Category: Featured Articles
Complete AdSense guide
As you might know Google AdSense is one of the most successful online advertising programs of today.
Chitika review
Chitika – sounds like a banana, but stands for one of the best CPC programs out there. We’ll give you a nice Chitika review here, one thing to start, sign up for Chitika, you’ll not regret it. Finishing our Chitika review you’ll understand why…
There are good and bad advertising programs in terms of revenue for the publisher. Good ones in general are Google AdSense, YPN, Adsdaq and ….. Hmm well, can’t think of any other good advertising programs. I have been testing a couple of programs and most of them are just crap. They try to copy Google AdSense and fail greatly because they will never be able to have more advertisers than AdSense. They aren’t innovative. Good news, Chitika is a new, innovative and good CPC program.
What’s special about Chitika?
Relevancy for local Pizza ads
To understand why Chitika is a good advertising program you need to understand in which particular situations Google AdSense is unable to bring the publisher good revenue. Google AdSense puts everything into displaying content relevant ads, which is a good idea hence that way both publisher and advertiser earn more money. Less relevant ads means less conversions after clicking on the ad resulting in less revenue for the advertiser and consequently less money for the publisher. Now comes the part what makes Chitika special: Chitika does not scan the content of the page to display relevant ads, they scan the search strings which were used to enter the website.
By just looking at for example “Pizza in New York” compared to thousands of lines of unnecessary code Chitika is able to display extremely relevant ads. Sometimes even more relevant than Google AdSense (more at the end of this review)…..
By displaying relevant ads they are able to pay the publisher top CPC rates because the Return of Investment for the advertiser is very high (advantage of content relevant ads). One example: Dating ads on a website about insurance will most likely result in absolutely no conversions. It’s very easy to test how relevant your Chitika ads will be. Go to a website who runs Chitika ads and append “#chitikatest=New York Pizza” to the end of the URL, press enter and reload the website. You should then see advertisements about whatever you entered, in my case New York Pizza. If you are looking for a URL then just go to Wikihow. One special example I would like to point out is this url. The drink “New York Egg cream” is something special for New York. Have a look on the link and then compare the relevancy of the AdSense ads with the relevancy of the Chitika ads. Google only shows general new york ads whereas Chitika shows ads of local stores. Amazing isn’t it?
Chitika’s Ad Layout
Psychologically optimized ads
When I first had a look on the default layout of Chitika’s ads I was amazed. I previously made a post about psychological AdSense optimization where I talked about colors and all that. The layout is extremely important as it decides whether the user clicks on the ad or doesn’t.
Chitika offers all methods of optimizing your ads, changing the title color, text color, border color and URL color. That’s of course what Google offers as well but there is one significant difference. Google’s TOS disallows placing images next to your advertisements because they think that that could somehow encourage the user to click the ads. What’s the big deal? That only means more money. The visitor sees the image and then automatically focuses the ad unit next to it resulting in more clicks. That’s a clever trick which Chitika automatically implements. Check out the picture, Chitika automatically displays relevant images next to the ads! Amazing, I was stunned when I saw that the first time. That of course means more revenue for you.
How much revenue can the Chitika publisher expect?
First thing we talked about was the relevancy of the ads. The relevancy is the main factor for high CPC. Chitika is able to display relevant ads as I showed you above. The result is a CPC as high as together with AdSense. I even have a higher CPC on my gaming site with Chitika than with AdSense. That’s because AdSense performs really poor for everyone in the Gaming niche. The CPC you can expect lays anywhere between 75 and 125 percent of your AdSense CPC.
Next factor is the Click Through Rate (CTR), by allowing major customizations and placing images next to the ads the Chitika CTR lays somewhere between 100 and even up to 250 percent of your AdSense CTR. Please keep in mind that most people don’t use Chitika to replace AdSense but as an additional ad on the website. Look at Wikihow above, they are using 3 AdSense content units and 1 Chitika unit near the footer. The footer is a relatively bad placement (see the heat map), but still the owner reported a CTR of above 1 percent, which is tremendous! By using Chitika as additional source of income you are able to increase your total earnings by 10-20 percent. Do you want to miss that?
For which sites does Chitika perform best?
No text content?
Chitika performs very good for all websites. The sites AdSense performs bad for are the sites Chitika performs very good for. Poor text-content websites for example.
The AdSense crawler is unable to find any content to display AdSense ads on video sites for example. They are not able analyze the video, they can only check out the description of the video, the title, the tags or the comments. In a lot of cases those aren’t however that relevant. Chitika is able to display relevant ads for the visitor by just analyzing the tiny search string which reveals what the visitor was actually looking for!
All websites work well together with Chitika, the best websites are in my opinion video sites and also local sites (see the Pizza example above).
In terms of CPC the same niches as with AdSense peform best. That’s simply because the ROI for the advertiser is high (the advertiser earns a lot if someone purchases something) and resulting in spending more money into ad-campaigns. Car sites, Insurance sites, medical sites, foreclosure sites, lawyer sites, local sites and a lot more perform really good. Low paying niches are the same as together with AdSense, but that’s not the fault of the advertising program, it’s the problem of the niche. My niche is relatively low paying but still I am earning more than before.
Interview with Chitika Account Manager
I was so stunned by Chitika that I immediately started writing on this blog post and thought “Hey! Why not talk to someone from the Chitika company?”. Two days later Vik Chhabra (@vikc) joined me in an interview overviewing and explaining Chitika. Of course also all the benefits Chitika has were subject of the talk. Thanks again to you for the informative interview!
The video is in HD by default, you can turn it off in the player if your internet connection is too poor performing (I have a friend who still downloads at 30 kb / second LOL). Feel free to contact Vik in case you are interested in joining Chitika, he will assists you with all the questions you have and setting up your Chitika account. Make sure to mention that you came from us and he will put you on his top priority list!
We found another nice interview with Alden DoRosario (@adorosario) on the SESNY. Worth watching, good information:
Others on Chitika
There are a lot of positive and of course negative comments from other people on Chitika. Here are some found on the Chitika site itself:
Brandon from FitBuff.com said: I had heard good things about Chitika, but it was just one of those things that I never quite got around to checking out. Finally, I went to the website, had the code installed in minutes, and Chitika instantly became one of my top revenue sources in the first month! There was literally no learning curve or optimization, so I’m sure my results will be even better once I delve deeper. I simply input the code in the appropriate spot, and I was done. One of the best things about the ads is that they are only shown to visitors who arrive at my site via search engines, so the “regular readers” aren’t bogged down by more ads, even though Chitika is earning nearly as much as the ads that are always visible!
Arnold Alting from downloads.nl said: Chitika | Premium works great for us. A good Google Adsense alternative with very well targeted ads.
Carl from carlpei.com said: The best part of Chitika has to be the support! I have Ryan from Chitika on my MSN list and he’s always ready to chat. I’m a small publisher, this gives a very personal feeling.
@TomRoyce from House Meets Owner said: I use Chitika on a hobby site and it earns 3x more than adsense does for the same # impressions.
@trentiles from Dubs in the Buff said: Only have been using Chitika for a few days. So far good experience but I wish I could customize the ads more such as borders, etc.
We recently placed a thread on our forum about removing the borders from Chitika ads.
Own Experience
I have been using Chitika for almost a month now, mainly to get away from AdSense as only source of income. My website is in the gaming niche not a that good niche in terms of advertising because of the young audience and no really expensive products. Nonetheless my Chitika CPC is 30 percent higher than my AdSense CPC, which stunned me at first because AdSense was priorly the program that got me the highest CPC. Looking at my monthly revenue now around 20 percent comes from Chitika which is not that much of course. But considering that only 10 percent of my search engine visitor see the ads and generate 20 percent of my total income then yes, that’s a nice in earnings. I am really satisfied.
Signup for Chitika
We hope that we were able to bring Chitika a littler closer to you. You probably still have lots of unanswered questions but don’t wonder, every advertising program is like a unique new world. We can only recommend you to sign up for Chitika and test it yourself, it’s free of course.
Recession says – Farewell to AdSense
Almost every company struggles with the financial crisis and so will all AdSense publishers. One thing is sure, the financial crisis will damage AdSense, how dramatic can’t currently be said. The winners of the financial crisis are less popular advertising companies who benefit from Adsense’s damage.
What makes AdSense AdSense?
That question is very important to understand why AdSense will undoubtedly take damage in the financial crisis. AdSense is the leader in CPC advertising because they have a large pool of advertisers which allows them to show relevant Ads on the publishers’ websites. Because of the fact that they can show extremely related ads both the advertisers and publishers earn money. The advertisers have a higher ROI (return of investment) because they get a lot more conversions per click compared to other advertising programs. The consequence is that the advertisers are willing to pay more for every valid click they get and as a result the publishers earn more as well. Relevancy is the key of AdSense’s success it’s what makes AdSense different from other CPC networks. (Actually it’s no more a real CPC network it’s a CPA network. It’s an affiliate program because the ROI sets the price of the click.) If you generate less sales then your CPC will be adjusted by AdSense. A lot of sales can only be achieved by relevant advertisements.
"There are niches that have a higher conversion rates than others. For
example if you run a website about a computer game then your audience
mostly consists of kids which don’t have a lot of money, however in the
dog niche for example, you have adults as visitors and they tend to buy
products more often." - Adsense CPA or CPC
What could disbalance Adsense’s system?
Google is the king of advertising programs simply because they are able to display relevant ads. If they are somehow no longer able to display that relevant ads their whole system could collapse. That danger now occurs because of the financial crisis. Companies are collapsing and so are advertisers. If all those companies are no longer able to pay for ads then Google will now longer own the relevancy throne. Not only companies collapse, but also individuals. There are a lot of individuals working together with AdWords and a lot of individuals no longer have the money to pay for advertisements. To sum it up, once Google lacks the advertisers the whole system of showing relevant ads no longer works as it did the past year.
The losers: both Advertiser and Publisher
If Google is no longer able to display display relevant ads both the publisher’s CTR and CPC will lower. There is already one form of drastic CPC reduction: Smart Pricing. Google uses smart pricing to make sure that the advertiser still earns something with AdWords, in other words they want to make sure that the Advertiser still has an adequate ROI. The current situation could result in smart pricing for every publisher.
The publisher continues showing ads with the difference that because of the lack of advertisers he is showing less relevant advertisements. Less relevant advertisements means less clicks. The reason: On website about “car insurance Hollywood” the probability that someone from Hollywood clicks on “Car insurance Orange County” is lower. It’s not what the visitor is looking for. The rate of miss clicks/interested clicks changes as well. With no more relevant ads the interested clicks decrease whereas the miss clicks increase. The result of both is a lower CTR. With the lower CTR the publisher (you) earns less.
Now that the Ads are no longer relevant the quality of the clicks for the advertiser also reduces. The previous “car insurance Hollywood” ads will be replaced with alternative “Car insurance Orange County”. A visitor clicks on the advertisement (could also be a miss click) and either closes the website right away (missclick) or has a look on the website and says: “NO! I was looking for Hollywood car insurance, I won’t buy anything you Orange County cammers!” The result are lower conversion rates for the advertiser. Lower conversion rates means lower ROI. Lower ROI has the consequence that the advertiser is no longer willing to pay that much for the ad. To make sure the advertiser continues advertising Google has to cut the publisher’s CPC (same effect as with smart pricing). That consequence’s consequence is a chain reaction. Some advertisers might discontinue advertising and therefore aditionally reduce Google’s ability of displaying relevant ads. I explained the result of that above.
Now that the publisher earns less he is also unable to continue investing in AdWords. I know a lot of publishers who use their AdSense revenue to finance AdWords campaign. What is the result of that? You know it, less advertisers and less relevant ads again! Lower CPC means less earnings for the publisher. The lower ROI means less money for the advertiser. Both are the losers of the crisis. It sounds horrific and yes, it is horrific. Let’s now see whether some bloggers already experienced unusual changes.
The (AdSense) world is out of joint
I asked several AdSense publishers on Twitter to @hendricius me whether they noticed any change in CTR and CPC.
Matt Smith from SmithSense said: I earn about $30k/month in adsense. I’ve seen No reduction in CPC or click through over the last 6mo. despite econ situation. (See our interview – very inspiring.)
@JamesFrancisIM from JFIM said: Not really. I still get good CPC even now, although I suppose it depends on what niche you’re in
@joelcomm from JoelComm said: yes, AdSense is definitely down. But traffic is great and overall revenue is UP!
@PassTheBoll from PassTheBoll said: I am experiencing some pretty bad results so far. Just a year ago I would’ve made close to $100/mo with my current stats.
@ellenm1 from DesignSpace said: yes, adsense has dropped, mostly over the last month.
@jacky_brown from CasaOfCash said: getting lower cpc on adsense sites, but may need to do some remodeling.
@rajupp from TechPP said: its very inconsistent. Yesterday it was damn good, today its just the opposite, not sure what to expect from Google. Note: I previously helped him to up his CTR.
I myself noticed a decreasing CTR and CPC. My earnings compared to 4 months before lowered by around 30% whereas the traffic increased by 10%.
What’s gonna happen next?
Good Bye AdSense?
AdSense will have to struggle with less advertisers, less publishers and less money. Advertisers and publishers will start direct advertising to make sure that they earn most (100% compared to 75% is a difference). An alternative for them would be to move to other CPC networks, to try affiliate marketing or publishing ads on a CPM basis with other companies. What worked extremely well for me was Chitika. Chitika has even more relevant ads than AdSense in some situations as of their way to identify what the visitors are interested in. The improved relevancy allows them to pay more per click: The CPC is around 20% higher on my gaming site than with AdSense. Ad layout is also an advantage, but that’s not part of this post.
Sticking to AdSense? Make sure to take precautions!
The key to success with AdSense is as said before having relevant Ads on your website. We are unable to influence the negative advertiser trend. However, we can take some precautions to make sure that our Ads give the advertiser an high ROI.
1. Use Section targeting to make sure your ads are as relevant as possible.
2. Use Text ads, they are known to be more relevant than Image ads.
3. Remove your Ads from unrelevant content such as About me, Contact me pages. Forum Owners: No Ads in General Chat forums.
4. Not too many ads.The more ads, the more missclicks, the less the quality of your clicks. Low quality clicks don’t convert and are thus not worth that much for the advertiser = no CPC.
Thanks a lot for reading and I hope to have explained the current situation quite well. Make sure to comment and check out the forum thread for further ways of discussing.
Psychological Adsense optimization
This is my first video post, a short video about optimizing your Adsense with psychological factors in mind. Adsense can be compared to shopping-mall psychology hence it is every important to choose the proper layout and positioning of Adsense. I experimented for more than 2 years and made the experience that a bad layout can get you 10 clicks and a good layout around 150 clicks per day.
Now that you watched the video I would like to add a short summary: the colors are very important. For me #000080 worked better than the standard title color #0000FF. If you ask me then that’s the same phenomenon as banner blindness. People get used to the colors and immediately identify your ads as real ads. Some people suggest to make the Title-color the same as the link color on your website but I made the experience that a solid blue still works best. All links are blue and that’s why blue Adsense links also perform best. Of course, make sure to test this method as well hence it could be that this method gets you most clicks on your website. There is no general formula, everything depends on your website.
Make your ads not look like ads
People don’t click advertisements unless they are super relevant, or the content is so bad that the ads are more relevant than the content. Especially the younger generation got extremely used to advertisements and learned to live with them. They are very hesitant and won’t click them unless they don’t notice that they are actually clicking an ad. Of course, this also means more false-clicks but that is another topic. The first step would be to change the text color of your Adsense units to the color of the your website’s text.
Make the borders go
Yes, we want our ads to look like content. To achieve that we need to make sure that both border and background color are the same as the background color of your website. In fact, there is no reason for using borders. They don’t look good at all and won’t even attract clicks because they make every ad look Adish. I never used them and will never do so which means that you shouldn’t do as well.
Hide your URL-Color
The URL color makes every ad look very Adish and as said above: adish looking ads aren’t clicked. When people see another URL standing somewhere then they will notice that they are actually facing an ad and are hesitant to click. We want people to only look on the Adsense tital – because that’s where they should click on. The first impression counts and the title is most important for the click. If we are able to draw all the attention to the title then the people will click it because the title looks like a link plus is related. However, if we let the user look on the “ads by google” or the URL then they will notice that they are actually looking on an ad and won’t click. Make the URL color the same as the text. For me a grey (#CCCCCC) or the same color as the Adsense unit’s text color perform best.
Change the positiongs
It is very important to move your Adsense units to where your users actually look at. Adsense introduced a heatmap at which location ads perform best. The heatmap is based on psychological factors as humans tend to look to the left of the page first and then move their attention to the center and then to the actual content. Those locations are the top-performing locations. If you are able to put your ads in your content, or on top of your site (like me with D3scene in the video) then you will get a lot of clicks, simply because people will look at the advertisements. Never use any sort of footer advertisements. “Gurus” recommended to do so in the Web 1.0 era, but that is no longer up to date.
Conclusion
Summing it up you should have learned that colors and placements of your Adsense units are two major factors for the CTR (click through rate) of your ads. Using large rectangles looking like content with no surrounding borders is the way to get most clicks. Blue link colors are performing best. Make sure to test your changes for at least a week to see whether your changes were good or not. Adsense requires a lot of testing. I never stop testing, there is always something that could perhaps up the revenue a little.
Merging two Wordpress blogs
In some cases you perhaps want to merge two Wordpress blogs. You either have two blogs which you want to merge (careful, don’t even think about doing so if they are not about the same niche) or you want to merge your blog with a friend’s blog to work together. Mark and me did the same and merged Donkey- and Ownblogger and now both work on DuoBlogger. I will first explain the benefits and then come to the problems and how you can solve them.
Reasons for merging your blog
In our case Mark is the blogging expert and I am more into advertising and promoting your blog.
-You can specialize on your knowledge, but still have related and other interesting content. That way you are able to ensure that your readers will never get bored and will always enjoy exclusive content.
-You can split your work. If you previously had to manage wordpress, design and promoting you can now divide the work depending on your skills. That is very good especially if one of you is more a designer and the other one more a coder (design and coding usually goes wrong. Look at the Gnome Desktop. Linuz Torvald read the designer’s code and said “Hmm, they must be code nazis”.). Look at both of your strengths and then see whether splitting could help improving your website. The splitting of course also applies to writing content, but don’t reduce the amount of writing, still keep publishing like you did before.
-You enjoy the benefit of more content. When you merge your wordpress blogs your are of course also merging your visitors. The visitors will enjoy the higher specialized content of the same niche. Happier visitors means of course more subscribers and more subscribers mean more money for you.
-You are not alone with problems. Ask yourself how often you have already had problems with your website which you were not able to solve that easily? With two people working together you enjoy the benefit of two brains . It’s like a Dual-Core processor – both of you can either work on one issue or divide the tasks.
Less money – a common misconception
You are merging your blogs which also means that you are merging your visitors. If both of you were earning 100$ each every month then you will now earn 200$. Assuming that you are splitting your earnings equally you will each still have 100$. Money should not be the reason for being hesitant with merging the blogs.
Before merging your blog
Make sure that both of you really want to do so. I can only recommend to do so if both of you are friends and trust each other. Not trusting each other is definitely not a good base for a business together. I am pretty sure that users will notice quickly that you are not trusting each other. Not trusting each other means that your writtten content will most likely be bad as well and users notice that. At least that when someone recommends me to start clicking on my ads for higher earnings.
Merging your two wordpress blogs
If all pre-checks and thoughts went fine then get ready to start the merging process. Please make sure to read the following guide fully once and then proceed with the merging process. You need: Access to all Wordpress Admin menus, access to phpMyAdmin and the FoxReplace addon. For simplicity I am using Blog A and Blog B as names for my old blogs and Blog C for my new blog.
phpMyAdmin Mass Edit
-Install a fresh copy of wordpress on Blog C and get a maintenance plugin so that google won’t index anything it is not supposed to.
-Export wordpress using the Wordpress export feature on both of your blogs. You should have two .xml files.
-Go into the wordpress settings on Blog C and import both .xml files after each other.
-It should ask you to whether you want to download the images from the old Blogs. Say yes.
-Blog C should now have all posts from Blog A and B.
-Open phpMyAdmin and search for the sitename of Blog A. It should find some results – replace all of them with the name of Blog C. Do the same with Blog A.
-Do the same for the URL of Blog A and B.
-I recommend you to use phpMyAdmin’s mass edit feature (tick all boxes and click edit in the action menu – see screenshot). Then Open the Replace any menu and replace Site URL and name of A (next step B) with site name and URL of C. That will save you a lot of time. It could take a while until FoxReplace completes – don’t kill your firefox, just be patient – get a coke. For me it took almost a minute.
-Congrats, you should now have fully merged your blogs.
The final step of the merging process is the most important one. You now have site C which has al the content of Site A and B. If google will index site C it will notice that it has the same content. What happens? BAM you get banned. To avoid doing so we activated the maintenance plugin. We will need to tell Google that site A and B moved to site C. To do so we are using an handy feature of the Apache web server (if your old sites are not hosted on an Apache server then the following stepps will not work, but the idea is still the same. If you aren’t allowed to use .htaccess files together with the apache ModRewrite module then you can also forward using a 301 meta redirect. If you aren’t running on Apache and don’t have access to .htaccess files then make sure to ask your next hoster for that.
Migrating old Permalinks
-Open your favorite FTP program (filezilla portable in my case) and open site A and B. You should notice an .htaccess file in the wordpress root directory.
-Open the .htaccess file and replace everything with the following:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^oldurl$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*) newurl/$1 [L,R=301]
-Replace oldurl with the URL of A (and B of course on B’s server) and newurl with the URL of your new blog. Example: oldurl: http://www.donkeyblogger.com – newurl: http://www.duoblogger.com
-Open an old URL on your blog (google your site and then see the cache) you should be forwarded to your new blog almost instantly.
-If you were using different Permalinks on wordpress blog A and B then you will need to use the Permalinks migration plugin to make sure that your visitors will be forwarded to the proper URLs on C. Install the plugin on C and enter the old permalink rule from either A or B (depending on which permalink rule you do not want to keep)
Voilá you now have merged your blogs :-). There might be some other little tweaks but they depend on your wordpress configuration. Happy blogging and don’t forget to subscribe to DuoBlogger and to let me know incase you had any problems.
Contact Us
 |
Mark
|
Phone: +1 (310) 734-8977
+31 6 34045081
Skype: MarkDuoBlogger
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Hendrik
|
Phone: +1 (818) 322-0251
+49 176 48899584
Skype: Hendricius
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