Selling links on your blog: Ethics or Money?

Who doesn’t like money? Everybody loves to have with a few bucks more in his pocket and I guess no webmaster is exception of this rule. The easiest way to get money from a blog or website is to advertise on it. Advertising companies is the usual and widely accepted way, this includes AdSense and AdBrite, or if we go on the affiliate network way, then Commission Junction and DoubleClick (Google). Other methods are, for example selling links on your website or simply writing so called sponsored reviews. These two are what I will argue about in this post.

Selling links on your website or blog

Selling links on your blog or website is strictly prohibited by the search engines and usually you get penalized if you don’t no-follow these links. That’s not a simple advice from the search engines, saying “You shouldn’t do it”, it’s a clear and simple rule which must be obeyed. Or you get yourself penalized and possibly removed from the search engines.
So, why are search engines so strict about link-exchanges? Because links are the base of the web and by selling these links webmasters poison the web. If links are sold on a website, those links will be adverts, thus the users have to know that the link they will follow it will land them on an advertiser’s page. The fact that every advertisement has to be clear to the consumers that it is an advert is stated in the European Community’s, the USA FTC’s and many other countries’ trade laws.
A user clicks on a link because thinks it will be useful for him. If you provide on your website links which are irrelevant to your content, you basically fool your users.
So how can you both sell links on your website and remain a good-guy? The search engines say that you should no-follow each link you put on your website and you don’t want to pass your reputation to. Like a payed link. The no-follow relation usually scares away the potential advertisers, but it shouldn’t really. They buy space on your page because they want traffic, if they don’t accept the no-follow tag, it means that they also wanted a piece of your Page Rank. And this is not really good.
Also, it’s up to you that you disclose that the link is a sponsored link or not. The ethics (and the trade rules) dictates that you should disclose, but since non-commercial websites and blogs aren’t governed by the trade rules and the ethics can also be put in the background in certain circumstances, again, it’s up to you what you do.
The no-follow tag has to be in place for every sponsored link, that’s the rule.

Sponsored reviews on your website or blog

That’s an odd situation, again. Starting from the “Everybody loves money” statement, one of the easiest way to get (almost) instant money is to write a 200-400 word long sponsored review on your blog. The problem appears when an advertiser requests from you to neither disclose that the article is a sponsored review, nor allow you to assign no-follow relation to the link which will point to the sponsor’s page. Excuse me, but as far as I my knowledge is OK, the advertiser wants to sell a product for example, not to increase its page rank by sucking a piece of your own rank.
The rules of the above mentioned linking rules should be followed in the sponsored reviews’ case, too. If you don’t apply the no-follow relation on the outgoing links from within the review, you will have issues with the search engines. That’s sure. Other than that, a sponsored review is advertisement, so your visitors should know that you wrote that article because you were hired to do so, not because you really — for example — recommend a service or product for them. But this depends on your ethics; if you’re an non-commercial website’s or blog’s author, you are not governed by any governmental trade law, of course, as far as I know.

My final thoughts are that webmsaters shouldn’t fool their visitors, and this applies to the ads and posts, too. Our websites are sponsored by the visitors, both directly and indirectly. If we fool them, we loose their confidence and they’ll never return. The worse case, when they start to spread that they were fooled by you.

Blogrush is gone… No probs… Blogrush alternative is coming

Cos We create another one!

OK, seriously. I was very disappointed when got the email from blogrush.com saying that they go out of business. By the way, this is the second company or service I was extremely satisfied with and went out of business, the first was Koreru.com, my former webhost. After I was customer for about a year or so, they decided to just go out of business. In a way it was good, cos I got forced to get a server cluster, it was bad, cos I was thrown in the deepest *ahem* possible.
And now blogrush. I got tons of traffic from them, which I badly miss, sincerely.

Just as the traffic of devoracles.com dropped, I got in conversation with a 4ugroup chief regarding why the traffic is so low. No, this is a personal website so it’s not their business, they were just wondering I guess. I explained; their first reaction was that I’m an idiot because I was relying on referral traffic. Yup, thanks again for the compliment Beth. The second reaction was that I have a new assignment: create a service like blogrush but better. How cool, I’m as excited as a turtle could be in the middle of the Gobi dessert, really. Watch out for Santa falling from the skies.

Anyway, if you’re seeking for a blogrush alternative and can wait about a week, you got a solution: there will be a service like the mixture of the former blogrush and of Technorati. The signup will be contact based to maintain the quality of the network, You can decide which sites should appear on your widget, advertising opportunities and many other things. Did I say yet it’s free? The plan is to sustain the dedicated server from advertising, which, I have to admit, I think it’s a really bad idea. Whatever.

I can’t tell an URL yet, but if you’re interested, just drop a comment. What the hack, it’s free, we all love free services.

The road to a professional content | Ethics and Standards

Like it or not, blogging and online publishing in general is part of journalism. The problem is that the content is written by untrained people who extremely often commit mistakes a professional journalist wouldn’t do. The first step to the professional content, in my humble opinion is to follow the standards and ethics of the journalism, thus eliminating basic mistakes.

First, let’s make one thing clear: I won’t show in these series real counterexamples. I don’t want to say that for example that “Matt Cutts blog is not good because… “, I’m not a judge, I just try to enlighten some things. By the way, if you’re wondering who Matt Cutts is, he’s a Google engineer and his personal blog can be found here.

Journalism when first appeared in England in the 10th century, wasn’t controlled by any journalistic code of ethics. Monks wrote these rudimentary newspapers by hand where they expressed their beliefs on one single paper, then other monks were copying these texts, then distributed the fresh newspapers to the people who had the knowledge of reading. There was no issue, monks didn’t lie.

The problem appeared when other knowledgeable people started to publish their own newspapers. They wrote their own beliefs which often had nothing to do with the reality.
To avoid the people’s disinformation, appeared in the 13th-14th century the first standard which said:

Don’t lie

That is, that simple. This simple standard was ported in every journalistic Code of Ethics and Standards we nowadays have, we still use this standard, at least it would be awesome if everyone would use it.

The Standards and Ethics codex of the journalists’ was complemented by many other things as the humanity evolved. For example it was added that a journalist shouldn’t accept bribes, another clear and simple standard. But let’s take a look on the current Ethics codex of the International Federation of the Journalists. It’s a very short read so please follow [this link] and read the codex.

I won’t go into every principle, I’ll just rip off the ones which can be reflected on online publishing too and can have the greatest impact on your content. So, the very first principle says:

Respect for truth and for the right of the public to truth is the first duty of the journalist.

As you see that’s what the first journalist standard in the history said, too. Why should you follow this principle? While a lie can bring you extreme traffic on short run, on long run you loose your reputation. Think with your visitor’s mind: “Dam, this guy cheated me once, I bet he will try again, I won’t read his posts again”, you lost a visitor. The problem is that not only one will think that way, but many. You loose your reputation, you lost your traffic and possibly your revenue too.
I can’t say this enough: tell the truth, your visitors will like you and your reputation will be increased considerably with each post.
Also, as per the 3rd amendment, you shall publish only content which source can be verified. This is very important in my opinion; if you say that “Google released its first space shuttle” it’s OK, but link back to your source, link to a Google page where this was announced. This will exclude people thinking that you actually said the untruth, and is also in your benefit: if other bloggers find your post faster than the Google announcement, they will possibly link to you, and I hope I don’t have to explain how precious a good link is.

4th principle states:

The journalist shall use only fair methods to obtain news, photographs and documents.

While in offline life theft is a bad thing, so is online. It’s extremely simple to go to the Reuters news service and copy-paste everything you find, that content will not be your own, the fact that you stolen will mark you, and not in the good way. If you’re unlucky, Reuters will also file a DMCA content removal request you have to comply with.
So, now form the bloggers point of view: You will have duplicated content (because it’s likely that Reuters published the content first), you will have headaches because DMCA lawyers are dancing on your head and after they finished, you remove the stolen content which will be punished by the search engines as they don’t like 404 pages.
Stealing content and publishing under your own name is also plagiarism, which in my honest opinion is one of the most disrespectful acts you can do. You will be caught, then you can say “bye-bye” to your reputation.
If I’m already at plagiarism, let’s see the 8th amendment:

The journalist shall regard as grave professional offences the following:

• plagiarism;
• malicious misrepresentation;
• calumny, slander, libel, unfounded accusations;
• the acceptance of a bribe in any form in consideration of either publication or suppression.

I think each is clear, maybe the last is a bit on the gray line because many bloggers write for example paid reviews.
My thoughts on paid reviews are, that you should only accept payment from a paid review if the one who requested the review wants from you the truth, your belief about the advertiser’s product, website or service. If they want you to say that the product is excellent while it’s the most fishy you ever saw, you better refuse to accept the offer. Why? Because you have impact on your users. If you say the background of Google is white, they will believe you; if you say that a product is excellent, they will believe you, they buy the product then realize that it’s the worse possible and never ever will believe you again. You lost your hard earned reputation.

These were the ethics of the International Federation of the Journalist which can be reflected on the online publishing. I really recommend you to read and even bookmark the page I linked above, you can only win if you comply with the standards of the journalism.
If you’re in the mood of reading, I’d also recommend The Washington Post Standards and Ethics. One thing is very interesting about this codex, specifically that this Codex was, let’s say composed right after the Watergate Affairs, when it was revealed how great impact can the journalism have on specific things, in Watergate Affairs case on democracy.
To learn more about the Watergate Affairs, please follow this link to The Washington Post’s archive.
If you’d like to dig yourself further in the Standards of Journalism, a great source shall be the International Principles of Professional Ethics in Journalism.

Basically, these were the standards I wanted to shed light on. If you think anything else should be mentioned, don’t hesitate to comment; I would be extremely glad to adjust the post.

Also, while I said I wouldn’t judge any other blog, You are anonymous and you can. Did you find a blog post or even news article which didn’t obey with the International Federation of Journalists Standards and Ethics? Please, drop a comment with a link to the post or the article.

Thank you.

I’d like to recommend subscribing to the RSS feed set up for these posts as this way you will get the posts directly in your favorite reader. To subscribe, please follow this link to Feedburner where you can choose your reader.

The road to a professional content | Introduction

A professional content is easy to understand, to read, has a well formed structure and title. Blogging which is nowadays one of the most popular hobbies the people choose, either because they want to share their life, experiences and difficulties they had or because they are simply bored. The only problem with blogging is that usually it has nothing to do with professionalism: the text is blatant, no standards and ethics are followed and because of the lack of the standards, these type of contents become boring and useless, often a headache to read. Can this be changed?

I’m not a journalist yet, but I study journalism and I’m sharing my knowledge with anyone who’s interested in the hope that it will be useful and at least a part of the learned things will be put in action. I really hope that in the next few years the number of the blogs will increase, I enjoy the fact that anyone can share his opinion and knowledge. I’m just dissatisfied with the way many do this sharing.

Just for the matter of the example, if you will follow these posts, You’ll understand that a well chosen title how can increase the effectiveness of your content, a well designed content how can be in the benefit of your user, a well-chosen font type how can keep your visitor reading and returning, and a good knowledge about the applicable “Journalistic Ethics and Standards” how can avoid you some headaches.

As I said, I’m not a journalist yet. I really hope when I graduate the journalism college, better said IF I graduate this college, I will be able to provide my users the content they will really find interesting, or at least they will recognize sooner if they should read a post or not. Because this is part of the ethics, too: the user shouldn’t read a whole article to learn if it’s useful for him or not; he should know from the first 2-3 sentences.

I will try to post these, let’s say lessons every Sunday, and I will cover the following things:

• Genres and use of the genres
• Standards and Ethics
• Typography - Designing a good layout
• Communication
• Media sociology
• Media psychology

Why will the posts be in your benefit? Simply because if you’re more professional, the users will be more likely to revisit your blog or website, your content will be more appealing and interesting, the visitors will find your posts useful.

I recommend following these posts to anyone who runs a blog, you can only win by using the tactics described in each post.

I’d also like to recommend subscribing to the RSS feed set up for these posts as this way you will get the posts directly in your favorite reader. To subscribe, please follow this link to Feedburner where you can choose your reader.

Please, tune in, you can only win.

Adsense Competitive Ad Filter will NOT help you to earn more!

This was a test running for a long time and now I decided to stop. The reason is that my earnings from AdSense dropped considerably.

I manage a lot of websites and only two of them doesn’t use AdSense for monetizing; all the rest is monetized with AdSense. About three moons ago I’ve read on a blog which actually states that it’s managed by “AdSense Experts”, that filtering some ads (suggested by them), will boost the AdSense earnings.

One of the top level domains on the list was blogger.com, thus entering in the filter list blogger.com will block any advert which has as landing page specified any blogger sub domain. Basically I will potentially block hundreds of thousands of adverts coming from bloggers who advertise their website via AdWords.

Back to my test. AdSense suggests to keep the competitive ad filter short as possible because it can ruin your earnings. I had 15 top level domains, some of them suggested by the so called experts, some of them from a website called AdsBlackList.com. I activated the list on 10th of August because it takes 2 days for the filter to be active. Now it’s 13th of October, that’s two months, and the list was cleaned yesterday.

I can’t tell what’s my daily earning with AdSense since it’s prohibited by Google, but I have high CTR mostly because all the pages are optimized for adsensea and they are blended in the page. The high CTR gives me some cool earnings every day.
As soon as the list was activated, my earnings started to drop. Slightly going down every day until I reached a level with about 10% lower than the usual. I thought that this is just because I got different type of visitors who don’t seem to like clicking ads. Then the days passed and the earnings were still low.

Until today: I decided to end my test and cleaned the competitive ad filter list. I don’t filter anything now and today my earnings got better, slightly moving upwards.

Just a coincidence? What do you think?

25 ways to drive more visitors to your Blog

1. Trends

One of the easiest ways to drive quick traffic to your blog is to write something which appears in the Google Hot Trends. Andrew Wise offers some insights about this technique, I tested it and worked very well and as anticipated.
The type of traffic is very short-lived, but the visitors can be converted to returning visitors.
The revenue impact is very low.

2. Text Search engines

People use search engines like Google, Yahoo! and Live to find information on the web. Every blogger should submit his blog to the major search engines to get the most precious type of visitors. The traffic will be long-lived and the revenue impact high enough to support the hosting costs.

3. Natural linking

Post a lot of quality content and people will link to you naturally. The traffic will increase exponentially as more bloggers and websites link to your pages. Since the links on the remote websites will remain in place, the traffic is long-lived. The referred visitors don’t seem to like to support your website, thus the revenue impact is low.

4. Social bookmarking

Submit your own posts and offer the opportunity to your visitors to submit your posts in social bookmarking service like Digg and del.isio.us. While the traffic will be short-lived compared to the traffic referred by search engines, the revenue impact can be quite pleasing if the website is optimized for AdSense.

5. Online feed aggregators

I know that many would rather consider Technorati a search engine than a feed aggregator, but I think it is, since it’s working based on submitted feeds. Anyway, be sure you submit your blog in feed aggregators like Technorati or BlogBurst. Blogburst will display your posts on websites like CNN or The Times if you’re lucky.
While the traffic is extremely short-lived, it’s good for building a community. The referred visitors don’t tend to click ads.

6. Directories

Google recently removed this suggestion from its guidelines but links back to your site is always good as your visibility is increased. Submit your site to as many free directories as you can but Never pay for submission. If your site doesn’t appear in a directory where you submitted your blog, don’t get annoyed and don’t try again, it’s normal.
Visitors and revenue impact will be similar to search engine referred visitors.

7. Ad Networks

Advertise your blog either contextually or by placement. You can always advertise your blog with Google AdWords and your contextual ad can appear in the search results or your banner even on YouTube.
The traffic will depend on you budget and how much do you wish to pay per click or per thousand impressions. The earnings from adverts on your own blog will be incredibly high as the users who clicked one ad, will click one more with pleasure.

8. Commenting and signatures

If you visit a fellow blogger’s blog, always leave a useful comment. Under ‘useful’ I mean something other than “Great blog” or “nice post”. Always specify your website URL in the comment form and if you can include in the comment a link back to your site, even better. But never spam others blogs.
Also, if you participate in discussions on forums, always include in you signature your blog’s URL. The same applies to e-mail signatures. We write dozens of e-mails daily, sometimes for people who we do not know. Why not let them know about your blog?
The traffic impact can be high, depending how many users visit the page where you left a comment or posted a reply. These visitors doesn’t help you at all earning a penny.

9. Give Away

Gifts are awesome things and everybody likes them. If you offer something for your visitors, an e-book, a mug, a T-shirt or even a pen, let’s say for every 100 visitor, the news will spread rapidly on the net and people will come to your blog to get a gift.
These visitors are likely to click ads, but the traffic will end just after you stop giving things away.

10. Social gadgets

Every humans have to be part of a community, period. Blogs are not the most community focused web sites, in order to change this, bloggers can install gadgets like the from MyBlogLog in order to form a community around the blog.
To understand how does this affect your traffic: John Doe tells about a brand new community he just signed up to to all of his friends. The next day, Jane Doe who is John’s friend will visit this community.
The traffic grows exponentially if you can maintain the interest of your community. The revenue impact is mid ranged from new members and after they familiarize with your site’s structure, the impact is almost null.

11. Trackback

When you write about a subject you know another blogger already wrote about or you even took his content as source, be good and link back to the original post. This will make the blog software’s engine to place a so called trackback URL on the blog post you linked to. People will click that URL and arrive on your website.
The traffic depends on how popular the source post is. The revenue impact varies between mid and high.

12. E-Books

Why wouldn’t you compose an e-book including your best 20 posts and which you can then merchandise either as a give away for those who sign up top your blog or by making as torrent publishing it on a public bitTorrent tracker, for example? Just be sure you include links in the text many times.
You will get direct visits which is usually has very good impact on your earnings. The traffic lifetime will vary widely. If people will like your book, they will share with their friends or seed the torrent more, thus the lifetime will be longer.
Worth a try.

13. Get social

Create as many free profiles on as many different social networks as you can. Start with MySpace, end with Twitter, but be sure to not miss any. In your profile add a link back to your blog and you’re set. If you want higher traffic, make friends.
The traffic can be incredibly high if you manage to build a great social network. The revenue impact will not be too impressive.

14. Guest Writing

Ask other bloggers to write on your blog and if you’re counter invited, accept it. You will be let to place a link back to your blog in the body of your post on the remote blog. While you lost one hour of your life writing the post, you earned a link. The more links, the more traffic.
The traffic will depend on how many links did you place on the remote blogs and how popular those posts got.
Revenue impact can be quite attractive.

15. Interact with users

If your user ask you something or just comments something, never forget to give a friendly answer. While this has no direct relation with your traffic, if you are friendly, your users will invite others to your blog and this can be very precious, both your earning and your traffic can be boosted easily.

16. Interviews

Write an interview with somebody who has greater reputation on the internet than you. Is that Queen Elisabeth or John Doe from the Elm Street’s 6th corner, it doesn’t matter. People like to read interviews. If you hit a good subject, people will flow to your blog.

17. Article directories

Write articles about something interesting and you have knowledge about, then submit it to article directories, for example EZArticles. You are allowed to place a link back to your blog. When people finished reading your article will search for something to click. Yeah, nowadays when people finish reading wants to click something. And that will be the link back to your blog you just placed in the article.
The traffic will be constant and depending on the quality and popularity of the article, can be extremely high. Revenue impact will be also high.

18. Mispell

Yeah. Misspell words, but be sure to not more than 2 per post. Incredibly high number of people misspell words when searching on Google, incredible but true. That’s why Google invented the “Did you mean…” thing. If you misspell the correct words, you will get some nice traffic.
Example: Instead of Obama you write Obaam

19. Reviews

Ask other bloggers to write a review about your site then offer the same for them. A well written review can have extreme impact on your traffic, if the review appeared on a high traffic site.

20. Offline media promotion

If you have a car, place a sticker on its back advertising your blog. Wear T-shirts which promotes your blog. You’ll be amazed how nicely these can increase your traffic.

21. Events

If you have a lot of local traffic, host an event where you promote your blog. If you see that another blog hosts such an event and you have the opportunity, grab your girlfriend and get to the event. Don’t forget to talk with many people, always mention your blog, give everyone a business-card and wear a T-shirt which promotes your blog.
The traffic will be incredible.

22. Image search engines

Many doesn’t know, but image search engines can send huge amount of traffic to your blog. To get the images in the search engines, you will have to use some attributes properly. For example every image should have alt and title attribute set. For example:

<img src='some_image.jpg' title='some image' alt='some image' />

When the image search engines will find your image and someone will search for the term “some image”, your image will be amongst the results.
You will get same amount of traffic and the revenue impact will also be the same like in the search engine’s case.

23.Testimonials

If you buy a product, if you sign up for a service and you like, ask the merchant to let you write a testimonial on their website. Both of you win. Just be sure you include a link back to your blog too.

24. CraigsList

Sounds stupid, I know. Write an ad and somehow include a link to your blog. Just be sure the editors will not consider the link spam.
If the readers click the link, you won. The experience is that this can confer you nice amount of traffic and users who will click on ads.

25. Video marketing

If you have the talent create videos and upload them to YouTube. People adore watching videos, and if you place either in the description or in the video a link back to your site, you won.

[--EOF--]

If you’d like to add some new things, let me know.
Available in e-book version,too. Click here to open the PDF version in a new window.

Adsense smart pricing - Tall tale

I have to admit, I tested on you a very interesting thing in the past few weeks. I don’t feel sorry because if I wouldn’t, I would have no reason to write this post and I wouldn’t know more about an AdSense myth.

The subject is quite interesting: AdSense Smart Pricing.

So I’ve read an article just before I started the AdSense Smart Pricing test. It’s basically about, if your AdSense performance is low, you get low earnings per clicks. Now as a SEO would say: the theory says, if you have low CTR, your earning per click will be also lower than if you’d have high CTR.

The first step is to determine what is an average CTR, to have a reference. One of my articles is about average CTR, what I wrote there is that the average CTR is about, let’s say 6%. That means that from 100 visitors on pages where you display adsense ads, 6 clicked an ad. I consider 6% to be a good CTR, it’s not too high, nor too low. High is not good because if you have a two figure number as CTR, that rises the flag at Google, you know: “Oops, this account performs too well, let’s see why”. And that’s not good. Too low on the other hand is not good for you, obviously.

So, how can one increase the CTR, there are dozens of options: blending, placement, borders, images above the ads… many tricks. But one of the most effective is to show ads *only* to the visitors which come from search engines. A good coder can do it in less than 30 minutes, if anyone is interested I explain how can it be achieved, but this article is not about this subject. It’s proven, that the users sent by a search engine click ads much more often than the ones who were referred by other sites. Don’t ask me why, they just do.
So, as the CTR is practically the per cent of the users who clicked ads on your site, it’s logical that if you show ads only to those who you know that will click ad, your CTR will be boosted.

Again: the myth says that if you have a low CTR, you will get only small earnings per click.

I applied to Devoracles and 2 other blogs I manage the above explained targeting, I showed ads only to the search engine referred visitors. And I think I only lost.

The earnings per click remained the same low as they were before, absolutely nothing has changed only the CTR has been increased and number of clicks dropped a bit since I didn’t show ads to everybody: thus I lost money.

So, let’s debug: what did I do wrong?

Absolutely nothing. OK, I only wasn’t as documented as I should have been. Smart Pricing means something completely different thing and is in absolutely NO relation with CTR!
Smart pricing is a tool to protect the AdWords advertisers. They don’t just want to show ads for you (sometimes they do, but that’s something else), they usually want to either sell a product, sign up for their newsletter, create an account, they want conversion to increase their ROI as they spent money on advertisement. Since the conversion rate on the content network –which is formed by billions of webpages where AdSense ads are displayed– is extremely low, Google protects its advertisers by lowering the earning per click for the AdSense publishers.
I explain: The AdWords advertiser wish to pay $1 per click. If somebody on the content network clicks on the advertiser’s ad, then immediately when the advertiser’s page loaded, the user closes the window, the advertiser lost. To compensate the advertiser, Google won’t charge the advertiser with $1 as the advertiser wished, but with, let’s say only one cent. So the AdSense publisher on whom site the ad was clicked, will earn only 1 dam cent.

Can Smart Pricing be avoided by the AdSense publishers? I guess the answer is no. We can’t instruct our users to remain and interact with the advertisers’ sites when they clicked on an ad. Its against the AdSense TOS. So our only relief is to calm down and be happy with that one cent we earned, it’s still better than nothing.

Another myth busted.

AdSense CTR - What is the average click through rate?

I was asked many times by my customers whether they perform well with AdSense or not. The answer to their question is simple: if they have high AdSense CTR, they perform well, else they do not.

Since they have no reference, the problem appears when they ask what is the average CTR in AdSense. Now this is a very hard question to answer. Why? Because it varies, it depends on too many factors.

Let’s think a bit and see what is the average CTR.

First, what are the factors which depends the Adsense CTR on? Not an exhaustive list, but the following factors:

1. Type of the website: regular presentation site, blog, online service, social network, etc.
2. Whether the website is content-rich and the content keyword-rich
3. Content industry. Is the content about medicine, IT&C, etc.
4. Visitors’ location (!)
5. Ad blending

If you don’t want to read all the explanations, click here for the answer, else read on.
Usually, blogs and social networking sites are the platforms on which the AdSense CTR is the lowest. I didn’t think yet about why, this is just my experience. Anyway, I think the blogs’ AdSense CTR is low because the age and culture of the visitors which visits the blogs and because many bloggers think if they post a 3-4 lines it’s enough.
If you think a bit and have a good analytic subscription installed on your blog, you’ll know that most of the visitors are between 12-35-years-old, at least on the blogs I manage/managed. Most of them knows which links are AdSense ads and which are regular links. Most of them doesn’t think that clicking an ad supports the blog they visit, or they think clicking an ad “may harm their computer”. Yeah, you heard well. I encountered some juniors on a conference where I was talking about online-advertising, who really thought that *any* type of ad may harm their computer. We all know (or we should) that this is very untrue and the AdSense ads are less offensive than a snail in a glass.
On the other hand, social networks doesn’t perform well, because they have less content. Take Twitter as an example: you tell in a few words the world what are you doing at the moment. Is that content? I wouldn’t consider it content.
Of course, all the above doesn’t apply on all the blogs. Many blogs have incredible AdSense CTR, many have older visitors. The above is just a general rule.

Websites other than blogs and social networks perform much better with AdSense, usually they have pretty high AdSense click through rate. The type of visitors is much more different and usually they arrive on a particular website because they were searching for one specific thing. And here comes in the scene the AdSense content matching technology. AdSense is very smart and provides ads very well matched to the content, the users finds the ad useful and will click on them because they are interested in the advert. A presentation site, a service has very clear content so the ad bot will serve ads which are extremely related to the content.

As a general rule of the thumb, a website has to have content to perform well with AdSense, read, have high AdSense CTR; if there is no content, the ad bot can’t serve ads (under content i mean text). But not all content is good. Let’s not forget that we want to show our visitors always ads which are very related to the content, and to achieve this, we have to use keywords in our articles and posts, they have to be keyword-rich. What am I talking about: for example if you write a review about a notebook, use many times the notebook’s type, manufacturer, and keywords related to the notebook, like the words “notebook, laptop, PC, hardware”, and so on.
Also, never forget that the ad bots can’t crawl *any* type of content. For example, if you publish comics on your website, the ad bot can’t crawl the text from the bubbles, thus will have no information about what to serve. Also, even if the Googlebot can crawl Flash based content, the Adsense bot can not! Well, this is not entirely true. Google announced today that from now on they will accept publishers who wants to publish AdSense ads in web based games, including games. Here’s the video example of how does this work:

If the ad bot can’t crawl the content, or has nothing to crawl, depending on how the publisher set his ad up, it will show either a solid color or public service ads which earns the publisher nothing. No AdSense ads equals null AdSense CTR.
The industry is also very important. If you have content for example about “how to cure headaches” and if your visitors don’t find your content useful enough, they will click any link just to find a great cure for their headache, and in the same time increasing your AdSense CTR. Simple yet effective.

Another aspect is ad blending. Basically, when an ad block is blended with the content the AdSense CTR is way higher. For example, if the title of the ad looks like a link on your site, the background is the same as you site’s, your CTR will be higher.

Finally, the AdSense CTR depends on where are the visitors located. I was amazed like you, but this is very interesting. Who do you think are clicking the most? Which nation: Japan, Brasilia, China, USA? I tell you what: US visitors. 90% of the clicks I receive is from US visitors, and more than 10% of my traffic is from the United States.

So what is an average AdSense CTR? I’d say, if you have a blog or social network then 3-6%. On a presentation site or any regular website the AdSense CTR is around 9%.

Brand new Guidelines for webmasters - from Google

I don’t know if you observed or not, but something has changed.

Every publisher and webmaster should read the webmaster guidelines which has been published ages ago by Google in their help center. If you didn’t, this is the greatest time: Google Webmaster Guidelines.

The interesting thing is… That this page looked totally different a few days ago! Google changed this document… The first thing I observed is in the very first category, when to submit a site to Google.
A few days ago, this was the to-do list:

When your site is ready:
* Have other relevant sites link to yours.
* Submit it to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.html.
* Submit a Sitemap as part of our Google webmaster tools. Google uses your Sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase our coverage of your webpages.
* Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online.
* Submit your site to relevant directories such as the Open Directory Project and Yahoo!, as well as to other industry-specific expert sites.

Now, this is the first block:

When your site is ready:
* Submit it to Google at http://www.google.com/addurl.html.
* Submit a Sitemap using Google Webmaster Tools. Google uses your Sitemap to learn about the structure of your site and to increase our coverage of your webpages.
* Make sure all the sites that should know about your pages are aware your site is online.

The very interesting thing, Google recommended to have other sites link to yours. Now they don’t. Why? Did the inbound links lost their importance? Nah… The answer i guess is more nasty: payed links. Google hates payed links, and I think they want to get rid of them. And this was the first step: if the newbie webmasters don’t know about the importance of the inbound links, maybe they will not pay heavy money on getting them. That I knew ages ago that the importance of the directory links was cut in pieces, but not to recommend submitting? That’s weird. Maybe due to high number of directories? I have no idea. What about you?

Google Webmaster Guidelines now: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769
Google Webmaster Guidelines in the past: http://web.archive.org/web/20071225205102/www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769

Get at least $1 per click with AdSense, hacking the relation between AdSense and AdWords

This article will be weird a bit, but in the same time very logical.
I’m an AdWords publisher, we create ads which appear in the search engines’ sponsored results or on thee content network, on AdSense publisher’s websites.
It was a hard way to learn that some keywords we are bidding on, cost a lot for us. Basically, because of bidding. AdWords is just an auction site, the only difference between Ebay and AdWords is that we don’t bid on items, but on keywords. Due to the bidding, some keywords are very expensive.

An example: I wrote an article about asbestos insulation in a PC case. If I would like to advertise that article using AdWords, I would bid on keywords like these:

• asbestos
• fireproof insulation
• mesothelioma
• asbestos cancer
• etc.

There is a problem with these keywords, specifically that I have to bid over $50 to $70 to use them. That means that if somebody clicks my ad, I will pay up to $70, for one single click.
And here comes the relation between AdWords and AdSense. While the AdSense publisher on whom website my advertisement was clicked will not get all that money because AdWords has a quite high commission, it will still get much more than the usual $0.05 or $0.1 .
So, we, AdSense publishers might get an idea which keywords pay better, and write articles or post content related to those keywords. Be aware though, that the webmaster guidelines states that we should publish our content for the User, you who reads this article, not for search engines or revenue centered, in our case to get better CPC in AdSense. But what if the article actually IS interesting? I guess then the above guideline is not applied on us.

Highest Paying AdSense Keywords

Do exist such a list? The answer is disappointing: no, there’s no such list, and can’t really exist. The lists you can find all over the net either for free or for money are useless, because the AdWords advertisers are constantly changing the ads, they bid on different keywords each day or week, so if I publish now a list of highest paying keywords, in a week or even in a few days it will become outdated, useless.
One thing is sure though. Even though the keywords are constantly changing, the highest paying keywords will always be related to the following things:

• Asbestos, related illnesses and services
• Auto insurance
• Life insurance
• Loans and related services
• Lawyers
• Cosmetic surgery in Los Angeles and Florida

While you can write articles related to the above keywords with the scope of getting better CPC it’s not a very wise act. You should write your content for your users, to be interesting for the users. If you write articles with the scope of high revenue and it’s not interesting for your users, you basically cut the tree under yourself.

While you may argue on the truth of this article, keep in mind that I tested this phenomena and I wrote about my own experience.

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