Padding Adsense Code in Blogger Blog Templates

Some of the default blogger blog templates place Adsense code automatically in a way that looks very ugly within the template, going inside or outside of graphic sections etc.

On my site, Distribution Business Articles I had adsense code that was showing up too the left of the graphic body template and needed to move the adsense block over to the right a bit.

This used to be very easy with the old blogger, and it is not too much worse now if you know what to look for.

The key is to find the section called <data:adcode/> and place a Div tag around it. I used the id name of 'adpadding' when I did this and gave the left side a padding of 150 pixels.

Here is the result on my blog. Note the body is about 560 pixels wide in total so with a 250x300 ad block there is about 250 pixels to split up and I have used 150 pixels. Its not quite dead center, but its good enough for me. Note this site talks a lot about product recalls and things of that nature hence the list of ads relative to that topic as opposed to something off topic like cartoons or Kohler sinks.

EDIT

This code is pretty short, simple and sweet, but per a request we wanted to share (You'll want to hit the check box to expand widgets)

This is the code for the css section of your template.

#adpadding {
padding:0px 0px 0px 150px;
}

A Great Picture Can Get You Lots of Traffic

I saw a great picture over at a blog called Dodgeblogium » Blog Archive » Ding Kong.  The image is actually a flikr photo, but its a good example of how a great image can garnish you traffic and maybe links.

One of the interesting things about attracting people to your blogs with an image is that they are likely to click away looking for something else and that could mean that they will click on an adsense advertisement on their way out of your website.

We have previously covered the aspects of how an image can be used as a link bait.  One of the things that can aid in this is making it slightly more difficult for others to copy the image or even hotlink to it(forcing them to link to your article instead, although hotlinks can be used to gather up links too!)

One of the keys in identifying an image of this nature is to find an image that is not widely circulated and hopefully very unique.  You do not necessarily want something very common like a picture of a big screen TV on a plasma stand or even a picture of President Bush (unless he is doing something goofy).  You want an image that is very unique.

Ever Have Problems Finding a Good Poll

Here is a sample Poll I created on a site still in beta called SmartLapPoll.com

 

So here is the poll, and it is definitely politically incorrect. The point is that it is not always easy to find a good or easy poll service on the web.  We are looking at multiple ways to grow this polling service into something extra useful.  So if you check it out, please let me know what you think of the functionality or what you are looking for in polling sites or services today that you are not finding.

I personally have a need for political polls, but also cover a number of tech issues as well from web design, web marketing, even some hardware and electronic gadget sites. (currently testing a slim external hard drive and a pocket solar charger for one site as an example).

 

Regardless let me know what you think about the poll above (functionality not topic) and what might be done to spruce this up.

Revver is Good for Readers and Good for Stats!

If you ever offer up your own videos on your blogs, I highly recommend Revver.  First, Revver enables you to earn some money from your videos.  Now, my videos tend to be tutorial in nature and I'm not getting rich from them but that's ok because those videos do something even more important.

They give my readers good content to view.  Video is richer in content than just text.  Plus combining video with text is even better than holding video separate.

Revver drops ads at the end of videos and you get credit for the impressions and clicks and that pays a little money.  But more importantly you get access to some great stats that helps you see what your readers/viewers are looking at and doing.  This then helps you to see what you are doing right with the videos and possibly what you are doing wrong.

Here's some examples of some partial shots of my stats . . .

There's another benefit here as well.  Running the videos on your website or pages also helps you place better in search if the title of the video is relative to the keywords for search.  It may not help you compete with mesothelioma treatment but it could help you a bit with less competitive words and definitely help you on Ask.com. 

Adsense Blogger Take Thyself to Ask.com, Register and Download the tool bar

This is a bit counter intuitive (well not really).  If you are a blogger that blogs for business and you make money from Adsense and other forms of online advertising, then you need to pay attention to Ask.com.  This search engine will be important for you whether or not you blog on politics, tech or a defined niche reviewing Vegas rooms that are the best for gambling at various levels or on specific days with certain dealer combinations.

They have the potential to be the next Google in search (Google gave up on that a couple years ago and they are just treading water.)

Ask.com however is doing a number of very innovative things with their search engine and just by the process of throwing darts not only on the board but towards the center, they are likely to hit a bulls eye soon.

So you need to get your blog articles indexed in Ask.  You can start by setting up a MyStuff account at ask

http://mystuff.ask.com/

You can also submit articles that you find interesting to Ask, just like you can with Stumbleupon or Digg.

I also recommend downloading the Ask.com toolbar so that they can gather up information about the websites that are important to you.

VOIP and Adsense

There are many different Adsense strategies that a publisher or website owner can utilize to work cohesively with Adwords advertisers.  One of those strategies involves building and structuring sites and articles to support online e-commerce retailers.

As an example I would like to show you a site called Neobits.  This website focuses on selling voice over IP products and services.  They are not an affiliate laden website, they sell real products.  For example they sell voice over IP products from Talkswitch, Panasonic, and many other VOIP equipment manufacturers providers.

For you to build a good site that helps this type of retailer, you need to understand whether or not they are advertising with AdWords first.  Once you know if they're using AdWords are not, then you need to structure your blog articles or your website to support the topics that their customers are filtering into their site looking for answers or solutions.

This oftentimes comes in the form of a product review.  That does not mean that you go out to their website and perform a write up warrior review of their actual website.  Instead, you need to do a deep dive into each of the individual products on the website and review those individual products.

Ideally you need to purchase the products or receive a review copy, and test the products out and provide your feedback or information were insights into how to use the products, how to use them to best advantage, how the products work well, and where the products fail.  When you talk about the failures of the products, you need to do this from the perspective of helping consumers find products that will work well enough for them to point out the products that have certain weaknesses and steer consumers away from the products that have weaknesses that they cannot live with.  That becomes a value-added service that you're providing in helping them to make their decision based on your experience and your newfound wisdom.

If you do not have access to the products can you a different opportunity.  It's called Web research.  You can go out and gather together a large number of other reviews that people done on this particular product and you can compile and consolidate those reviews.  Be sure to point out the areas where the reviews have identified a consistent pattern or results.  Also make sure that you know any of the exceptional items that individual reviews noted, or problems that they found.  It's important not to give these outliers too much weight as it could just be a fluke and that single review, but it is something that could be valuable to your consumers to understand the potential of that product and how it might work for them in specific situations.

Writing it for Copy

now of course after you do your review, or after you compile the reviews of many different writers, you need to take a look at your article and you need to format it so that it will work well with AdSense.  You need to use the script in essence provides to block keywords that will not relate to the topic that you're covering, and you need to utilize good keyword density to help promote the keywords that you do want to promote especially for AdWords topics.

When you're working for AdSense results, you do not necessarily want to have an article that is several thousand words long.  Instead you want to break your article up into multiple pages.  Each page should have a focus on the topic that you're covering such as voice over IP, but it should also have a sub topic some niche of voice over IP.  Shorter articles will work much better with AdSense placements, plus as your readers are flipping from page 1 to two and then to page 3, you will be earning additional impressions and an additional chance to convert someone through an AdSense advertisement.

The style does not necessarily always work well in a blog format and is sometimes better suited towards static websites.  It can be achieved by breaking up a single blog article into multiple blog articles and then interlinking between those articles.  As blogs are published from the most recent to the oldest, you will left to make the decision on whether or not to publish the beginning of the article first or save it for a lapsed so that it appears on top of the other articles.  If you save it for last, you will probably want to publish all of the articles at the same time, if you publish it first then you may want to space out the publishing of your articles over several days.

Are Your Incoming Links Sourced from a Dangerous Site?

Here is a Great tool recommended to me in an article from a friend of mine. 

The site and article can be found at Advertising For Success: Lost Innocence and Page Rank

The tool enables you to get a sense of the quality and safety of the links are pointing to your website, your internal pages and more.  Generally the more back links you have the better, however some of those back links can associate you and Google's eyes with bad websites.

Google defines a bad website is anything that makes it difficult for Google to do business or earn money in advertising in my humble opinion.  This means those websites may look perfectly legitimate to you and may offer unique content and even very useful services, but Google doesn't like them and they might start to dislike you as well just for having a link received from that site.

Now you can stop someone from linking to your website, but you can work to build up your links from other sites that are more trustworthy and keep things balanced.  This game of Google's is somewhat similar to the games are played in both residential and commercial real estate.

In real estate function and location are the most important things.  That plays out on the web as well and Google has the ability to provide you the right location.  If they don't like you they can bury your location and make it very difficult for you to do business successfully.

Microsoft adCenter

Normally we talk about Google Adsense here.  That is not the only fish in the sea, and Microsoft adCenter is a service that enables publishers and advertisers to work through Microsoft's version of AdSense.  Microsoft is not an original in this market, they rarely are.

That doesn't mean that you can't make money working with their advertising services or even make money as a publisher running their ad content on your site.  The trick is, if you run Microsoft's adCenter on your site, you cannot run AdSense at the same time unless you happen to have a rotator program, that will only show AdSense or adCenter adds alternatively.

So if you have multiple locations on your website where those types of ads are running, you need to ensure that they rotate entirely off the page while the other service is rotated on the page.

Note Microsoft does take the time to send you lots of direct mail materials for their online advertising service. And is that Search Master Steve Guy a relative or a rip off of the Verizon Wireless Guy?

One of the specialty items about the Microsoft program, is that they enable a more targeted approach to Internet surfers based on the information that Microsoft has about their usage of Microsoft products.  This enables Microsoft to a limited extent to understand who's actually looking at the ads, how old they are, what sex they are, and maybe even where they live.

Google is working to catch up in this area by capturing users information from all of the different Gmail like accounts that Google offers.  But they don't have the reach that Microsoft has in this area yet.

I've only used Microsoft adCenter to a limited extent.  I do plan on using it more especially in my own advertising campaigns.  In some niches it can be cheaper and more effective.  Plus it never hurts to understand how a competitor works so that you can get the best deal on whatever it is you might be advertising from baby clothes to computer memory.

Moving From Free Tools to Paid Tools - Keyword Analysis 201

Eventually as you build up more experience in working with domains, websites, blogs, SEO and SEM, you will consider when to stop using the free keyword analysis tools and start paying for even better keyword research tools.

I use a number of keyword research tools that are free from tools available at Google and Yahoo and Yahoo!'s Overture to tools from Adwords and even a number of great tools from sites such as SEOChat.com.

I have found that eventually when you start working on more comprehensive site plans you will want to use a more comprehensive tool, that is faster and and answers some of the questions that you can not cover with free keyword analysis tools.

When I first started doing this work, I investigated some of the paid tools, even tried some free trials with keyword research tools, but ultimately opted to continue using the free tools until I had earned enough to pay for the good tools.

It was kind of like the principles used in real estate flipping.  You build your investment off of you profits not your principle investment.

Now as I look at my lines of business, I have been earning much more money from areas of business that did not require an deep dive into keyword analysis.  But recently, I am finding that these tools can generate a premium in my work and so I have finally reached a point where purchasing these tools make sense.

As I journey through this purchase, I am not yet prepared to buy the service a year at a time, but I can easily afford to pay for the service for a 1 month subscription (and I'll leave the auto renew options unchecked).

When I have some working history with the tools, then I'll make my decision as to which tools to continue with.

With that in mind, I am going to try Trellian's KeywordDiscovery tools first.

Its not an expensive tool to jump into (they do have a decent free trial offering as well).  But even the paid version is only about $70 for the first month, and if you like the service you can pick it up at about $50 per month after that.

Adsense Notifier Helps Track Stats While You Surf

One of the first plugins that I added to Firefox was a little add on called the Adsense Notifier. I can't recall exactly, but that plugin, may have been the reason why I started using Firefox in the first place.

If there is anything truly addictive about firefox plugins, the adsense notifier is it, and I'm not going to drug rehab to break my addiction.  This one is just too useful.  This tool enables you to check your Adsense stats at a glance. 

The Adsense notifier can be configured to show you the stats that are important to you within the lower right portion of a firefox browser window.  The image above gives an example, by displaying from left to right the number of uniques, the number of adsense ad clicks, the page CTR (click through rate) percentage, the eCPM, the total earnings and the average earnings per click.

These are just some of the configuration options, and not the extent of what is available.

If you want to quickly check your account in more detail. just right click on the notifier section and it launches your adsense account in a new tab.