How to get Relevant AdSense Ads

Many bloggers complain that they are not making any money because they are getting lots and lots of irrelevant ads; AdSense Ads that are not related to the content of their blog. Well this post is intend to help those bloggers. If your blog has a good search engine rank, a good readership base , lots and lots of high quality posts and good blending for your AdSense ads but you just don´t make money at all, then you have a problem of ad relevancy, maybe your ads are not good enough to attract the attention of your readers, and believe me when I say that most blogs with AdSense are having this problem, but why?

There are many high paying ads out there for all topics, from Health care to business and from cars to real estate the problem is that most blogs are not suitable for those ads and instead they get just the public service ads form Google (PSA´s), these pay nothing at all. Before making something else you might want to try these tips:

Make sure you are using the right keywords – As you know keywords are very important to get relevant ads, if you use high paying keywords you should get high paying ads, There are many websites and services out there that can help you with this, you can also check our Top Paying keywords section. Along with keyword research comes keyword density, increase it in your posts and you´ll get more related ads.

Don´t combine topics in the same page – If you are going to write about “The best books of the year” then don´t add another topic about “The fastest cars” in the same page, remember, one topic per page and one page per topic. I´m not talking about your front page because its obvious that in the first page all your new posts are going to be displayed no matter what topic you are writing about.

Block irrelevant ads – Google allows you to block those ads that are not relevant to your content, but you just have a limited number of ads to block.

Check also your title and sidebars and menus – because sometimes the AdSense bot examines these sections too, and delivers ads related to what they are about. Try to add high paying keywords not just in your posts but in your menus and tittles.

Now, there is another way to get relevant and high paying AdSense Ads, it is a simple HTML tweak that will increase the number of relevant ads in your blog. This will confuse the Google Bot and will force it to focus only on specific content.

You can use NotePad, just open your HTML page and go to the beginning of your article or post, and add the following line:

<!– google_ad_section_start –>

Then go to the end of your post and add this line there.

<!– google_ad_section_end –>

Now save changes and publish it again, as you can see it is very simple but effective this tweak will confuse the Google Bot and you´ll get ads related to what you are writing about. This is called “Section targeting” and it allows you to literally suggest sections of your HTML text to the AdSense bot you can use this technique with all the sections you want to emphasize for ad targeting.

If you want the AdSense bot to ignore a certain section like the sidebar on your blog just use the same procedure but this time add this line to the sections you want to ignore.

<!– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –>

<!– google_ad_section_end –>

For more information visit: AdSense section targeting

A Word About Blogging Platforms

Besides Blogger and WordPress, What other blogging platforms you can use? How do you choose the right platform? Where is the best place to blog? These are common questions asked by people who want to start a blog. There are no strict answers or rules to these questions, because it depends on what you are looking for.

Now I´m going to give you a small lesson about Blogging Platforms, their features and their disadvantages. This post should help you decide which is the best option for you. The first thing you have to know is that there are 3 types of platforms:

• Hosted blog platform
• Stand alone blog platforms
• Remote Hosting

Ok, now I´m going to explain what exactly is a hosted blog

This kind of platforms is where the user simply needs to sign up and set up a weblog account in order to start blogging. There’s no need to install any programs, get a separate web hosting account, and/or obtain a domain name. Examples of such platform are: LiveJournal and Xanga. Starting a blog using hosted weblog providers is the simplest way to begin blogging. Most people who wish to start a weblog use this type of platform.

Now, for basic set up guidelines , just visit the provider’s site, sign up for an account, and specify some basic customization like: template design, title and description. Once you have done this, just start writing your entries. With this kind of platform your blog´s URL will be something like http://username.provider.com.

This kind of service is perfect for bloggers who don´t know a thing about HTML , CSS, PHP , or FTP. This may sound like the best option to start a blog, but don´t hurry and please continue reading.

A brief explanation about Stand Alone Platform

This type of blogging platform is where the user needs to download and install special software in order to start blogging under his own domain or URL. Blogger Lounge is powered by a stand alone platform which is WordPress. Examples of other providers are Movable Type Greymatter , TextPattern and B2Evolution.

The basic set up guideline for this platform type is as follows: Go to the provider´s website, check the requirements, download the software, install the software on your domain/URL, and follow set up procedures. This type of weblog platform is good for bloggers who wish to have more freedom in tweaking their blogs, either by customizing templates or adding functionality. Users of stand alone platform are comfortable with handling technical matters. Or, at least, they can rely on someone who can help them with such things.

Advantages

Complete control of your blog´s design
Some of them are very easy to use if you take a look to their tutorials and to their “How to” guides.
Most of them are for free.

Disadvantages

Although they are very easy to use once they are already installed, the problem is the set up process, because you have to know some technical issues about FTP, hosting and more, but as I said there are many good resources that can help you with this process, just visit their tutorial pages and documents and everything should be fine.

Cost, when you use a hosted blog platform you don´t have to worry about hosting plans and all that, but with this kind of service you have to look for a good hosting provider. That is going to increase your costs, but once you have a successful blog that generates income you wont have to worry about that!.

Your other option is: Remote Hosting

There are some blog platforms that allow a combination of hosted and stand alone blogs, you have the option to host your blog using your own domain or to host it in their own servers using a sub domain. This has some advantages and disadvantage, check out why it is important to have your own domain name. This type of blogging platform is somewhere between using a hosted blog provider and a stand alone platform. Examples are: the famous Blogger and WebCrimson.

Bloggers who will benefit the most from this type of platform are those who wish to have some control over their blogs but do not wish to go through the trouble of installing software into their pc´s.

Remember that you have the last word, review your options and your goals, and choose the one that best fits your needs, you can find further information about platforms in these articles:

Charlene Li has a great evaluation article about the main providers.

Helen Teixeira has a great review about blog platforms.

SitePoint has a very useful review called: The Big 3 Reviewed.

Affiliate Programs

So you want to make money online, ok let´s talk about affiliate programs, for those who don’t know what this means let me give you a brief explanation. Affiliate programs are very popular right now. An Affiliate program or an associate program is an arrangement between two parts, the merchant website and the affiliate website, the first one pays the second one for a certain service in many case they pay their affiliates to send them traffic, But there are many ways to get paid with this affiliate programs. you might have heard of many people making money with affiliate programs.

Each affiliate program has its own terms and conditions but the main purpose is the same , affiliate programs are to make money to generate an income for websites or blogs. You can use many of these programs in the same website but there are others that don´t allow you to do so. Affiliate programs are one of the best ways to quick cash on the internet. You don’t need to sell your own products and in some cases you don´t even need to own a website.

The most popular affiliate programs are Google AdSense and YPN , these kind of programs put special ads in your website and pay you each time an ad is clicked. One of the best things about this programs is that you can sign up for free. The amount of money you will receive per sale or per click depends on the affiliate program that you signed up for. Most companies offer on average about five to ten percent commission on every sale and from $0.05 to almost $50 per click, depending on your keywords and content. Some companies will give you money for every referral you send to them whether they buy a product or not. Just take a look into each company guidelines before signing up and find the one that best suites your needs.

Here is a list of some of the most profitable affiliate programs available. Choose the one you prefer and start making money.

Google AdSense: The king of all affiliate programs, with this simple Pay-Per-Click program you can make lots and lots of money almost without effort.

Yahoo Publisher Network: Pay-Per-Click program, display ads that are relevant to the content of your site and earn money from qualified clicks.

ClickBank: Internet´s leading retailer of digital products, you can promote their products in your website and get paid for each sale, with commissions as high as 75% and more than 10,000 products to promote.

Amazon.com Associates: Displays ads with products of amazon.com, you can earn up to 8.5% in referral fees, create and post links to amazon.com and get paid.

eBay Affiliate Program: Earn money just bu driving traffic to eBay.com , earn up to 65% commission on eBay Revenue, earn up to $22 commission for new active user referrals.

CPays: Claims to have the highest commissions in the industry and they say it is guaranteed. More than 70% commissions. Another good option.

Forex Affiliate: Affiliating in the Forex market (currency exchange and trading) offers you a great earning potential. This program offers various earning options , just select the one (or more) that suits you best.

AdBrite: Write your own ads and start making money.

Text Link Ads: Publish simple text link ads in your blog and get paid.

Chitika eMinimalls:With more than 10,000 participating blogs and websites, promote products and receive money.

These are just some affiliate programs we recommend but there are hundreds of them, you take a look to each one and choose the best for your online business and start making money online. More Affiliate Programs.

How Often Should You Update Your Blog?

The other day a friend asked me via email, how often should he post? Because he was writing about 2 post per week sometimes 3. Well at that moment I told him that there are no strict rules about how often to post, but I also told him that if he want to be a successful blogger and make money with his blog he should consider updating more frequently, why? He asked me, because there are about 50,000,000 of blogs and your readers and subscribers are always waiting for you to update and to post, therefore if you update lets say 1 post per day this mean that your visitors and readers will visit your site every single day and this will increase your stats.

If you don´t update your blog frequently then the readers and subscribers you used to have will leave and they´ll start looking for other alternatives. It is a fact that almost 80% of bloggers don´t update their blogs frequently this gives you more opportunities to get readers and traffic.

But I know that it´s not easy to be constantly updating a blog or a website that depends on many factors like:

• How many blogs you have
• How many readers and subscribers you have How old is your blog
• Your blog topic
• The length of your posts
• Your free time
• And much more…

Let me give you an advice if you want to make real money with your blog , create yourself an schedule and stick to it, let´s say Monday to Friday from 8 am to 11 am write posts and update blog, the rest of the day (not the entire day of course) look for new ideas and topics for the next day.

How to Start a Blog

A few years ago it was very difficult to start a blog, maybe because very few people knew what a blog was. There were no resources for those who wanted to build one. In that time blogs were not money making machines they were just online diaries. Well thankfully right now we have a lot of resources and tools to start blogging. When Pyra Labs launched Blogger in 1999 it was an unknown blog-publishing tool, it was in 2003 when Google acquired Pyra Labs that this tool began its boom, and the blogging business was never the same.

Now for those beginner bloggers that want to start a blog and make a profit from it, here is a small but useful guide on how to start a blog, have fun.

Ok if you want to start a blog you have some options (service providers) you might want to consider, your first option and if you allow me, the best; is start one with a free blog-publishing tool like Blogger or WordPress. These platforms allow you to create your blog in few steps and without charge. Here is a simple guide on how to start a blog with Blogger.

1. Go to their main page and create an account.
2. After creating your account, login.
3. Go to your Dashboard and click the “Create a Blog” button.
4. Name it. Add a title and type the URL you want for your blog (Check availability).
5. Choose a template or theme.
6. And start posting.

Here is a great guide to start a blog using Blogger.

Here is another one at About.com

A Video explaining how to use this tool.

Now How to start a blog using WordPress. This tool has a lot of features that the others don’t have, like tags and categories, here are some good resources.

Here is another guide from About.com, this time for WP.

Here is a very useful video that explains how to setup a Blog in WP.

Learn more about How to Setup a WordPress Blog.

There are other platforms you can use , here is another guide to start blogging but this time for Moveable Type.

Free WordPress Themes

As You know I´m a WP user I think it is a very cool tool for blogging, but that´s another story, previously I posted an entry about where to find some good looking templates fro Blogger, now in this post I´m going to give all WP users some links where they can find the best themes for their blogs, So please enjoy them.

In Theme Viewer you can fin hundreds of designs for WP.

Template Monster has one of the largest collection of professional WP themes but they also have some for free.

More templates form wordpress.org

More good templates here.

There are many websites and blogs offering themes for WP but these were the ones that I´ve found more interesting. If you know another site that offers good themes please name it in your comments.

Premium Blog Editors

Nowadays there are several options in the market to create, edit and manage our blogs, some of them are free but very useful and efficient tools , each one of these blog editors offer different features that help us to make the most of ours blogs, lets review these powerful money making tools. I hope you try and ejoy each one of them to see which tool is the best for you.

Qumana: Great blog editing tool.

RocketPost 2: A very smart blog editor designed for serious bloggers.

w.Bloggar: A cool piece of software to edit and manage your blog.

WB Editor: Nice blog editor with a very simple to use interface.

BlogDesk: A very simple to use blog editing software.

Zoundry: Blog editing software that can make you earn money from product reviews.

How to Add a Favicon to your Blog

First of all a Favicon is an icon or a logo of a website or blog, some browsers display these icons next to the address or next to the title of the page. These icons are also used to identify a website or blog when you add it to your “favorites” they are very small (16×16 or 32×32 pixels) and they are usually in .ICO format. Blogger and WordPress have a generic icon for all blogs, but you can customize your blog with your own favicon, these are the steps to do so.

1. You will need to create one. You can do this using some web tools that allow you to create a favicon from an image, you can do this using the Chami “Favicon from pics” online tool. What you have to do is select an image for your icon and then create your favicon.

2. After that, once you have created your favicon you´ll have to download it to your PC, your file has to be “favicon.ico”.

3. Once you have your file in your hard drive you will need to upload it via FTP to your main directory or host it somewhere different from your pc. Blogger does not support .ICO files so let me give you the trick, go to Freewebs or any other free hosting service and create an account, upload your favicon to your directory and copy the URL where it is hosted.

4. After that copy this code:

<link rel=”icon” href=”YOUR_FAVICON_URL” type=”image/ico”><link rel=”shortcut icon” href=”YOUR_FAVICON_URL” type=”image/ico”>

5. Paste the code into your template or theme after the tag < head> but before the tag < / head > and save the changes.

And thats it! after this you shall see your icon next to your blog’s title on the browser bar. Favicons allow you to improve the identity and the image of your blogs by making them more unique.

Blog Stats

Stats are very important to analyze your traffic and to know how your blog is working, there are many free stat services that offer you a great range of features that help you successfully analyze your blog or website. If you want to be a professional blogger and make real money then you need something to measure your traffic. Some of the features of these services and tools are:

Hit counters: This feature gives you a report about how many hits your blog or website receives during a certain period of time, lets say hits per day or hits per month or total hits.

Visit counters: This special feature reports how many visits your blog or website received during a certain period of time, some of them are real time counters, this means that they are updating constantly and giving you a general report at the end of the day.

Referrers: This nice feature allows you to analyze where your traffic is coming from, you can actually see if your readers come from a search engine or form another website.

Keyword analyzers: This feature gives you a report about which keywords where used to find your blog or website.

Users Online: When this feature is enabled gives you a constant report on how many users or readers are reading your website or blog in that exact moment.

If you use a statistic system for your blog and if you analyze your traffic and your readers then you would be able to apply new strategies and your blog is going to grow along with your income. Take a look and use these free professional stats analyzers.

Blog Patrol: Measure your blog stats with these free ready to use counters and tools.

MapStats: Track your visitors and submit your blog.

Histats: Very useful statistic software for website and blogs, track your visitors, analyze your traffic and predict it.

Free-Counter: Get free counters and stats for your blog or website and add your blog to their directory.

Stat Counter: Very reliable tool to analyze your traffic with invisible counters.

ShinyStat: Real time counters and traffic reports for your blog or website.

FeedBurner: Attract readers and analyze your subscribers.

How to Setup a WordPress Blog

Blogging has become one of the most popular activities on the Internet, for many bloggers it is a way of life and a way to make money . The numbers of blogs has increased because now it´s easier to create and manage one. There are new tools and platforms that can help people to create and edit their own blogs, most of them are free services. Some of the best platforms are WordPress and Blogger, both of them are very popular and useful, as you can see Blogger Lounge is powered by the first one. This time I´m going to explain you how to setup a WordPress blog. Here is what you have to do.

Check web hosting requirements. First of all you have to ensure that your hosting provider supports PHP and MySQL database. PHP version has to be at least 4.2 and MySQL 4.0. Here is the link where you can see the requirements, you can ask your provider for more support.

Download WordPress. You can download the script from the website for free. Save the “.zip” file on your hard disk and use something like WinZip or WinRar to unpack the files to a temporary folder.

Now, rename the wp-config-sample.php file to wp-config.php.

Then open this file in your favorite text editor (like Notepad).

Now edit the next variables:

The name of the MySQL database (create a new one using your web hosting control panel in case you had never created it before).

Your database username, password and MySQL database server (usually localhost).

Now upload all files to your web host. Point your browser to /wp-admin/install.php and follow the instructions on the screen. During the installation process the admin password will be generated. Take note of his password because you will need it in the next step.

Another and easier solution on how to install the PHP script is to sign up for a quality web hosting service which offers pre-installed PHP scripts. Then easily go to your control panel, find the section with pre-installed scripts and select WordPress. The installer will do all the job for you. All you need to do is to choose the script you want to install.

Now the setup

At this point the script should be successfully installed. Point your browser to wp-login.php file in your WordPress folder and sign in with the username admin and the password generated during the installation (this password can be changed from the Profile section at any time).

Remember that the design of a blog is very important. For this reason WordPress offers the option to change the layout. Here is a post where I give you some great links and resources where you can find the best WP themes. Once you have a theme, upload the files to wp-content/themes/your-new-layout-name folder. From the Presentation section select your new theme and activate it. Now your blog has a new look and you are ready to start blogging for money (or just for hobby)!

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