Making Money Blogging – Blog Stew

Let me break down exactly just what this ’smart pricing’ really is.  There is a lot of confusion as to the exact definition of the system adsence uses.

What is Smart Pricing?

Google’s smart pricing feature automatically reduces maximum cost-per-click (CPC) bids for certain pages in the Google Network.

Essentially if Google decides the click on any given ad is less likely to result in a sale for their advertisers they reduce the price of that click, so in theory the advertiser saves money which makes them happy, Google makes less money a long with the publisher.

Lets break this down and look at just how Google come to these conclusions on smart pricing.

Continue reading after the break.

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Everyone who uses Adsence is looking for the next ‘holy grail’ in profitable niche’s.  Selecting a high paying niche when building your next site can dramatically increase the amount of revenue generated by Adsence.

The ‘key’ is to target keywords which have the highest cost per day estimations.  This means that businesses and companies are actively competing for these advertising spaces and therefore more money is being pushed into specific niches.  The advertising budgets of these companies is a good indicator of the profitability to be found in certain niches.

After the break I’ll include a table which outlines the cost per click, clicks per day and cost per day of some keywords.

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Finally made it, its taken 2 months but I’ve finally hit the magic $100 on Adsense!

Ok so lets look at how I actually managed it.

Sites displaying Adsense:

• 2 blogs, this one and another on a popular mmorpg pc game.
• 2 content driven sites.
• 21 web proxies.

The main bulk of the income has come directly from Adsense which is displayed on the main page of the proxies.  The very nature of proxy advertising is to get burst traffic, generally over time the revenue generated from proxies tends to drop, that’s why setting up new fresh proxies as often as possible is the way forward.

My current Adsense total = $102.12 that’s as of 2nd March 2009 (date of this post)

My goal was to try and break the magical $100 mark in February, but I think I can let myself off for missing the mark by 2 days!

The question is, what to do now?  Well more of the same really.  I’ll be looking into updating my content sites along with adding more.  Creating more web proxies and focusing on services I can provide.

My latest project is www.corelogo.com which has taken off really well.  I’m happy with the design of the site and I’ve just started to advertise the services CoreLogo offers around webmaster forums.  Its nice to have something different to do, its all very well staring at text for hours on end but that can soon become a drain and off putting to some extent.  There’s nothing better than whipping out Illustrator and Photoshop to get the old creative juices flowing!

Its been 10 days since my last post, that’s to long and its going to change!

So what the hell have I been doing online since this blog started?

My first goal was to reach the fabled $10 amount on Google Adsense, that was the first major mile stone in my greater online money making plans.  I managed that fairly fast with an average income around $0.10 per day at that time.  That’s nothing great but it was the start I needed.  It showed me how easy it was (in theory) to make good amount of money online from advertising revenue only.  My first angle of attack was to start setting up content driven websites, based on WordPress.  I have a solid understanding of WordPress from some past experiences so it made sense to stick with what I know.  I looked at things in my life which I currently enjoy or have a good interest in, then I began to produce sites based around those subjects.

One of the first criteria in making successful sites is to base the site on subjects you know and understand.  Making content driven sites to produce income is all well and good, but its a hell of a lot more difficult when you have no interest in the given subject.  My advice is to stick to what you know, all day, everyday, then you can’t go wrong!

Eventually I had produced 4 content driven blogs/sites.  Then it was time to learn SEO methods.  I have a good knowledge on the more common easier methods, but I need to expand this knowledge.  That’s what my current focus is aimed at.

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Seems like it’s been an age for my Google PIN to arrive.  I’ve got a hell of a lot done since moving over the $10 mark on my account, to enable payment.  The number of sites I own has increased along with my overall knowledge of everything Internet related.  Up to know I’ve been focusing my efforts into content based sites.  The sites all feature hand written content by me.  This was very time consuming to do, but I felt it needed to be done.  I want to understand everything there is in relation to making money online, and to do that I need to spend them time doing the less glamorous tasks!

Up to now the best snippet of advice I’ve come across has been:

Try, just try!  You never know what can or will happen until you try.

So with that in mind that’s what I’ve been doing.  It’s also what I advise anyone wanting to try and make some sort of money off the Internet to do.  For every one person trying to make something of the net there has to be well over 20 thinking about it.  But that’s the difference between us and them, we do.  For people just starting out such as myself, it can be frustrating reading the results some people are achieving.  Only to them look back at my own Adsense account to see measly little figures.  But rest assured they had to start off just the same as me, and that’s what keeps me going.  I don’t think its possible to see fast results, its all about time.  Naturally as time goes on you get more and more organic traffic coming your way, which in turn will hopefully increase the earning you produce off Adsense.

The latest venture I’m looking to start is a network of proxy based sites.  However knowing completely nothing about them its going to take some time.  You will see lots of crap on the net about making easy proxy sites which will generate $1 per day, now if I could start 100 of these earning that amount, well it hardly takes a brain surgeon to work that out.

Google Adsense

Google Adsense can be daunting for people new to the advertising format.  This post will outline what Google says for first time Adsense users.  I’ll also give some opinions on what they say.  Again please understand this is aimed at people newish to Adsense, that’s not to say it might contain some things people who are more familiar with the format can take away and learn from.

So lets get stuck in, I’ll list the guidelines in bullet points then break them down.

Basic Adsense user guidelines

• Use text and image ads.

Text ads have more ads per ad block.  So you might lean towards thinking ‘there’s more ads so more chance of people clicking on them right?’  This is not entirely the case.  People find images a lot easier to look at, also they may be animated giving the eye more incentive to look in there direction.

• Use wider ad units.

Bigger ads.  The bigger they are the more chance people have of seeing them.  But remember not to go overboard, people are still going to visit your site looking for quality content, not an ad fest.

• Use channels to monitor ad performance.

Make sure you use these, its easy for first time or new users to ignore this.  They will allow you to monitor the exact amount of turnover each add is producing.  Naturally from that data you can then begin to fiddle with your ad design and placement.

• Ensure your site is Google policy compliant.

If its not then expect to get banned!  Or thrown so deep into the google black hole (sandbox) you’ll never come back!

• Good quality site content.

This is what will make people keep coming back!  As I’ve said before, sites that I’m interested in writing for tend to do better performance wise.

• Original content.

Copy and pasting jobs can be good for some sites, however its generally better to produce your own stuff, then with some luck you will get well known for it!

Keep reading on after the split….

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My little red notebook is full of information relating to generating search traffic.  It mainly relates to Google they are the big daddy after all so it makes sense to work to their guidelines!  I want to speak about how Google says you can increase traffic to your new sites.  Most of this will be common sense, but still this will I hope make a good basic reference guide.

Web Master Guidelines

• Pages are listed in Google as a direct result of their relevance and importance.
• Search result rank is based on links – Quality links are better than quantity!
• Produce unique quality relevant original content to increase rank.
• Violations in web master conduct will result in page ranks dropping (note I’m speaking about the SERP here – Search Engine Results Page).
• Think like your users would when they view the site, then adapt your site as needed – This is also a good point to get another person to go over your sites and give their opinions.
• Make sure all outgoing links still work – Ensure your not linking to any dead pages!
• Use Google web master central – Its free after all, and we damn like free!!
• Register sites on Google web master tools – Goes without saying.
• Submit .XML Sitemaps to Google.
• Report spam sites or other sites ripping your content off to Google, again using the web master tools they provide.
• Use web master help groups.
• Google Analytics provides accurate stats for your sites.
• Use Google alerts to monitor when people start speaking about your site! – You can set this up to look for other things, but I find it rather interesting to see some random music DJ site is talking about BlogStew!

As you can see Google provides many tools that can make your life as a web master a whole lot easier.  I use all of these tools myself, its simply stupid not to.  If you follow these basic guidelines you should be able to produce websites which will make some money from AdSense.

Going from my personal experiences, sites which I’m actually interested in producing content for make more AdSense/advertising money.  I currently have 3 sites running (soon to be 4 tomorrow) which I actively produce content for, in the past I tried to set-up sites with the single intention of making money from AdSense among other advertisers…it hardly worked and sites would soon drop off into the depths of the net.  Also it helps to enjoy what you do, simply producing brain dead content to try and improve page ranks is hardly fun!

Life’s for living so try to enjoy as much of it as possible!

Ok,

So today the plan is to add my sites to Squidoo and all similar sites.  Basically this should help with making money online, since the quality of back links that should be generated to my sites will be of a higher quality.  This means I should rank higher in search engine results, which should mean more clicks on my adds!

I’ve only really been working at trying to monetize my websites for a week or so and the workload has been massive.  There was me thinking I could simply sit down, find a good high traffic keyword then simply make up a page which relates to it, whack up adverts then be done with it.  That’s not the case at all, hell if it was everyone and their dog would be earning off the Internet.

Its still early days, I just can’t wait to see when this starts to pay off.  I also need to start up some more sites, exciting stuff!

I’ve made it! (by 12 Cent)

My AdSense account has finally gone over the $10 mark!  Now I can edit my payment details, Google only pays out above $10 (on terminated accounts).

This might seem mad to some people that I’m actually getting excited over this.  For me this is the first real milestone in my greater online money making plans.  From the day I set out to try and make money online, all I’ve done is spend it.  Its costs a fair amount of money to setup websites as they come with added costs.  Registering a domain is cheap that’s for sure but getting a company to host your site that’s when the spending comes in.  To date I’ve spent around $170 on setting my sites up.  Remember this is not including the hours and hours of work I’ve put into this venture.  It takes time to get websites up and running but takes even more to teach yourself how to understand and use the internet as a tool for making money.

I’m going to lay off on these AdSense account updates until it reaches $50 which is half way to my first Google cheque.  At which point I’ll speak in more details on which type of ads are working for me.  With some luck the next update won’t be that far away!

The first advertising type I’m going to dive head first into is Google Adsense.

$9.41 I know its nothing amazing, but its a start!

I’m currently sitting at $9.41 which is hardly a bank breaking amount.  But as I say its a start and we all have to start somewhere right?  Google Adsense seemed like the natural place to start with my advertising, it is after all the largest advertising entity in the world.  Its also extremely easy to set-up and get running.  I’ll speak about setting Adsense up in later posts.

What can we learn from the current state of my Adsense account?  Well I’m not using 2 methods of advertising avalible to me:

• Adsense for Mobile
• Adsense for Feeds

Mobile may be a little bit more tricky than feeds to get running.  Mainly because I currently have no mobile sites online, neither do I have any immediate plans to start producing one.  However for feeds that should be easy enough!  As I already have feeds running through FeedBurner (I’ll speak about FeedBurner in greater detail in upcoming posts) it should be very easy to integrate Adsense into them.

I could speak about the methods I’m trying to use to increase the traffic to my sites, but that’s for another post.  I want to keep this simple and run updates showing how good (or bad!) my Adsense account is doing.