Sometimes less is more

Do you already have a blog or some other type of website? As you probably know, I have lots of sites on the web. Next question, do you have your sites monetized? In other words, do you make money from the sites? I guess, after thinking, that I have every one of my 200+ websites monetized in one way or another.

For today, let’s talk about Google AdSense. AdSense is probably the number one means of blog monetization around. There must be literally millions of people using Google to make money from their sites. I know that I do, and I bet you do too, if you have a site earning money for you already.

Google has rules for just about every aspect of using them to monetize your site. For example, there is a limit as to how many ad units you can put on any given page on your site. You can’t have a few sentences of content and 40 ads on the page! Google limits you to putting 3 ad units on a single page. Yes, they have other products that you can also include in the page, but for actual ad units you are limited to 3 such units on a single page. If you put 4, you are in violation of Google’s terms, and you risk losing your AdSense Account.

So, since you are allowed 3 ad units, you should make sure that you put 3 on each page, right?

NO.

Not Necessarily.

Sometimes, putting fewer ad units will earn you more money! Of course, a lot of people are reading this and thinking that I must be crazy. The more ads you put, the better chance somebody will click on one, right? That part may be true, but you should also consider that you can get MORE clicks, and still earn LESS. How can that be? Let’s have a look.

How does the whole advertising game work on AdSense? Well, if a company wants to advertise on the Web through Google, they open an AdWords account with Google. They sign up and they bid for keywords. For instance, they might choose the word “flowers” as the Keyword that they are targeting. And, they might say that they are willing to pay 50 Cents (US currency) for every time that somebody clicks on their ad. Another company may also choose the keyword “Flowers” and they might bid $1 for that Keyword. Other companies may also bid on that same word, and bid as little as 1 cent. So, for instance, let’s say that a total of 20 companies have bid on the Keyword “Flowers” and the bids range from $1.00 per click all the way down to 1 Cent per click.

OK, next, on your blog, you write a post about Flowers. Ding Ding Ding! Google sees that this post is about Flowers, and suddenly the whole process kicks in, and those people who bid for the keyword “Flowers” have their ads placed on your site. The person who bid the highest amount gets his ad placed first. The second place bidder gets his ad listed second, and so on. Now, if somebody clicks on those ads on your site, you get a share of that money that was bid for the click.

So, let’s say that you put the maximum of 3 ad units on your site. Each one of those ad units can have multiple ads, as many as 5 ads on each ad unit. So, if you put 3 ad units on the page, you may have as many as 15 different ads from Google. This would mean that you have the top 15 bidders advertising on your post about flowers. Advertiser #1 bid $1 per click. Advertiser #2 bid less, and Advertiser #3 bid even less than that. So, in having put 15 different advertisers on that one post, you may have a bunch of guys bidding 5 cents or even 1 cent per click! Those clicks are not worth very much. It takes a lot of 1 cent clicks to make up for just one click from the guy who bid $1.

Let’s say that you put just one ad unit on that post. Suddenly, you have only the top 5 bidders advertising, and the lowest click might be worth 50 cents or so still. So, in this case, you could get 10 clicks on that page that has 3 ad units, and make less than if you got just one click on that page with only 1 ad unit. It sounds kind of complicated, but if you think it through, you’ll find that it is actually quite simple!

So, if you are blogging in a niche that has few advertisers, you might explore the possibility of cutting back on the number of ads that you place on your site! You might make MORE money that way! One thing to keep in mind - it doesn’t hurt much to experiment and see what pays off best in your case. You can always switch back after a few days of testing!

MyBlogLog Server getting slow?

Are you familiar with MyBlogLog?  They have a little widget that you can put on your blog that shows who your recent visitors to your blog are.  Of course, only visitors who are registered with MyBlogLog will show up there, but that’s OK.

I am having a problem with that widget, though.  It’s slow!  Have you noticed?  I am finding that my sites hang up waiting for MyBlogLog to load!  Actually, it often shows that it is trying to connect to MyBlogLog, and that holds up the whole rest of the page from loading.  Have you noticed this?  I am considering removing MyBlogLog from my sites because it is getting too slow.  I like MyBlogLog, because it is great for building a community on your site.  I mean, when you go to your site and see people that you “know” even just recognize as regular visitors it’s a nice feeling to know that they have been back again.  But, is it worth your site hanging for 15 seconds or even up to a minute?

For me, it has no value if it is going to hold up your site.  What do you think?

More traffic = More earnings

Yes, it’s that simple.  When you are operating a website that is monetized with CPC (cost per click) advertising, or any kind of advertising, the more traffic you get on the site, the more money you will make.  Let’s face it, if you get 100 page views per day and earn a certain amount from that, you will certainly earn more if you suddenly get 1,000 page views per day!  No way to deny that.

So, there are two tricks that you need to pull off.  One way to get more traffic is by bringing more people to your site.  Another way to get more traffic, and the one I will talk about in this post, is by having those same visitors look at more pages on your site.  The longer they stay on your site, the bigger the chance that they will respond to the advertising present.  Also, if you are doing some CPM (cost per thousand views) advertising on the site, the move pages they view, you will automatically earn more money!

So, how can you get them to view more of your site.  Most people who surf the web will come to your page, take a quick look, maybe skim over your latest article on the site, and quickly move on to another site.  I have found a way, though, to get a few more page views, and keep people on your site longer.  I started doing this a few months ago, but I have found a way to revolutionize it and make it much easier!

On one of my sites, I have a blog, which is the main part of the site.  I also have a photo gallery that you can click over to if you want to view photos.  But, I never made a huge amount from the Gallery.  I knew it had potential, though.  I started putting links to photos from within my posts.  For example, let’s say that in one of my posts I mentioned something about Cebu City.  I would link the words “Cebu City” to a Photo Gallery of Cebu City.  Or, if I mentioned a race car, I might link to a photo of a race car that was in my gallery.  The more opportunities that I would give people to look at something else on my site, the more pages they would view, and the more odds that they would act on the ad that happened to be on one of those pages.  It also kept them surfing my site longer than they would have if I didn’t link over to that race car that they wanted to see.

All of this was OK, but it’s kind of cumbersome to have to keep putting in those links every time you write an article.  Sometimes you forget to put a link to something, and that blows the whole concept.  Well, luckily, I found a plug-in for my wordpress blog called “ALinks” which does this automatically.  What you do is that you make a list of keywords that you want to have linking to other pages.  After you have done this, every single time you type that word into your post it will link over to the page where you tell it to go!  It’s all automatic.  For example, if you enter the term “race car” into the list on ALinks, and tell it to go to a certain URL that has that race car photo, then every time that the term “race car” appears on your blog, it will link to that photo!  No need to manually do the hyperlink any longer!  Cool, don’t you think?

I just set this up on one of my blogs two days ago, and my advertising earnings on my Photo Gallery are now 10 times what they ever have been!  I consider ALinks a great success on my site!  Give it a try.