New look to AdSense ad units

Google has announced a revamped design of three of their AdSense for content ad units. After analyzing publisher site layouts and reviewing requests around the world, they decided to make their formats more space efficient and visually pleasing by changing the layout of the text. They are starting with changes to the following ad units:

• Leaderboard (728x90): The title, description, and URL are now arranged in rows instead of columns (except, of course, in the case when only one ad is showing).
• Medium and large rectangles (300x250, 336x280): The URL is now in the same line as the title.

In certain cases, you will also see a few minor adjustments to the font size. For example, the font size for the leaderboard with four ads is much more readable. You should expect these changes to roll out over the next few weeks.

My initial impression is that the changes for the most part are a good idea. Too many times I see sites that attempt to make the AdSense ads appear as if they will lead to another part of the site's content. Having the URL right next to the AdSense links lets the surfer know they will be leaving the site. Though I admit I'm not too crazy about the look of the leaderboard units being laid out in rows as opposed to the now traditional columns.

Got an opinion about the new look? I'd like to hear what others think - either for or against, so leave a comment.

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.

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.