One thing I realized recently was that most of my search traffic comes from my older posts. However, I found myself doing the same thing as a lot of other bloggers, placing my contextual ads on pages and not considering these facts about who is visiting the pages.

Typically I would place contextual ads on most of my blog pages except for the home page, thinking that the loyal readers visited the home page and did not want to have those ads in their way. After taking a fresh look I discovered that was not the case.

The reality is most of the readers on a blog that are loyal readers read a post when it is fairly new, probably within the first 48 hours of it’s life cycle. So instead of placing ads based on pages, maybe it would make more sense to base them on time. I have changed my contextual ads due to this data, these ads will now show up on pages after 48 hours.

The idea is simple, keep it clean for the benefit of my loyal readers, while still taking advantage of the long tail search traffic.

Let’s see what happens!

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The Good….

• You can change colors schemes and settings in your Adsense control panel and the changes will be reflected on your site live. No need to copy and past new code.
• There is an Import old Adsense Code function to convert your existing code.
• If an ad does not result in any pageviews in 7 days it will be marked as Inactive.

The Bad…

• There is a new variable called “google_ad_slot”, just not sure we need another tracking device. And it is not clear if you can cross these over domains, or you need to make a new ad for each Domain.
• It will be a lot of work to convert old pages to the new Adsense code.

The Ugly..

• The system is extremely slow when converting. Each new ad takes 10-15 minutes to show up on a page.

Read the official release at the Inside Adsense Blog.

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Link : YouTube Videos

There are a lot of limitations to what videos you will can currently play with this setup.

Basically it is either contextual or based on a YouTube category. It will be interesting to see how this progresses. I like the idea, but as usual with anything new there will be a lot of testing and adjusting to get a system that makes sense to the end user and satisfies Google’s plan for monetizing video.

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I have gone through all the Official Google press and tutorials and the Video Units are not showing up in the Adsense setup as advertised. So I guess it is just a waiting game now. The system looks pretty good from the blog posts, there is also a post on the Official Google Blog.

The main question I have is whether the Google AJAX Search API will be included to offer the video units?

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” CyberCoder, who suffers from major loss in Adsense income yet he plays by the rules!” – I hope Google is reading that…..

Now I have to admit when I went through my stats, which by the way are Google Analytics, I had to search pretty hard to come up with 10 irrelevant keywords, but they are there, and they are pretty damn funny at that.

1. theargylesweater - I live in Mississippi, an argyle sweater could only be less needed than a Parka.
2. 1966 mustang overheating – Ok, I could actually help with this one, but how does Google know that, I need to look for those cameras around the house.
3. bigsausagepizza trinity – Hhhmmm, is the blasphemy? I know about the Trinity, and I certainly can handle some sausage pizza, but once again, how do they know that?
4. girly wordpress themes – Hey now, I love wordpress themes, but you are barking up the wrong tree here.
5. i want to make money illegally – damn it, I thought nofollow, noarchive, noread, iknownothing Meta tags took care of that.
6. iwanttogotolawschool - And your asking me that after seeing #5?
7. prettylilpanties - Uh, hey honey if you read this we will talk later.
8. traces of murder/the bathtub killer – Ok, really guys, I don’t know anything about this, please contact the guy who searched for #6!
9. yahoo password stealer – Is someone just trying to make me look bad to Yahoo? See #6…again….
10. turks cap dallas texas – Yes I wear Caps, yes I lived in Texas,for a long time and yes I know a lot about Dallas, but who are the Turks?

PS: Thanks Garry, I needed a little fun this morning!

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See this page at YouTube.

But, you can work up your own YouTube custom player and preload it with your Favorites or other channels. I have setup a page to demonstrate. CyberCoder – Custom YouTube.

The information at YouTube is located here.

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I work with a few bloggers very closely, and I see and hear the same thing often. “I can’t keep up”. The interesting part is that this same statement comes from a variety of blogger types.

I work a full time job, 50-55 hours a week, I own at least 60 domain names, and have 10+ blogs and websites that I am working.If you have more than one site, you need to manage your time and resources. Here are a few things I do that help me keep it all rolling.

• Delegate – I have a couple of people writing for me. They get paid from the blogs that they write on.
• Trade – I have traded skills with others. Garry Conn is a good example. He did the header graphic on this site, and I did some PHP programming for him.
• Layout – It starts with my browser, when I start up, I have 9 tabs loaded as my home page. My Yahoo, Google, Gmail, Adsense, Analytics, Google Reader, Pandora, Google Docs and Google Trends. From this point I can see what is going on with my sites, and what is going on with others.
• Glance first – Each time I sit down to work I glance at each tab to get an overview. This means I spend maybe 1 or 2 minutes on a tab. I do not answer emails at this point, or dig through stats. From here I can go back and work on what looked to be the most critical items.
• Scheduled posting – I use WordPress and the scheduling has saved me a lot of time. An added benefit to the scheduling is releasing a post to publish early in the morning so by the time traffic is rolling my posts are already in the Blogsearch and at least the home page has been Indexed.

With this plan of attack I have been able to keep my full time job and get my online income to go from $25 to $2000 a month. And don’t kid yourself, luck plays a part in all of this too. And I have been lucky at times over the last couple years. But if you want to take advantage of luck, you have to be prepared. Are you prepared?

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Not sure what it says about us, but key that headline into Google and you get 313,000,000 results. Yes, that’s 313 Million.

Everybody says they hate the get rich quick schemes, yet someone is digging for them and trying them.

Anyway, if you want to get rich quick, I certainly can not help you, if I could, I would and I would be rich myself. However, I may be able to help you at least pay for your hosting and buy dinner out.

I work on a site for a customer that had these numbers last month.

287 unique visitors, $52 of income.

Now, I realize that is not very much money. However, if you do that twice you can get a check for over $100 every month. And in my book $100 is worth something.

287 visitors is an average of 9 visitors a day, THAT IS ALL, 9.

C’mon, how hard can that be? And the total size of the site is 14 pages. Oh yeah, static pages, not a blog, just a good ol’ basic 14 page website. We have not changed ANYTHING in over a year.

Here is my punch list for this site.

1. Focused Content – One subject, very little variance. They call this a “niche site” now, we used to call it a “small vertical market”.
2. Google Adsense. – 2 Ad Units. One 336×280 above the fold, one 336×280 at the very bottom of the page, right after the last piece of content. The colors used are blended into the site, and each ad title is dark blue. Always use a blue because people still tend to thing a blue underline is a link.
3. Sitemap. – Real simple. I use GSiteCrawler to build and upload the sitemap. Submitted to Google and Yahoo using their respective web pages.
4. Analytics. – I like Google Analytics, it’s simple, web based and I can have all my accounts at my fingertips.

Summary:

Always remember the old KISS rule, Keep It Simple, Stupid, or maybe now it should be Keep It Search Simple.

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With a little success I have had in the last year I was able to drop the part time job, and I am so happy about that. I would much rather be on the computer than working for someone else part time.

The problem I run into is that looking at the list, you would think they all go hand in hand, but his is not always the case and I struggle to find the balance in these three items and I would break them down like this.

• I want to blog more, and better.
• I program almost naturally.
• I need to make more money.

Although they seem to be 3 pieces to the same puzzle a lot of time they are not. The key has been to realize that the 3rd item, Making Money, is a result of the first 2 and not an action item.

Typically I sit down to blog, and before I know it I am programming. This is the trend I need to break. One thing that has helped recently is helping others. I have done a little programming and editing for other bloggers, and although you would think that caused more problems, but, it is actually the opposite.

When I help someone else, especially someone who is a good blogger (such as Garry Conn) I see where their focus is, and that motivates me to focus on the blogging, and only program on the essentials.

So here is to my focus, to post more, help more and let the chips fall where they may!

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One additional tip I would throw in there is where to get good content for your target audience. Quit looking at the other bloggers, and look around your family and friends. I have several people that are writing for me on blogs covering topics such as Celebrities, Television, DVDs, Music and Politics.

One of these writers does not even know the blog address of the blog she is writing for, and she could care less. She writes very nice posts, emails them to me and we split the income 50/50. Very simple process that is getting excellent results.

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