Insight

It seems like Google’s AdSense is the number one way most bloggers start making money on their websites when they get started, and certainly my blogging experience is no exception. Adsense makes it really easy to get relevant ads on a blog quickly and efficiently.

How Does It Work?

Basically it is a contextual advertising program which lets bloggers simply add a piece of code to their site and then Google serves ads based on the content of the page. So if you have a site about songwriting, the ads displayed will almost always be relevant to that topic. Why is this a good thing? Because it increases the chance that a user will click on the ad - as opposed to just putting up a static banner or something that has nothing to do with the content of your site.

Every time a user clicks on an ad - you get money.

AdSense has tons of other tools for bloggers and web publishers to make money, including a referral program where you can recommend Google tools and services. If people sign up for the services you get a commission - ranging from a few pennies to several dollars per “sign up”.

AdSense currently pays my mortgage every month. Granted it took me about 10 months of serious blogging to get to the point where I could make that claim - but I love essentially living mortgage free for about 5 hours of blogging each week.

Naturally AdSense is something I would highly recommend to any blogger as they are getting started.

If you haven’t already, you can sign up for Google AdSense using the following button:

BoxesandArrows has a great article about the lingering myth that important content (and even effective advertising) needs to remain above the fold. This is based on the author’s real world experience at AOL. A few nuggets:

On even being able to determine wherever the actual “fold” is:

In the ClickTale study, the three highest fold locations were 570, 590 and 600 pixels – apparently from different browsers running on 1024×768 screens. But the overall distribution of fold locations for the entire study was so varied that even these three sizes together only account for less than 26% of visits. What does all this mean? If you pick one pixel location on which to base the location of the fold when designing your screens, the best-case scenario is that you’ll get the fold line exactly right for only 10% of your visitors.

On the lingering pervasiveness of this myth:

And why? Because people think users don’t scroll. Jakob Nielsen wrote about the growing acceptance and understanding of scrolling in 1997, yet 10 years later we are still hearing that users don’t scroll.

Final thoughts:

Stop worrying about the fold. Don’t throw your best practices out the window, but stop cramming stuff above a certain pixel point. You’re not helping anyone. Open up your designs and give your users some visual breathing room. If your content is compelling enough your users will read it to the end.

Tons of great information in this detailed and realistic article. Check it out.

I decided this morning that I would run some Y! Publisher Network ads on some of my smaller sites just to get used to the interface and inventory selection before I decide to run any on some of my larger sites.

So I logged into my Yahoo! Publisher account and this is what I was greeted with:

Okay, so I need to clear that up I guess. There are no other options on the screen so they must be innately interested in me getting paid. I’m all for that so I click through to the payment screen:

In case you can’t read that, it says, “The Payment Options page is locked from the 19th to the 24th of each month. Please come back an other time to change your payment options.”

What the hell? I click back to Publisher Home and still get the payment prompt. I am locked in an endless dead loop with no hope of getting to anywhere that I can configure ads and serve them on my sites.

OK. Google still gets my business.

Score
Google: 1
Yahoo: 0

Now that I have just about finished porting all my blogs over to Wordpress from Movable Type, they go ahead and launch a Beta MT product that actually looks pretty cool.

Here are some quotes from TechCrunch:

The new version of Movable Type is a radical departure from previous versions.

MT4 includes more than 50 new features including a new installation and upgrade wizard, easier and more powerful template management tools that speed site development, all new default templates and themes, and a completely redesigned user interface focused on streamlining common tasks.

MT4 as social media platform allows users to turn their readers into communities through Movable Type’s new community management features, with the ability to give users the right to post, add and share rich text and media posts with photos, videos, and audio. MT4 also includes a new ratings framework that enables a variety of recommendation features.

Scalability is dramatically improved with built in support for database caching through Data::Object Driver and Memcached, incorporating technology that powers Vox, LiveJournal and TypePad, as well as Web 2.0 sites including AOL, Microsoft, Digg, Wikipedia, Craigslist and Facebook.

I might leave my last blog Movable Type and use it as an excuse to really test this new version. Check out the TechCrunch article for screenshots and so forth.

The place to keep track of all things web-related as well as candid insight ino running an independant Internet consulting company.