The Truth About Blogging and Adsense

Warning: If you are overly sensitive to the truth, you may not continue to read this blatant post!

When I attended career guidance classes in high-school, I don't quite remember "sitting around in my underwear checking my AdSense stats" being on the list of possible careers, but it seems to be quite the dream job of today. While there are a few of us who like to keep busy, I'm pretty sure there are millions of people out there who would just love to quit working and take a permanent all-expenses paid vacation. But that's just not reality, no matter how great it sounds.

Bloggers Needed: Lazy People Need Not Apply

First of all, successful blogging is work. I'm not sure how much of that is making sense, but the keyword here is: WORK. I do agree, it's not always hard work, but it is work nonetheless. The sooner you believe and understand the fact that blogging requires work, the sooner you can begin to enjoy your job. If that was not too difficult for you to swallow, you may want to continue reading about what AdSense can do for you.

If you already have a high level of traffic, AdSense has a tendency to produce two more common results: Based on a high percentage of "clickers", you may actually start off day one earning Adsense revenue. On the flip side, if you have a lot of loyal readers who enjoy the fact that your blog remains ad-free, you run the risk of offending them. Many readers enjoy non-threatening environment of a blog that isn't trying to sell them anything, including "junk-advertising".

The AdSense Catch-22

If your site has relatively few readers or visitors, you won't necessarily offend anyone - but you probably won't make any money the first day, either. As your readers develop a loyalty to you as a writer, they will have already been exposed to your AdSense ads, and still continue to frequent your blog. As your readership grows, depending on your niche - your earnings should correspondingly increase. But this is not always true. Some niches simply produce more "clicking" visitors than others. In fact, if your niche is not product based, you may find that the relevant ads are actually not relevant at all, and may not generate interest or clicks.

By implementing your ads in higher visibility areas, you will increase the visibility of the ads, encouraging more clicks, but you also compromise your layout design, and should be careful not to give up valuable "real-estate" on your blog to irrelevant material. Be sure to place some of your most useful information in neighboring spaces, so that you ensure that your readers will not only be exposed to your ads, but have an equal opportunity to read the information they came to read. If your ads are more prominent than your content, you may find that your visitors quickly leave your site through your ads. If you simply to wish to generate clicks, I suppose this would be the way to go, but most bloggers are genuinely interested in having their content actually read! In that case, concentrate on your content - and its visibility.

Ignore your readers - and they'll go away.

Personally, I am more motivated by returning visitors, multiple page views, and lengthy visits than how many pennies I can earn per visitor. But by the same token, I am also encouraged by the possibility that I may not provide everything my readers want, and that perhaps through relevant ads, I might give them something they are looking for - while earning revenue at the same time.

When properly balanced, AdSense can be a valuable tool for both readers and bloggers, providing additional content and products to your visitors, and generating revenue for bloggers and website owners, without interrupting the blog-reading experience for the visitors.

The Untold Story of How the Three Little Pigs Built Their Blogs

Learn From the Mistakes of Others

Well, as we all know - learning from your mistakes saves you the time and hardship of making them again. But two of the three little pigs didn't seem to learn much from their ordeal with the big bad wolf. I don't know if you ever knew the names of the three pigs, but the one who built his house out of straw - that was Gary. Larry was the one who built his house out of twigs, and George, well - he built his home out of bricks.

Keeping Up with the Jones's

All three pigs moved from wolf's territory just after he huffed, and puffed, and blew two of their houses down. They moved out near the old information highway, which is far away from the big bad wolf. The three little pigs moved into a new neighborhood called the Web, which is now almost entirely dominated and powered by Ooogle. But the pigs weren't intimidated by Ooogle's laws of the land, and each had a plan to become part of the blogging community.

Their new neighbors, the Jones family, said that almost everyone in the community has recently redesigned using the Web 2.0 model - and the pigs just had to keep up with the Jones's.
Each of them quickly began to build their blogs, each with different types of blogging platforms, different types of writing styles, and offered very different information on their blogs.

Gary's Blog Was Build from Straw

Gary actually built a pretty nice blog. The design was clean and simple, he had decent content, but his approach to getting more traffic was a little weak. Basically he just submitted to a few blog directories, trying to avoid dealing with Ooogle and the laws of the land. He sat, and he sat, waiting for visitors - but they didn't come. His traffic was close to zero, and Ooogle completely ignored his blog. He thought he could be doing more, but he didn't really know what to do. Gary would have to learn a little more about building traffic and becoming a part of the community before his blog would have the strength to stand up to Ooogle. Gary's blog fizzled.

Larry Built His Blog from Twigs

Larry wanted to build his blog quickly, so he used articles that he had posted on an old website he had. Well, one of Ooogle's laws of the land is that you never post duplicate information, so Larry's used articles quickly got Ooogle's attention. Ooogle banned him from the query results page, saying he posted duplicated information. Larry's blog fizzled.

George Gained Success through His Blog Built of Bricks

George bought his own domain right away, that way people would take him more seriously as a member of the community. He started out with great content to begin with, and often participated in discussions in forums and joining conversations by leaving insightful comments and sharing useful information on relevant blogs. He even gave away some great information for free. George's blog sizzled! Within just a few weeks, he had his first few visitors, and some even left comments! He commented back, and he visited the sites of those who left comments - leaving a comment for them as well. He was invited to guest blog on a popular blog, and a few of his posts were pretty hot on Digg! He was well on his way to becoming a valuable member of the community, offering useful information to his readers.

The Traffic Formula

Traffic, just like any other measure of success, is the fruition of the hard work and dedication you have put into your blog. If you don’t already have a steady flow of traffic, whether it’s five visitors a day or five-thousand, then you probably aren’t taking the proper combination of steps (or enough of the proper steps) to help people find your blog and take interest in what you have to say.

Quality Content

Basically, the successful traffic equation is simple:

Quality Content + Community Participation = Traffic

This is probably the most important factor when considering your traffic flow. As far as new visitors are concerned, if you don’t offer valuable information within the first 30-seconds of their visit – you’ve lost them. Furthermore, if your layout is confusing, or if your information is outdated, they might leave without reading the great information you offer. The combination of quality content and a good site layout is the proper foundation for a successful blog, and a growing readership.
As debates between the journalism community and the blogging community heat up, there is a more intense expectation of bloggers to produce quality content. Even if you are blogging about Aunt Martha’s favorite recipes, your information could either be jam-packed with useful information – or you could rattle on for paragraphs about nothing but her cat. But if readers are expecting to get a few great recipes from that aunt they never had and are instead pummeled with countless anecdotes about Fluffy – they’ll leave. They probably won’t even stick around long enough to find those delicious recipes – and certainly won’t be book-marking your blog!

Community Participation

Once you have a decent amount of information put together in an organized fashion, you’re ready to get out and socialize! That’s right – in order to build blog traffic in the quickly-evolving web 2.0 world of today, you’ve got to get out and join the blog party. This means joining social networks, forums, community memberships, and commenting within your niche. Find others that have blogs in complimentary subjects, and leave comments that offer value to the conversation. You’ll find that leaving useful and informative comments on highly-visible blogs can turn out to be a wonderful source of traffic.

On that same note, if you participate in community forums, you will find that by sharing valuable information within that community can help seat you in a position of “authority” within your particular niche. Basically, it’s a game of social survival – just like high-school, but in this game the goal is not only to become popular, but to become viewed as an authority in your niche. You want to get people talking about you, and what you have to say. I can’t tell you how many times I have seen people open their posts with, “I was just reading an article by Darren on ProBlogger”. I’m starting to wonder if the guy could just write 10 words about chocolate – and people would actually believe that there was a blogging lesson in those 10 words that they learned by visiting ProBlogger that day.
That’s the power of becoming an authority within your niche.

What You Lose When Your Blog is not Reader Ready

What are you really losing when your blog not only fails to keep visitors interested, but isn't drawing in a huge crowd of readers? You may think that you can ruin your online reputation or credibility, or your opportunity to make money, or even pushing potential customers away. And while all of the above may be true, you are also losing something much more. You are losing valuable time.

Face it, the internet is a fast moving world, and if you don't keep up - you could be left in the dust. When your site is is shambles, you might lose revenue or potential readers. If your blog is not finished, or lacking valuable content - you allow others the opportunity to do what you aren't. You not only prevent yourself from earning your potential during that time, but you could affect your future earnings as well. But worse yet, you lose the time that others are (or could be) excelling in your niche - instead of you. If you are taking too much time on one aspect of your blog, and aren't really prooving to be a success as of yet, you may be allowing others to take advantage of your slack, and take over your niche.

Be sure that you are making the most of your blog's presentation. If you are gearing your blog layout towards keeping readers interested in your reading, you will have more time to devote to producing quality content. You only have one chance to make a first impression in the real world, but thankfully in the virtual world you have the opportunity to bring back visitors that you may have had before. People most often remember the sites that they enjoy, or want to share - but typically forget sites that were not at all useful. So even if you've chased away a few visitors in the past, you can have your site "reader ready" before they arrive again!

Search Phrases and Keywords - A Traffic Building Exercise

Try any number of combinations of a phrase, and see how different the search results returned for each phrase can be. For example, open four individual browser tabs (or windows if necessary).

Google the following phrases:

• hammer tools
• hammers tool
• tool hammers
• tools hammer

When I Googled the four above phrases, I got different results, or the same results in a different order. Without scrolling down on each page, I can already see that MyToolStore came up within the top 5 listed results in all four searches. You can experiment with this using almost any phrase, in almost every search engine, and it will produce the same result - single or plural nouns, as well as the order of your chosen words will have a direct impact on the results returned.

Why should this matter to you? Well, you see . . . your will appear in the search engines much in the same way as the tools and hammers. The average search phrase is about 4 words, and that will also produce more specified results. For example: If you are searching for a hammer, you are likely to also type in what type of hammer you are looking for. If you just typed in hammer, you would get too many unrelated results - but if you typed in "geology hammer" or "rock hammer" your results would be much more specific.

Since your blog will appear in these results as well, or articles that you write, you'll want to use certain keywords and phrases in your writing - naturally, of course. You can easily implement this tactic by replacing words like "it" and "this" with keywords and key phrases that search engines will pick up on. For example: In this article, I have used the following words: blog, blogging, write, and writing – a combined total of nine times so far. (This will increase with the next sentence!) When I ran a search for the word “blog”, the search tool included the word “blogging”. But when I entered in the word “blogging”, it did not pick up on the instances of the word “blog”.

From this simple exercise, you can conclude that the root words are more likely to produce results that include other variations, as long as the spelling of the root word remains intact. For example: “Write” will not bring up results containing the word “writing” because the ‘e’ in vary was replaced with the letter ‘i’ in writing. The more you mention a certain subject in your blog posts or article writing, the easier it will be for search engines pick up on your keywords, and will eventually regard your website or blog as “relevant” to a certain topic.

Are You on a Blogging Island?

Isolating yourself can be good for a short time, but if you figuratively live on a blogging island all of your own, you may not end up having the best response to your blog. As a blogger, you've got to find a way to get yourself out there, making yourself known. Creating a place for yourself as a writer in the blogosphere at some point becomes a necessity. This can happen in quite a few ways, but is always much easier if you have great content.

However, for some bloggers, there can be a large amount of work that goes into carving your name into your niche. Whether you start your day at the local coffee shop with fellow bloggers, or have a few of your favorite blogs that you regularly read and comment on, you will probably find that your visibility will increase if you network with other bloggers. But it's got to be done right, otherwise could receive the less-than-desired title of a "splogger". Get to know some of the bloggers in your niche, or at the very least, get to know their blogs.

Three Tips to Successful Blogging

No matter what your blogging motivation is, you're eventually going to want people to be reading it. Whether you're writing a novel online, or blogging in a particular niche to establish yourself as a blogger, without readers, your blog will essentially be for the simple self-satisfaction and enjoyment of designing and writing to your blog. If you are writing a novel online in the form of a blog, you'll want readers to leave you encouraging comments, or constructive criticism. If you're running a business blog, you'll want readers in order to make money, as you will if you're running a niche blog with advertisements, visitors and readers will help generate revenue.

High Quality High Quantity Blogging - If you want to build an excellent readership, you'll not only want to provide regularly updated information, but high quality information that your readers can benefit from. People will come back if they are receiving something, or learning something from your site. Readers will also likely return on a regular basis if they are entertained by what they are reading. Your blog can be simply for entertainment purposes, or your useful information can be written in an entertaining way, both will bring people back for more.

Useful Links and Information - If your blog is providing links to information that is useful to the readers, or information that isn't generally easy to find, your readers will likely return for more information. This is especially true if you regularly update the material on your site, or post to your blog on a regular basis. A great deal of people searching for information on the internet will search for free information before opting to pay for information, so providing it for free would boost your readership.

Credibility - In order to establish credibility, you've got to know what you're talking about. If you don't know your subject well, you'll have to be willing to do a lot of research to learn enough to write fluently about the subject. It's generally good to choose a subject you are extremely familiar with, especially if you want to establish credibility as an expert in your field. However, if you're just trying to get your feet wet, post quite a few articles and posts before you launch your blog or website. Try to get a feel for what it's like to post regularly, and establish a pattern to your posting. That way, you're not overwhelmed with by the need to post as often. While keeping your blog updated in the future, you can rest assured that your readers have enough to keep them reading. Don't launch if you're not familiar with regular posting unless you already have plenty of content. Readers may not come back if you only have one post. Blogging credibility can take months, and hundreds of posts to attain, but you've got to pay your dues in nearly every field. It's rare for anyone to burst out on the scene as an expert in a field if no one has ever heard of them.

May 19 - Current Blogging Jobs From Around the Internet

If you are looking to earn money as a blogger, but have relatively little success gaining the traffic that it takes to really monetize your blog, you could consider the option of blogging for someone else. Many companies and individuals out there are looking for bloggers, and if you enjoy blogging and want to be paid for your time and your work, it's a viable option for any writer.

Don't worry if you don't have previous blogging experience, if you're an experienced writer, or an expert in your field, you have the same chances as anyone else for landing the job. I have worked for quite a few people, writing articles for blogs and websites, and let me tell you, it's just as much work as blogging for yourself, but it's sure nice when that paycheck arrives - just for doing what you already enjoy doing. Here's a few job opportunities that are current as of this month.

Green Blogger Needed Real Estate Blogger Needed Web Promotion Blogger Needed

Sports Blogger Needed b5media Blogger Jobs 451 Press Blogging Jobs

What Is Your Blogging Motivation?

If you haven't already pondered this question, then it's probably about time you ask yourself the question. For many people, the answer to the question is simple - money. For others, it is for personal enjoyment, the feeling of being a known expert in their field, venting of personal feelings or opinions, and some people blog to self publish their books or poetry where readers can follow the writer on a literary journey.

If you were able to sum up your blogging motivations in a simple word, the word is probably money. Let's face it, it is one of the most common motivators among new bloggers, and can also be the single factor to cause a lack of enthusiasm from a once gung-ho blogger. Money as a motivation has also led to the creation of sploggers, who design their entire blog to flood the visitor with spam advertisements instead of quality writing. While this might make a few dollars for the lucky splogger, there are a world of savvy blog readers who will avoid the splog like a disease, and it will not be a viable long term source of income, nor will it inspire return readers since splogs do not usually provide any useful information, advice, or even a funny anecdote to keep readers interested.

If money is your motivation, but you also have a true passion to write, then you just may have a healthy combination that could push you towards success. Once you find your blogging niche, put your energy into writing quality posts, and write often enough to keep readers interested in coming back. Your motivation to express yourself through your writing should be fueling your blog's growth, which - if you are writing useful or interesting information - you will see an increase in return visitors at a fairly steady pace. If you are genuinely motivated to write, then you just may have what it takes to endure the first few months of potentially no revenue from your blog.

What if your motivation to blog truly is money? Does that directly translate into failure? Not at all, it just means that you may have to work a little bit harder to come up with original content, and find your inner strength to keep up with the daunting task of writing your posts. It definitely helps to have some interest in either writing or sharing information, but doesn't have to be your passion. Many successful bloggers began out of a desire to work from their homes, without having to sell anything. Blogging is a great way to do that, but it isn't quick and it isn't a guaranteed shot at making big bucks, and your success can hinge on whether or not you continue to write. For you it may help to enlist the help of a few guest bloggers or college interns to keep up with the demand of providing fresh content on your blog. There are plenty of bloggers for hire who really enjoy the writing aspect and will readily provide content for your blog - some for pure enjoyment, some motivated by the mighty dollar, but sometimes for surprisingly low prices.

Whatever your motivation is, the key to successful blogging is quality original content. Things that encourage readers to come back can be anything from your writing style, your topics of choice, your humor, your great advice, sharing knowledge and information. Some may even read your blog because they identify with you in some way, and are personally enriched by your words, or maybe you inspire them to be the person they want to be, and cause them to be better than they are. Maybe you don't even care if you're helping people, you just love knowing that you are an expert in your field, and that makes you feel good. Either way, grasp your motivation and let it pull you up to the next level - you'll need ongoing enthusiasm to keep you on the road to success!

Finding Your Blogging Niche

So, you've decided to blog, huh? If you haven't already, then it's time to find your niche. Bloggers generally create their best work when writing about a subject they know well, as most writers do, and blogging is no exeption. So when choosing the subject of your blog, it's best to go with something you already know about. If you make a choice to blog about a subject that you are truly passionate about, you will find that you almost always have something to write about. Otherwise, you could find yourself struggling to write about your chosen subject after just a few posts. The truth is, most blogs fizzle out within just a few months for that very reason.

There are several many different types of blogs, and equally as many writers to create them. There are personal blogs, where the blogger can rant and rave about life, share pictures and videos with their friends, or take you on a personal journey through their life or a health crisis. There are business blogs, corporate bloggers, tech blogs, gaming bloggers, and blogs about blogging. Ultimately, what you blog about will depend on your interests, and can either make or break you as a blogger. So the decision of what to write about is likely the most important choice you will make, and could mean the difference between an enjoyable blogging journey, or a long and frustrating path to writer's block.