Jamdo Marketing Blog

For many bloggers, Google Adsense is going to be one of the primary ways of monetising a blog - possibly the only way.

While Adsense is a great system and has been the entrepreneurial blogger’s best friend for a few years, it is still not a perfect system and can be improved with a little human help.

There are a couple of things that a blogger needs to be aware of with Adsense and needs to adjust for in order to maximise the profit potential of their blog.

Adsense Smart Pricing

Having low quality advertisers on your site (ie. in Adsense) can be a big problem for a blogger.

When a reader clicks on the Adsense ad of a bad site, there is a much higher chance that they will immediately hit the back button on their browser.

While this is not your fault, if it happens too often, the Adsense system may think that you are sending out junk traffic.

The way Adsense combats junk sites running contextual advertising is to “smart price” them. That means that for the site sending the junk traffic, the payout per click will be reduced.

That can obviously impact your earnings.

Beat Smart Pricing

Luckily Google offer a fairly easy remedy to this problem.

The “Competitive Ad Filter” in your Adsense account is your best friend in this situation. It allows you to block up to 200 advertisers from advertising on your Adsense blocks.

But how do you know who to block?

Luckily, many other people have experienced this problem. Many lists of low quality, low paying Adsense advertisers have been found and put on appropriate black lists by bloggers and site owners.

There’s a good list compiled by Mark Cook for example.

Just log into your Adsense account and go to Adsense Setup >> Competitive Ad Filter and copy and paste the above list. Hit save and you are good to go.

Now, you will want to try to keep that list up to date from time to time by adding to it yourself and finding other lists (they are regularly mentioned in discussions about Adsense on webmaster forums for example).

But doing this simple thing will stop most of your worries about this problem and also maximise your earnings from Adsense.

Technorati Tags: adsense, google, smart pricing

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I think I have hit a happy middle ground with Adsense advertising on Jamdo, with the placement of the advertising blocks.

There has always been an ongoing debate in the blogosphere regarding Adsense advertising on blogs.

A lot of people shun any money making from blogs at all. They think that the readers should be placed first and should not be subjected to any advertising whatesover.

Some are a little more reasoned that the ad placement should not be prominent so as to not upset the regular readers. The problem with that of course is that putting Adsense advertising in less prominent positions like the bottom of the right hand column means that it is much less likely to be clicked on.

Yet other bloggers think it is the right of any author to make money from their blog and put advertising wherever they please, including annoying popups etc.

I like to think I have found a happy alternative on this blog.

If you are a regular reader of a blog, then the most likely entry page that you will come in on is the main index. As a blogger then, you may want to tone down the advertising placement for the main page - especially having a big block of adsense smack bang in the middle of the page.

However, a lot of people from search engines enter sites via one of the other pages. These people are generally not the core of your loyal readership. In my opinion then, I really have no problems placing fairly prominent advertising in their face - like an adsense block straight under the title of the post, which is what I am currently doing on this blog.

Now there are a few problems with this.

If you only offer a snippet of the story on your front page, then your regular readers have to click through also in which case they will also be subject to the prominent advertising.

On the other hand if you offer the full story on your front page for your regular readers, you may get duplicate content issues with the search engines as the same content appears on several pages of your blog (ie. the index page and the post page). This is just something I have decided to cop sweet.

Now, I don’t think there is really any right or wrong answer for how Adsense should be used on blogs - it is obviously up to the author.

But I like to think that here at Jamdo, I have reached an acceptable compromise.

Adsense Resources:

Images and Adsense - From the Horse’s Mouth
Positioning Your Adsense Ads - From ProBlogger
Best Adsense Placement for Highest CTR - Adsense Master Plan

Technorati Tags: adsense, google, advertising, blogging

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