When I first made a “real website” by buying my own domain (Blogging the Internet), I started to tinker with various content management programs to build my site, and later learned that blogging is the easiest way. Now I’m sticking to it.
But at first I was one of the million newbie webmasters who are lured to the “get rich quick” paranoia” that abound in the internet and also tried my best looking for internet programs that will take me to that paranoia. I was utilizing various pre-hosted sites (my favorite is Freehostia in doing the test-and-try website building trying to find my own niche on the cyberspace and the same time hoping that I will earn somehow through it.
I joined pay per click programs (PPC) where you click banner and text ads and then pay you cents and worse joined a High-Yield Investment Program (HYIP) and was cheated. I lost a couple of dollars joining the site and I swear to myself that I will not join one again.
My frustration is getting worse when I also joined affiliate programs such as Commission Junction, Linkshare and SFI and expected to earn but to avail. These site as good in their own way but my skills in affiliate marketing is very poor and my highest earnings was about $20.40 from CJ when I used my own affiliate link to purchase my own domain.
I share some dilemma with people who say that “internet income is just a false dream”.
I am not a risk-taker especially on the internet. The last thing that I will want myself is to be a victim of internet fraud and loss my hard-earned money and like most cybercitizens I want money and if possible free from the internet.
Then I meet the leader of contextual advertising – AdSense.
AdSense program is 100% free and I have applied to it the moment I wonder why most sites I have visit has that ads powered by AdSense. I applied four times, three times rejected and finally allowed to post ads to my sites using their script code. It took me quite awhile to be able to put AdSense ads in my site considering that I am still learning how to make a site and my knowledge about PHP and HTML is limited.
Since I decided to focus on having a blog, I tried to invest an ad placement on my blog placement, having that trial and error process on making a good and professional looking blog and took a longer time finding a suitable Adsense Friendly template (I’m using WordPress).
Adsense, like any other contextual advertising program uses your blog content and keywords to place related and suitable ads on your site in a way not to confuse your readers of what is your site all about and irritated for placing blatant advertising banners. The ads put by Adsense have a better chance to be click and earn money from it.
Though Adsense doesn’t allow you to select what ads will appear in your site, you can still exclude ads from your direct competitors (sites that have the same topic or products that you have).
How Adsense know what Ads are to place in your site?
Google uses bots (Google bots), an engine that regularly visits your pages and read your site content, keywords, structure and formatting of pages, language you use and tell Adsense to display ads related to what it sees. The bot also tells AdSense what IP address you use (your location) to display related ads near your region.
The longer that your site is up, the more the bot will access your site and later a tighter match f ads related to your blog will show up. Google bot mostly uses keywords as its tip to Google, so there is a need to use proper keywords on your post because for some reason Adsense prefers post with less picture and larger or bold text in zeroing the subject of your blog.
However, be careful in suing too many keywords. You may make Google Bot understands more quickly your site content but at the same time distracts your readers. A good post that is informative will surely attract readers and make them come back to your site, but you will, but using irrelevant and annoying keywords will drive them away from your site and instead look for other blog that is more useful to your read. Losing a visitor will also results to loss of your Adsense earnings.
Treat your readers by giving them useful information, and not to make them feel that you are just using your blog to make money. There’s nothing wrong in pleasing Googlebot and your readers at the same time. Why not hit the two birds with one big stone?
It will be a great help that your keyword is also your title and use them on your post as well. Ex. You write about computers, make sure it is in the title and repeated in the post so that tightly match of ads will also show thus having a high click through rate from your readers.
Try not to copy content from free sites. You will not only lose your credibility as a blogger, worse risking to be accuse of plagiarism and also getting Google irritated with splogs (short for spam blogs) post. Splogs is very dangerous because it may results to the termination of your account.
Anyway who advertise to your blogs?
Google has a program called Adwords, where business or site owners like you pay to advertise their product and services and also to drive real traffic to their websites.
These guys are bidding on a certain keywords related to their site content and pays some amount depending on the keywords popularity. They post their ads on Adwords and then it is being shown in Adsense.
