Blogopoly

My last post covered the issue of quality content. Often you can have quality content and strong traffic but hardly make a dime from Google's AdSense program, yet other sites with less traffic can make more. Why is this so? Pricing for advertising on Google uses a bidding system - if you pay a higher CPC than the rest of the advertisers, your ad is seen more often and placed higher in the priority queue (priority is also based on click performance). Therefore the most sought after or most highly valued keywords often yield Google a higher price for their ads, this higher price is passed on to website owners that have AdSense ads on their pages.

This means that if you are intending on creating a Blog that will make money through AdSense, you need to think carefully about the content of your site. Unfortunately this site is't going to make much money fro AdSense as keywords relating to blogs are not very valuable. PVRblog is a great example of a blog using AdSense successfully. The topic of the blog is DVR technology (think TiVo) which is popular, keywords relating to DVR technology and TiVo specifically are sought after keywords for advertisers on Google. This combination of good traffic and valuable keywords is yielding great rewards for the owner, Matt Haughy.

He has written a few tips on how to make a succeful AdSense site, which I have republished here:

1. Pick a topic

Blogs are about anything and everything and it isn't every day that you find a good blog focused on a topic. In order to have any remote chance of success gaining an interested audience and getting good on-topic ads showing up, pick a
narrow topic you are passionate about and run with it. I would guess that I do just as good or better than Gizmodo on textads (Gizmodo certainly covers the same area of PVRblog, just not as in-depth) even though I probably have 1/10th the traffic because my site is more tightly focused.

If there's anything in this list that requires a drastic change on the part of website authors, this is it. Focused blogging isn't that popular but I'm convinced it's the only way to have a chance to carve out a niche on the web. If you want to proclaim yourself as an expert on a topic to both an audience and search engines so that people will know you're the one site to go to for information, you'll have to focus. Focus and be as specific as you can.

2. Consider your topic as it relates to the web

If what you are aiming for is ad revenue, it helps if your topic is something you can buy products related to it. It also helps if those products can be bought online and people are comfortable with it. One of my favorite topic sites (arguably slightly blog-like) is Kicksology. Professor K knows everything and anything about basketball shoes and about once a week I drop into the site to see what's new in cutting edge shoe design. Often when I see a rave review on a cool looking shoe, I want to know how much it costs and if I can buy them. It's an impulse buying thing, but if you notice Kicksology recently added Google's ads to the site, but they're not super-focused. Ideally, if I was reading about a new shoe, I'd want ads offering the same shoe for purchase right now. I've checked out a few dozen of the reviews, but the new air jordan review is the only one that carries with it targetted ads. Generally speaking, Kicksology is about something not normally ordered or sold online and the ads are often a poor fit for the content (no one's fault really, people just don't buy that many shoes online).

TiVos are very close to the web. People buy them online, they look up tips and hacks for them, and resellers have tons of TiVos to move. I didn't really think about it when I started the site, but thanks to the mass availability and customers looking for deals on them, the web's a natural place to shop for a new TiVo.

If you're really interested in knowing how well a topic might work out, try going through the process of placing a Google Adwords ad. During the process they'll tell you how much a keyword will cost you, and you can use that to determine if writing a blog about goldfish is going to be more lucrative than the one you could be writing about golden retrievers.

3. Be passionate and write your ass off

Don't start a blog just to turn a buck, because it's going to be clear to your audience that you don't really care about the topic if you don't offer much beyond press releases from companies. If you want to have a site that ranks highly at Google, write how-to article after how-to article and offer content no one could find anywhere else. I love this guide to ranking higher in google because it doesn't focus exclusively on HTML tricks or stoop to tips on gaming the system, it simply says: write the most useful website on earth and everyone will link to you, which will make you #1.

I started PVRblog because I've been following the space for the past three years and I have dozens of in-depth tutorials I've written and want to write about the subject. I'm enthusiastic about the topic and I look forward to spending a few downtime hours writing articles, conducting interviews, or reviewing books and hardware for the site.

4. Designing for Google and your audience

Don't underestimate the power of Google and google-ability of your site. About half of all the traffic to PVRblog is from a Google search. If people are looking for information on how to upgrade a tivo, they might find my articles about it, and alongside every article are four links to upgrade kits at various prices. I wouldn't be surprised if the click-thrus are crazy high on those links, for those users. I do the same thing myself, often looking up reviews on cellphones and following ad links to help find the best prices I can.

On the technical side of things, having an accessible, valid XHTML site, with good semantics, good page titles, and good filenames helps Google index your site. Typepad does all these things extremely well right out of the box. After I launched PVRblog, Google indexed the entire site within hours and reindexes it often. The site shows up in the top ten for many common TiVo hacking or TiVo feature searches. Searchers are often looking for info to help a purchase, and are likely to click an ad, so it's worth thinking about them.

Nick Denton recently wrote about the design of a weblog may change based on Adsense, and I'd say he's got a lot of good points, but be careful that you don't go too far, forcing people to make extra clicks just so you can stream more ads at them. Your audience will pick up on this eventually and bail.

What not to do

Of course now that I've given you a few tips, it's important to reiterate what you shouldn't do. Don't just slap ads on your blog and expect to get rich the next day. If every blog about anything on earth is going to carry adsense boxes, their utility is going to go down and people won't be likely to click on them. Don't be disappointed if you're not pulling down big bucks on your topic-focused, well-googled site. It takes time to build an audience and gain links from people that find your content useful. If you follow these guidelines, it's quite possible you'll be able to pay for your own hosting. Eventually, you might make more.

Text republished from a.whollottanothing.org in accordance with the Creative Commons attribution noncommercial sharealike license