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Is Syndicating Other People’s Content on Your Blog OK? Posted: 10 May 2008 12:31 AM CDT This weekend I’d like to throw open a couple of discussion starters for the ProBlogger community. The questions come from some of my Twitter followers. flabuless asks the following question to you the ProBlogger community: “Is syndicating content is kosher or not…ie running someone elses content through rss into ones own blog?” This is a particularly important question that I see a variety of opinions on in my travels around the blogosphere. Do you syndicate other people’s content? If so, do you have some standards or guidelines around how you do it? What is your reaction to when you see others doing it to your content? Share This

My Book Arrived! Posted: 09 May 2008 05:05 PM CDT Today there was a little excitement in the Rowse House. On returning from a morning out there was a parcel sitting on our doorstep. On opening it I found: It’s been fun to watch many of you ordering, receiving and even reviewing the ProBlogger book - but it’s a very strange feeling to hold it in your hands after all this time of working on it. While blogging and authoring a book have some pretty similar tasks involved in putting them together - a blog is a fairly intangible thing while our little book is… well it’s something that I can hold. I also think it’s probably going to be useful in explaining what I do to friends and family who don’t quite get it. While I’m on the topic of the book - thanks to those who’ve been reviewing it. If you have the book I’d love to hear your thoughts on it - whether it be as a review on your blog, a review on the Amazon page for it (there’s a few up already) or just a comment below. You might just find your review quoted on the book’s home page if you review it! update - last night was a surreal experience. My wife went to bed at 10pm as she usually does. Two hours later I went to bed expecting to find her asleep and there she was with a cup of tea reading the book! I wish I’d had my camera with me at that moment! For those who know ‘V’ (my wife) you’ll know that she’s not really into blogging - she doesn’t read my blogs at all (apart from when I’m traveling to catch up on what I’m doing and to show my son ‘Daddy’ on my latest video). So to see her reading my book was pretty funny. What surprised me was that she told me that after reading 4 chapters she thought she now ‘got’ blogging. Yep - after all these years of me trying to explain what I do to her I had to write a book so she’d get it! If that doesn’t convince you to buy it - I don’t know what will! Share This

Ad Positioning: Tactics to Increase Your AdSense Earnings Overnight Posted: 09 May 2008 09:09 AM CDT In this series I’m examining tactics that can be used to increase AdSense earnings immediately. Read the introduction to this series here. Today I want to talk about positioning your AdSense ads - something that has a very significant impact upon the amount of money that they are able to earn. I learned this lesson after I’d been using AdSense for some time - I often wish I’d discovered it earlier - because not thinking it through earlier cost me a significant amount of money! My Story of Learning about AdSense Positioning I remember clearly the time that my AdSense earnings almost doubled over night through me simply moving them from one part of my blog to another. Up until the point where I made this discovery my AdSense ads had been largely in a banner position on my blog. I don’t remember my exact reasoning for putting it there but it was probably because that’s where I saw all the big sites doing. My blog’s post pages looked like the diagram to the right. Performance with this positioning was OK - but then again, I didn’t know any different so while I was earning enough on my blog at this point to make a day or two a week of earnings I was blissfully unaware of the potential that my blog had to take me a step closer to going full time as a blogger. I’m not sure of why I decided to experiment with my ad positioning but after a while of positioning my AdSense ads this way I decided to have a ‘play’ with other positions. I began to think about where on my page my readers would give their full attention and decided at the top left hand side of the content area would probably be the most logical position for people to look at a web page (as that’s where they start reading). This was at a time before AdSense brought out their ‘heatmap’ which confirmed that this was a wise move. So late one afternoon I decided to move my ad unit from the banner position to this spot at the top left hand side of my post area. My ads now looked like the diagram to the left. I was actually a little nervous about making this move. What if my earnings went down and I started going backwards? I decided to give the new position a couple of days testing. I could afford to lose earnings for two days but if they didn’t at least match the previous positioning I’d switch it back. That night just before I went to bed I decided to log into AdSense to see what the results were like after a few hours. Imagine my surprise when I saw my CTR 40%! 40% more readers were clicking my ads and this was obviously already impacting my overall earnings! I didn’t sleep too well that night as I realized the power of what I’d discovered. I could potentially see a 40% increase in my earnings with a simple move of my ads. The next morning I awoke earlier and logged into AdSense and found that the CTR was now up by just under 50%. That day I’d increased my earnings enough to dedicate at least another day a week to blogging by simply changing the position of an ad unit! Tips on Ad Positioning Ad positioning is vitally important to the performance of ad units like AdSense. In general - the positions that are ‘hot’ can be seen on the heatmap to the right (this is the official AdSense heatmap which they put together from their own research and observations of where ads work best. You can see how anywhere at the top of content can work best (the brightest orange area) but that in general above the fold and to the left seems to be the ‘hotter areas’. This does vary from blog to blog and there are some specific spots that work best on blogs (I’ll show them below). The key is to try different things and to find what works best on your blog. Further Reading on Ad Positioning: Previously on ProBlogger - Introduction to Advertising Optimization - Ad Position AdSense Help Page - Where should I place Google ads on my pages? Next week I’ll continue this series of tips for increasing your AdSense earnings overnight with the continuation of my own story of learning to use AdSense and some more tactics that took my earnings to even higher levels! Share This

Tactics to Increase Your AdSense Earnings Overnight Posted: 09 May 2008 08:07 AM CDT What would you say if I told you that there are things that many bloggers could do on their blogs that could bring about large increases in their AdSense earnings in 24 hours or less? One of the misconceptions about making money from blogging that is out there is that the best way to increase your blog’s earnings is to increase the traffic to your blog. “Double your traffic and you’ll double your income” I heard one speaker say at a conference earlier in the year. Well that speaker is right…. increased traffic generally does lead to increased advertising income…. but doubling your traffic can be a massive task one that could take months or even years to achieve. Growing readership is something every entrepreneurial blogger needs to be working on as it does help with income levels but… What if there’s a faster way to grow your AdSense earnings? Over the next week I want to look at a few methods of increasing the revenue from AdSense on your blog that can have immediate impact upon earnings. Before We Begin: I should say before I go any further that these won’t work on every blog - if you’ve already optimized your blog well they’ll have less impact - but if you have a blog l like I did a few years ago you could see some significant improvements. These tips will be more basic for some readers than others - so if you consider yourself to be at an advanced level you might want to just scan over the posts (although a refresher can’t hurt). I also should say that these principles don’t just apply to Adsense. The same can be said about Chitika, Shopping Ads, WidgetBucks and other ad networks. Lastly - I want to say that I’m not usually one to use claims like ‘increase your earnings overnight’ - as we all know, blogging for money is a long term thing. However these lessons did have immediate impact upon my own earnings. I had already been blogging for some time - but together what I share increased my own earnings by over 100% very quickly. Stay tuned for Part 1 shortly. Share This

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