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?

• Less than $10: 4%
• $10 to $20: 14%
• $20 to $50: 14%
• $50 to $100: 9%
• $100 to $250: 12%
• $250 to $500: 18%
• $500 or more: 29%

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?

• Less than 10%: 8%
• 10% to 20%: 13%
• 20% to 30%: 35%
• 30% to 40%: 16%
• 40% to 50%: 24%
• 50% to 60%: 3%
• 60% to 70%: 0
• 70% to 80%: 0
• 80% to 90%: 0
• 90% to 100%: 1%

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.

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.

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.