We invariably get asked by friends and family for help in getting into the business. What follows is the advice I would give to anyone who is considering blogging online and monetizing their site with AdSense or affiliate work.
1. Domain name and copyright considerations
First I’d like to start with the domain. You may want to consider whether or not there might be a copyright issue down the line with the domain name you choose. People can be difficult. If your site becomes popular they may demand the domain name and it might be costly to defend against the demand. Always research the domain name before settling on it.
It’s not necessary to choose a domain name with keywords in it. Memorable and relatively short is great. A domain that communicates what’s in it for the site visitor is even greater!
2. Responsive Design
A great looking website is essential. I also recommend making sure it works well in mobile devices, including phones and tablets. Currently roughly over 50% of Internet traffic is on mobile devices. I was just at Google’s Manhattan offices for an AdSense event and they projected that mobile devices will constitute 78% of Internet access within three years (if my memory serves me). I am moving my sites to what’s called a Responsive Design WordPress template by a company called SoloStream. There are many other WordPress template sites designing good Responsive Design templates, but when you choose one I strongly recommend paying for a template. They’re relatively inexpensive and will save you the heartache of using a free template that comes with teh baggage of spammy links in the footer. Pay for your template, it’s more than worth every cent of your investment.
3. About AdSense
There are two sides of this issue, the advertiser side and the publisher side. On the publisher side, as far as I know, and this is from a Googler, Google are planning on rolling out a responsive ad unit that will automatically resize for whatever viewport size is being used (viewport is the size and (landscape/portrait) orientation of the screen. They are also experimenting with other methods to display ads on mobile devices. But this might not roll out until summer or later this year, from what I can tell.
On the advertiser side they’re rolling out new mobile friendly features on the advertiser side so that advertisers can better execute on a mobile strategy. Seems like anything “local” is going to be hot. They even have a feature where a phone call is initiated if an ad is clicked, rather than taking the phone user to a website.
4. What size ad units to use?
Here is a recent thread on WebmasterWorld.com that discusses sizes to use on a responsive design template http://www.webmasterworld.com/google_adsense/4541398.htm
5. Where to get the best Internet Marketing info?
Your best information can be found at SearchEngineLand.com, SearchEngineJournal.com, and WebmasterWorld.com. All are excellent resources. I’m associated with WebmasterWorld.com.
6. Monetization
Here is a link to a discussion I initiated about monetization. While local based advertising may be hot and hotter later, those may end up showing on your site if your content creation focuses on local activities, resources, etc. The essential monetization points to keep in mind is that
a. Newbies are a good demographic to cultivate. Experts are a poor demographic to cultivate. Newbies need gear, need products, need confidence. Newbs find confidence in information (books) and gear (products that make them better at an activity). Experts do not need gear and don’t buy products.
b. Think about products or advertisers that can purchase advertising. Who is your audience, what is their purchasing power, how deep is their need for products and just as importantly what is the profit margin on those products? Products with razor thin profit margins, like electronics, tend to not pay as well. The manufacturers and retailers are have little profit to spend on advertising- they can’t break even if they spend more on advertising than they make on each sale. If you register for an affiliate network like Commission Junction you’ll see what various niche’s pay and you can get an idea of profit margins. The higher the percentages paid to affiliates the higher the profit margin (but also competitiveness).
7. About affilliate work
Affiliate work is when you link to an ecommerce site like Amazon.com and receive a commission when someone makes a purchase as a direct result of your link. A downside to affiliate work is that suspicions surrounds certain affiliate networks and how sales are accounted for. Some say there is parasite software that is siphoning off affiliate’s clicks and claiming them as their own. Aff networks aren’t as popular now. That said, Amazon.com has a strong affiliate network and it is a trusted name so a clickthroughs can convert to a sale well, if the link is in the right context. Context is everything for affiliate links and AdSense advertising.
8. Ad placement
Text links, whether AdSense text links or affiliate text links work well along the sides but in my experience they can convert well at the end of an article or placed within a magazine pull quote box that is embedded within the content. Here’s tutorial about pull quote boxes and how they can be used to embed ads within content http://www.pixelperu.net/mandarin/index.html
– A large banner at the top of the page gets good CTR (click through rate) and earnings. Ad units embedded within content (surrounded by a box or alternate color to set them apart from the content) works well. Large Rectangles work well at the bottom of a page because advertisers like to show display and rich media ads there, which pays you per impression. Pay Per Impression helps monetize content that might not monetize well with Pay Per Click. With pay per click the price paid is under pressure to convert into a sale. The higher the conversion rate the more you get paid, in general. Pay per impression does not have that kind of pressure, they just want to build top of mind presence, like a TV ad.
– Do not overwhelm the top of the page with ads, that is a no-no that could cause the site to not rank well. So two or three ad units all together or at the top of page or above the fold will get ranked less well in Google.
9. About SEO
Don’t worry about keyword phrases. As long as the title tag communicates a general idea of what the page is about then you’re good. Nowadays, what’s best for your site visitors is overall what’s best for you. Meta Description tag is not used for ranking but it is used by site visitors to determine, when looking at the search results page (SERP), whether the page has something in it for them. What’s in it for me? That’s the question people ask before clicking on a SERP listing. What’s in it for me? The meta description, a good one, will answer that question. Run a few keyword phrases for products or whatever and look at the Google ads along the top and sides of the page. Those are carefully constructed and the best ones answer the “What’s in it for me?” question. That is how to structure your meta description tag. Here is what an ideal SERP listing will look like, with the site’s title tag on top and a meta description on the bottom:
Title tag
Declaration of what is to be found on the page. A call to action (click here to read about it!)
10. Just build it!
As far as promotion, that’s another thing altogether. The essence is to build a good site then tell others about it. Search engines are citation based algorithms so citations are important. Citations are generally links but there may be other signals taken into account. Don’t take shortcuts. That will backfire, it always does. Using Facebook to build up a circle of people friendly to the content is a good thing, it’s telling people about your site. Put the social media chiclets on the site to make it easy for people to share.
Here’s a key aspect about promotion that tends to get lost in the noise of marketing advice: The more people share your site to each other the better the site will end up ranking. People share what is useful, so the content must be useful. Focus on making the content people would want to share with their friends and family: Usefulness. The content must ask and encourage people to share it, via email, Facebook, and twitter and Stumbleupon. It’s not the sharing that will drive the ranking, but making the site worthy of sharing that will.
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