Create multiple 125 x 125 Image Ads for your blog using Google Ad Manager

I just finished setting up my ads for this blog using Google Ad Manager. Its very simple, and I would like to share this with my readers.

First you need to activate your Google Ad Manager Account, every Google Adsense account has Google Ad Manager enabled by default now, so just login to your Ad Manager Account.

Create Your Ad Slots

Suppose your are planning to to display 4 125 x 125 px image ads, you need to create 4 Ad-slots. For this you need to go to the inventory tab of your Ad Manager and click on “Create New Ad Slot”. Give a name like I have given the name “Asokans_125×125_1” for my first Ad Slot. You can give any name which is meaningful. Please note that there should not be any space in the Ad Slot name. Next select the size as 125 x 125 , next you should uncheck the Adsense Ads. You should also enter a description for the Ad Slot.

Follow the same procedure and create another 3 Ad Slots in the similar way, namely, Asokans_125×125_1Asokans_125×125_2, Asokans_125×125_3, Asokans_125×125_4 with the same settings, except the description.

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Google Ad manager for all Adsense users

Google yesterday announced that Google Ad Manager is enabled for all Google Adsense users. Earlier Ad Manager was only open through invitation. Google ad manager is useful if you are selling ads directly to your advertisers. The advantage is that if you do not have any ads booked for a particular slot or if the advertisement booked is expired then Google Adsense Ads will be displayed automatically if you enable this feature. Other biggest advantage is that you will be using a hosted ad manager on the Google server which should me reliable and your server does not need to bear the load of traffic. I had been using OpenX for a while but this was really slowing down my site. Now I am using Google Ad Manager as I had got an invitation for this earlier in March 2008.

If you have a Google Adsense account, you can sign-in here or you need to apply for a Google Adsense Account

Monetize your video posts with Blip.TV

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.

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Will Google Adsense Work for your blog?

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.

Now how is this related to my blog Adsense CTR?

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

Google Adsense Vs Private sales of Ads

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.

Which one should you choose?

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

How different bloggers earn money from their blog

You know what is a blog and there are many people earning good from their blog. How do they earn so much money and why can’t you earn as they earn. This may the question that might be moving around you. Well, we need to check how do they earn so much of money and can we adopt these techniques or tricks.

Let me give your some clear and common fact these bloggers follow

Time and Age of their blogs

This is something you need to think. How long have you been blogging sincerely? How much time do you spend for your blog. How much posts do you do everyday?

If you are blogging once in a while, forget about earning, If you are busy with your daily work or your full time job and you are not able to make blogging as a high priority task, then its difficult to earn. If you have just started blogging, then hold on and carry on, it takes some time to get good traffic, loyal visitors, improve your bounce rate, improve your search engine ranking, branding yourself, high Google pagerank, good number of subscribers, creating news letters, all these take its own time.

John Chow earns money tell people how much he earns, this is really interesting. He has good number of subscribers, had good pagerank, heavy back links, and he has good number of advertisers. Can you imagine, he charges US$ 500 to write a paid review. He made this happen after he was working hard for some time. His blog is now more than 2 year old.

Darren Rowse says he earned very less from Google Adsense, which was just US$ 400,000. Can you even imagine to earn this from your blog? Yes you can earn, but let me tell you Darren started blogging in 2002, its now about 6 years. So you need to wait to reach some heights. These are the people who made people realize that you can earn money through blogging and you do not need to sell anything.

Amit Agrawal the first Indian Professional blogger earns around US$ 1000 from Google Adsense and he knows how to maximize Google Adsense Revenue. He has a technology blog where he posts information which are really worth reading and you will find all his posts with great information. I read his blog every day. He has been blogging since 2004

All these bloggers generate revenue from different affiliate programs and advertising program. They get paid because they have loyal visitors, good traffic. Traffic is the power which really monetize your blog and for traffic you need good posts, and keep your blog fresh with new posts consistently

Monetize your blog with Feedburner

I have been using feedburner to burn my blog feeds and manage subscriptions. One of the features of Feedburner is to monetize your blog using Google Adsense. You can now integrate Google Adsense with Feedburner to serve ads to your blog subscription as you may be aware that Feedburner is acquired by Google

Login to your Feedburner Account

Select the blog for which you would like to display ads

Select the Monetize Tab

If you are using Wordpress, select word press from the drop down menu, you will get a code and the instruction to paste the code to your wordpress template

You are done

Google Says NO to Google Adsense Ad Blending

I had done a post related to Google Adsense Ad Blending last week. After that I was doing some research on the controversy of Ad Blending to find out more information. It is strange that Google had advised the Adsense users to Blend the ads according to the theme of the webpage and now its telling, its against the guidelines.

I am bit annoyed with this as when they have provided us with the option to adjust the color and we can make is more like a part of the blog. I do understand that Google Adsense is alive only if Google Adwords is live and for the interest of the Advertisers Google needs to take some steps to keep the advertisers happy. I am also a Google Adwords user and many times I avoid ads to be displayed to the content network.

If we blend the ads and make it in a way that the visitor is not able to understand which are advertisements and which are internal links, then its like making the visitors click on the ads by mistake and may not even return back to our site. To do this I have added an heading as sponsors to the the Google Ads.

To conclude, we can blend our ads, but in a way that the visitor is aware that he is clicking on the ads and not links on the web page and this is what Google wants us to do. They don’t want us to place the ads in a way that it looks like its links inside the blog or website.

Recommended Reading

• Adsense Blog
• SEO Round Table

Blending Google Adsense to your blog

After doing some changes on the template of this blog, I was working on optimising my Google Adsense Ads placement and did some blending work. So what is this blending work. Now a days what happens is most of the visitors are seeing these Google Adsense ads on every web page and they know about these ads well. What we need to do is to blend these ads and make it a part of our blog. Google adsense ads should not be separated from our blog. I did some blending work by modifying the sidebar links using CSS. The ads I created on Google Adsense is according to the color scheme of my blog theme and the links I have created in way that really blends with the Google Adsense Ads.

I am just experimenting it and will come out with the change in click through rate. Just have a look at the image on the right, which is of my sidebar, this includes Google ads as well as my recent post links. I have also added a block of Google ads inside the content page, which floats on the top left side of each post. The interesting part of Google adsense is it serves relevant ads and ads which are related to the post. By using this method the chances of increasing the click through rate is good.

Even you should try using image ads, which are good for increasing your Google adsense revenue.

While writing your CSS style please make sure that you test it both on Internet explorer and Firefox as both are popular browsers and widely used. There are some problems with Internet explorer and shows funny views for some CSS scripts.

According to the Google terms and conditions

1. Ads shouldn’t be placed under a title or section heading in a way that implies that the ads are not ads.
For example, ads shouldn’t be placed under titles such as “Dallas Business Opportunities” or “Today’s Hot Deals”. Placing ads directly below titles such as these implies to your users that the links in the ads are publisher-created content. The example below shows a placement that does not follow this guideline.

2. Ads should be easily distinguishable from surrounding content.
Similarly, you should not place an ad unit by a group of links that has identical colors and line spacing. Doing so may cause users to think the ad unit is content created by you. In this situation, we recommend using a different color for the ad titles or indenting the ad unit to help distinguish the ads from your own content. This screenshot shows an implementation that does not follow this guideline:

Google adsense is one of the best revenue generator for your blog if you use it wisely

To comply with the terms and condition of we have placed a heading as sponsor and separated from the group

Earning from Adsense using others traffic

Google Adsense is a revenue tool for webmasters and bloggers who get paid for the clicks generated. Some clicks bring you 0.01 cents and some more than a 1$. You should have noticed that earning for Google Adsense is very less and it takes long time to get your first check. As I mentioned in my previous post, I got my first check after 6 months. If you try something against the guidelines, then your Google Adsense account is surely banned. Most of the Adsense users do not even get paid for even compensating the hosting charges, so how can you get some earning from Google Adsense.

You need traffic, which is very difficult when you start a blog. You need to do miracles to get traffic instantly when you launch your website, or you need to depend of programs like Google Adwords, which will prove costly and be sure you will not get even half the money you invest for your campaign. Never depend on the earnings from Google Adsense for your new blog or website.

What to be done to get earnings without having traffic on your own blog?

Use some others website, who has traffic. Insert your Google Adsense code to a website which is old and has good traffic. Yes, I am not kidding, you can do that. I am not telling you to hack other website and get your Adsense code in. There are many Adsense Revenue Sharing Sites where you can add your Adsense ID and get earnings as per the Google Adsense Guidelines and its acceptable and its working well.

Just adding your Google Adsense ID will not get you earnings, you need to go through the working procedure of the particular program and work accordingly. Some websites like IndianPad, Pollo, Indian citizens, need to add pages and you get your Adsense code to work when your page is viewed. Sites will good traffic will have more page view and you can surely earn from that.

In this post, I would like to highlight about Indian Citizen’s website, where you can join for free and add pages related to Indian Citizens and get the revenue share. This site has good traffic and the site is heavily promoted.

Join Indian Citizens and start earning