I wrote about the mystery of why a few pages on one of my blogs were only showing AdSense public service ads or no ads at all in earlier post, Google Adense Ads Not Showing Up or Appearing as Public Service Ads.
I did report the problem and was pleasantly surprised at ow quickly they fixed. Took them about a week and I thought they would never fix , ignore or fix months from now.
They could give me no reason why the problem happened- this is basically the email I received:
Thanks for your patience. Our team was able to restore the AdSense ads to
your site. I’ve reviewed your pages and verified that ads are up and
running again. Please let me know if there’s anything else I can do.
Thanks for all the suggestions. I wasn’t comfortable with the wait and see if it fixes itself. Time waiting for it to adjust is time not making money and doesn’t cost more than a few minutes to send off an email requesting help.
One of the biggest problem in a downward or stalled economy is the perception. For most people nothing has changed, They have the same job and same mortgage and gas and food prices have been high for a while now.. but all the news and media play to our fears and we “feel” poor. When people feel poor they stop spending and this makes situation worse.
Some say the answer is get people to spend more. It is ironic that CNN and CNBC pundits go on ad nauseum about the horrible worsening economy yet run constant commercials to buy buy buy.
I am actually and advocate of spending less and living simply and think we have become as a society victims of our own success.
Yuppies and DINKS had kids and wanted to keep all their toys and jobs. Parents a work means money for daycare and low paying day care jobs and parent guilt which lead to parents spending $500.00 on video consoles and yearly trips is Disney World.
I suppose that is a whole other post but now we have ended up in a crappy economy and are starting to pick up the cheque for the free lunches of the past 10 years or so.
At any rate- what does this mean to ME?
Why Have My AdSense Earning Gone Down?
My AdSense earnings are not meeting my projected targets. My CTR seems a little low and EPC also down.
AdSense is so tricky and hard to figure what exactly is the actual problem. Are my blog boring and readership down? More people know how to implement SEO on their bogs and websites and more people going after the same pie?
I can use analytics to figure most of it out and from my numbers nothing much has changed and my conclusion is that ADWords ads are costing less because people are spending less on advertising. For some reason in any kind of a cash crisis small businesses will slash their advertising budgets first.
This is the time of year when my AdSense ads will start to go though the roof with all those Christmas dollars waiting to be spent. I think Advertisers are frightened no on is buying or will buy and are hedging their bets and waiting to see what happens in the coming weeks.
I have still not had a response from Google. I ha identified 5 pages on one of my sites where Google Adsense Ads have been replaced by Public Service ads or no ads at. there are about 1500 pages on the blog with problem and the 5 pages that are not showing ADSense ads have related terms. They are all about the same topic. which see,s too much to be a coincidence. I am suspecting that the pages MAY have been mistakenly banned because of keyword stuffing. This seems to be the only thing that can make sense. If it we something going with scripts on my pages would be on wider variety of pages and not just on the 5 that deal with a single particular topic.
I am going to have to find out if the pages have been “banned” from Adsense. I would have thought that if one page was bad they would pull on the ads. I am having trouble finding out what exactly are the repercussion of a banned page and if a whole site is affected or not.
I have been toying with idea of just adding a redirect and putting pages on new URL within the blog. I am also not sure if by “fixing” the page it will automatically be “unbanned” or if I have to manually request or submit.
I am annoyed because I have done nothing wring and don’t; want to fix a age that isn’t broken. I also don’t want to further tick Google off.
ARGH..
I may just ignore for a few days and see if Google ever gets back to me and let them tell me best way to solve problem.
The term is bit vulgar - I apologize. This is a term I use when I take a very popular post on a blog and completely pimp it out to squeeze every once of money and value out of it.
There may be better or more effective ways to do it but this is how my mind works and how I get from point A to depositing a cheque in the bank.
To Pimp Out Your Blog Posts
You MUST ave a popular blog with good, solid traffic and lots of quality content. If your blog is new or you don’t have many posts or readers then you will piss people off. You are taking a popular post and totally prostituting it so you better have some quality stuff surrounding it if you want to maintain credibility.
If your blog is new and you dont have a lot of good content- stop reading now and come back in a few months,
Figure out What ARE your most Popular Posts.
These change day to day depending on news and season. I generally just use something like Daily Top 10 plugin for wordpress You can also see what’s going on using Mybloglog or any analytics program. You basically want posts with lots of traffic. This method will also work very well on “Best Blah Blah Lists”, for example “Best Christmas Albums for Jazz Lovers” I may set this up as a test on the site a report back on result despite it not being a popular post (yet).
What Kids of Posts Work Well for Monetizing:
-Product posts work very well. This is why “top” or “best” lists work very well. I may have a popular post on how to stop page rank bleeding but will not get me a great return on any products. This is why if you are going to create “make money blogging” type site forget about the making any money part .
Take a look at your existing popular posts and see if there is a way to include products on the post- software? electronic something? tool? equipment? Beef up the post if you can with mentions of tools or utilities you use. Don’t be obvious about it- only add the info if it enhances the post.
Pimp Out Your Post
Throw every things you got at it -in an intelligent way.
1. Google Adsense - The Best Ad Size to Use for Highest CTR
What is the best Google ad size to use?
The BEST ad to use for Google Adsense HANDS DOWN no questions asked when you want a high click though rate is the 336×280 square. It is in your face but it does work. I wold not wrap your text if you to maximize. The first thing your reader should see when then land on your page is that ad- above the fold and preferably in the middle of the page.
2. Amazon Widgets
- I use a slideshow. I use the biggest size that will fit on my blog. I select 5-16 related products. Using my ” Best Christmas Albums for Jazz Lovers” scenario I would have in my slideshow all the albums listed and then some.
Place this bedside or under your large Adsense rectangle. Don’t embed it in your post. You want these ads above or as close to above the fold as possible.
Amazon recently added a widget for users to to listen to mp3’s- for this kind of post I would ad at the end of post and use some sort of call to action that will get them to listen, Like-” this is my favourite cut off the album- listen to it and tell me what you think” etc.
For the truly aggressive you could offer a contest or promotion and have readers write a review, or a post on their blog about a favorite memory that one of song invokes.
Add product images. If a long-ish post add some product images. Breaking up paragraphs create visual interest. Do NOT go too big and by all means embed and wrap into post text.
Text Affilate Links- Commission Junction, Amazon, etc.
Make sure you link your products to affiliates . I prefer Amazon for lots of reasons. I do a bit with Commission Junction for the really niche products . In a text link embedded in a post I rarely leave the anchor text untouched. I will edit to make it sound more natural and I almost always add nofollow tags.
You can also try linking to presell pages. Link to other posts on your site that review or describe the product in more detail and that pages links to affiliate.
Use Your Posts Popularity to Boosts Other Pages
Use your popular posts to encourage visitors to visit other related post that might be buried. A plugin like Related Posts is limited. With the ‘Best Christmas Jazz list” you could also mention in post that you have a list of “Best Fathers Day Gifts for Audiphiles” or whatever the season dictates.
Popular posts also are a good way to get readers to subscribe to your feed and newsletter- Make sure you are using call to action and not mamby pamby wording.
What NOT to Do to your Popular Posts
Don’t sacrifice integrity of your blog for some quick and easy money on a few pages. I do this to 10-20 pages on a blog where I have all ready established myself to my readers. My blogs are not littered with affiliate ads in sidebar and header. I will say this again you will PISS OFF readers if you do this to all your pages and lose all credibility .
Do not over sell a product or give too much information- This is directly opposite to the idea of linking to a pre-sell page where you go into greater detail about book/product/service. It is a bit fo trial and error.
If I use a popular post to links to pre-sell page then the person who follow the link is all ready pretty intersted and the pre-selll page can tip them over to buy the item. Sometimes.
Mentioning product in a post without giving away too much information may encourage reader to click on the affiliate link and a cookie is dropped and you will get cut of whatever they buy within a time period i.e Amazon is 24 hours and other affiliates can be as long as 30 days. There is no right answer on which is best- it is situational and you will have to test.
I will say during Christmas season getting a reader to click on affiliate link when buying trends are high is more effective then trying to “sell” one specific product.
You can really maximize a popular blog post and drive up its revenue by being aggressive with Google ads and affiliate links. It takes careful balance not to turn off your reader and should be handled with care.
If you want ideas for specific site then feel free to post site info in comments section.
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