Dont Blind Optimize Your Adsense

It’s nice to see the Adsense blog giving out specific optimization advice for bloggers today, but it’s simplistic in the extreme. Darren adds meat to the bones but even so, there is still a little something lacking from the rather generic heat-map-esque pictures Google provided.

If you really want to optimize your Adsense, then using those images as a starting point is an excellent idea, but it should not be the end in my opinion. You need to be using the tools Adsense provide you, and quite likely some third party tools also to really optimize for your own blog, your own audience and your own CTR.

As you can see from the images, those palcements are pretty sensible, and if your at a stage where those kind of recommendations are new to you, then they’re an excellent starting point. From there though, you’ll want to look at a number of slightly more advanced ways of evaluating your ad placements.

Using Google’s Own Tools

For starters, you can start by creating custom channels for each and every type of ad you are giong to use. You’ll find this all on your Adsense control panel, and it’s pretty simple to use. Set up a channel for:

• Each size of ad
• Each type of ad
• Each ad placement
• Each color combination

The idea is that by comparing CTR (click through rate) of various position/size/color combinations, using the heatmaps as a starting point, you should be able to fine tune the way you show your ads to get maximum CTR and thus earnings.

For the record, these days im not a big Adsense user, but the principles havn’t changed much since the last time i took a deep look at this. When I last optimized my Adsense, i managed to take my CTR to 33% higher than previously just based on some neat little tricks I’d read, some intelligent display logic and paying close attention to channels.

Using Third Party Tools

There are also a number of excellent third party tools you can use to delve even deeper into your Adsense optimization. One popular one is this script for use in conjunction with Google Analytics.

My personal favorite would be Adsense Tracker, which, despite the nauseating snake oil seller homepage, is a damn good tool for really discovering what works and what doesn’t with Adsense.

Adsense?

Dont forget though, Adsense is not the only fruit! Your best optimization strategy may be to drop Adsense alltogether and use an entirely different program. Andy Hagans would be the best person to pay attention to in that area, though to get you started, i compiled a big list of blog ad programs a while back that you might find useful.

Do let me know what your experiences are with optimizing adsense, if there are any good tools, or tips you can share that i’ve not covered, or any other points you can ad. The power of the performancing community is the community, so lets hear what you have to say!

The Press Release Padding Trap

Until recently I had not noticed so much but now I realise there is a disease spreading through blogs and I see it getting worse. Most affected are product blogs, particularly in my beloved digital photography niche. What is this disease I am so fearful of?

I am sure this problem affects all types of content, I have no doubt newspapers and trade magazines are the worst offenders. In fact I used to work with people who relied on it.

The problem is using press releases as filler.

As bloggers one of the things we need on a daily (or more) basis is content. Content is the fuel of our endeavour. Press releases seem like ideal content, I can see the temptation.

• Timely
• Informative
• Well written (seemingly)
• Authoritative
• Factual

.. most of all it’s news.

So what is the problem? What’s wrong with that?

For a start, every other blogger has the same press releases so your reader will have seen the self same post for the Nth time today. You are not going to get the reputation as a “go-to blog” just repeating verbatim what everyone else has already regurgitated.

Secondly by just repeating what someone else has said you are just buying into their marketing spin. Is it really a revolution? Or is it more likely the CEO and board are hoping it will revolutionise their creaking bottom line?

Thirdly, if search engine traffic is something you care about, you are not going to show up for this content. PR syndication services are regularly indexed by search engines for their own news services, they will get there first.

Fourth and most important, it’s boring. A press release, no matter how well written, is not a good blog post.

I am not saying you should ignore the press releases, they are often the main source of news in your industry or niche.

Solution?

The answer? Add value!.

People visit your blog to hear from you. They can go to Canons own site or PRWeb to find press releases. Add commentary. Counter the spin. Say why this piece of news is important, or why it’s not important. Start bursting some PR bubbles or hype up the good stuff that you are really excited about.

If you are only going to copy and paste then your blog is spam. Do what you set out to do – write. You have your opinions, share them!

The Great Adsense Hypocrisy Part 2

I find it interesting that as bloggers we try to create the best content, the most welcoming and usable designs and more reasons for visitors to return but the majority of us get the best adsense rewards by efficiently driving visitors away.

Nick has touched on the strange relationship bloggers have with adsense but it has started to really concern me.

In the past I created affiliate marketing sites and drove traffic to them with every SEO trick in the book (most of the “tricks” not worth the bits and bytes they were written with). While I made the sites initially to push affiliate products I soon started earning “easy” money from adsense. My whole goal changed to getting traffic in to the site and out through my adsense ads. I quickly learned that I was most successful when people saw my snippet in Google and thought my content would provide what they were looking for but really didn’t. Visitors arriving at the sites would make me most money if they quickly left. My efforts switched from good content to good advertising placement. From quality traffic to maximum traffic. At the point where I peaked in earnings was when I felt the worst about what I was doing.

Writing was what I had got into producing my own websites for. I enjoyed the creativity of it and the feedback I got from people enjoying what I wrote. It wasn’t all bad, I still wrote articles for magazines and online publications, but it still nagged at me that my websites were dangerously approaching spam.

We don’t want spammy blogs do we?

If you follow our advice on metrics you will have installed an adsense tracking script so you can see which pages get the most adsense clicks and where the traffic comes from that converts best. Look at your stats and you will probably see what I do. The majority of your adsense-clicking traffic will be from search engines. You are earning most from turning your site into a revolving door. I don’t know about you but I want to produce valuable blogs. I’m starting to think adsense might be bad for bloggers.

So what’s the answer?

I don’t want to be a profit of doom, it’s more in my nature to be positive so presumably I have an answer?

Actually I do but it’s not easy.

I think we as bloggers who care about quality need to wean ourselves off the GoogleCrack. OK, I don’t mean cold-turkey, and no need to remove it entirely. Just as we don’t agree with building your blog with search engines in mind I think building your blog with adsense in mind might be just as detrimental. Again though, I don’t advocate removing search engine traffic, I don’t advocate removing adsense completely.

The solution seems to me for you to find an income stream that goes against the turnstyle philosophy and fits more with the ideals of a content creator. What revenue can you produce from long term, loyal, motivated fans, rather than transient here today gone tomorrow search visitors?

Going back to my affiliate sites has the answer. The times I made most from affiliate schemes was when I posted good, useful content that customers used to make purchasing decisions. People would buy from newsletters and reviews. Often they would have to see these product mentions several times, they must have been repeat visitors.

I know I have mentioned it before but I think ebooks and other content products are a natural fit, and probably the best bet for writers. It’s a natural progression for a visitor to enjoy your content and then upsell to buying your premium content.

What do you think?

I might feel differently tomorrow, although I doubt it. You might have had similar thoughts already or you might disagree with me. I would be really interested in your thoughts on this, is adsense bad for blogs?

Richmedia – An Adsense Format Too Far?

I was shocked and disappointed this morning when I saw the news reported by JenSense that Google are going to try “Rich Media” advertising formats through their network

Google AdSense is moving beyond the traditional text and graphical advertising to rich media, including interstitials, expanding ads and floating ads. AdSense began contacting publishers last week to be involved in the rich media limited beta test.

OK, apparently they are more likely to be site targeted rather than contextual (bloody good job!) but there is very little information out there apart from rumours because of the people taking part being under NDA.

Do Google not get it? The reason we liked Google Adwords in the first place is because they were text.  Let me spell it out Larry and Sergey,  they were not annoying. Now they are going to throw the most annoying and intrusive forms of online media into the mix. Including the evil evil evil intersitials.  You know the ones, the ad that stops you getting to the content you wanted and forces you to wait for a full page ad to load so you can click it off and get to the page you expected to see in the first place. Nice.

Advertising agencies will absolutely love this, I know I used to work for one. They will love it not because these ads work but because they can charge higher production fees for planning, building and deploying them. So they will be a success in terms of ad budget, just not in any way that matters (ie. customer opinion and ROI).

Would you allow these ads on your blog?
 

Maximize Revenues… with Design

I think this post about page design is one that should have been made 3 years ago–many thanks to Graywolf for putting it out there. The problem most people have is that they don’t do much thinking about ads until after they finish their design template.

So of course they then have to “fit them in somewhere”… and usually that “somewhere” is somewhere where they don’t “clutter up” the design. The problem being those “clutter up” spaces are usually where the heat map turns orange or dark orange.

The thing is, if you work hard at it and focus on ads in the beginning, you can put them in obvious, ‘obtrusive’ places without losing as much of the site’s aestheticism. Yes, you’ll lose a bit; it’s a tug of war.

Bottom line: are you in this to make money or aren’t you? If you are, check out Graywolf.

Linkbaiting At Work

We have discussed Link baiting a fair amount here at Performancing. Right now you have an opportunity to see a link bait campaign at work and unfold.

Andy has created a Link Baiting Competition. The clever part of course is the competition itself is link bait!

And it is working, his blog on that thread has received 31 comments at last count and traffic (looking at the public stats) has increased massively.  Before even a decent idea has been posted the links are coming in. They do not even need to choose a winner and they have achieved the link goal already. How about that for link bait? Heh, genius or dumb luck? Bit of both?

So what lessons can we learn from this piece of blog marketing?

Number one is for people to want to talk about something, pro or anti, there needs to be something to talk about. Milliondollarhomepage was worth talking about. Yet another pixel advertising homepage is not newsworthy. Your idea needs to be remarkable. That does not mean unique! Competitions are done all the time, what Andy has done is used it in a new way.

Second, hook into something people are interested in. Many bloggers want to find ways to market their blogs. Link baiting itself is interesting and good to talk about. Heck I managed to find enough to post about more than once, heh.

Third, feed the human self-interest. WIIFM (What’s In It For Me). Cash is an obvious prize, your niche might have a need/want for something other than cash that you can give away with as high a perceived value. You might be able to give away software or free content, telephone consultancy or training, design, etc.

Have a good think how you can use this technique without it being a me-too idea and you might have a big success. As you can see, it works, it is already working for Andy.

Performancing Firefox 1.1 Delicious/Technorati Release!

Performancing for Firefox 1.1

That’s right, as Nick promised last week, we’ve launched Performancing for Firefox 1.1!

So what’s new in this release?
Read on for a complete walk-through of what 1.1 has to offer.

New features

• More Technorati Support
• Delicious integration
• Trackback support (including auto-discovery)
• Draft support (and default to draft option)
• Ping support
• Statusbar Icon Enhancments (drag and drop)
• More Settings Options
• Full metaWeblog API implementation, now working in Roller, blogharbor, and many more
• Lots of Bug Fixes
• Logging in from account wizard now times out if connection fails
  
• More informative Blogger.com error reporting
• Hitting a tab twice no longer looses data.
• Less confusing automatic technorati tag adding
• Numerous metaWeblog API fixes
• Edit post now conserves original dateCreated parameter
  
• Issues with setting and editing categories (drupal still has issues).
• New posts no longer created when editing a post (on WP)
• Preview links now open in a new tab
• Spaces are now possible in technorati tags
• WordPress 2.0 support
• Many more small bugs

Also new to this release:

• Support and Documentation
• PFF Buttons and Banners

Support and Documentation

Also for this release, Chris has put together a great handbook, dealing with topics from What PFF Is to using Technorati, Installing Spellcheck, Adding your own blog, and lots more.

If you find a bug in version 1.1 please head over to the Project tracker and file a bug report!

Buttons and Banners

As you might know, we just concluded our Performancing for Firefox Design Competition.
We had some great entries into the competition and even better winners!

Congrats to Wayde Christie for winning and providing us with these awesome designs

More will come once we get a page up with all the available buttons you can use.

Additional Technorati Support

If you thought technorati tags were cool, now when you click on the ‘Page Tools’ button, you will get Technorati stats and incoming links for the current page you are viewing

See Handbook entry Technorati Support in Peformancing for Firefox for more information.

Del.icio.us Integration

Not only can you easily bookmark anypage you have loaded to Delicious, and easily search your tags, you can also bookmark your posts using your technorati tags from the Publishing Options sidebar.

See Handbook entry Del.icio.us Support in Performancing for Firefox for more information.

TrackBack Support

We now offer trackbacks support.

Simply enter the urls you want to trackback in a comma seperated list and on publish we will send a trackback request.

See Handbook entry Sending Trackbacks from Performancing for Firefox for more information.

Draft Support

This was one of the most requested features.
To post an entry as a draft, check the ‘Post as Draft’ checkbox in the ‘Publishing Options sidebar’.

(If you havn’t already you’ll need to enable this sidebar in the settings under ‘Show extra publishing features’)

See Handbook entry Posting As Draft for more information.

PingSupport

For ping support, you first must enable Pings, then select your chosen pinging service from the options that will appear.

Statusbar Button Enhancments

Now if your not happy with the location of the PFF StatusBar Icon
You can easily change it’s location.

First click on the icon and drag it to your prefered location, be that somewhere else on the statusbar or in any of your other toolbars. You will see a red bar indicating where it will be placed in release.

More Settings Options

We now offer a more complete list of options, from hiding features you might not use like Delicious or Technorati to enabling Drafts by default.

Technorati Tags: performancing, blogging

Announcing Performancing for Firefox Handbook

With the release of Performancing for Firefox 1.1 and all the features that come with it, a single page of information wasn’t going to cut it, so we thought we had better create some more comprehensive documentation. Announcing the Performancing for Firefox Handbook.

While I have made a start on it we would really like you to contribute! Comments that clarify points are welcome but also you can contribute new pages too. For example, do you use a blog platform that is not on the default list? Please tell everyone how to use PFF with it. Just like the extension itself, we can only make it really great with your help.

You can post on your performancing blog and let us know so we can add it. The not so comprehensive style guide is here, please read it before contributing.

Could You Blog For Hire?

You can write, people like your style and enjoy your work. But you can’t make enough money from advertising to pay your bills. What can you do? Have you considered blogging for hire?

“Professional Blogging” does not always have to mean selling advertising space or joining a blog network. Corporate marketing departments are slowly getting the idea that blogging could be a good thing for business and are looking into setting up blogs. While some begin with every intention of maintaining their blog using internal resource, as many realise that this is not realistic. That is where you could step in.

There are a few options, you can freelance your writing to companies or even “Ghost Blog“. Ghost Blogging involves writing for a company as if you are part of the company. You “become” a member of the staff, in some cases pretending to be the CEO or some other high powered executive. In other cases you might be nameless, write under your own name or take on a persona of someone in HR or PR. Personally, as a consumer and as a blogger, I prefer the straight and honest approach of writing as yourself.

You could say that Scoble is not far from this scenario. Scoble didn’t always work for Microsoft. While many Microsofties do blog, you could say Scoble was hired to provide a blog-voice for the company. OK, the post at Microsoft is taken but there might well be companies that you could apply your blogging skills for.

Another scenario is writing about a company on behalf of that company in your own blog. This is not so much an advertorial, more a transparent and upfront relationship like a spokesperson. You could say Hugh Macleod fits into this category with his pimping wine and bespoke suits. It is clear what the relationship is between him and the companies he represents and the companies receive a lot of attention they would not have without his work on their behalf.

The best part of all this is while it pays well, you could earn hundreds or thousands depending on the niche and the amount of work you do, but also it doesn’t have to take all your time. There is an opportunity to blog for income and then use your other free time to blog your own projects if you wish. It’s a good job to have too, compared to other ways of making a living. Blogging for a company can have many of the same benefits as blogging for yourself, no geographic ties, no need to 9-5 in a office, no commute, etc.

As well as being able to write well, you need to be able to connect with the companies audience and provide useful, interesting information. All your skills in research will be required and also you need to be able to talk the talk fluently. While it is probably best for you to already be an expert in the niche depending on your learning skills and the amount of support you get from the company in terms of facts and news you might be able to blog without any prior knowledge.

So how do you get these gigs? The obvious route is to pitch yourself to likely companies directly. Another route might be to find out the marketing agency of a company you are interested in and talk to them. Failing that more companies are now advertising on job boards and putting out tenders in freelance writing sites.

I think depending on the niche and the time commitment I would be happy doing this. Could you see yourself blogging for hire?

YPN to Enter the Big Leagues?

Sure, we were all happy when Yahoo! entered the contextual ad game with YPN. But it’s a joke to say they’re competing with Adsense right now. The question is, when do they plan to enter the big leagues?

Apparently, they plan to kick it up a notch in the spring. Loren Baker has the scoop:

As a member of the Yahoo Publisher Network Advisory Council, I spoke with Yahoo about this last week and plans for YPN which were approved for printing on this blog include:

1. Improvements in Relevance : The ads that are shown by YPN are based upon what Yahoo calls its ‘matching expert’s. These ‘experts’ will be expanded to include :

* Contextual Engine : Targeting based upon the content of the page
* Ad Targeting : Publishers can “tag” their own site by defining their ad targeting category in the YPN admin
* User Data : Behavioral targeting or profiling (geographic & demographic)

2. Wire Service : Offering publishers payment via direct deposit this Spring

3. Expanding Invitations : Continuing on reviewing and approving thousands of high quality web publishers

4. International Rollout : Global expansion beyond the United States to English and non-English speaking countries

5. Yahoo Search Box : Publishers can add Yahoo Search to their site which will pay publishers a percentage of sponsored search revenue

6. Integration into Yahoo Answers : Yahoo may be offering its registered users the ability to earn revenue or points for contributing to Yahoo Answers and other user generated content offerings.

Apparently Yahoo! is also concentrating on something known as “publisher quality”.

Such ’smart growth’ tactics by Yahoo are leading to the monitoring of ROI and controlled reach of Yahoo Search Marketing advertiser ads, as Yahoo is taking the quality approach as opposed to quantity.

For example, Yahoo is following a strict editorial review process

Umm, Yahoo, have you ever seen most Adsense publishers? “Quality” is a sucker’s word!