I recently created an account with blip tv for uploading videos of my travel. I find the uploading process very simple and fast. Interesting part of this video hosting site is that you get paid for the advertisments which are displayed along with your videos.
I have been using Google Adsense for some time now and I find my CTR has improved these days. I have no much gain in traffic but the income from Google Adsense has gone up which means that the CTR or the click through rate of my Google Adsense has improved very much. I was googling around to find out what is a good CTR for Google Adsense. Mine is around 5% and earlier it was just less than 1%.
I found a post at Darren’s Blog which says for blogs its around 2 to 5% which keeps me happy that my ads are well blended and placed well. I was just doing some calculations about my Adsense revenue and found that I can earn handsome if I have good traffic. If I have a traffic of about 1million pageviews a day, I can earn about 2,000 $ a day, which is a good revenue for a blog. I know that I cannot do this for 1 year atleast, but I find my traffic growing good and surely I can get to that spot.
All I need is to create good content and increase the number of posts on my blog.
If you do not use Google Adsense, just try it, its the best source of ads and revenue for your blog. Google adsense inventory never run outs of ads for any of your blog pages and it shows relevant ads which increases the CTR and finally your revenue from the ads.
Do you run out of topics do your regular blog posts. I am sure the answer is yes, even I used to.
If you have reading habit then you can do write about the things you read and create blog posts. Initially when you start a blog, you will find it very difficult to do regular post as you may not get sufficient topics to write about, but once you start off, you will find this problem solved. You should try to maintain the theme of your blog and write on topics related to the theme of your blog. If you have a personal blog, then you can write about anything that you come around, like if you go to a restaurant for a dinner, you can write a post on that particular restaurant, dishes, menus, service etc. If you watch a movie, you can write a review about that movie, if you go to a shopping mall, you can shot some pictures, video and post about the mall.
This is the way I manage to do frequent post. How do you do?
I had been stressing on consistent blogging on few of my previous posts which is very important to maintain a blog with consistent traffic. If you have noted, I did not do any posts in the Month of May, just 1 post, that’s the problem what I and many of the bloggers face. My traffic went to down and no new subscribers and my revenue eventually went down.
What happens is if you are involved in other work and blogging is not your full time job, this can happen very often and irregular blogging will never given your a regular income. Recently Darren Rowse had posted a Poll on How many posts do you do on your main blog? The comments were interesting and you should read it.
Now coming back to the topic of this post, how to plan your posts in a way that you blog posts are consistent. There are many times that I get time and topics and I can do 4-5 posts a day and as like in the Month of May, I could do only one post. If you are using blogging tool like wordpress , Joomla, Drupal, then you can write your post and publish it on a future date. This is something what many bloggers do. But again there are some restrictions on this. If you are writing a post on a hot topic, you should not plan to post it on a future date.
If you are not getting time to write you posts, you should at least find time to go through your draft posts and publish those or complete those and publish it.
Create as many draft posts as you can whenever you get some idea. You will find these draft posts useful when you run out of topics.
Don’t over post, your subscribers many get annoyed. Keep posting periodically, your visitors will make sure that you are alive.
This is a question which I have been asking myself and analyzing the revenue income from Google Adsense. I have been using Google Adsense for this blog and studying the income using the channel feature of Google Adsense. I use Google Adsense for 13 different website and I did a detailed study on the income from my different websites.
In my case Google Adsense does not work well for this blog. I get more traffic and even I have got good loyal visitors, but the clicks on this blog is very low when comparing the CTR with other websites . I have about 185 Feed subscribers which I do not have on any of my other websites, but still the clicks generated on this blog is low when looking into the impressions and traffic of this blog.
What could be the reason?Visibility and blending of ads – The ads are placed well and well blended according to my knowledge and experience. I have used the right color and placed above the content as well as the sidebars.
Possible reasons
Do you own a blog? If yes, do you use Google Adsense? If yes, do you click on Google ads on other blogs or websites?
If I am to answer, I say NO, I very rarely click on other blogs Google Ads.
Reason – I am very scared to click on Google Ads as I do not even want to click on those and I have made an habit to always stay away from these ads. I know that I do have any problem clicking on Ads on other sites or blogs, but I am not willing to develop the habit of click on Google Ads. If I do that often, I am scared that I may click on the Google Ads on my blog too and I do not want to get my google adsense account banned.
Most of my blog visitors are blog owners or bloggers who want to make money online. I do write only on this topic on this blog. Most of the visitors know what Google Adsense is and they do not want to click on these ads. I had run Google Adwords campaign two months back for about two months and my Google Adsense revenue was very high. I was getting most of the visitors who came clicking on a Google Ads and come to my blog go through some pages and again they click on one of the Google Adsense ads which they find on my blog and they go to the Advertiser’s web page. These visitors may not really know what Google Adsense is and they don’t know if this is an ad severed by Google.
My other websites, which are on different topic like web directories, Online Encyclopedia, has very good CTR. The type of visitors on these websites are different from those I get on this blog. They are on an aim to find what they want and they do not hesitate to click any link which has a title that is similar to what they are looking for. So I get a better CTR on these websites.
I am sure that most of you who own a blog with Google Adsense, will be very hesitant to click on Google Adsense Ads even on other websites. Am I right, your comments are anticipated
I was going through my traffic source on Google Analytics (Your Traffic Source) and found something interesting. I get a lot of traffic from image search. I really do something to get this and today I would just give you some tips to get your images listed for relevant keywords for Google Image Search. I do a lot of posts related to the resorts in Maldives on my other blog. I do use lots of images on this blog as I always travel with a camera ( canon Tx 1 ) and the texts in my posts are very less compared to the Images and Videos. If you search of Kanuhura Resort on Google Image search, my blog images are listed first and I get a lot of traffic from this. This is just an example, but how does Google know that this image is of Kanuhura resort?
Let me come back to the answer to the question that I came up. You need to tell Google or any search engine that the image is of so and so or give the information about the image and you do this using the Alt tag.
I use windows live writer to do my blog posts and it has an excellent feature to insert the alt tags. As you side on the image on the left side, I just need to enter the alternate text in the text box provided. By default, the image file name is inserted, but you need to edit it insert the right keywords or description of the image.
Using Alternate text for your images will be really worth the time you spend as your images get listed in Image search results and this is again opening up your traffic and chances of more back links.
Contests are one the methods to improve the growth of loyal visitors or readers of your blog. I see method used by most of the bloggers who have good amount of traffic and regular readers. Today I saw a post on John Chow blog announcing a contest.
How does contests improve your blog’s traffic or grow the number of loyal visitors?
When you announce a contest and the price, many would like to participate in it and many may even recommend their friends to check that out. Some who are bloggers or who participate in different discussions or forums may post about your content on these forums or in their blogs.
Getting a reward from your blog will even give more results as the winner will always try to post about this on other forums or his own blog about the contest. You get more backlinks, more traffic and more revenue. Traffic and revenue are always related, the more traffic you get, the chances of making more revenue is high.
Contests increases the interest in your visitors to come back and read your blog post, check if you have done any new posts and interact with you by posting comments or trackbacks.
Mostly I see that the bloggers don’t give away big prices, usually it will be like 10,000 entrecard credits or a free review about their blog.
Try announcing some contest on your blog and giveaway something which the participants should feel that, its worth. When you announce a contest, make sure you decide the price for the winner, the closing date of the contest, the terms and conditions and the judges for the contest.
I have never tried this, but very soon I will be announcing one. So stay tuned in
Google Ad Manager is another tool to sell your advertising slots and serve ads on your blog. The problem with Google Ad manager is that you need to request for an invitation for Google Admanager and once Google send you and invitation, you can login and use the tool. I have just started using it and the Ads served on this blog is using Ad Manager. The advantage of this tool is that you can opt to serve Google Adsense Ads to the slots which are vacant or it has the feature to compete with the purchased ads. Other option is that you can override the Google Adsense properties by adding some tags to your blog <head> tag and bled the ads as you can do in the Google Adsense control panel.
If you have still not applied for an Ad Manager Invitation, just do it and try it. They are constantly upgrading the features and I feel on a long run, it will be helpful. The biggest advantage of using a third party Ad server is that you do not need to give load to your server and I feel Google servers are very strong and can cater the ads efficiently.
This was the title for John Chow ‘s Google Adwords Campaign. I was seeing this ad very often on my blog very often and now I see the same from Googlelady.
This is a screenshot from my blog,
Revenue generation from your blog will be your ultimate aim if you are running a blog for money. I have discussed about earning through blogging in my previous posts and different sources of revenue for your blog. How much can you earn from a blog is a question which had different answer for different bloggers depending upon the traffic of the blog and kind of traffic you have.
Google Adsense is the most widely source of advertising tool by most of blogger. But when they start getting sufficient revenue from private sales of ads, they avoid Google Adsense for many reasons. I have noticed that blogger like Darren Rowse, John Chow do not use Google Adsense these days. They started their earning from Google Adsense but now they get very high income from their private sales of Ads and almost all the ad slots are over booked.
I got an invitation for Google Ad manager recently and was just trying to do the settings. I have not yet started using it as I really do not need it. It is has good features, but its not helping me much. I use Google Adsense more on this blog not because I earn more from Google Adsense, but I do not have any private advertiser yet who pays me more than Google Adsense.
Bloggers like Amit Agrawal earns more than US$ 1000 from Google Adsense, so why should we think that earning potential in Google Adsense is less, but Amit’s blog has millions of page views every month, so we cannot expect a big revenue from Google Adsense. Another problem that can happen to your advertising revenue is if your Google Adsense account is banned, what will be your source of revenue if you solely depend on Google Adsense.
My Strategy
I use Google Adsense, and I am trying to get some private advertisers, not looking into the rates much for now. I can offer good discounted price and I have good number or Feed readers now. As my blog statistics improves, I may get good advertisers and good revenue from private sales of Ads.
Other possible revenue is from Affiliate programs and other advertising sites like CJ, Amazon, etc, but all needs conversion and you may not earn anything in the beginning. I also offer paid reviews complying with the Google Webmaster guidelines
So to conclude, Google Adsense can play an important role in your blog’s revenue, stick to it and as your blog traffic grows, you can try for private sales of ads