I was amazed to retrieve a cease and desist email from Google Adsense about my ads on this blog the other day. Allegedly I violated their terms and conditions by using advertising in a floating layer (you know the ones that cover dodgy pages before you can use them).

The reason they thought of me that way was that I had a skyscraper ad on the right hand side of this content section positioned absolutely. I also had a JavaScript in place that would hide the whole ad section on browser sizes that are too small to accommodate for it.

However, as the Google compliance testers seem to turn off JavaScript and use a very small browser window when doing their checks, my ads overlapped the content and I became an outlaw.

So remember that when you use AdSense for your web sites don’t position them absolutely but float them or use negative margins instead or else you’d also have to face being banned from the system and get three days to rectify your mistakes.

Article from: wait-till-i.com

When I first started out with AdSense, I had little money to spare on web hosting, and I knew nothing about how to get a site ranked in the search engines or to generate traffic. It took a lot of work, reading, experimenting and failure before I discovered great ways to build my AdSense business.

Normally Google won't approve AdSense applications for free websites, but there is one exception. So if you're short on cash for hosting and are eager to get started, you might give this a try.

Blogger.com Blogs


Not long after Google bought Blogger.com, they made AdSense available to Blogger blog owners. Blogger is great because it has an easy interface, Google and Yahoo crawl the blogs quickly, and best of all if you're broke–they're free, and Google loves to give out AdSense accounts to Blogger owners. :)


So if you're looking to get started with AdSense and not spend much money, Blogger is a great way to get started.

Before I talk about how to setup a Blogger blog for AdSense, though, let me tell you what an RSS feed is and how it works. If you already know this you can skip ahead. I make reference to this in the setup instructions, so it's important to understand.

An RSS feed (as it applies to a blog) is basically a list of all of the recent posts made to your blog. People can use "RSS Aggregators" (software that continually checks up on your RSS feed to see if there's anything new) to keep up with new posts on your blog. Websites will also want to publish your RSS feed on their sites if your content is good. This gives them fresh content for their visitors. And we all know that content is King (actually Content is NOT King) in the world of website building.

Blogger blogs come with an RSS feed built-in, and you can use this to your advantage to generate traffic to your blog. I'll discuss that in a bit, but first let's get into building the blog.

Create Your Blogger.com Account

Determine Your Blog Topic First

Before you create the blog, you need to figure out what topic the blog will focus on. Think about your skills or hobbies that you're really good at. You might not be a mechanic, but if you're really good at working on cars on the weekend, and you love to do it, that would make a great blog topic. Brainstorm your skills and interests to determine what you would enjoy writing about. It's important that you like to write about it, since you will have to do so to build up the blog!

I will say this: If you have some knowledge on a commercial or industrial topic, this will usually get higher paying AdSense ads. But a hobby blog can do very well also (I know this from experience!).

Create the Blog

Once you have a topic chosen, it only takes about 5 minutes to setup a blog. From the Blogger homepage click the "Create Your Blog Now" link and follow the blog wizard instructions. I won't get into detail about them because it's pretty straight-forward, but there are a few points I want to make.

First of all, when you choose your blog URL, make sure that the URL contains the keywords for your topic. For example, if you're creating a blog about health insurance, "healthinsurance.blogspot.com" is ideal, or "health-insurance" or even "health-insurance-blog" or "health-insurance-12345". Just make sure that your keywords are in the URL, that will help you be found when people search for your keywords in the search engines.

Also, be sure to pick one of the professional looking templates. I suggest you just pick the plain-white one that is first in the list of templates when you're creating the blog. Once the blog is created, then click on the "Templates" tab and select one of the nicer ones shown there. I'm not sure why Blogger doesn't show you all of the available templates in the blog setup wizard, but they don't.

The Settings Tab

A discussion of the important points of each settings tab is outlined below.

Basic

On the "Basic" settings tab, set your blog title to the keywords you want to show up for in the search engines. That will help you get ranked.

Give a good, detailed description about the benefits of reading your blog daily. You want to get people to add your RSS feed to their aggregators and websites so you can get traffic, and this will help.

Answer "Yes" to the question "Add your Blog to our listings?". This will have your blog appear on the main page of Blogger when you make new posts (albeit for a brief period of time), and allow people to search and find your blog using Blogger's search tool.

One other, lesser known detail about setting that question to "Yes" is that if you set it to "No" Blogger will shove "nofollow/noindex" meta-tags into your blog template header, which will prevent your site from getting crawled or indexed. I believe this was done to fight what Blogger called "spam blogs".

Publishing

Set the "Notify Weblogs" setting to "Yes". This will send a notification to Weblogs every time you make a new post. Weblogs is a site that lets people (and search engine crawlers) know when new content appears on a blog. You want the crawlers (and visitors) to hit your pages when you add new content, so be sure this is set to Yes.


Formatting

You can do what you want on this tab-I personally set the number of posts on the main page to between three and five.

Comments

Allow comments unless your blog topic is really controversial and you're likely to get a lot of flaming (people lashing out at you for what you have to say). Allowing comments is good because it gives more food to the search engines and keeps your blog updating and fresh even when you're not posting to it.

I usually let anyone comment, and don't limit it.

Don't show the comments in a pop-up window, because that will prevent the crawlers from being able to get to the content since it's javascript-based.

If you're concerned that people might flame you, but you want to allow comments, enable comment moderation so that you have to approve each comment that is added before it goes live.

If you want to be notified when a comment is made, set the Comment Notification Address to your email address.

Archiving

Set your archiving to daily if you post every day, or weekly if you only post every few days. If you post every day daily is the best way to go, because it gives the search engines more unique pages to crawl and index. More unique content means more traffic to your blog and more clicks on your AdSense ads (I'll get to adding your AdSense to the template in a bit).

If you don't do a daily archive (and maybe even if you do), enable post pages so that each post will still have its own unique page even if multiple posts appear on the same archive page. Having multiple posts on one archive page is not a bad thing if you have post pages enabled, since the posts tied all together make for yet another unique page on the blog.

Site Feed

Definitely enable the site feed. If your posts tend to be very short, you might enable full descriptions. But if you have long posts (which I recommend), do not enable the full feed, use the short feed. Here's why:

If you put the full post in your RSS feed, then the person reading the feed doesn't have a reason to go back to your blog since they have already read the full post. No visitors to the blog means no clicks on your ads. AdSense has an "AdSense For Feeds" in beta testing, but it's not open to all publishers yet, so at least for now you need to induce people to visit the blog.

If they can only read part of the blog post, then if they want the whole story they will need to go to your blog. You can plan for this by making sure that your title and the first 255 characters (about the first 50 words) really pull in the reader's attention. You need to use those first 50 words to make them just have to read the rest.

Also, if your RSS feed appears on websites, you don't want to give away the farm by showing the whole post. You're letting websites use your feed so you can get clicks on the posts in that feed and get visitors to your site to build AdSense revenue.

So set the "Descriptions" to Short, write long posts and make the title and the first 50 words count.

The Templates Tab

If you haven't already picked a nice template from the list, click on the "Pick New" link under the templates tab and select one of the templates that you like and that fits your topic.

If you don't already have an AdSense account, you can click on the "AdSense" link and apply for one straight from the blog instead of having to go to Google.com to apply. That's how badly Google wants Blogger blog owners to use AdSense on their blogs! :)

Once you've done that, it's time to paste your AdSense code into your template. Click on the "Edit Current" link if you're not already there.

There are two methods of setting up your template. You will generate the most clicks by doing the following:

1. Find the section of the template that looks like this:

<!--– Begin #main - Contains main-column blog content –-->
<div id="main"><div id="main2">
2. Paste your AdSense code for a 336×280 large rectangle directly after the second
tag. Be sure to format the colors of the AdSense to blend in with the background of your blog for maximum results.
3. Optionally, if you want to show a second 336×280 block at the bottom of the list of posts, look for this code in the template:

</Blogger>
</div></div>

Put your AdSense code between the </Blogger> tag and the first </div> tag.

Click the "Preview" button to make sure the AdSense blocks look correct and did not mess up the look of the template. If all is well, click "Save Template Changes".

Note: Once you've made changes to your template, if you go and select a different template with the "Pick New" link it will overwrite your changes and you will have to put your AdSense code back into the template.

Setup Your Profile

Once your blog is setup, you want to setup your profile. To do this, click the "Back to Dashboard" link at the top of the browser window. Once at the dashboard, click on the "Edit Profile" link in the right hand column.

Check the "Share my Profile" box, and the "Show my Real name" box, unless you have a really good reason not to. It helps build trust if you have this information showing on your blog because people can see you're a real person and not some anonymous nobody. Your profile by default will be shown on your blog.

If you don't mind people contacting you via email, you can select "Show my email address".

Click "Select blogs to display" and make sure that your new blog is checked.

If you have a photograph somewhere on a website, you can point to it with the Photo URL. I recommend doing this because again, it builds trust and makes you more real and personal to your readers. If you don't have a picture on the web, or don't have a website, I'll gladly host a picture of you on one of my servers for free. Just reply to this email and attach your picture and I'll set you up.

Go through and fill out the rest of the information. Focus on the "About Me" box, because that will show on your blog pages. Use that description to establish yourself as an expert on the topic that your blog is about. People like to know that they're reading an expert opinion that they can trust. This box is your chance to prove you have an expert opinion!

Save your profile when you're finished.

Getting Traffic to Your Blog

Once your blog is properly configured, spend about a week making a good, informative post or two per day. You don't want to go advertising an empty blog, so it pays to make some good posts first.

You can post to the blog by clicking the "Posting" tab. Make your title be eye-catching while still containing the keywords that the post is most relevant to. For example, if your post is going to be about how to build blue widgets from scratch, and you want to be found when people search the engines for "Build blue widgets", try and make your title at least start with those keywords. For example, "Build blue widgets - from scratch". The dashes help the search engines differentiate the keywords from the rest of the title.

You might get some stray traffic from people searching for blogs on Blogger, and your posts appearing in the "most recent posts" list, so don't be surprised if you get some traffic and AdSense clicks even before you start advertising.

Submit Your Blog to Blog Directories

To get the traffic rolling you need to submit your blog's RSS feed to as many Blog Directories as you can. If you search Google for "RSS submission site", the number one result as of right now lists off 55 directories that you can submit your feed to.

With a Blogger blog, your RSS feed is always your blog url plus "/atom.xml". For example, if your blog url is:

http://myblog.blogspot.com/

Your RSS feed url is:

http://myblog.blogspot.com/atom.xml

This is very important, because it will help attract the attention of the search engines as well as get your blog noticed by people who are searching for information and for content for their websites.

All of this will result in getting in-bound links to your site. Most people will use the title of your blog as the link text for the link to your site, and that's why it's important for your title to be the keywords that you want your blog homepage to rank for in the search engines. Having in-bound links that contain the keywords you want to rank for is a very powerful way to get ranked well. I have blogs that rank on the first page of search results for my keywords because of this (some even in the first or second position).

But you don't want to sit around and wait for the links to start to gather. You want to…

Trade Links With Related Websites

Another thing I do to help get my blog ranked is to trade links with other webmasters who have sites on similar topics. I find them by searching for the keywords I want to rank for. If the blog category is not a competitive, commercial category, you can write directly to the webmasters of the top 20 - 50 results and see if they will exchange links with you.

If it's a more competitive, commercial category, you can find out who links to the top websites for your keywords by searching for "link:http://www.YourCompetitor.com/". That will show a list of URLs that link to your competition. Write to the webmasters who own those linking sites and see if they will trade links with you, too.

When you request a link exchange, be sure and make the request personal. Mention something that you like about the webmaster's site and why you think that your blog is a good match for a link. You might even go a step further and put up a link to the webmaster's site before emailing them. That way you can say "I've already put up a link to your site on my blog and wanted to see if you felt that my blog was a good match for a link back from your site"-or something like that. Take the first step, it's a good gesture and it helps you get more links. Of course, if they don't agree you can always take their link down. ;)

If they agree to exchange links, make sure that you have them link to your site using the keywords that you want to rank for. For example, if you want your blog to rank well for "Home Made Widgets", be sure to have them use the link text "Home Made Widgets".

You can manually insert the webmaster's link and description text into your blog by modifying your template. I try to put it in the left or right hand column just below the archive links. To do this, modify your template and look for this code:

</MainOrArchivePage>

That tag marks the end of the archive list. Just below that code, add this code:

<h2 class="sidebar-title">[TOPIC] Links</h2>
<ul class="archive-list">

Where [TOPIC] is replaced with the topic of your blog.

Below the <ul> tag, add this code for each link you want to add:

<li><a href="http://www.website.com/" target="_blank">Link Text</a> - a short description about the site.

And finally, below the links, add this:

</ul>

Every time you make a new link exchange with a webmaster, just go in and repeat the

code with the new link and description just above the </ul> tag.

The more competitive your blog topic is, the more links you will need to get to rank well. But if your posts are informative, witty and humorous where appropriate, word will soon spread about your blog and your traffic will grow as people link to you without you even asking for a link. Growth in traffic means growth in AdSense revenue.

Concluding Comments

I hope this tutorial will help some of you who are on a restricted budget and just getting started with AdSense to start making some money by creating quality blogs at Blogger.

It takes some time and effort to make good informative posts, but once you have learned to create one successful blog you can repeat the process and create another, and another, until you achieve enough success to start putting up your blogs at your own domain name instead of "yourblog.blogger.com".

Article from: jonathanleger.com

This is the second part of two series of articles about How to Increase Your Google Adsense CTR. Here are some other tips to increase your Google Adsense CTR:

7. Place an image near your ads because user tends to look at this section.
8. Use channel to track your ads performance.
9. Include Google Search Box in your website. Though it will not drastically increase your CTR, it's still worth to be used. Around 3% of my monthly income comes from Google Search Box. What I love about this facility is that it shortens my development process. I don't have to develop my own search facility and let Google handles it!
10. Do not click your own ads, or ask people to click it. Believe me, Google will be able to detect those illegal clicks and they will ban your Adsense account if you do it. In fact, I even suggest you emailing Google if you find out your CTR is "abnormal" (above 30%). Ask them to investigate it, in case one of your competitors tries to ruin your reputation.
11. Increase your traffic. There are many ways to increase your traffic; firstly you have to do SEO (Search Engine Optimization), then submitting your website to several search engines, directories, free articles directories, doing link baiting, and many more. I will discuss all these techniques in another article.
12. Many people suggest targeting high paying keywords. But I won't recommend the same thing because I'm sure you will face bloody competition to reach the top position in SERPS (Search Engine Result Pages). Believe me, there are thousands of people who also think like you do. I would prefer to use popular keywords that many people search in Google and there are not many competitors (let's say, 200 – 400 searches a day with total competitors below 500,000). These maybe are not high paying keywords (they usually only pay $0.1 - $1/click); but imagine if you can get 1000 page views/day with 3% CTR, you already get $3 - $30/day! (for a new publisher, this is a very good start).
13. Being specific. If you have many interests, do not put them into a single website. You better create several websites for each of them. For example, you like baking cake, cooking and gardening. Do not put them together into a single website because it will make it too general. You better create three different websites for each of them. This will make them more specific, has more targeted visitors and your keywords will not be diluted.
14. Learn what "masters" say. You will find many valuable tips by joining Google Adsense forum such as http://forums.digitalpoint.com.
15. Be patient. If you are a new Google Adsense publisher, please remember one thing: BE PATIENT. You won't become a millionaire within a night. Everything takes time (unless you already have a huge amount of traffic).

Article by: Enzo Chiu

This is the first part of two series of articles about How to Increase Your Google Adsense CTR. Many people think that they just have to copy and paste Google Adsense code into their website and start earning a huge amount of money from it. What a huge mistake! I also thought the same way two years ago. Later I realized that without optimization, that's impossible. Here I will share all of the tricks to increase my Google Adsense CTR that I found within the last two years.

Here are some tips to increase your Google Adsense CTR:

1. Make sure the ads that are appearing on your site are closely related with your content. This is the first thing you have to do because if your ads are not relevant, there's small possibility that people will click on them. Then, what should you do to tackle this problem? Here are the tips:

• Create a keyword rich content. I suggest you creating one topic a page.
• Check your keyword rich content and then mark some of your keywords as bold or italic. But don't do it too much, just do it 1 – 2 times per page. Otherwise, Google assumes you are doing spamming.
• Use your keyword in your page title.
• Use HTML Tag H1 as your content title, and put your keyword in it. Don't forget to place this tag at the beginning of your content.
• If all those tips still do not work, there is just one possibility: there are no ads that matched with your keyword! You can check this out by using this marvelous tool from the Digital Point Website. It is called the Google Adsense Sandbox, and located in http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/Adsense-sandbox/
• You'll be asked to enter your selected keyword and it will display every Adsense ads that's connected with that keyword. What if your suspicion is correct? Change your keyword! Do not worry; sometimes you just have to change one or two words.

2. Use wide ads (336x280, 300x250 or 250x250). Because these are the best performing ads.

3. Blend your ads with your website themes. For example, if your background color is white, change your ads border and background color to white as well. If your background color is dark (black), use bright color such as yellow as link color. This will decrease user ad-blindness.

4. Place your Google Adsense in these positions:

• Above the fold

Above the fold is the top position of your page that's visible without your visitor having to scroll down. This is the best location that works for me. I place 336x280 ad unit in this location and it works very well. Why? Okay, back to our example. Your article is about "how to bake delicious bread". Someone finds it from search engine; when he opens it, he first sees ads about "baking school", "baking book" or "bread recipes". Who won't be interested?

• In the middle of an article.

This works well if your article is long (more than 500 words). People tend to stop for a while and look for something different while they read. I suggest using rectangular ads (125x125, 180x150, 300x250, 336x280, 250x250 ad unit) for this purpose and make it left justified.

• At the end of an article.

Many people reported that placing Google Adsense ads at the end of their article tends to work very well. This is because when people finish reading an interesting article, they usually think "okay, what's next?" That's your chance! By placing Google Adsense ads at the end of this article, people will spend a minute to read it and then (maybe) click it. For example, you write an article about "how to bake delicious bread". And at the end of it, there are some ads about "bread recipes". Who won't be interested?

5. Regarding the fourth tip, I don't recommend you placing three ad units in a single page. From my experience, the number of ad unit you place in a single page doesn't affect your CTR. In fact, I even found that placing three text ads in a single page make my ads "unblended". For example, I put 160x600, 468x60 and 336x280 ads on a single page. You know what? My 468x60 ads only showed 3 ads in it, whereas my 336x280 ads only showed 2 ads in it! My suggestion is: use 1 – 2 ad unit and a single link unit on your page (Google allows 3 ad unit and 1 link unit to be placed on a single page).

6. Always use Link Unit! Many people never realize that Link Unit is the most profitable format if put in the right place. Try to place it near your navigation menu. People will misidentify it as a navigation menu and automatically read it. If your ads are closely relevant to your content, there's big possibility they will click it. I move the top navigation in one of my websites to the bottom section and replace it with 728x15 Link Unit Ads. You know what? My Google Adsense CTR increased by 200%!

Article by: Enzo Chiu