting is that the profit from AdSense — $997 - $723 = $274 million — more than covers the “other costs of revenues” item, which includes data centre costs, credit card fees, etc. This leaves the bulk of Google's revenue — the $1.4 billion (58%) it makes from displaying ads on its own sites — to cover the other costs in the company, which means most of that revenue is pure profit — over $700 million last quarter!

And people wonder why Google doesn't crack down more on made-for-AdSense (MFA) sites?

Sponsored Link: Turn Words Into Traffic is a great e-book about writing and distributing articles in order to get traffic to your sites.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

July 21, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Chitika Publishers Lose 30% Of Earnings To Auditing

A couple of months ago I asked polled readers about their Chitika eMiniMalls earnings to

find out what the average earnings were and what percentage of earnings they were

losing to auditing. A completely unscientific poll (I had to scrub the data to

remove duplicate/multiple votes) but here are the results.

Average Earnings

So how much money do Chitika publishers make, before auditing, on a monthly

basis?

Surprisingly, almost 30% of those polled make $500 or more a month from

Chitika, and almost half make at least $250 a month. Even after auditing (see

below), half would make at least $150 a month, and I suspect a good 10% to 20% would make over $500 a month.

Average Percentage Lost to Auditing

What percentage of a publisher's monthly earnings are lost due to auditing?

Chitika's auditing practices for eMiniMalls brought them a lot of grief early

on, and they're still somewhat controversial. Over half the publishers lose up to

30% of their monthly earnings after auditing and 40% of them lose between 30% and

60% of their earnings. So a 30% loss in earnings is probably a good estimate for

new publishers for the first few months until a pattern emerges.

Suggestions for Improvement

The poll allowed voters to suggest improvements to the eMiniMalls program. Not

suprisingly, the majority voted for same-day auditing of data, just like AdSense

does. Another large group wanted same-day auditing plus more powerful reporting

capabilities — eMiniMalls reporting is definitely less sophisticated than

what AdSense publishers are used to.

So there you have it, some more data points. I run eMiniMalls on my electronic fence guide and while it doesn't make much, it's more than I thought it would. (I also put it on this parody site, but so far it's earned me zilch there. Not surprised about htat.) If you're an AdSense publisher with sites that match the eMiniMalls categories, sign up and give it a try — the ads can be placed on AdSense pages as long as you're using eMiniMalls in non-contextual mode (where you supply the keywords).

Sponsored Link: Here's my Chitika referral link if you want to join.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

July 20, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

One Blog or Many Blogs: Which Is Best?

As I continue with my AdSense-friendly blog series, I realize that I haven't touched on the one-blog-or-many-blogs question. Implicitly, though, I've been favoring the multi-blog approach, which is why I've been giving quite detailed WordPress installation and configuration instructions. Let me explain why I favor the multi-blog — or blog network — approach.

It's All About Targeting

If you've learned anything by now from my writings, it's that properly targeting your blog or site is extremely important for so many reasons. Not only to get the right AdSense ads to display on your pages, but also so that your site is findable in the search engines and to attract and maintain a steady and repeatable stream of visitors. The latter is particularly important with blogs.

But I can do that with blog categories, you say. Yes, to a certain degree. Putting everything including the kitchen sink into one giant blog is going to make things harder, though. Don't forget that the domain name and page URL can go a long way to getting the right kinds of ads. And yes, you can classify everything nicely into categories and provide category-specific feeds that your users can subscribe to…

I bet, though, that most people don't bother subscribing to a category-specific feed. They'll just subscribe to the main blog feed. And if you end up posting many items across those different categories, they'll find it hard to keep up and winnow out the chaff. In the end, they'll just unsubscribe and go looking for what they want elsewhere.

Creating Your Own Blog Network

What you want to do, then, is create your own blog network. Each blog in the network is focused on a single topic, ideally a very narrow topic. Readers only subscribe to the ones that interest them and don't get flooded with irrelevant or uninteresting posts. Your ad targeting is spot on, too, because all the content is related to the topic at hand. Everyone's happy.

Well, almost. There's no doubt that setting up and maintaining multiple blogs is more work than running a single blog. And you may find yourself busier because you'll feel the need to post entries more frequently to the individual blogs, a problem you don't have with only one blog. But that's the price you have to pay. And this means, by the way, that there is a limit to how many blogs you can run as an individual before having to enlist others to help you out.

The Synclastic Network

My own blog network is slowly taking shape. I call it the Synclastic Network. Synclastic is a mathematical term meaning curved toward the same side in all directions. The root of the network is Synclastic.com, the oldest domain I've registered, older even than EricGiguere.com. So far the network only has three blogs in it: Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense, GeekAffiliate and J2ME Programming Guide. But more are on their way, and I also include non-blog sites in my network.

Of course, you may have reasons — and they can be perfectly innocent — to not link all your blogs together. So your blog network may be more of a virtual concept.

Whatever you do with your blog network, establish common processes to simplify your life. Keep copies of the plugins and themes you use. Tag and categorize your posts consistently. Optimize your ad placement as much as possible. Create links to the various administration consoles and keep a list of userids and passwords somewhere safe. Use hosting services that make blog installation easy.

Processes let you concentrate on the content. And that's the important part of a blog network.

Sponsored Link: I just bumped up my rating of The List FX. See my List FX review for the reason.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

July 19, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | 1 Comment 

The AdSense-ready WordPress Blog (Part 3)

And so we continue our series on creating an AdSense-friendly blog using WordPress. (Is anyone finding this useful?) Please read Part 1 and Part 2 before continuing.

Editing the Theme

The blog is up and running, but there are some things we need to change about the way it looks and behaves before we start posting. And before we add any AdSense code.

A WordPress blog's look and feel is controlled by its theme. A theme is the set of HTML pages, CSS stylesheets and images that define the blog's presentation. Changing the visual appearance of the blog is done by editing the theme.

Instead of modifying the default theme, you can actually download alternate themes that others have created and use them instead. But you'll probably want to change the theme anyhow, so you might as well learn how to do it using the default theme.

To edit the theme, login to the adminstration console and click on Presentation and then on Theme Editor:



On the right side of the window you'll see the list of files that make up the theme, starting with the stylesheet. You can click on any of the listed files to edit the corresponding code in the big text area on the left side of the screen:



Just remember to press the Update File button to save any changes you make to a file before moving on to the next file.

PHP Files

All files except for the one labeled Stylesheet are a mixture of HTML tags and PHP commands. PHP is a programming language, but you don't need to know PHP in order to make small changes to a theme. The important thing to remember in these files is that special tags are used to separate PHP commands from the HTML. Each PHP command begins with this tag:

<?php

and ends with this tag:

?>

For example, here's a nested list whose list items are
obtained from a database via some PHP code:

<li><h2>Archives</h2>
    <ul>
    <?php wp_get_archives('type=monthly'); ?>
    </ul>
</li>

If you're not a programmer, avoid changing any of the PHP code. But the HTML code is fair game to change.

Changing the Title

By default, the page titles for individual blog entries looks like this:

Reviewing Digital Cameras » Blog Archive » Hello World!

We don't really want the “Blog Archive” fragment in there, we just want the name of the blog and the title of the post. So in the theme editor we click on Header and look for the <title> tag. Here are the lines we need:

<title><?php bloginfo('name'); ?> <?php if ( is_single() ) { ?> » Blog Archive <?php } ?>
<?php wp_title(); ?></title>

This may look somewhat intimidating, but it's actually not that hard to understand if you look at it closely. All we need to do is change it to this:

<title><?php bloginfo('name'); ?> <?php wp_title(); ?></title>

Don't forget to press the Update File button after making the change.

Adding Section Targeting

The next thing to do is to add section targeting commands to emphasize specific parts of the pages for analysis by the AdSense crawlers.

Click on Main Index Template and find this code fragment:

<div class="post" id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">
        <h2><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>"

Insert the google_ad_section_start command in between the <div> and <h2> tags:

<div class="post" id="post-<?php the_ID(); ?>">
        <!-- google_ad_section_start -->
        <h2><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>"

Now find the matching </div> end tag and insert the googl_ad_section_end command right before it:

  <!-- google_ad_section_end -->
  </div>

Now repeat this process with the Page Template, Single Post and Archive pages — basically anywhere that a <div> of class “post” is found. Don't forget to save your changes as you make them.

Adjusting the Width

Now make a small change to the stylesheet. Click on Stylesheet and search for the “narrowcolumn” and “widecolumn” classes:

.narrowcolumn {
	float: left;
	padding: 0 0 20px 45px;
	margin: 0px 0 0;
	width: 450px;
	}

.widecolumn {
	padding: 10px 0 20px 0;
	margin: 5px 0 0 150px;
	width: 450px;
	}

Change the width in both cases from 450px to 468px, for reasons that will be evident later. Again, save your changes.

That's all for this installment. Next we'll look at adding the AdSense code to the blog.

Sponsored Link: Learn how to create e-book covers with your paint program.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

July 19, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | 2 Comments 

10 Alternatives to Checking Your AdSense Earnings

It's a common problem among AdSense publishers, especially those with the AdSense Notifier installed in their browsers: the frequent and compulsive checking of AdSense earnings throughout the day. It can be a big time waster. But constant checking won't lead to more earnings — in fact, it could lead to the opposite! Here are ten things you could be doing instead to increase those earnings over the long term:

1. Write more content.
If you make time to check your earnings, you can make time to write some content. A blog posting, an article fragment, whatever you can do. It doesn't have to be immediately publishable — use your blog's draft mode, for example, to prepare some content ahead of time for later publication.
2. Read the AdSense Terms and Conditions.
It always surprises me how many people haven't read the AdSense Terms and Conditions and the accompanying Program Policies. (Note that the Program Policies are considered to be part of the Terms and Conditions.) This is where you discover important information like:

  • No encouragements to click.
  • Only label ads as “Sponsored Links” or “Advertisements”.
  • No more than 3 ad units, 2 search boxes and 1 link unit per page. (As of this posting.)
  • When Google says “Jump!” you say “How high?”

It's well worth the time to read it thoroughly.

3. Visit an AdSense forum.
My favorite AdSense forum is the Digital Point AdSense forum, which is heavy on the signal and less so on the noise. It's a great way to learn from other publishers' experiences.
4. Study the AdSense heat maps.
The AdSense heat maps (there are two: one for regular content pages and one for forum pages) give you great advice on where to position ads for maximum clickability. Are your ads in the right spot? If not, try moving them into the hot spots on a few pages and see what happens.
5. Research keywords.
Have you been wondering how hot a topic is? Some quick tests with Google Suggest, the Overture Keyword Selector Tool and the AdWords Keyword Tool (all free) can let you know fairly quickly if it's something you can pursue. If you have a bit longer to spare, you can also fire up a tool like Keyword Elite for more in-depth research. (Subscribe to my free profitable niche discovery course for more tips on keyword research.)
6. Create some channels.
Although tedious to manage, AdSense channels, particularly the custom channels, can provide some interesting and useful data. Combine these with an ad tracking script to really find out what ads are making you money and what you can do in terms of ad formats and ad placements to increase your earnings.
7. Create systems.
Serious AdSense publishers have multiple sites and/or blogs on the go at any given time. Creating and managing your sites and blogs is much simpler and more effective if you have systems in place to help you with different things. Like customizing WordPress for AdSense or using a templating framework for creating new sites.
8. Optimize your pages.
So much traffic depends on how well your pages rank in the search engines that it makes a lot of sense to devote some time to search engine optimization tasks. Most search engine optimization tasks have the beneficial side effect of improving the ad targeting.
9. Think like an advertiser.
That money you're making ultimately comes from the advertisers who are advertising with Google's AdWords program. Do you understand how AdWords works? Do you know how ads are chosen for display? You can get a lot of insight into AdSense by studying its “flip side”.
10. Spend time doing other things.
Go talk with your spouse. Play with your children. Read a good book. Watch a movie. Take some time off from AdSense by doing other things. Give your poor brain a break from all those thoughts about high-paying keywords, traffic strategies, search engine optimization, and related topics.

Write these tips down or print them out. Place them near your computer. When you find yourself wanting to check your earnings, look at this list instead and pick something to do. Try to increase the time between earnings checks. How far can you go without your next “hit” of AdSense “crack”?

Sponsored Link: Have you heard about The Real AdSense Code?

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

July 17, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Zorry!: The new board game by Zinedine Zidane

Every once in a while it's good to do something different. Last night, instead of working on Part 3 of my AdSense-friendly WordPress blog series I decided to do something just for the fun of it. Given the controversy over Zinedine Zidane's heat butt in the FIFA World Cup 2006 final last Sunday, I thought it would be amusing to update the class board game Sorry! in light of Zidane's achievement:



Please see Zorry!: The New Game by Zinedine Zidane for all the details. (It's a single-entry blog, sort of a variation of the single-page site we've talked about before.)

We now return you to your regularly-scheduled programming.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

July 13, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

The AdSense-ready WordPress Blog (Part 2)

Today we continue our series on creating an AdSense-friendly blog using WordPress. Please read Part 1 before continuing.

WordPress Installation Made Easy

After you've decided on your blog name, gotten the domain and setup the hosting, it's time to actually create your blog. WordPress is written in the programming language called PHP and requires a database as well, with MySQL being the preferred (and default) choice. Advanced users can install WordPress using the detailed WordPress installation instructions on the WordPress site.

Or, if you're lazy like I am, you can simply use cPanel and Fantastico, assuming of course you chose a hosting service that supports both. Let me walk you through a typical deployment using those tools.

Create Your Blog Home

Before you run Fantastico, you have to decide where your blog is going to be located. Is it going to be at the root of your site (www.mydomain.com), a folder within your site (www.mydomain.com/blog) or a subdomain (blog.mydomain.com)?

If installing at the root or in a folder, there's really nothing to do.

If installing in a subdomain, though, you'll need to create the subdomain before proceeding any further. Login to the cPanel for your site and click on the Subdomains icon:



On the resulting page, enter in the name of your subdomain and press the Add button:



Now go back to the main cPanel screen. You'll see a new folder with the same name as your subdomain (digital-cameras in this case) was created under your home folder (which usually has the name www or public_html). The contents of that folder are now accessible using two addresses: www.synclastic.com/digital-cameras and digital-cameras.synclastic.com. We only want the latter web address to be valid, so we need to put a .htaccess file in the digital-cameras folder to redirect all accesses to the subdomain. Here's what the file looks like:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} .
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^digital-cameras\.synclastic\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://digital-cameras.synclastic.com/$1 [R=301,L]

This is almost identical to the code in Part 1 for redirecting the www form of a domain name to the non-www form. Paste the code above into a .htaccess file and change both instances of “digital-cameras” to your subdomain name and both instances of “synclastic” to your domain name. (You'll also need to change the “com” to whatever top-level domain you're using if it's not .com.) Be sure to place this file in the subdomain's root folder, not your main site's root folder.

After installing the .htaccess file, test it. This URL:

www.synclastic.com/digital-cameras

Should redirect you to the proper URL:

digital-cameras.synclastic.com

The page address shown by your browser should change accordingly.

Installing WordPress With Fantastico

Now click on the Fantastico icon on the cPanel main screen:



Then click WordPress on the Fantastico main page:


src="http://www.memwg.com/images/wordpress-adsense-4.gif">

Then click New Installation in the box on the right of the page:


src="http://www.memwg.com/images/wordpress-adsense-5.gif">

Now the installation wizard opens. The first thing you must do is select the domain and the installation directory for WordPress. You have three choices:

For example, here's what I did to create the blog on digital-cameras.synclastic.com:



Then set the userid and password you want to use for administrative access to the blog. This lets you gain access to the WordPress admin pages once the blog is up and running, so choose a good userid and password:



Now fill in the basic details about the blog. You can change these later if you have to:


src="http://www.memwg.com/images/wordpress-adsense-8.gif">

You're almost done. All you need now is to fill out some email account details. I wish Fantastico didn't require this, though, because it's only useful if you plan on posting to your blog via mail. You need a separate email account (don't use your main email account!) for this. Either provide all the details needed (userid, password, POP3 server name, POP3 port number) or else supply a bogus userid and password:



Now click the Install WordPress button to actually install the blog. You'll be asked to confirm some details and then press Finish Installation. A few seconds later your blog will be installed. You can even email the installation details to yourself, which is a good idea in case you forget what you did.

Testing the Blog

Now you should test the blog. Open a browser window and enter the URL of the blog. You should see a page that looks like this: [click the image to enlarge it in a new window]



Congratulations! You now have a blog!

Before proceeding any further, login to the administration console by going to the wp-admin page (you can also click the Login link near the bottom right-hand corner of the page) and entering in your administrative userid and password:



Now, before we do anyting else, click on Options:


src="http://www.memwg.com/images/wordpress-adsense-12.gif">

And then Discussion:


src="http://www.memwg.com/images/wordpress-adsense-13.gif">

Check the option An administrator must approve the comment:


src="http://www.memwg.com/images/wordpress-adsense-14.gif">

Then save the setting by pressing the Update Options button at the bottom of the page.

What you've just done is turned on moderation for all comments and trackbacks, an important tool for controlling comment spam.

That's the end of the WordPress installation. In the next part we'll look at basic AdSense-friendly configuration options.

Sponsored Link: Learn about profitable niche discovery with my free course.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

July 12, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | 1 Comment 

The AdSense-ready WordPress Blog (Part 1)

Last week I mentioned using a WordPress blog that shows postings in chronological order as a way to quickly create a mini-site. I thought I'd back it up a little, though, and start by discussing what it takes to create the perfect “AdSense-ready” WordPress blog. (Much of what I say in this series applies to other blogging platforms, but everything is written specifically for and about WordPress.)

Why WordPress?

First, let's talk about why we're using WordPress in the first place. WordPress is the first choice for many bloggers because it's:

There are other free blogging solutions available, Blogger being the most obvious, but for ultimate flexibility it's hard to beat WordPress. (Note that this blog you're reading is not running WordPress, for geeky reasons, but I run other WordPress-hosted blogs like GeekAffiliate…)

Title and Subtitle

Now, before you do anything else, sit down and choose a title and a subtitle for your blog. I'm not talking about the domain name, but the blog's name and description. Some tips:

Try to be as happy as you can with your choice, because once it's out there it's going to stick and you'll have a devil of a time changing it. Spend as much time as you think you need on this. Be sure to search Google to see if anyone is using the same blog name. If they are, it's probably best to choose something else to avoid confusion.

The Domain Name

Once you've settled on a blog name, it's time to pick a domain name. Actually, you should be doing this concurrently with the name selection.

You might be wondering if you really need a domain name. Absolutely. Otherwise your blog is at risk. Yes, you can use a subdomain on someone else's domain, but what happens if your relationship with that party dissipates? What if that party doesn't like what you're doing with your blog and decides to delist it? What if you want to change or upgrade blogging platforms? Ultimately, your blog lives by its findability and linkability. If the base URL for your blog changes for any reason — and I have firsthand experience with this — then you might as well say goodbye to all those incoming links, especially if you can't arrange proper server-level redirects from the old blog address to the new blog address. And even with proper redirect things can still get messed up — Technorati lists both memwg.com (currently #20) and MakeEasyMoneyWithGoogle.com (currently #56) in its list of AdSense blogs, even though the latter is nothing but a redirect to the former.

Domain name tips:

Most of my older domain names were registered with GoDaddy, but lately I've been using 1&1 exclusively because the $5.99 price for .com domains includes free private registration. Shop around, though, things change all the time.

Generally speaking, you'll want to install your blog at the root of the domain. Unlike this blog, which has the unwieldy path “/blog/adsense/” (and was created before I understood how to properly manipulate the blogging software I use to do otherwise), you want the blog to be on the home page so that it gets indexed quickly by the search engines. And also so that it's easy to find.

Prefixed With “www” Or Not?

Unless you're using a subdomain (see the next item), your blog will be accessible in two ways: “www.domain.com” and “domain.com”. Some links will use one form, some the other. You want to prevent this. Choose one form and arrange things so that anyone who accesses the site via the other form gets redirected to the proper (”canonical”) form.

On most web servers, this means noodling with the special .htaccess file in the root. If you want to redirect the non-www form to the www form, use these commands:

Options -Indexes
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^nodebtisgood.(.*)
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.nodebtisgood.com/$1 [R=301,L]

You would, of course, replace all instances of “nodebtisgood” with your own domain name.

To do the reverse — go from www form to non-www form — these are the commands you need:

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} .
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^nodebtisgood\.com
RewriteRule (.*) http://nodebtisgood.com/$1 [R=301,L]

See Webweaver's .htaccess redirection examples for more details on this.

Subdomains

If you already have a site and you want to add a blog to it, you have two choices: install the blog in a subfolder of the site or else install it in as a subdomain. (This assumes that your hosting service lets you create subdomains.)

Technically, a subdomain is a separate site from its parent site. As such, it's easier to get the home page of a subdomain (which in this case would be your main blog page) indexed than random pages within the parent site. This is a good reason to use a subdomain, although recent abuses of subdomains by spammers is likely going to cause Google and the other search engines to index subdomains more carefully.

Semantically, though, I like having the blog separated from the main site in this manner. Keep the subdomain short, usually just the primary keyword itself works well. Avoid calling it “blog”, as in “blog.foo.com”.

Get Your Hosting Right!

Armed with your domain name, you're ready to find a hosting service. I always recommend separation of church and state on this one — don't host your domain with the registrar you bought it from. That way, if you run into problems with your hosting service your domain name won't be frozen and you can point it elsewhere if necessary.

You should be able to find hosting very cheaply for your WordPress blog. If you're at all technically-inclined, or willing to learn, consider getting a reseller account. This is a hosting account that you can use to sell hosting services to others. You're not looking to do that, but a reseller account gives you lots of space, bandwidth, and the ability to host multiple domains (25, 50, even unlimited…) for a low price. Personally, I have a reseller account from ResellerZoom myself, which gives me the ability to host up to 50 domains for only $5 a month. But again, it pays to shop around.

Try to get a hosting service with Fantastico support. Fantastico is a set of auto-installation scripts that can be used with cPanel, which is the standard control panel for managing hosting accounts. Fantastico makes WordPress installation trivial.

Be sure to setup email accounts within the hosting service, or at least forward the email to one of your other accounts. Don't setup a “catch-all” account, you'll just get flooded with spam. You should set up “webmaster” and “postmaster” accounts in addition to at least one other.

Next time we'll look at getting the WordPress blog up and running.

Sponsored Link: Read my review of The List FX to see if it's worth $9.95 to you or not.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

July 11, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Are you an AdSensepreneur?

Yesterday I met a real entrepreneur, a guy who was currently had three separate companies and had already sold companies he'd created. He doesn't do anything related to contextual advertising, but I thought his mindset and his attitudes were very important things to keep in mind if you're trying to make real money with AdSense. You really do have to think like an entrepreneur — or an “AdSensepreneur” if you want. Here are some characteristics of an AdSensepreneur:

This isn't meant to be a comprehensive list, of course. But if you really want to take your AdSense earnings up to the next level, think carefully about these characteristics and see if they fit you or not. Perhaps the best thing you can do to jumpstart yourself is to create a plan for increasing your earnings and adjust everything you do to work towards and in support of that plan. Just don't expect it to happen overnight!

Sponsored Link: Download the free e-book Google AdWords Made Easy today.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

July 10, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

The AdSense Mini-Site

We've already discussed the single-page AdSense site. Today we look at a slightly different site, what I call the AdSense mini-site.

In some ways, an AdSense mini-site is just a single-page site with two or more pages. You develop it in much the same way:

There are some changes you'll want to make, though:

You'll also want to spend more time on the look of the site. Creating a single-page site is quite easy because you don't have any navigation to worry about. With multiple pages, though, you want the site to look good and to easily move the visitor from page to page. That actually complicates things.

How many pages should a mini-site have? Probably between 5-20 is a good number. You want to keep the visitor interested so they'll read the other pages and increase the chances they'll click an ad. Too many pages and they might not bother exploring any further. Tutorials (”7 steps to getting out of debt”) or narratives (”why I bought my digital camera”) make good mini-sites.

If you want an example of a mini-site, the guide to electronic pet fence and containment that I've mentioned here before is a good example.

Here's a tip for you: build a mini-site using a WordPress blog listing entries in chronological order (as opposed to the usual reverse chronological order). If anyone's interested in more details on how to do this, I can write up some instructions and post them here.

Sponsored Link: Lots of free books and software are available for free from MyFreeGiveaway. Another one of those “butterfly marketing” membership sites.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

July 7, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

The drudgery of article submission

Regular readers may recall my article writing series (summarized here in one convenient article). Recently I've decided to revisit the topic and to create some new articles of my own to submit to various sites. Although I think article submission is a great strategy to get some links and publicity for your site, I've always hated the sheer drudgery of submitting articles to umpteen different article sites. So I've decided to investigate article submission software to see how much they can speed up the process. I've narrowed it down to two choices:

These two packages seem to be the most legitimate ones I can find. So far I'm leaning towards Article Post Robot because it's a bit cheaper and the creator offers a free trial of the software. (I hope to do a full review of it on GeekAffiliate soon.) Besides, it has much cuter graphics:

(That image was shrunk to make it fit…) But I'd love to hear opinions from any of you out there as to what you use and why.

You may wonder if it's ethical to use article submission software in the first place. Well, you're right to be wary — there are definitely some iffy programs out there that exist solely to spam article directories. This is why most legitimate article directories today require submitters to register before articles are accepted. So any article submission software that doesn't take this registration step — and any manual verification in addition — into account is simply no good in my books.

If you want to submit articles to more than one or two directories, though, I think it pays to invest in this kind of a program, just for the amount of time it's going to save you. Really, I'd rather be writing articles than submitting them. I know the latter's an important part of the process, but if I don't have software to help me along then I'll just limit myself to a couple of major sites like EZineArticles.com and SearchWarp.com and be done with it. But for maximum effect you want to submit to several directories. So it's one of those classic time-vs-effort debacles that's unique to everyone's situation.

Personally, I like to see AdSense publishers spend most of their time creating content and using tools to automate the other stuff rather than the other way around. After all, blogging software like WordPress lets you concentrate on the content and is a real boon for legitimate content producers — though we've all seen blogs being abused as well. Article submission software is along the same lines.

More on this topic once I've played around with the software.

Sponsored Link: Speaking of article directories, you can create your own with Desktop AdSense Cash Machine. But be sure to read Are article directories ethical? before you do.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

July 5, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

The List FX review and SEO for Firefox extension

Two tidbits for you about a new Firefox extension and a product called The List FX:

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

July 4, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Google AdWords Made Easy (Free e-book)

One of the things I tell AdSense publishers is to spend some time reading about or (better yet) playing with AdWords. Why? Because that's where the money ultimately comes from — the advertisers placing ads with Google via AdWords.

If you are looking to learn more about AdWords, you can download the new 85-page e-book Google AdWords Made Easy by Brad Callen (although annoyingly he refers to it consistently and incorrectly as “Adwords” and not “AdWords”… but don't let that put your off, the content's good). The book is a sales tool for Brad's Keyword Elite product, perhaps the best keyword tool out there today, but the references to Keyword Elite are fairly inobtrusive and you don't need to purchase KE to get value from the book. (The references to KE are almost all the same: Brad shows you how to do something manually and then shows how much more quickly and easily it can be done using Keyword Elite.)

This book, by the way, was previously known as The Player's Guide to AdWords Domination and was available by signing up for Brad's mailing list at www.keywordelite.com.

Although it's not mentioned in the book, don't forget to check out my free Google Suggest Explorer for another free tool for garnering keyword suggestions. Brad's book (and most other books and articles) use the Overture suggestion tool for most of the research, but using both of those along with AdWords' own keyword tool is perhaps the most comprehensive way to create keyword lists for free.

Sponsored Link: Brad also sells a tool called SEO Elite that's worth a good look if you're interested in heavy duty search engine optimization.

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

July 4, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | Comments Off 

Private Label Articles: Part 3 - Uses of PLR articles

As you may recall, in Part 2 of this series I mentioned the potential legal pitfalls of using PLR (private label rights) articles. So it was with some amusement that I read this email from one of the free PLR sites:

“Due to a disagreement with the supplier of the Private Label Articles we had to temporarily remove them until we find another source. Until then we are giving away AdSense Websites!”

Ooops. Man, it must hurt to create a PLR membership site (this one was offering 100 free PLR articles weekly) and then have the rights to those PLR articles revoked… kind of takes the wind out of the business model, no? If you ever plan on using PLR articles, be sure you know what rights you have to the material. Obviously this group discovered they didn't have the right to distribute the articles they were using.

So what CAN you do with PLR articles? As I see it, there are two legitimate uses:

Now I know that people use the articles for other purposes, and that's why PLR articles are especially hot right now — they look like an easy way to get fresh content into a site/blog. But if you're thinking long term, you've got to think beyond just stuffing every article you can find into the system. I don't expect to discuss PLR articles any further unless there are specific questions you'd like answered, so we'll move on to something else. I hope everyone is having a happy holiday weekend (Canada Day here, Independence Day in the US)!

Sponsored Link: Hey, why not sign up for my free Profitable Niche Discovery course? No hype, just solid information. So far there are 8 lessons, spaced two days apart. All written by me — no rehashed PLR articles!

Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.

July 3, 2006 | Filed Under AdSense | 1 Comment