AdSense in General:

1. AdSense in a Nutshell
2. Signing up for AdSense
   
3. The different ad formats reviewed
4. The best AdSense colors
5. The best AdSense placements
6. The worst AdSense placements
7. Increasing your AdSense CPC on the longterm
8. AdSense Ad Planner Publisher Center
9. Using AdSense Channels to increase CTR + CPC
10. Integrating AdSense into Analytics

vBulletin AdSense Guides:

1. AdSense inside post for vBulletin
2. Section Targeting for vBulletin

Miscellaneous Posts:

1. An interview with AdWords Expert: @Fuzzone
2. Chitika vs AdSense relevancy
3. Matt Smith: AdSense Millionaire
4. Seeing the CPC of Placement targeted ads

If you have any questions/suggestions/tips regarding our posts then please ask them and we will later on include them in our FAQ. You will be properly credited of course.

You can find all our video tutorials on our Vimeo Channel.

AdSense Website Reviews

You are stuck and need more help? Duoblogger offers AdSense consulting on your website(s) and we give tips on how to improve your AdSense earnings. Since there is always something to improve, do not hesitate to ask us. You can find more information about this on the AdSense Consulting page.

Some examples of our reviews

UPDATE: We opened up a general thread on our Duoblogger forum which includes all our reviews which we’ve done so far for clients.  You can find it in the AdSense Forum, and we would surely appreciate feedback.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Did you ever experience that day when you sat down in front of your computer and actually nothing came to mind? Or when you set time aside to blog while you are actually wasting that time doing other stuff rather than blogging? Well, to be honest, your not the only one. I think I can safely say that almost every blogger has experienced this at least once. I actually had this when Hendrik and I merged our Blogs together. My blog pattern was kind off messed up, and so I had to came up with different ideas. As I looked back over my day and the things that I’d done it struck me that there are a lot of tasks that bloggers do that are important – but that can at times become distracting from… well… writing posts… the core task of any blogger.

10 Important but Potentially Distracting Blogging Tasks

Following are 10 potentially distracting tasks for bloggers (note, I’m not saying that any of these are not important or worthwhile, just that they can actually become a distraction if we allow ourselves to become sidetracked by them).

1. Social Messaging – Twitter, Stumble, Msn, Skype, IM, Mybloglog…. (add your favorite blogging/social service here). Each can suck up your time if you don’t get focused and put some limit around them.
2. Social Bookmarking – many bloggers become somewhat obsessed with writing posts for and then gathering votes on social media sites like Digg, StumbleUpon, Yahoo Buzz etc.
3. Social Networking - building profiles and interacting upon Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace etc – all useful in building a brand and profile as a blogger, but potentially a distraction.
4. Blog Design – blog design is important at creating a first impression but when you find yourself tweaking it, reworking it (especially widgets/plugins), planning your next one more than actually writing content for your blog you might be in trouble.
5. SEO – like blog design there always seems to be something you could do a little better when it comes to optimizing a blog for search engines. It can be worth your time to do some of this, but one of the most effective ways of doing SEO is to write content that hits the spot with readers.
6. Reading other Blogs in Your Niche – yet another great use of time, but many bloggers spend so much time on other people’s blogs connecting, leaving comments and even writing about them that they fail to write anything unique on their own.
7. Networking with other bloggers – another great way to build brand and traffic to your own blog is to connect with other bloggers in your niche – however there are millions of blogs ‘out there’ and it can be an endless task.
8. Monetization – finding and testing ad networks and affiliate programs can take a lot of time. Then optimizing them for your blog and tracking the results and extending your earning potential by finding private sponsorships and ad sales can really eat up even more of your time.
9. Analyzing Stats – one of the biggest potential time suckers, that many bloggers, such as me, become distracted with at different times, is analyzing your stats (see this post on Google analytics from either Hendrik or Mark). Sure, you can learn a great deal from looking at who is coming to your blog, from where they come and what they do when they arrive. or
10. Personal Life – It can always happen some day… Your friend or someone close to you gets a car accident and loses a leg, or worse (this may sound cruel but don’t forget this can happen to anyone on a given day. Visiting him/her takes hours and there goes your time to blog anything that day.

Let me tell you this – there’s nothing wrong with any of these activities…. BUT….

While these are all great activities the danger is in those times when they sidetrack us from other core aspects of our blogging.

In my own blogging I try to guard against becoming distracted by:

• Having goals (both long term but also daily goals).
• Being aware how I’m spending time (periodically throughout each day I stop and ask myself if I’m on track.
• Setting time aside for the most important part.

What distracts you most from blogging? How do you keep yourself on the track?

Upping your vBulletin’s CTR

I have been running several Vbulletin forums and would love to share some tips for you. This article focuses more on the placement of advertisements to attract more clicks. This means this article focuses on CTR optimization for your Vbulletin forum (and other forum software as well, but I am using Vbulletin examples).

Before we start discussing the placements I would recommend you to read some articles I have written before:

• Read about the Smart pricing phenomenon. When smart priced by Adsense you usually experience extremely low CPC rates. There are several reasons for that and perhaps cause to be be missing a decent amount of revenue.
• Read which colors you should use together with Adsense.
• Placing AdSense inside your post for vBulletin.
• Using AdSense section targeting with vBulletin
• Last but not least, a general post about increasing your Click-Through-Rate.

Now you should have learned that #000080 as link color is a good choice and that large-rectangles will pay you out most. You will want to make your ads look as content of your site. Keep that in Mind and you will understand the reason for the following ad-placements. Replace my background and border color (EAEBEC) with the colors of the background where you place your advertisements.

I am using both Image and Text ads in my forum. Some content pages might target lower-paying ads which are then often shown as image ads. Image-ads are of course a lot more disturbing but in some cases might yield a little more money. Test it and decide yourself.

The best vBulletin AdSense placings

You will need to edit the templates, to do so, open your Vbulletin options, then go to “Styles & Templates” and then to “Edit Templates”. Replace “your_channel_id” with your channel id, “your_publisher_id” with your publisher id and “alternate_ad_url” with an URL pointing to your alternate ads. If you have no alternate URL then leave it blank and put no value between the “.

Large Rectangles

A navbar advertisement is definitely the way to go because it is right in the center and will attract a lot of attention. With the right link color and with 2 large rectangle units you will experience a click-bomb. If you are using a fixed style then I recommend you to align the ad units more to the left. If your design is fluid then use centered ads. To center them replace the “left” with “center”.

I increased my CTR using this tip from 0.6 percent (large-banner ad) to almost 2 percent on my Vb forums. Your CTR will be higher as long as you are not running a website about computer games. Gamers rarely click on advertisements. That’s one of my biggest problems as well, I am not getting a lot of clicks and good conversion rates with my gaming site.

Edit: Navigation / Breadcrumb Templates –> navbar.
-Go to the end of the file and paste at the very far buttom:

<div align="left">
<table>
<td>
<script type="text/javascript"><!--
google_ad_client = "your_publisher_id";
google_ad_width = 336;
google_ad_height = 280;
google_ad_format = "336x280_as";
google_ad_type = "text_image";
google_ad_channel = "your_channel_id";
google_alternate_ad_url = "alternate_ad_url";
google_color_border = "EAECEE";
google_color_bg = "EAECEE";
google_color_link = "000080";
google_color_text = "000000";
google_color_url = "808080";
//-->
</script>
<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">
</script>
</td>
<td>
<script type="text/javascript"><!--
google_ad_client = "your_publisher_id";
google_ad_width = 336;
google_ad_height = 280;
google_ad_format = "336x280_as";
google_ad_type = "text_image";
google_ad_channel = "your_channel_id";
google_alternate_ad_url = "alternate_ad_url";
google_color_border = "EAECEE";
google_color_bg = "EAECEE";
google_color_link = "000080";
google_color_text = "000000";
google_color_url = "808080";
//-->
</script>
<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">
</script>
</td>
</table>
</div>

Link Unit

You might already have noticed my link-unit on top of the navigation-bar. That’s a very tricky location because users will think that the ads are part of your navigation bar. In fact, I once made the ads look exactly the same as my navigation bar but then quickly received a message from google telling me I should remove advertisement from inproper locations (I am not sure whether they were talking about the link unit because I had ads that looked like threads…). The link-unit had a CTR of 0.75-1.5 percent which is quite a lot. Anyways, I made them look a little more normal again. and still get very good results. Note: the following code can vary a little depending on your forum’s navbar.

Edit: Navigation / Breadcrumb Templates –> navbar.
-Search for: <!– nav buttons bar –> and paste below:

<div align="left">
<script type="text/javascript">
google_ad_client = "your-publisher-id";
google_ad_width = 728;
google_ad_height = 15;
google_ad_format = "728x15_0ads_al_s";
google_color_border = "E8E9EA";
google_color_bg = "E8E9EA";
google_color_link = "000080";
google_color_url = "E8E9EA";
google_color_text = "E8E9EA";
google_ad_channel ="your_channel_id";
google_alternate_ad_url = "alternate_ad_url";
</script>
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">
</script>
</div>

Postbit

The thought of the next ad is the following: What are users looking at when browsing through a forum? Of course – they are looking at the content within the threads. That means placing an advertisement there would be ideal. I have not yet found a code to wrap text around the advertisement. That is quite difficult because when someone starts a thread with a quote or code then the layout of that is usually destroyed. A good design is very important so unless someone provides a better code that will not break the design I highly suggest you to just place your advertisement above the post.

Edit: Postbit templates –> postbit.
-Search for <!– / icon and title –> and paste after the </if> the following:

<div align="left">
<script type="text/javascript"><!--
google_ad_client = "your_pub_id";
google_ad_width = 336;
google_ad_height = 280;
google_ad_format = "336x280_as";
google_ad_type = "text_image";
//2007-11-29: D3scene_Header, D3Scene
google_ad_channel = "your_channel_id";
google_alternate_ad_url = "alternate_ad_url";
google_color_border = "EAEBEC";
google_color_bg = "EAEBEC";
google_color_link = "000080";
google_color_text = "000000";
google_color_url = "000000";
//-->
</script>
<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">
</script>
</div>

To show the postbit ad on every page only in front of the first post use the following code:

<if condition="($post[postcount] % $vboptions[maxposts] == 1)">the postbit code</if>

Link Units

You now have 3 content-ads on your website and reached your maximum, but you can still place more link units. Some of you might say now, oh, less ads equals more money, but that is not the case. I can strongly recommend you to make use of your 2 remaining link units. You should place the remaining adsense advertisements as second post in your forum board.

Users read through the content of your thread and then continue reading below with the replies. The first thing they will see are the advertisements which they will then eventually click.

You could modify my code to show an avatar and look more like a user. That will increase your CTR even further but might be a little too tricky for Adsense. They ban you for everything, so I can only recommend you to go 100 percent white hat. Replace the “Your-Website-name” with a desired name of your choice. I recommend you to simply put the name of the site there.

Edit: Postbit templates –> postbit.
-Go to the end of the file and paste the following:

<if condition="($post[postcount] % $vboptions[maxposts] == 1)"><div style="padding:6px 0px 0px 0px;margin-top:4px;">
<table class="tborder" cellpadding="$stylevar[cellpadding]" cellspacing="$stylevar[cellspacing]" border="0" width="100%" align="center">
<tr>
<td class="thead" align="left">Your-Website-Name</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="alt1" align="center">
<div align="left">
<table>
<tr>
<td width="200">
<script type="text/javascript">
google_ad_client = "your_pub_id";
google_alternate_color = "FFFFFF";
google_ad_width = 200;
google_ad_height = 90;
google_ad_format = "200x90_0ads_al";
google_color_border = "EAEBEC";
google_color_bg = "EAEBEC";
google_color_link = "000080";
google_color_text = "000000";
google_color_url = "008000";
google_ad_channel = "your_channel_id";
</script><script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"></script>
</td>
<td width="200">
<script type="text/javascript">
google_ad_client = "your_pub_id";
google_alternate_color = "FFFFFF";
google_ad_width = 200;
google_ad_height = 90;
google_ad_format = "200x90_0ads_al";
google_color_border = "EAEBEC";
google_color_bg = "EAEBEC";
google_color_link = "000089";
google_color_text = "000000";
google_color_url = "008000";
google_ad_channel = "your_channel_id";
</script><script type="text/javascript" src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js"></script>
</td></tr></table></div></td></tr></table></div></if>

Using popunders to monetize your traffic

Last thing you might be interested in using is a popunder advertisement. They are somehow like popups and payout most. Go for a Valueclickmedia popup, cpxinteractive or tribalfusion popup. I am making most money with the valueclick popup in my VB forum.

Showing ads to guests only

Keep in mind that too many advertisements are really disturbing for your users. They are not gonna stay on your website if everything is spammed with advertisements. As a result I am showing ads exclusively to guests. People that register will not see a single advertisement at all. That will make them return to my website and perhaps start participating in discussions which will on the long term benefit me because of their added content. You could also show large-ads to guests and tiny ad units to users but that depends on your philosophy :-).

To do so simply wrap another if condition around your whole ad tag. If you want to do that with a posbit advertisement wrap the new if condition around your other if condition (bad coding, but easy to do).

<if condition="$show['guest']">your-ad-code</if>

Let me know if my tips worked out on your forum and if you have any other thoughts. If none of the above works out for you then please feel free to contact me or try CPM ads. You might also wanna open a thread in our forums and we will help you with any questions you might have.

That is not so easy – as you will need to have at least 5 million search queries or 20 million content-ad views per month. It will take a while until I can reach that with my current 20 visitors per day hehe.

To give you a brief idea of your advantages: Once you are a premium publisher you will be able to access exclusive services. The most important one if you ask me is that you can customize the look of the advertisements. You can make them look more like your actual content. The advantage of that is tremendous. Imagine you are already getting 10 000 clicks per day and can increase your CTR by 2 percent by changing the look of your advertisements. That’s 200 clicks more every day. Calculate that for a month – that is a lot more money. Especially on good niche pages where you get a decent amount per click.

Adsense Premium Publisher

Notice that you would not recognize that those were ads if there was no such thing as “Sponsored Links” written above. Also keep in mind that you get banned from Adsense if you use “Sponsored Links” somewhere next to your advertisements on your pages as normal publisher. I usually never click on advertisements – in fact only a few people do. But if your advertisements no longer look like advertisements then how would I know that they are in fact advertisements? You can only see that when hovering with your cursor over the URL – the link to a google page shows that. Imagine how it would look like to place a large rectangle in one of your blog posts? People would keep clicking the ads just because they would think that they are part of the article.

In fact you can also customize the look of the advertisements even further – you can use your own fonts, your own colors and your own size. You can make them flexible to your website’s layout. A huge advantage if you ask me, hence you can improve your CTR by matching the Adsense ads better to your website even more.

Sounds too good to be true? Wait, it gets even better:

You can place Adsense units on adult pages. That means if your website somehow has something related to the Adult niche you could use Adsense to display ads there as well. Content relevant adult ads should bring in some nice money.

You can use Adsense on Casino Pages. Gambling is strictly forbidden in most of the US-States. Same applies to Adsense – casino related websites are not allowed. Once you are premium publisher that rule does not apply anymore – you can use your ad-units on as many casino related pages as you like.

You get your own Adsense account manager. You are getting someone who is there for you whenever you have questions about your Adsense account. You will get a telephone-number which you can call to get help. Those people will actually help you – compared to the support for a normal adsense publisher the quality increases by around a million percent…. (Yes, I am tired of getting automated emails…).

You can negotiate the revenue share. Normal Adsense-publishers have no permission to discuss the revenue-share for Google. That stands in contrast to the Premium Publishers – they are allowed to negotiate the share which Google will get. That’s a huge advantage because 10% more on 100.000 per month is in fact quite a lot.

So what have we learned today about Adsense? They don’t care the slightest about normal publishers but once you have the required amount of page-views or searches they will offer you something named “support”. Until then you have to deal with Web 1.0 advertising techniques that are less customizable than a rock. Doing something wrong as a normal publisher will get your account suspended but doing so as premium publisher will only get you more money.

Good job Adsense, we love you. No, just kidding – we need you because there are currently no good adsense alternatives. Nonetheless, those companies at least offer good support and way better methods of monetizing your traffic.

1. Mozilla Firefox

Yes that’s right, I’m a big fan of Firefox since 2.0 and haven’t even thought of switching back to Internet Explorer. That being said; Firefox is limitlessly extendable, fast, and lightweight. If you’re still using any other browser (even Google Chrome), then switch to Firefox immediately, it’ll boost your productivity – I can guarantee you that.

There are also countless plugins available, check this post on the 25 must have plugins for bloggers.

2. MemoKeys

I’ve discovered a nice Tool that will help you saving time by saving common used text in a specified keynumber(for example F1 to F12). Just save the text you want in one of those F keys and press it somewhere in word or msn and it will paste the text immediatly into the window.

Click on the image on the right side to see a complete overview for it.

3. Microsoft Office 2007

Not as highly needed for just the Word, since you can use notepad which is already giving in Windows itself. It is handy for making PowerPoint Presentations and Excel sheets. I also have it for Outlook since it can handle multiple mail adresses.

If you don’t have the money to buy it, then I recommend the OpenOffice, which is free and some say just as powerfull.

4. WordWeb

Misspelling much in English? Try out WordWeb.

It is a powerfull English Dictionary tool with about 150,000 words in its database, although it also allows you to look into online sites such as Wikipedia. WordWeb’s a feature rich dictionary & thesaurus tool and a must have for bloggers who write their own content.

5.  Digsby

Digsby is an all-in-one IM/social networking client. It supports most of the IM protocols out there, like Yahoo!, MSN, ICQ, and AIM. It even supports Facebook chat! It features tabbed conversation window, allows you to manage your email, and stay up-to-date with everything that’s happening on your Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, and LinkedIn accounts. As its makers say: Digsby = IM + Email + Social Networking.

What Do You Use?

I’m sure that I’m just covering the most important ones here, but I’d love to hear from other PC using bloggers – what applications are you using?

Andy El runs a blog about making money online. If you like you can read through his adsense tips. Read carefully and you will see how bad researched they are. This leads me to my misconceptions about Adsense. Note that not all misconceptions are from his site.

1. You should influence the ads by adding high paying keywords to your website. That is not exactly true and could be a potential danger. Google has algorithms to display content relevant advertisements. You can do that if you have high-paying keywords related to your content! But don’t do that in any other case. It will reduce the niche-relevancy of your website and could lead to smart pricing. The reason behind that is very simple: Google checks the conversion rate and the return of Investment for the advertiser. If people just click high-paying keywords without purchasing anything (that happens if the keywords are not related to your website’s content) then the conversion rate goes down. Google will smart price you to make sure the advertisers still get decent money from advertising and consequently invest which will get google more money. I made the experience that Google does not care about publishers, they only care about advertisers.
2. You should filter low paying keywords. No, no, no and no! Don’t even think about doing that. If your site gets low-paying ads then the reason for that is your website. Google only displays as relevant ads as possible. If there are no high-paying ones then it could be your niche (Gaming websites, video sites, general blogs are extremely bad for Adsense (if you run one consider getting direct advertisers). Filterting low paying ads results in smart pricing as well because you will then most likely get ads that are not as relevant to your content as the ones before. Same reason as in point 1.
3. A high CTR will not get you smart priced. Why should a CTR have any influence on the conversion rate and ROI of the advertiser? It does not, if you get less clicks it does not nessecarilly mean that your conversion rate goes down. CTR is no factor for getting smart priced. Read my guide on smart pricing for more details and a better understanding of the smart pricing phenomenon.
4. Place images next to your ads for a higher CTR. In fact this works but is highly illegal. Humans always need something visual, they will look on the image ad and see the text ad next to it. A result is more clicks on the text ad. Be very careful here, placing arrows or anything else that encourages clicks could result in getting banned from adsense. A picture of yourself is more or less white hat, but the best is to place two adsense ads next to each other – one of them text only and the other one image only. Have a look and see if that works for you. It usually does especially in forums with 2 large rectangles next to each other.
5. Use as many ads as you can. If you want to decrease the amount of returning visitors, then yes go ahead. Instead think about placing your ads wisely. Don’t use the 468*60 or the 728*90 it will not get you any clicks. Instead perhaps only go with 2 large rectangles. You will get more Clicks and your website will look better with rectangles. Horizontal banners are just Web 1.0 and I always get annoyed when seeing them, especially if they are eye-catching image ads. Quality > Quantity.
6. Use ad sharing software in forums for more clicks. Yes, you will get more clicks but the conversion rate will most likely go down as well. It’s almost like a clicker-community – the people will click but not buy anything. Google will result the cost per click to make sure the advertiser still has a decent ROI.
7. Adsense can not detect false clicks if done properly. Yes perhaps they can not but still, same reason as above applies. Lower conversion rate means smart pricing. If you only get 0.5 cent per click then you could also consider joining PPC sites and you will get more…. Never cheat Adsense, it will somehow influence your account.

If I forgot any misconceptions then please let me know and I will add them to my post :-). You need to read and learn, that’s the only way to be successful with Adsense. Oh and sorry Andy, 50% of your post was in fact wrong.