A Better Search Box

In a way I'm reversing what I said in my previous post. After consideration, I've decided that a page optimized for AdSense should not make use of the technorati search box. Their search box takes you to their site where the search results display other blogs from their index. If you're building a regular site or blog this is a useful function, however for an AdSense optimized blog or site you want to narrow down the avenues for people to leave your site for another.

This is why I recommend using the search box widget at beautifulbeta. When you go to the site, the box is in the upper right and just under it, it says "add this widget to your blog". Click the link and it will take you to a widgets page. Simply click the widget and you will be prompted to log into your blogger / blogspot account. If you get an error, simply click "Back" and try it again. For some reason (for me at least) it doesn't take the first time.

I'm not sure if it'll work for non-blogger/blogspot users but heres the code and you can try it and see:

<form id="searchthis" action="/search" style="display: inline;"
method="get"><input id="search-box" name="q" type="text"><input
id="search-btn"value="Go!" type="submit"></form>

So now you still have a search box, only its providing results just from your pages where the searcher will be exposed to your AdSense ads. I still recommend listing your blog on technorati so simply log in and edit to remove their search box. Once again, many thanks to Hans at BeautifulBeta. Visit his site, for lots of nifty hacks and widgets to add more flair to your blogs.

Add Your Blog to Technorati

Just a quick post today. I wanted to talk about adding your blog to Technorati. This is super-easy to do and adds more functionality to your pages. By going to the site, you complete a simple registration and then claim your blogs. I chose to claim my blog by inserting a simple string of javascript code they provide into my template. You can do this by adding it directly into the html, but I found it easier to insert as an html page element, then I could easily move it around to find what best works for me.

Not only does this help your pages get noticed (and more traffic >> more AdSense ad exposure >> more AdSense clicks!), but if you have the "notify weblogs" checked in blogger, your new posts are automatically added. Additionally, by going to technorati you can customize the widget displayed on your pages without ever mucking with the code embedded in your page again. For instance, I chose to use the widget to display a search box and a "Blogs that link here" link for added fuctionality. I chose to not display a link to my profile because frankly a couple of my blogs require a complete over-haul and are a bit of an embarrassment (read: what I'll be doing for the rest of the day!), but I can easily add the link once the over-haul's are complete.

Play around with it and see if it doesn't add more flavor to your site and hopefully bring in more revenue too!

Adding Social Bookmarking Widgets to Blogger

'K, I've been looking for an easy way to add the social bookmarking widgets to my blogs and I think I've found it. Why is this important? If people find your blog which you've made useful and informative they may want to share it with others, so why not make it easier for them? Remember more visitors = more traffic = more AdSense clicks.

The site is here (Many thanks to Hans at BeautifulBeta!) but I'll give it the rundown here and try to clear up some parts I thought could have been a bit clearer (the purpose of this site, after all, is for you to learn from my trial and error!)

1. Go to your blog's template tab and click "edit HTML"

a. Download your template just in case you want to change it back or have problems. I didn't, but it's still a good idea.

b. Check "expand widgets" box.

2. Scroll down and find your .post img { } settings. It'll look something like this:

.post img {
padding:4px;
border:1px solid #cde;
}

You'll want to replace the border settings (between the colon and semicolon) to "0" or you'll have a border around each icon. Unfortunately, this also removes the borders from all your images in your post. (At the site they mention another way using a bookmarks css, but I have no idea how to do that yet. If I figure it out I'll update this post.)

Anyhoo, the .post img should now look like this:

.post img {
padding:4px;
border:0;
}

3. Place the following js within the head (I chose to place it just before the /head tag):

<script src='http://home.planet.nl/~hansoosting/downloads/beautifulbeta.js' type='text/javascript'/>

4. Continue to scroll down looking for:

<p class='post-footer-line post-footer-line-3'/>

(For some reason I had problems finding it when scrolling upwards from the bottom, and no problem at all when scrolling down, maybe just a perceptual quirk). Replace it with the code found here (Right click and save as .txt and open in notepad to cut and paste into your template).

That's it, you've just added social bookmarking widgets to all your posts!

Again, many cool-points to Hans at BeautifulBeta!

Dynamic Fresh Content on Your AdSense Sites

OK, so we've discussed how original quality content is what's going to get people to hopefully find your page and keep coming back. But, what if your page is like this one. I don't want to re-hash what everyone else says (remember that advice I read about social bookmarking and what happened?) and any changes I make will take time until I see results to share with ya'll.

So how do I provide relevant material for those who come back to my site before I've got something new to share? Simple! I've included RSS feeds from relevant sites high up on my page, so visitors will see the new links when they change. In this case the links are on the right-hand side and since this site is about my progress using AdSense, the feed is from the AdSense Blog I mentioned in my last post. Now, if I've got no new progress to report for awhile, his posts will provide changing (dynamic) links on my site and visitors (hopefully) won't think this an abandoned site.

Now I know what you're thinking: "More links out mean more lost visitors." This is something I've gone round and round about, but I think it boils down to your original content. If you've put the time into offering fresh quality content with no tricks to bait people in (How many times have you been looking for say, a theater listing, clicked a link and found yourself on a porn-site? Did you stick around or did you simply close the window and make a mental note to avoid that URL in the future?) then people will find your site. And if they find the content useful, they may bookmark it and hopefully return in the future. If they have a similar or related site, they may even post a link or your own RSS feed. Then you'll see a higher pagerank and higher listings in search results which in turn will give you more visitors. And more visitors will translate into more exposure to your AdSense Ads which will translate into more AdSense clicks! TA-DAAA!

AdSense Progress so far

It's been awhile since I've last posted so what have I been up to? Well the purpose of this blog is to update my AdSense progress, so I've been making mistakes and learning from them so I can bring you what I've learned.

Some of the things I've found:

#1. Good AdSense newsletter, but he keeps pushing his book. The newsletter is full of good content, and I'm sure the book is too, and you can also visit his blog. I haven't bought the book yet, but plan to once I get in the black. The idea of AdSense is solid, but to be honest, to make the huge gobs of money some people report you have to have lots and lots of traffic (see points # 4, 5, and 6).

#2. There's been some speculation about whether or not you need an outbound link on your pages. The blog I link above says you don't need to, but I figure it may not be necessary but might be a part of Google's algorithm, and at this point I need all the pagerank I can get. The problem with outbound links is you're providing an exit point for someone to leave your page that isn't one of the ad units. Additionally, Google has revised its position concerning competing ad programs. So, what I've done is registered with Amazon as an associate and placed text-links to relevant items, books, etc on my pages. This way if I lose the visitor by the link I have another shot at monetizing them. I also used the "target_blank" modification on the links so that the links open a new window. This way, I hope, the visitor will still have my page open, if they aren't interested in what Amazon has to offer.

#3. I've been playing around with using article indexes to provide some extra fodder to my sites. Since it's duplicate content I don't know if it'll bring down the pagerank for the entire site or will that individual page get a lower rank, or not indexed at all. Any feedback on this would be appreciated.

#4. One way to get more traffic to your site is to have more links out there. This way you have higher online visibility, and more quality links will give you a higher pagerank (placement in search engine results). I read somewhere that you should add your pages to various social bookmarking sites. Actually what I read was to add every single page from your site. This seemed like spamming so I just added the index pages from my subfolders. I got an email from Simpy saying that this "self-promoting" was frowned upon and that they would block all my future posts, and my sites as well. I haven't heard anything from the other social-bookmarking sites so take from this what you will. I think the best alternative, which I haven't done yet, is to add a small list of icons for these sites for your visitors to add them to their own bookmarks. So that was a mistake, I learned from it, and now you have too.

#5. Contribute to relevant forums. I haven't done too much of this yet, but I intend to. The thing here is like point # 4. You don't want to spam. I believe in karma so what goes around, comes around. Forums have members who hate to see spam on their site, they want good relevant posts. It would be very easy for a person on a forum to make a post saying "Hey, this guy wants hits? Lets give him so many hits in so short a time Google will cancel his AdSense account for click-fraud." Or the forum may just block your account with them, thereby removing your visibility with them. I think they're an excellent venue for quality links back to your site, say, in your signature, as long as you're respectfull.

#6. And lastly, contribute articles to those same article indexes. Like the signature field on forum posts, you can include links back to your site in the "About the Author" field of your contribution. Thus, by providing others with a little free content, you can get hundreds if not thousands of links back to your site.

So that's what I've been up to. My next post will probably be about how to add those social bookmarking links easily to your site. From what I've seen so far, its pretty easy to automatically add to blog posts, but adding to regular html pages has to be done manually (per page). Either that, or how to be banned from the internet altogether. We'll see how it goes.