Archive for the ‘Adsense’ Category

8 Effective Ways to Improve the Conversion Ratio of Banner Ads

Written by Brandon on April 6, 2008 – 5:30 pm -

I highly suggest taking the advice included in this excelent article on improving banner ad clickthrough. I’ve followed similar articles for google adsense ads, and I’ve managed to increas my conversion on certain properties by four fold. Granted, it was 1/2% to 2 %, but this matters if you have massive traffic.

In the early days of the World Wide Web, banner ads were the most popular and reliable revenue generators for marketers, webmasters and advertising companies alike. They were everywhere. However, in the wake of the dot-com crash and market saturation, prices paid for banner advertising click-thru’s plummeted and banner advertising lost most of its appeal and effectiveness.

American Chronicle | 8 Effective Ways to Improve the Conversion Ratio of Banner Ads

Posted in Adsense, Affiliate Marketing, Blogs, Building Blog Revenue | No Comments »

Create a Rapid Wealth Generating Web 2.0 Style Business with Wordpress and 4 Simple Plugins

Written by Brandon on January 28, 2008 – 5:45 am -

I know you’ve heard this story before: “Create a Rapid Wealth Generating Web 2.0 Style Business with Wordpress and 4 Simple Plugins”, but a few recently created plugins for Wordpress have really opened the floodgate for creating rapid, wealth generating blogging businesses. But before I get into the nuts and bolts of the business model, I would first like to introduce you to a website currently using this business model: Trendhunter.com.

photo by Joe Shlabotnik

The Trendhunter Business Model

Trendhunter.com is essentially a multi-user blog where thousands of users have contributed articles to the site. According to my recent check at Alexa.com, Trendhunter is the 9th most popular design website on the internet The main focus of revenue for the site comes simply from the sheer volume of contributions which number in the dozens each day that are posted to the front page, and the ability of the contributors to promote their posts. How does owner, Jeremy Gutsche, get so many contributors?

  • He shares ad revenue with his users.
  • He encourages bloggers to promote their own content by contributing to Trendhunter.com
  • He edits each post that makes it to the front page which, unlike Digg.com, means only the most interesting trends make it. This helps maintain strong content quality that is on topic.
  • He promotes and encourages contributors to promote the site using web 2.0 tools such as blog widgets and old-school viral tools like emailing friends.

I believe that sharing the ad revenue is the strongest incentive for making such a popular blog because Mr. Gutsche makes it so easy to make extra money. How does he make it so easy? By making the ad sharing easy. All you have to do to make money is have a Google Adsense Account. When you sign up for Trendhunter.com, you are prompted to enter your AdSense code. Now, every article that you write that appears on Trendhunter.com will show your adsense ads, and any ads that are clicked on generates revenue for you. For most articles, only a dollar or two revenue is generated, but it is possible to generate up to $50 for articles that are viral and extremely popular. And, of course, the more popular the site and the more articles you write means the more money you make. All of this along with the collective power of all the other people on the site wanting to make money means explosive expansion once the site has built some popularity.

Although Trendhunter.com has developed really strong growth and requires a very small staff which has developed a relatively low impact revenue stream, there are some areas which Trendhunter.com could improve. I want to focus exclusively on rapid content generation, though, which is essentially the heart of Trendhunter.com’s business. So, how do you add content currently to the site? You have to go through a fairly excruciating process that involves filling out a half-dozen text fields minimum and tab through 4 tabbed pages. At any given time during this process, if you accidentally click on the wrong link surrounding the entry form and you’ve lost your data.

Adding the Tumblr Method of Rapid Content Creation

Trendhunter.com’s content creation could be so much more fun and easy if there were some sort of bookmarklet that you could add to your toolbar, so whenever you’re at some website you want to write about you could push a button, write a few sentences, and boom! your post is done. Enter the Tumblr.com Bookmarklet. This bookmarklet lets you press a button, and all the images pop up on a new screen. Then, you can choose an image, write a couple of sentences, and hit “post”.

A quick comparison of the Tumblr.com content work flow versus the Trendhunter.com content work flow reveals that the same quality post can be created with the tumblr bookmarklet method in 25% of the time it takes to create a Trendhunter post. The work flow savings you get with tumblr.com are:

  • automatic uploading of images and videos
  • 10-20 less clicks needed per article, which saves your hands
  • more incentive to write an article because it only requires one click on the tool bar
  • quotes can be added by simply highlighting the desired text you want to quote.

Trendhunter.com would surely benefit from adopting this model, and the Trendhunter tool bar that already exists seems ripe for including this in their development schedule. But if you are as ambitious and motivated as Jeremy Gutsche, you may be able to beat him to the punch by creating an even more effective and simpler version of Trendhunter.com using Wordpress and a number of simple to implement plugins.

So, what are these plugins that can make Wordpress as popular and powerful as Trendhunter.com? We should start by analyzing what Wordpress is missing that Trendhunter has:

  • First, Trendhunter has a stronger user customization, so Wordpress needs a plugin that allows users to add a photo of themselves, add their Adsense information, and add whatever other information you care to follow. To fill this gap, I use the Cimy User Extra Fields plugin which allows you to add any number of extra fields to your users’ profiles. More importantly, you can also recall the information in these fields using the Cimy template tag. For instance, if a user provides his Adsense account number, then I can put this account number into any post that this person writes using a small amount of PHP code. This guarantees that the writer will get all ad credit for his posts.
  • Second, Trendhunter gives each contributer his own sort of miniblog within the overall site. This miniblog includes an image of the person, the contributor’s stats, as well as the person’s own URL which he can send to friends. Again, all of this can be created using the simple template tags provided by the Cimy plugin.
  • Third, Trendhunter is missing a way to create posts quickly and easily. A new Wordpress plugin that recently became available that has proven incredibly powerful is the Quickpost plugin provided by twelvehorses. This plugin allows you to create posts very quickly. You can also offer this to your contributors and they can add posts equally quickly. This is the major advantage you would have over Trendhunter using Wordpress.
  • Fourth, Trendhunter gives readers ways to spread posts virally to other sites. You can accomplish the same things that Trendhunter offers with a couple of useful plugins. One is the Social Bookmark plugin which allows you to bookmark an article to any number of dozens of social bookmarking sites. The other plugin of note is the WP-email which allows readers to email an article to friends.

There are some definite advantages of using these Wordpress plugins, however, there are also some hurdles that you should be very aware of:

  • First, it’s not completely clear if you are following the Google Adsense terms of service agreement if you exchange out user ad accounts . This is because when you have a generic Adsense code where you substitute other authors’ Adsense account numbers this may be seen as altering the code. The Terms of Service says you are not supposed to alter this code in any way, however, I personally do not consider this violating the TOS because the end javascript code really is not altered than the intended code. I highly suggest reading about this and using this at your own risk. However, judging Trendhunter.com as a test case, using this method is acceptable as long as you do not alter the code in any way and just the account has changed.
  • Second, the Quickpost Plugin has a bug where you have to sign in before the plugin works. I’ve informed the plugin writers, but you may have to hire some outside help if this plugin becomes an essential part of your business.
  • Third, the Quickpost Plugin posts direcly to the site no matter what your user status is. That means contributors posts go live immediately without being approved by an editor. This, again can be quickly fixed by a competent Wordpress developer and a couple hundred dollars. You don’t necessarily have to offer the quickpost plugin to users, but it is so handy it’s hard not to offer this option. My suggestion is to only allow posts on the home page in a category no one would ever choose. This might deter getting unwanted posts on the home page.
  • Finally, the Cimy Extra Fields plugin can be very powerful yet tricky to set up with Adsense. You will want to consider writing a very well thought out conditional statement in PHP that assures that you have received a valid Adsense code. This is not for the amateur to attempt.

Overall, if you’re willing to try to learn from Trendhunter’s great strengths and shortcomings you may find yourself with dozens of contributors and ten times the traffic. If you need any help fleshing this out or need further instruction on implementing this feel free to leave a comment or email me at bbaunach@yahoo.com.

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Posted in Adsense, Blogs, Building Blog Revenue, Building Web Traffic, Experimental Techniques, Starting a Business | 1 Comment »

Building Blog Revenue: Adsense Ad Relevance and Ad Placement

Written by Brandon on December 25, 2007 – 11:55 pm -

There are two major topics have been haunting people since the beginning of Google Adsense: Adsense Ad Relevance and Adsense Ad Placement. These two factors will have the largest affect on your ability to produce revenue on your blog using this program. In this article, I will cover the fundamentals of making your ads relevant and the placement of your ads. Then, I will cover several quirks that are must needed knowledge when weaving through the Adsense riches minefield.

Have you ever made a blog post on bicycles, say, only to have the Adsense ads next to the bicycle post show up with ads for juicers? I have, and it stinks. No one is going to click on an ad for a juicer next to a post on bicycles. If you’ve had similar occurrences, then ask yourself these 5 basic questions:

  • How long ago did you write the post? If you wrote a post recently and the ads are showing up not relevant, it may still take some time for Adsense to crawl your site to get the correct content. According to Google, the Adsense Crawler (which is different than the Google Crawler) may take up to a week to crawl your content. If your post has been up less than one week then be patient before your freak. For more on the Adsense Crawler, check out this link.
  • Is your web page behind a restricted login page? There are ways to get around this with the latest version of Adsense, but this may be a problem that is not easy to fix. My only suggestion is to not have Adsense on pages that are not publicly accessible.
  • How much text-based content is in your post? For example, I use excerpts of posts on category pages, but I also show ads between the excerpts. How long should I make these excerpts? I’ve now tried several experiments, and I’ve found that if the title (between your title tags in the head of your web page) is relevant to the ads you want, then a 50 word excerpt from the article with at least a couple of keywords is adequate to get good ads. Anything less than a 50 word excerpt is pushing it.
  • Does your page have adult content? This won’t get through for ads even if you just use swear words a lot.
  • Is the Adsense code placed within an iFrame on your site? If so, then this could be a potential problem getting relevant ads for the adjacent content.

Let’s say you’ve gotten this far, you’ve reviewed all these questions, tweaked your website accordingly, and you still are not getting relevant content for your blog posts. Then there is one secret weapon that you will want to use which are the Google section targeting tags. These tags let you target particular sections of content on a web page while ignoring other content. The tags are:

<!– google_ad_section_start –>
<!– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –>
<!– google_ad_section_end –>

An example of its use might be:

<!-- google_ad_section_start -->
A paragraph about dogs
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->
<!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) -->
A paragraph about shoes
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->

This bit of code will give you ads on dogs but not on shoes. It’s just that simple. I recommend trying this out in your post templates of your blog, however, I warn you that it may again need a couple of weeks for the Adsense crawler to find the code. So, you won’t receive any instant gratification on this. By the way, you will still need a decent bit of text for Adsense to analyze. One word with these tags around it will not get the results you want.

Now, on to Ad Placement. Let’s start with Google official words on great ad placement, and then I’ll give you my personal experience. Google has created a handy diagram for the best ad placement which is linked here.

Blog ad placement

I highly suggest putting ads in the same manner shown above. You could write volumes about what to do to optimize Adsense ad placement, but here are five simple steps that you should follow:

  • Show ads just like the diagram above on your blog.
  • Assign each ad its own “channel”. A channel allows you to differentiate between one ad placement and another. put a different channel for your home page, single post pages, and archive pages, sidebar, and header.
  • Watch the performance of these ads for two weeks
  • Chose the top three performers in terms of click through rates
  • Get rid of all the other ads because the top three performers will probably do much better than the rest by many factors of magnitude. And, underperforming ads just make a cluttered and unreadable page.

I love to experiment, so I would try different ad sizes and colors, but if you’re not the experimenting type, then here are the top three performing placements, by far, for my blogs:

  1. 468×60 ad size on a single post below the post title and post information. Single posts are the most googled posts, not the home page. When people land on the home page they are just browsing. When people land on a single post, they are looking for something in particular. By the way, don’t use a big fat square in a post. It looks cheap and stupid, and I think it will hurt your overall brand even if you get better short term clickthrough. I get between 2% and 4% clickthrough. If I have 10,000 viewers each day that means potentially 400 ads clicked at $.25 per ad, say. That’s $100 for not having to do too terribly much but have good ad placement.
  2. Search on the sidebar. Here’s the deal, I have very few people use my search bar, but the ones that do often click on an ad when they get search results. I’ve received upwards of 30%-40% clickthrough rate on my search, but it only accounts for a small percentage of the overall traffic to the site. If you can get your search to somehow be fun and attractive to users of the site, then you may be in store for some massive revenue potential. Google has created a clunky, ugly search form which you can completely modify to your needs. I suggest really thinking about how you make this search stand out and be attractive for people to use. You may even consider having a separate page devoted to search that people use on a daily basis.
  3. 5 keyword link unit in the sidebar near the top of the page. I don’t know why, but this link has amazing clickthrough rates for me. Maybe it’s because the ad looks like part of the categories links, I don’t know. But, the rates are in the 30% range. I really can’t believe that nearly one third of the people that visit would click on this. The only explanation I have is that this unit is located on one of my low traffic sites and when the traffic boosts less people will click. In other words, this may be the luck of the draw.

Finding these three placements has lead to my overall clickthrough rate to go up by a factor of five on most of my sites. These are the best ad placements for my Adsense ads, but this leaves a lot of free real estate. Do NOT clutter this real estate up with Adsense ads. In stead, I suggest finding a “premium” ad provider that will give you big, flashy ads that look better and pay better. If your traffic is over 1000 people per day then you should be able to find a better ad provider than Adsense. Or, you could get the advertisers yourself. This is by far the most lucrative yet most difficult route.

As a recap, I’ve covered two major factors for creating strong revenue in your adsense regime. There are literally dozens of techniques for making these ads work for your, but these factors are the baseline when using ads. In the future I’ll cover other adsense revenue generating angles including arbitrage, widgets, Adsense sharing among others. If this was helpful, drop me a note in the form of a comment. I’d love to hear your opinion.

Posted in Adsense, Analysis, Building Blog Revenue | 2 Comments »