Positioning your Adsense Ads

The amazing thing about the Adsense advertising system is how one simple change in positioning of your ads can have a profound impact upon the earnings you receive from it. I still remember a fateful night about 8 months ago when I learnt this lesson and doubled my income overnight (no this isn’t one of those posts where I’m selling something - relax). It was 10.30am and I was about to head to bed when on a whim I decided to shift my Adsense ads from the position that I’d always had them at the top (banner position) of the blog I was working on...

Read More

Big Fish, Small Pond Blogging

I just checked my email and found three requests from readers to have a look over their blogs and offer some tips. I’m happy to do this from time to time for free - but am unable to do it individually for everyone in depth without having to charge a bit of a consulting fee (mainly due to the numbers of requests I get. So I thought without mentioning the blogs who’ve asked for help (I don’t want to cause any offence or embarrassment) I thought over the next few days I’d write a few random tips that come to mind as I’ve surfed each of them.Define...

Read More

10 Steps to Guarantee You’ll Never Make More than 0.14 cents per month with AdSense

Every day I come across and courses which promise to teach people how to make thousands of dollars a day with AdSense by following a few easy steps - so I thought it was time for one that shows you how to guarantee to keep your blog from making money with AdSense. Here’s my top 10 tips for a guaranteed earning of 0.14 cents or less per month from your blog:1. Position Ads Out of Sight - Ensure that you put any ad units that you put on your blog below the fold where they’ll be sure not to annoy your readers. If you do choose to put your ads above...

Read More

Run a SWOT Analysis on Your Blog

Today is the last day in the 31 Days to Building a Better Blog project and as a result I want to make your last task a little reflective and forward looking.Your task today is to run a SWOT Analysis on your blog.A SWOT analysis is a strategic tool that has been used for many years in business (and many other fields) to look at the Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats that that business might have or be facing.Much has been written about SWOT analysis and how to carry it out (I’ll let you do some searches on Google for it if you’re not...

Read More

Relevant Ads

Revenue = high readership + high paying ads + relevant ads + well placed and designed adsThe third element of our Adsense equation is that of relevant Adsense ads. It is all very well to rank high in search engines to generate high levels of traffic, but without relevant ads that relate to the content of your blog you are not likely to generate much in the way of click throughs.Let me give you an example. Recently I was asked to help a fellow blogger who has struggling with his Adsense ads because whilst his content largely focused upon the topic...

Read More

High Paying Ads

Adsense Revenue = Traffic Levels + High Paying Ads + Relevant Ads + Optimally Positioned and Designed AdsThe next element of this Adsense equation to be examined is how to get high paying Adsense Ads running on your site. Obviously in any business one way to get higher profits is to charge more for your product - whilst you have no direct say in how much is charged for ads run on your site - there are ways of targeting types of ads that might bring in a higher return than others.As we mentioned in our initial explanation of the equation, the PVR...

Read More

Increasing Traffic

have argued the case for our equation for increasing Adsense RevenueAdsense Revenue = Traffic Levels + High Paying Ads + Relevant Ads + Optimally Positioned and Designed AdsI now will turn my attention to each of the four elements of good Adsense revenue in turn and give some practical easy to implement tips to improve each from my experience.Increasing Traffic Levels is a key component to increasing Adsense revenue. As I wrote previously, ‘The more people that see you Adsense Ads, the more likelihood there is that someone will click on them.’Increasing...

Read More

An Equation for Success

There are many factors that impact the level of revenue generated from a blog using the Google Adsense program. Books have been written explaining expert strategies for Adsense - However for the purposes of this series we’ve boiled it all down into four elements that we believe impact your Adsense earning capacity the most. Speaking in general terms here is a simple equation that illustrates how the factors each contribute to Adsense Revenue.Adsense Revenue = Traffic Levels + High Paying Ads + Relevant Ads + Optimally Positioned and Designed AdsIts...

Read More

Is Your Blog Suitable for Adsense?

Is your blog suitable for Adsense? - Before you rush into signing up for Adsense expecting it to earn you a million dollars it is worth asking the question of whether Adsense is the right revenue strategy for your blog. By no means is it the only option - you might like to check out this tip on other ways of making money from blogging.Whilst there are some amazing success stories about earning big dollars with Adsense out there, it is worth taking a realistic look at some cold hard truths about the Adsense program.Google does not accept every site...

Read More

Adsense Tips for Bloggers

How do you make money from the Google Adsense Program? What AdSense Tips can you share with us?I have been asked this question so many times in the past few weeks that I thought I should write something on the topic. It seems increasingly bloggers want to try to cover their hosting and ISP costs with some revenue from their blog - and increasingly they’re doing it and are able to make a few (or quite a lot) dollars on the side. Many are turning to Google’s Adsense program.Covering costs of my Digital Photography Blog is why I originally signed...

Read More

How do You ‘Sell’ Your Blog?

am no stranger (nor are you, probably) to how the wider media sometimes depicts bloggers: as closeted wannabees who add to the rise of ‘faux journalism’. Books are currently being published on the subject.This could understandably contribute to any beginner blogger’s self-consciousness; especially those who are staring at their ad revenue reports, wondering if any money is every going to start showing up.I used to be bashful when I talked about my blog. Not anymore. Why should I be? I’m proud of it. I’m proud of what it catalogues; thoughts, my...

Read More

How to Get Your Blog to 100,000 Visitors and Beyond

I’ve had a lot of requests to detail how I got 100,000 visitors (now past 150k as I write this) to Free Money Finance. While the topic is not clearly in the subject area of personal finances, it can be part of how you increase your income (and thus improve your net worth), so I’ll cover it. Plus, this will serve to help out other bloggers as well as remind me of what else I need to do to grow this blog. If this isn’t your cup of tea, simply ignore these posts. I post frequently enough that a new, money-related post is not far behind this one.I’ll...

Read More

26 Steps to 15,000 visitors a day

The following will build a successful site in 1 years time via Google alone. It can be done faster if you are a real go getter, or everyones favorite: a self starter.A) Prep Work:Prep work and begin building content. Yep, long before the domain name is settled on, start putting together notes to build at least a 100 page site. That's just for openers. That's 100 pages of "real content", as opposed to link pages, resource pages, about/copyright/tos...etc fluff pages.B) Domain name:Easily brandable. You want "google.com" and not "mykeyword.com"....

Read More

How to Choose a Niche Topic for your Blog

The approach I’ve taken to build a business around blogging has been to build multiple blogs around niche topics. I describe the reasons for this in my post One Blog Many Categories or Many Blogs? but I regularly am asked about how I choose my niche topics to blog about. In this post I’d like to outline a few questions that I tend to ask myself when considering a new topic. I hope it helps:Are You Interested in the Topic?A friend of mine explained it this way recently:“Probably the best place to start thinking about what your blog should be about...

Read More

What is blog?

So what is a Blog anyway?It’s a good question to ask at the beginning of a Blogging for Beginners Series as it is a question I am asked every week.There are a number of ways I could answer this question ranging from the broad to the highly technical.Here are a few definitions from other much wiser people on the ‘what is a blog?’ question to get us started (and once you’ve seen what they have to say on the topic I’ll share my own thoughts):‘A weblog is a hierarchy of text, images, media objects and data, arranged chronologically, that can be viewed...

Read More