Friday, December 1, 2006

Getting your blog found

Alright, so now I've made my try-out blogs and added the AdSense code snippets. Per page you can add up to: 3 ad units, 1 link unit, 2 search boxes, and 4 different referral buttons. Now the blogs I'd made thus far were just to check it out -- I really didn't expect to get a following or make lots of money. To do that you have to get your blogs noticed and thats what this post is about.

The number one rule is: Content is King! Lots of blogs, and websites for that matter, take the shotgun approach to making money from AdSense. They repost free articles full of keywords and dubious content on pages with their AdSense code. The temptation is strong, but resist it. I did it too at a site I'll discuss later and the result was that none of my pages other than the index page were added to any of the search engines. Summary: Google (and other search engines I surmise) penalizes repetitive content, so keep it fresh.

So now you've made a fresh, relevant post to your blog and you want people to see it. Blogger / Blogspot have a rss feed function built in. Use it. Additionally post your feed to Google's blog base and Yahoo's feed's. These functions allow other sites that think your content is relevant to their site to dynamically re-post your content on their pages. For this reason you want to add a signature in your post so that people can follow that to your site and potentially to your AdSense ads (remember, thats what this blog is about).

I know what you're thinking: "Now wait a minute! If fresh content is so important, howcome I want people re-posting my stuff?" The answer as I understand it is that rss feeds are dynamic. They're only going to expose your most recent stuff, and typically thats the direction the internet is heading -- last weeks posts are old news. Thus, by making frequent contributions to your blog, you'll regain exclusivity to your prior posts, as well as gain a certain amount of authority of which you write.

I'll be writing a future post concerning other venues or indexes to post to. If you want to plug yours here, leave a comment.
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Thinking of using AdSense? Follow my progress or just learn from my mistakes at: http://adsenseprogress.blogspot.com/

Getting started with Adsense -- Starting with blogs.

Alright, just to warm up to the topic, I gotta bring everyone up to date. I've long thought of the internet as being a great source of revenue for those who knew how to tap into it. I didn't, but when I found myself unemployed it seemed like a great time to learn. Somewhere I stumbled across a blog or post concerning AdSense. For those who use it or are interested in it, it seems like its everywhere. Up until that time I was aware of it but had no idea how prevalent it is.

If you don't know, Google's AdSense is a a pay-per-click (ppc) advertising revenue program to monetize your website. The advantage over affiliate programs is you don't have to hunt up what to advertise, the script that you insert into your page analyzes your pages content to automatically display relevant ads.

So after doing a little reading, I decided to test the waters, and started a couple of blogs. One is a comics and pulps fanzine blog. My brother contributes to an APA so the content is actually his. One huge post on a near monthly basis . Since a friend of mine forwards every single joke, chain-letter, etc e-mail she gets I decided to make a humor blog to take advantage of all this content. Incidentally, after making the blog, I haven't gotten any good e-mails from her, so I'll just have to be patient. So I've checked out how to make a blog. Blogger/Blogspot are free, super easy to use, and have the AdSense functionality built in. The drawback is that since they use sub-domains Google doesn't list them in typical web-search results. They utilize a separate search function for blogs. I didn't know this and perhaps you didn't either, hence the reason for making this blog -- to provide updates to my learning curve to help others get a quicker start.

Now that doesn't mean your blogs will never be found using conventional methods, and I'll cover more of that here.

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Thinking of using AdSense? Follow my progress or just learn from my mistakes at: http://adsenseprogress.blogspot.com/