AdSense Ads in your RSS Feeds

If you're like me, and most AdSense publishers for that matter, then you have placed your AdSense units into your blog or site's template - ensuring that each page has the maximum number of ad units without the fussy bother of working your content around the ad units. You've probably allready set up your RSS feed so that readers can bookmark your feed to get the latest posts. But if they are reading your blog through a feed aggregator like feedburner, then they aren't getting exposed to your ad units and you're missing out on potential clicks!

If you are new to feed advertising with Google or feedburner, follow these steps to add Google ads to your feeds.

1. Sign in to your AdSense account.
2. From the AdSense Setup tab, choose AdSense for feeds as the product.
3. Your ad units will be automatically named and properly sized for your feeds.
4. Set your ad type, frequency, duration, position, position and color. See tips for these settings.
5. Add a channel and mark it targetable by advertisers. We recommend this to increase the visibility of your ad space.
6. Choose a feed in which you want the feed ads displayed.
a. If you've used feeds in the past, choose one from your list of active feeds that do not yet have the ad units included.
b. If this is your first time setting up feeds with AdSense or FeedBurner, you'll need to burn a new feed first. Click the burn a new feed, then enter your blog or feed. Some platforms may present you with a choice of feeds to use as the source, usually the Atom feed is the best choice. After supplying this information you will be given a new URL for the feed you should promote or redirect to make sure all subscribers are seeing your replacement feed.
7. Save your changes and start using your Google-powered feeds with AdSense.

AdSense Clicks But No Money

Ever checked your stats, and seen that you had clicks but no revenue was generated? There are a couple of reasons why this may have happened.

Configuration of allowed sites

The Allowed Sites feature allows you to specify a list of sites where your ads can be displayed. If you use this feature, you must ensure that you have entered all the places you want to display your AdSense code.

To check whether this is the case, log into your account and visit the "Allowed Sites" page to your AdSense Setup tab. If the "Allow any site to show ads for my account is complete, you are not affected by this problem, and this isn't the case. However, if "Only allow certain sites to show ads for my account 'is populated, the revision of the list of sites in the box below - are all the sites you own listed in this box? If the answer is' no ', you do not get credit for clicks on sites not listed. Please make sure you add all the sites where you want to display your AdSense code.

Invalid clicks

The Google AdSense program monitors clicks for suspicious activity, such as artificial clicks generated by bots as well as click fraud. Often times, programs which advertise sending large volumes of traffic to your site will instead use bots that will look like visitors in your traffic logs. These bots will click around your site, including your AdSense links, to make it look like you're getting good quality traffic. It doesn't take much to lose your AdSense account, so I would encourage steering clear of any program that promises traffic. Write good content, and the visitors will come. Targeted organic traffic, traffic that has come naturally to your site interested in whatever topic your site is about, is more likely to click an ad than a visitor that got there by misdirection.

Google AdSense Policy Changes

Google has just announced changes to the AdSense policies. Some of the changes are merely superfluous - they made the policy page more navigable to make it easier to find information on what is and is not acceptable. The major changes and clarifications are outlined below:

• Google Brand Violations: This policy has always existed in our Terms and Conditions, but we have now brought directly to the "Ad Placement" of the page so that it is easier to find. Under this policy, we do not allow ads or boxes to be placed on pages that Google deviation logos, trademarks, brands or other characteristics of the content of the page or URL, which could lead users to think that the page associated with Google.
• Encouraging Clicks: We clarified this policy a bit in 'Encouraging clicks "of the program - the ads can not be formatted so that makes them indistinguishable from other contents of the page where they appear. This includes, for example, the formatting of content for mimic the ads, ads with aligning images, and placing ads in a misleading.
• Placement of ads in email and email programs: This update policy specifies that the Google ads, search boxes, and search results may not be placed in e-mails, and the par-mails.
• Other Google products policies: With this new policy, publishers are not permitted to place ads, search boxes, or search results, within, or with other Google products in a manner that violates the policies of the other product or service. For example, this includes placing ads on sites that allow users to download videos from YouTube, which is not permitted by the Terms of Service YouTube.

If you ask why it is important, it is because the AdSense program policies are officially part of the AdSense terms and conditions. They are official policies that AdSense publishers must adhere to and follow. As AdSense publishers, it is of utmost importance to stay abreast of policy changes, or risk losing your account and/or unpaid earnings.

Revisiting AdSense

I've been gone from my blogs for awhile, and have decided to renew my interest in them. Why? Because although I haven't been posting I've been earning some decent money from AdSense with the old posts I've got out there. One of the first things I did, and I suggest you do as well, is check my templates to make sure their optimized for search engines. Mostly, what I mean by this is that my keywords have no spaces after the commas and to use root words instead of their protracted versions, such as 'blog' in lieu of 'blogs.' Imagine my surprise to realize that the majority of my blogs didn't even have description and keyword meta tags! Which obviously leads to a great post about why you should have them.

Basically what I did was go into the html template and insert just after the /title tag
< content="MY BLOGS DESCRIPTION" name="description">
< content="YOUR,BLOGS,KEYWORDS" name="keywords">
Obviously, you'll want to replace the capitalized text with your relevant description and keywords. For the description, I just copy and paste the original text description I've already written for the blogs header. From this description I extract the relevant keywords that apply to this blog, again, using the root words, separated by commas with no spaces. To get a better idea about what I'm talking about go into your browsers tool bar and select 'view source' under the 'view' tab.

The most important aspect of your blog is the title. Make sure it contains your most important keyword that people will be using in their search. For this blog it would be 'AdSense' with a secondary key phrase of 'Getting Started.' The second most important aspect of your blog is fresh content. I don't mean posting every day, though consistently updated blogs are supposed to score higher than abandoned blogs, but that the content is all original and hand written. Trust me, you're way better off hand writing one blog than using scraped or borrowed content on a hundred blogs. Google is smart and they check content against everything else out there. If it's used elsewhere then it ain't nothing new, so why should they point to it again and again? Behind the content, are the keywords, followed by the description. The description is used as a default to define your blog, site, or page. Thus, they help, but not as much as a lot of people think. But in this game, it's all about numbers and if you can get that placement 1 or 2 slots above your competition on a search for your keyword on google, then you'll see a vastly improved number of hits than otherwise.

Up until now, the blogs I've written have been mostly about the content selling the AdSense, with some secondary advertising for other affiliate programs like Amazon. I've decided to branch out and use other affiliate programs as the basis for my writing with AdSense being secondary to the content. The hard part about this is avoiding the temptation of using all that content the affiliates have already written. You can still use it as a basis, but you'll want to rewrite every single sentence! I've found it's easier to read through what they've written to get an idea of what the product offers or features, then closing that page and writing my own.

OK that's enough for now, I've got work to do to update these blogs, and I hope you'll see much more from me from here on out.