blogging – Shmooze With Ben

AdSense income dropped?

Unless you are checking your stats regularly then you probably won’t even notice that your income has dropped for a particular site.

Sometimes you will see that it has actually gone down to zero.

The first thing to do is to check your web statistics. You may have installed Google Analytics or another tracking program. If you haven’t then you may automatically have something like AWstats installed.

If your stats are more or less the same, then you need to investigate further why this may be.

Some reasons it may be are:

1. There is an error on one of your pages which is not causing the page to display correctly.

2. Your site has actually been hacked. Ouch.

3. AdSense is no longer displaying on your site. Find out why. Perhaps the site has been banned or perhaps there aren’t ads which are targeted towards the content.

4. You have been hit by Smart Pricing. Not a huge amount that you can do, but are some steps that you can take.

The point really, is to make sure that you do keep an eye on all of your statistics and notice if anything changes. And then adjust as necessary.

Why do I mention this?

I recently noticed that the income on one of my sites that was earning about $15 a day fell to about $5 a day. Consistently.

There were no errors.

And hadn’t been hacked.

What I did notice though, was that AdSense was not being shown on the home page but was on the other pages.

The home page was a list of links to other pages in the site.

What I did, was to add a block of text which was targeted towards a particular topic and within 24 hours, the AdSense is showing again and the income is back up again.

About 10 minutes work for $10 a day ain’t so bad 🙂

Moral: Keeping an eye on your stats and if something changes for the better or for the worse, find out why. It’s not always due to the amount of traffic that is coming.

Two Products I Find Offensive

I have a feeling that this is going to
cause a bit of controversy in the marketplace,
but I need to vent and also think that you
are going to find my vent useful.

If it saves just one person some money, then
that to me makes it worthwhile.

You may expect me to start talking about 1-click
products sold on Clickbank.

But I think that you know about those scams already.

No, there are two kinds of products.

1. Local/Offline Marketing Courses
2. Putting bad quality PLR products on Amazon

The first is because the pitch is that even
though you are not able to properly SEO your
own sites, you are offering this service to
other people knowing that the chances are that
their site will be as successful (or not) as your
own.

The second is because you are just totally
spamming the marketplace and ruining the
marketplace for genuine sellers. In
addition, once someone has purchased from
you, in all likelihood they will never buy
from you again as they feel bad about their
first purchase. Not quite building a business.

Well, wanted to keep this short, but very
interested in what you have to say.

Have a feeling it may get heated, but let
the excitement start 🙂

Please do make a comment below.

Auto Blogging is Dead

Hi,

I received an email the other day from Google where they speak about their policies.

You can see the full blog post at:

http://adsense.blogspot.com/

However, the part which really sums it up is:

“Fact: We don’t allow sites with auto-generated or otherwise unoriginal content to participate in the AdSense program. This is to ensure that our users are benefiting from a unique online experience and that our advertisers are partnering with useful and relevant sites.”

In Google’s usual unspecific way, they have been fairly unclear. However, they have given two different categories of content which they seem to disapprove of.

1. Autogenerated
2. Unoriginal content

The second one does kind of surprise me as much of the internet is unoriginal. For example, the fact that I quoted Google above, does that mean that I can’t have adSense on this blog if I so choose?

At the end of the day, Google themself has been their search engine on the back of content from other websites.

Does this also mean, that you can’t use PLR content?

Before giving you my view, let’s look at the first category, that of autogenerated content.

In my humble opinion, I think that this is fairly clear. They are talking about plagarized content or more specifically Auto Blogs. Now that Google has come out and said it, I would expect many adSense accounts to be closed down if they are earning through autoblogs.

Perhaps I am reading it wrong, but that is how I read what they are saying about autogenerated content.

I think that overall on their blog post, they are giving these two categories of content so that they can cover their bases when they ban accounts.

What I do think is the integral message of their blog post though is that they want the user to have a quality experience.

It has long been known that how long a visitor stays on your site is one of the ranking factors associated with your search engine position. I have a strong feeling that adSense is also going to be measuring that metric to decide if your content is worthy of having adSense on it as an advertising platform.

So, what to do?

1. If I were you, I would stop autoblogging or seperate it out from the rest of your sites that are earning from adSense. In this way, if they do ban your autoblogging account then hopefully your ‘safe’ account will be alright.

2. Concentrate on the user experience more and look at ways of making visitors stay on your site for longer and look at more pages. For example, consider adding video or diagrams which will engage the reader and ensure that they don’t press the back button as soon as they get to you.

We keep on hearing about how adWords has a habit of banning accounts that they don’t consider are giving the surfer the optimum experience. My prediciton for 2011 is that adSense will also start banning accounts.

Would love to read your comment below on how you interpret what Google are saying and what you would do about it.

Keeping it real in an unreal world,

Ben Shaffer

How to spam blog comments

Alright, more a case here of how to effectively write a blog comment.

Below you will see some comments which were recently placed on my last blog post. I am almost sure that 99% if not 100% of the comments were automated.

However, it did make me realize something when I was moderating my comments.

That is, that blog comments are great to get a link back to your website. Whether they are ‘follow’ or ‘no follow’, always useful to have especially if you were going to leave a comment anyway.

However, if you are going to comment on a blog specifically to get a backlink then make sure that you do say something useful other wise it will not be moderated in your favor.

Some bloggers won’t accept comments which are negative. I am not like that at all as long as they are relevant and contribute to the context.

Any blog commenting tips of your own? Please comment below (but nothing spammy 😉 )

Keeping it real in an unreal world,

Ben Shaffer

PS. In my next post, I intend to show you how to add the ‘I Like It’ Facebook widget as you can see at the top of this post. If you WOULD like me to do that, then please ‘like’ this post.

Update

Definitely have a sense of humor, so not sure if it was a joke or no. If it was, then thought it was funny. If it wasn’t then kind of an extra sign 🙂 This appeared as a comment about 5 minutes after making this post (click on the image to see larger):