How to maximize your adsense revenue

As I have described in my previous posts that Google Adsense is the best program for new blogs and the set up is very simple. You do not need to deal with the advertisers directly buy Google adsense serves ads to your blog your website. Google has two programs which connects advertisers to publishers. Google Adwords is a program for advertisers and Google Adsense is a program for publishers or webmasters. Advertisers buy ads and pay for it and Google servers these ads to publishers through Google Adsense.

Most of the publishers find that the revenue generated from Google adsense is not even enough to pay their hosting charges, but there are many website owners / pubishsers who earn good from this program

Factors deciding the revenue for Google Adsense

1. Traffic
2. Ad placement
3. Ad styling
4. Quality content
5. High paying keywords
6. Ad Sizes

Traffic

Traffic is the most important factor that effects your Google Adsense revenue. If you do not have much traffic, the do no expect much revenue. You get paid only for the clicks that are generated from the ads placed using the Google Adsense code. If you do no have good number of visitors then there will be less clicks and the revenue will be very low. You can even earn from Adsense using others traffic using adsense revenue sharing portals. I have given some tips to increase your increase your traffic in my earlier posts.

Ad Placement

Ad placement is very important for increase your Google Adsense revenue. You have the flexibility to place the Google adsense ads at places where you want to keep. You should place the ads in way that they are visible to your visitors. The biggest advantage of Google Adsense is that it shows ads relevant to the content of the page.

Ad Styling and right format

You can place different kinds of ads like text ads, image ads, linked units with different sizes. You also have the flexibility to style your ads. You should create the ads which look natural with the content. You need to blend the ads into your pages so that the visitors do not feel that they are going to click on any ads

Quality Content

Before even thinking of placing ads on your blog, you should have good content which should make your blog attractive to the visitors. Do not make people think that your blog is just a MFA site.

High Paying keywords

If you have used Google adwords, you should be knowing how much does a keyword bid goes. If you have content which has topic / content which has keywords with high value, then the payment for such clicks are very high. If you have checked the reports of your Google Adsense earnings, you may find that the pay rate for every click is different. I am using Google adsense in different websites and every website has different content. Some websites fetch me more than US$ 1.00 per click and some clicks, just less than US$ 0.02. There are many websites giving information about highly paid keywords which you can find by Googling. I do not want to go in details of that as its against the Google Terms and conditions

Ad Sizes

There is option to get different sizes of ads. I have found ads with size 300 x 250 gives good click through rate again that depends on the layout of your blog. You should select the right Ad size for your blog and go through the Adsense revenue sharing reports ad decide the best and try different ad sizes.

These are few tips that should boost your Google Adsense revenue. I would like to remind you that you should always work according to the terms and conditions of Google adsense and never try to get more earnings by clicking on your own ads or ask anybody to click on the ads or you will get your Google adsense account banned. You can even earn from Google Adsense using Revver if you have Video posts and Google Adsense revenue sharing portals are other way to maximize your google adsense income.

Managing your affiliate links in Wordpress

You may have joined different affiliate programs and you may need to use your affiliate links to promote your affiliate program. Very often we need to refer to our emails or login to the affiliate control panel to find our our affiliate link. This is something time consuming and we may even not bother to do this many times. I always use windows live writer to do all my blog post and it has a Glossary feature, which I use to store my affiliate links. But again I need to do this manually and this is sometimes not working for me. I was thinking of some plugin for wordpress which could store all my affiliate links with some keywords which I use in my posts so that when ever I use these keywords, the links are created automatically with the target URL to my affiliate page.

I came across an excellent product which does all I want and its so simple to manage called WP Affiliate Pro.

Advantages of WP Affiliate Pro

• Add 1000’s of Affiliate Links
• Easy Installation
• Decide how many times the links should be created
• Monitor the performance with click tracking
• No need to know HTML or PHP
• Customize colour and style of your links

Purchase WP Affiliate Pro

Withdraw your PayPal funds to your Indian Bank Account

There are many Indians who are reluctant to use Paypal as they have problem getting the real cash from their Paypal account. I recently got all my Paypal money transferred to my account Axis Bank Account using this feature in just 4 days time. I got good conversion rate too. You need to set up your bank account details for this. You will also need the IFSC code of your bank which you can find on the cheque book of your account.

First you need to go to your PayPal account

Once you login, you will see the link “Withdraw” Just click that and go to the next page

In the image shown below, just click on the “Withdraw funds to your bank acount”

Enter the Amount that you want to withdraw and select the bank account. I have a bank account already selected so I see a drop down list which I can select from or I can add a new account

For adding a new account, just select the bank. The banks which are accepted for this are

HBSC BankYou need to enter your account number and the IFSC code of your bank, which you can find on the check leaf or you can get it from you bank

Thats it, in next 4-7 days, the money is in your bank

This is real money business. If you do not have a Paypal Account, just sign-up for a free account

How to manage organize your affiliate programs

I have signed up for many affiliate programs and I often get confused with the login information, login URL etc. When you have a blog, one of the biggest income generator other than private sales of ads is affiliate program. For example, I am an affiliate of Shaadi.Com and I did a post to promote few days back. I am an affiliate of different affiliate programs and to keep track of the earnings, promotion, banners are difficult if things are not organized well.

Ok let me explain to you, how I manage all these things. I am bit choosy while signing up for affiliate programs so I am not having much to manage, but I do it in an organized way. I will be in a stage when I will be promoting many affiliate programs using my blog and the traffic to my blog.

Tools I use for managing the affiliate programs and private sales of advertisements

Advertisements - I do sell advertisement space other than using Google Adsense. I have good number of websites with enough traffic. I am happy to say  that my traffic is growing everyday and I am working hard on that. 85% of my traffic are from search engines and some from referring sites. I have a very small budget for advertisements  and I usually use Google Adwords.

Let me come to the point now, to manage my Advertisers, I use OpenAds, hosted on my dedicated server and its working fine. I sell space on CPM basis and the advertiser need to buy minimum 10,000 impressions and the ads run till the purchased impressions are over. In fact I have already applied for an invitation for Google Ad Manager, if I get an account, the I could try that. The advantage of using Google Ad Manager will the the efficiency in delivering ads.

Affiliate Programs - To manage my affiliate programs, I again use openads. The ads are rotated along with other paid ads and I get to make some income from my the affiliate programs which I promote. I also have my in house ads running along with these paid ads.

I create a campaign for each affiliate program I promote and add up all the information about the program to the campaign details. I may have different login details for different affiliate programs, so to avoid any confusions, I keep these information updated in the comments column of the campaign.

In this way, by using OpenAds, now known as openX, is good and efficient. There are lots of reporting tools available which can help you in monitoring the performance of your ads and affiliate programs.

OpenX is a opensource program, which can be downloaded for free.

How to market your blog with email signatures

I have been explaining different methods to market your blog and get some traffic for free. Just check how many emails do you send every day? Why don’t you use these emails that you sent to your clients to do some selling other than the content of the emails. Yes we can do that by adding an email signature to each mail that you send out. Every time when the recipient of your email gets your email, there will be a small text with a link to your blog web page. There are some chances that the recipient of that email may visit your blog. Its good to try it as you do not have anything to lose or you do not need to pay anybody

How to create an email signature?

You should not create big email signatures. A perfect email signature can be of 5-6 lines. I suggest to do as mentioned below

1. Your name
2. Your company name or blog name
3. URL of your blog
4. Your email ID
5. A short message or an advertisement text
6. Your phone number

Every email client has the feature to create email signature. You can create either as a plain text one or an html email signature with colours and images. You can mention some interesting features or your blog or if you have an offer, just mention it in the advertisement text. Suppose you give off some free e-books, you can mention that. You can also use email signatures in your profile for any forum or discussions. You can imagine how many visitors will visit such kind of forums and if your post is something different there are chances that the reader click on your blog URL and visit your blog. This is a sort of free traffic for your blog. Such visitor can even turn as your regular reader or even a customer if you are selling something.

How to create an email signature with outlook client?

I use MS outlook to read and send my emails.

Its very simple, go to Tools->Option and in that mail format, you will find the signature button. Create a signature and save it. You can find more information about creating an email .So to conclude, you should use email signatures with each and every email that you send out as its free advertisement and you do not have to do anything extra other than creating one. I would also suggest to keep changing your signatures periodically so that your email signature looks fresh and do some marketing for you.

Suggested Reading

• Creating an email signature

Do you have a question? I will be pleased to answer it or if you feel the above post has something lacking, you should comment on it.

How to create traffic by commenting on other blogs

You have a blog and you need traffic. Commenting on other blogs which are related to your blog is a good practice, provided you do it in the right way. Commenting on other blog, exposes your blog URL to others and help you in getting some traffic for your blog, but not back links as most of the comment forms are with “rel=nofollow tag“.

How to write a comment

Select the blog

Select the blogs that you would really like to comment upon. The best way is to subscribe to RSS feeds using at RSS reader like Google Reader. Spend some time to read the posts everyday and using a reader to read the posts is same like reading your emails. You should be aware of the blog, visitors, author of the blog that you regularly read and understand the post well.

Read others comment

Before you comment, just read the other comments posted on the blog post

Comment Uniquely

You should write a comment which should be something different from other comments. Just do not comment something which is already posted by some other visitor. You comment should attract the other visitors and they should react to your comment. Your comment should be something which the author should respond or the other visitors should comment upon. You should have good knowledge of what your are commenting and you should do some research on the topic of the post and if you can find something contradicting or something which is not correct, then that can really make your comment the best comment. If the author or other visitor or cementers reply to your comment, then you should surely reply to them also.

Other important factor that I would like to stress upon is to keep your name consistent in the Name field so that you get noticed and popular

Advantages of commenting on other blog posts

There are many advantages of commenting on other blog posts

1. You get noticed
2. Your Blog get noticed
3. You may get regular visitors or subscribers for your blog
4. You become a part of the blogging community and get popular
5. Your blog posts get more traffic and back links if your posts are worth it

All these are real ethical way of generating traffic and marketing your blog. I do this and I have got good, loyal and returning visitors from this method.

Don’ts

1. Do not just post comment like,very good post
2. Do not post more than 2 links as wordpress by default marks such comments as spam
3. Do not comment something which is not related to the post
4. Do not post bad or de-motivating comments
5. Use correct spelling, grammar
6. Do not just go randomly to some blogs and post a one line comment, very good post, I like the post

I am sure that if you regularly comment keeping these tips in mind, you can surely make use of the commenting feature of the blogging world. After all blogging is interaction and building community.