Inside AdSense, the official AdSense blog, has a new AdSense optimization tips for bloggers post. Nothing there is rocket science, and there are no surprises there for regular readers of the Blogging Tips series 
, but it’s still a good, short, informative post.
I especially like the maps:
although I find that lowering the “search” function a bit, and putting a square ad in its former place, works quite well.
Following my comment on his post (it’s always nice to serve as an inspiration for someone more successful than ourselves ), Eric has a new post in which he offers a trick to use temporary URLs to test ad relevance in blogs – which I had said was not as easy as with normal sites.
His trick is based on the fact that you can add “garbage” to the end of URLs (such as “?a=1), which are ignored by your blog’s software, but, to Google, means it’s a different page. So, you… oh well, Eric says it well, so just go there.
Eric has a recent post in which, talking about the completion of his Invisible Fence case study (very interesting reading, by the way – I’ve mentioned it before), he also mentions a nice trick: using different directories to test the relevance of AdSense ads in different configurations.
Google “reads” the content of a page and displays mostly revelant ads quite quickly (you put the AdSense code in a page, then load it a couple of times, and the ads will probably be relevant); however, if you change the content, it can take weeks for the ads to update their subject to the new content. A consequence of this is that your initial tests may “stick” for a long time – even though you’ve updated the content, or keywords, or section targeting, or whatever, the ads are still related to what that page was like when you first loaded it up, after adding the AdSense code to it.
So, Eric suggests testing it in other places – instead of www.something.com, what about www.something.com/test1 , then, after a couple of changes, www.something.com/test2 … and so on. Each new address means Google will “learn” what your page is about, anew. Only when it’s exactly as you want should you move the files to the root directory.
This, of course, applies more to “normal” sites and mini-sites than to blogs, but can still be of use in blogging.
Don’t include the word “blog” in your blog’s title, unless it’s about blogging.
You may have noticed that this site is back to simply “The Tlog” (which is neutral and doesn’t affect what Google will think the blog is about), losing the ” – a technology blog” part. Yup, I make mistakes like everyone else.
This can help in SEO, too.
It’s amazing that this thing has been posted in at least two places (this blog is one of them), and I’ve seen nothing, anywhere, coming from it. No blog entries. No discussions. Not even comments under the two blog entries. And it works – even my 2 “late afternoon” attempts have been actually making me money, which, considering that they don’t cost me anything in terms of time, effort or money, is great.
Let’s put it like this: imagine you can do something today, that, starting 6 months from now, will make you about a dollar a day. That’s $30 a month… insignificant, right?
But you can do it several times. As many as you want.
(NOTE: this is part of the “Blogging tips” series)
This is a point I’ve already made in several past posts (that sounds weird…), but it’s so relevant and so often ignored or even unknown, that it deserves its own part in this world-famous-any-day-now series.
As I’ve mentioned before as well, most ad clicks come from first-time visitors, as your regular readers tend to become “blind” to your ads – they filter them, unconsciously. That is mostly unavoidable – though it’s still desirable to convert newcomers into regulars, as there’s still a chance they’ll click on an ad, but, mostly important, they may link to your blog, make it more interesting with their comments, and tell other people about it.
But there’s still something you can do to reduce the “ad blindness”, and that is to change ads from time to time.
If you read this blog regularly (and if you don’t, why not? ), you’re probably aware that, in the last few days, I’ve made a few changes around here, such as adding the sidebar to individual posts, and changing the ads below each post in the individual post pages – replacing the old “medium rectangle” with 2 green-bordered small squares.
If you haven’t done so, look at them. Notice something wrong?
Yup, they’re all about blogging, or something related. Not like they used to be.
Even old posts (see the top 10 posts list, for instance) have blogging-related ads.
And they’ll probably be this way for a week or so. Why?
Less than 3 months of blogging… In the Google Sandbox (which means virtually no visits from Google searches)… and I still have a day job.
Not a fortune, but I’ve just been able to pay the recent repairs of my car with my blogs. Nice.
Today, car repairs. Tomorrow, the world! 
EDIT: shameless self-promotion: why not read the Blogging Tips series, now with 37 parts and still growing? 
Eric Giguere of An AdSense Blog: Make Easy Money with Google has been doing an AdSense case study from some time now, which I’ve found quite interesting. Basically, he’s been creating a small site about invisible fences for dogs, and each stage of the site is archived, so you can compare them.
For instance, the first stage, “content”, only has text and some AdSense ads; the second stage is SEO’d, the third adds images and the fourth moves all formatting to CSS, incidentally improving the looks a lot.
Along with this article, this case study has been one of my main inspirations for my new mini-sites.
I’ve just found an article at My Blogging Tips called “How To Make Money Online Using Niche Content Websites“.
The author’s suggestion is not related to blogs at all – instead, he suggests discovering a niche that has few or no websites about (as a Groo fan, I’d suggest cheese dip, myself ), then making a simple but useful (and static) site about it, with good SEO techniches, promoting it, then… forgetting about it!
He suggests that, if the niche is well chosen (something people want to know about, but which there are few sites about), after 3-6 months (allowing for getting out of any sandboxes and everything) the site can steadily earn you $1-$2 a day. Now, as that site was probably put together in a week or less (but it’s still supposed to be better than the competition, which, the author suggests, probably consists of just a couple of unprofessional sites made with FrontPage or Word… yuck!), and needs no further attention, you can create another next week. And another, the following week. And another.
50 web sites (doable in a year) would give $50-$100 a day. Without requiring any further work from you. Not bad, huh?
And, as you do them, you’ll probably get better at it, be able to do another site more easily and more quickly, have increased knowledge about which SEO techniques work better, and so on.
The only bad point: you have to search for those niches all the time, and then quickly learn enough about each one to make a decent, informative, useful website – and they’re probably subjects that don’t particularly interest you.
As I said, these are not blogs. You’ll get virtually all earnings from first time visitors, as the sites won’t be updated (unless you get “attached” to a particular one, whose subject actually interests you). Besides, return visitors tend to ignore ads a lot more than first-timers, whether it’s a blog or a static site.
I may try something like this in the future…
Read the article, it goes into a lot more detail.
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