Caydel’s SEO Blog

According to Silicon.com, Google sent out an email to 50,000 subscribers of the Google Video Blog containing the W32/Kapser.A@mm virus, better known as the ‘Kama Sutra’ virus. This virus raised some concern in February when it began to appear in the wild, often disguised as pornographic materials. It works by waiting with no side effects, until a specific date and time arrives when it overwrites key system files.

Later, a note was posted to the Google Video Blog saying, “Some of these posts may have contained a virus called W32/Kapser.A@mm - a mass-mailing worm.” Further, Google has  suggested that readers run antivirus programs to remove the virus  from their systems.

I wonder if Google is at some type of liability as a result of this incident. I can just see somebody suing Google for a massive virus infection soon!

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So, now you’ve decided that you want to monetize your blog. Additionally, now you’ve set your goals. You know where you are, and you know where you want to be. Now you have to decide how you want to get there.

There are a variety of different options out there to monetize your traffic, each with lesser or greater amounts of intrusion upon yourself, your visitors and your ethics. I will give a quick rundown of some of the different options available to you.

Google Adsense

Google Adsense is the ‘typical’ text-based ads that you see on most sites. You are generally paid a cost of $0.01 - $5 per click, depending on the keywords on your blog. You can run image or text ads on your site.
Adbrite

Adbrite offers a variety of different methods to monetize your traffic. You can run network ads similar to the Google Adsense program, as well as allow advertisers to purchase ads on your site directly. This type of ad is paid either daily, weekly or monthly. They also offer interstitial ads.

Performancing Partners Network

The Performancing Partners Ad Network is a newer program which allows you to sell 125×125px graphical advertisements on your site. The slots are sold on a monthly basis.

PayPerPost

PayPerPost is a network aimed at bloggers, which gives the bloggers the chance to review or write a post for an advertiser. These offers typically pay $1-$20 per opportunity.

Please note that you should research your options thoroughly prior to choosing your programs. The information given above is merely to give you an idea of what’s out there.

To monetize this blog, I chose to work with Adbrite and the Performancing Partners Ad Network. I made this decision since in my prior experience, i have found that the payouts from Google Adsense are generally fairly small for blogs, with low click prices and click through rates. I rejected PayPerPost because I have no desire to do paid posts; while I am interested in advertising on this blog, I do not want my content influenced by too many outside factors.

The benefit common to Adbrite and Performancing is that both programs allow me to sell ad slots myself. They both allow me to control the prices of the ad spots I sell. Additionally, they are paid on a weekly or monthly basis, rather than by traffic. Because of this I can leverage the fact that since a blog is made up of many repeat readers, even if an ad is not clicked, it still has strong branding potential with the blog readers.

A large factor to consider is how the ads will work within your layout. I found that the Performancing ads work well within my sidebar, and the flexible unit size in Adbrite allowed me to create a large unit on the right side of my screen that may contain a larger number of ads.

Placing Your Ads

Placement of your ads is very important for them to have the maximum effect and monetary return. Rather than cover this (exhausted) topic myself, let me refer you to one of the best resources for ad palcement information. Please see Google’s ‘Blogtimize - Optimize the ads on your blog‘.

Conclusion

Research the programs above, and decide how you want to advertise. For the rest of the series, I will mainly focus on Adbrite and Performancing, since they are the programs I am using, although I will make some reference back to Google Adsense.

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Before starting any project, the first, most important step is to set some goals. Since you are reading this, it is logical to assume that you want to start making some money from your blog. This is a good starting place when developing our goals.

• I want to make some money from my blog.

Now, let’s send some basic questions to define our goal. For example, how much money do you want to make? These numbers should reflect your traffic to a certain amount to ensure that your goals are obtainable. Perhaps an extreme example, but hoping to make $1000 per day on your blog that gets only 20 visitors per day is not easily obtainable. For example, a blog with low traffic (<100 uniques per day) may hold the following goal:

• I want to make $100 per month from my blog.

That’s a good start. But a goal should consist of both a what and a when. So far, we have the what, but we need to set a when. Without a time frame to work in, it may be difficult to reach all your goals within a reasonable time

• I want to make $100 per month from my blog by the end of two months

This is a reasonable goal. But what are you going to do when you get there? Are you just going to rest on your laurel and just let your blog take care of itself? Of course not. Set a few more goals, so you know where you want to go.

• I want to make $100 per month from my blog by the end of two months
• I want to make $300 per month from my blog by the end of four months
• I want to make $600 per month from my blog by the end of six months
• I want to make $1200 per month from my blog by the end of one year

Once again, I want to stress that you should adjust your goals to match your traffic levels, keeping in mind that as you develop your blog, your traffic will only grow. At the same time, don’t be afraid to be optimistic - optimism will just mean you have to work a little harder. As with all things, blogging is all about getting a return on the work you put into it.

Hopefully, you now have a rather complete set of goals to achieve. In the next post in this series, we will look at developing a strategy to conquer those goals.

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You have a blog, and you want to make some money off of it. Ok, fair enough. You, and 20 million other bloggers have the same dream. In fact, I share that dream with you. So, I have decided to write a ‘Monetize Your Blog’ series as a bit of a learning process for myself, as well as to provide a resource for anyone else who wants to follow in my footsteps. As it is said, why re-invent the wheel?

As it stands, the information within this series will be blog-oriented, but you should be able to take the basic concepts from what I have written here, and apply them to your own site, no matter what type of site it is. Right up front, I want to make sure everyone knows that I welcome questions, comments, and suggestions. in fact, they are encouraged.

Game Plan

Now, there is no point in even starting a project like this without some sort of a game plan. So, to give you a sneak preview into what you expect, here is the series as I envision it:

1. Introduction
2. Set Your Goals
3. Select Your Advertising Programs
4. Creating House Ads
5. Creating an Ad Sales Page
6. Optimizing Your Ad Company’s Copy
7. Estimating and Setting Your Initial Price
8. Attracting Advertisers
9. Summary and Results

Of course, this will be subject to change as we go on. I may encounter issues and subjects which should be touched upon, or I may take a post to answer questions or comments.

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As I wrote earlier, I have been re-included back into Technorati, which is great. I am getting lots of traffic from them, and a few comments and links I otherwise wouldn’t have. I’ve also noticed another major surprise - autoblogs are now grabbing my posts from Technorati tag RSS feeds, which may lead to duplicate content and link devaluation problems.

The Good

Well, I may as well start on a positive note. By picking up my posts from Technorati, these auto blogs (linked examples) are giving me a bunch of backlinks I otherwise wouldn’t have had. Additionally, I have been getting the odd bit of traffic from these blogs, although people coming from these blogs don’t always seem to stick around. There are some up sides to the fact that I am getting syndicated all over creation.

The Bad

Of course, it is a bit of a downside that many of the auto-blogs are syndicating my content without any attribution of authorship, or anything to note that these are not original. This annoys me - I don’t care if people quote me to high heaven in their posts. Or, even quote the post whole-sale. But most real people have the courtesy to attribute what they borrowed from me. These auto blogs don’t even do that.

The Ugly

And wait, it gets worse. I am wondering to a certain degree how this will interact with the Google duplicate content filter. From what I know of the dupe filter, Google assumes that the first place they crawl containing a certain chunk of textual content is the proper owner. In these days of RSS feeds, and tag-searching, I have found copies of my posts on these auto blogs within 30 seconds of my posting them to my own blog. What would happen if they get crawled on one of these autoblogs first, prior to my blog being crawled? Would Google attribute to them the authorship, and leave me in the cold?

Conclusion
I am sure Google is smart enough to recognize spam blogs quite effectively, but I wouldn’t doubt that there is still some level of risk inherent in the process. Additionally, if we think about the situation in terms of link building, overall incoming link quality plays a large role in how much Google trusts your site*. Obviously, if you had a site referenced by 10 .edu sites out of 12 incoming inks total, you would probably be trusted more by Google than if yo had 10 .edu links out of 2,000 links total. The value of your incoming .edu backlinks is now more diluted by the vast mass of your link weight, and you have a lower average quality of your incoming links.

So, I am not sure what to think about this auto-blog copying issue. I would assume that everyone associated with Technorati has the same problems, whether they recognize them or not. Thoughts, anyone?

* Yes, I know. It’s a debatable subject in whether incoming link quality plays a role in whether Google trusts you. I personally think it does, so I am sticking with this viewpoint. Hate mail into the comment form, please!

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I just came across a post on Eches Blog where he espouses the idea of filtering all the MFA (Made For Adsense) sites from your Adsense ads by using the Adsense competitive ad filter. He also mentions that by doing this you may cause your adsense earnings to increase. Additionally, the post also links to AdsBlackList.com, a site which lists a variety of MFA and low-paying sites with the idea that you use the competitive ad filter to remove these low-paying ads. From AdsBlackList.com:

Why would I use AdsBlackList?

There are three main reasons.

1) Increase your adsense revenue up to 50%
2) Increase the reputation of your website by NOT linking to Made for Adsense sites
3) Save the quality of contextual advertising in global

In other words, subscribing to ABL and submitting MFA sites that you’ve discovered, you will be helping yourself to make more money and helping your customers to find quality information when they click on your adsense ad

I am not sure I understand how this could lead to higher adsense revenues. Adsense works on a priority system where cost and relevancy are balanced in order to bring you the best blend of relevancy and price available to you. By blocking certain ads, the ads you do get are likely to be priced lower than the original ads. So, how can they justify the theory that creating a blacklist a mile long and blocking ads which Google would normally show as the best paying ads for that block can increase your revenue at all, let alone by as much as 50%?

Somebody, enlighten me, please!

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Yes, I know halloween is now past again. However, I just saw the best pumpkin carving job I have *ever* seen, and decided I *had* to post it here on the blog. May I present ‘The Man in Orange’.

I think that is just wild…

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