John Chow Makes Money Online For Us!

John Chow Makes Money Online For Us!

When I first started blogging about 5 months ago, I thought blogging is like writing a diary. But after five months of blogging, I found out blogging is more similar to my other passion in life -- Massive MultiPlayer Online Role Playing Game. (MMORPG)

Here is the reasons why:

1. You build yourself up SLOWLY by performing many repetitive tasks
Whether you are playing World of Warcraft, EverQuest, or Ultima Online, you spend lots of time performing repetitive tasks to build up your strength, money and experience points. In blogging, you spend lots of times performing repetitive tasks like commenting, submitting sites to directory, answering emails, and writing posts to build up your blog over time. Other than a few popular blogs, most of us have to build up our readerships and backlinks SLOWLY over months of time.

2. You always wonder if those A-List players are cheating
When I am playing Runescape, a free online MMORPG, I always wonder how those people can get to level 99. How many hours did they spend playing? It is impossible! They must be using some kinds of illegal bots! They must be cheating!

At the same time, when I am surfing John Chow dot com and seeing people leaving 100+ comments in there, it just make me wonder, do those top commentators have nothing else better to do in their life?

3. There are lots of tips online, but most of the tips are coming from the same source
For any MMORPG, you can find lots of tips online, but most of the tips are coming from the same source. People just build a site and rewritting the tips using his own words and claim it as his own.

For blogging, I can find lots of blogging tips online, but most of them are rephrasing words from popular sites like Problogger's blogging tips. On one occasion, a blogger even has the guts to copy the entire "Seth Godin's 56 tips to get traffic for your blog" and asks me to link to his post.

By the way, Seth Godin's post is a good read, and I recommend it to any bloggers, whether you are a newbie or a A-list blogger.

4. You need to build online relationship to succeed
Whether you want to be a successful gamer or a successful blogger, you need to network with other players (bloggers). It is impossible to succeed in a virtual world or blogosphere alone. You cannot succeed offline without building links and you cannot succeed online without networking either.



Enjoy the World of Blogs!

Top 10 AdSense Tricks

Top 10 AdSense Tricks

ADSENSE TIPS

An increase in CTR can mean a lot to AdSense Revenue. To increase AdSense revenue, either you have to increase traffic or increase CTR.

If somehow, you manage to triple your CTR just by tweaking the Google AdSense code, that equals three times boost in your traffic. Here are a few tips for increasing your CTR.

What Google AdSense Engineers say:

- An email conversation with a Google Engineer:

"Due to the dynamic nature of Google AdSense, fluctuations in your revenue will occur. Your earnings will depend on a number of factors, including the types of ads being served to your pages, the cost per click or cost per impression of these ads, and your users' click through selections. Regarding ad placement - the best ad format varies from page to page. We've observed that, in general, wider ads perform better because of their reader-friendly format. We strongly recommend putting your users first when deciding on ad placement. Think about their behavior on different pages, and what will be most useful and visible to them. You'll find that the most optimal ad position isn't always what you expect on certain pages."

- Google Optimization Guide:

For example, on pages where users are typically focused on reading an article, ads placed directly below the end of the article tends to perform better. It's almost as if users finish reading and asking themselves, "What can I do next?" Precisely targeted ads are just like answering their questions.
https://www.google.com/support/adsense/bin/static.py?page=tips.html

What Webmasters have concluded

Webmasters have very diverse views on how to increase CTR. It largely depends upon the keywords you are targeting, looks of your website, the quality of its content, placement of AdSense ads, page optimization and various other factors. Generally, AdSense blocks wrapped between the quality content works the best. For the websites having poor quality content, placing the Ads before the start of the content works best.

If you develop a poor quality content website, it will likely give you high CTR and clicks, but you will be getting low priced ads and also nobody will like to add your url to their favorites. But if you have quality content, that keeps the visitors glued, you may get low CTR, but you will be getting high priced ads and regular visitors, too.

Proper positioning of ads on your website has direct impact on your CTR. Change the location of the ads and watch changes in your CTR regularly. Try to locate the area of the page where the focus of the visitor can be. Generally, AdSense ads near the quality content or other crucial areas like navigation bar tend to perform better. But it really depends upon the keywords you are targeting, and the traffic you have. As the Google engineers say, more user friendly ads, more widespread tend to do better than towers and others.

The Traffic

AdSense comes after traffic. No traffic, no AdSense. Take a great care of your traffic. Your visitors expect some valuable information from you. Make sure you are providing quality content to them. This will increase your visitors' return back ratio. And only those visitors will return who are more targeted to the content you are providing. More targeted users mean more CTR. 85 percent of my visitors add my website urls in their Favorites, and most of them do return.

Install a Website stats monitoring software and regularly look at your web logs, and get a handle on where your traffic is coming from. Try to establish a pattern or relation between your AdSense stats and your traffic stats, so that if there are any marked deviations you can make a judgment on why there has been an increase/decrease and what (if anything) you can do about it.
This will give you new ideas to develop traffic.

Experiments

Experiment and experiment a lot, till you are satisfied with the tweaks you have done to achieve highest CTR. Track your page performance by making channels of ads in your AdSense Control Panel and experiment till you are satisfied with your CTR. Though, each such experiment will make you loose money for a day or two, as Google may take time to adjust with new changes, but it will be beneficial in long run.

Taken By ĞǒǒğšMăštĕr™

RSS

With the growth of blogs and RSS feeds you’re starting to see adsense included in the feeds now. IMHO this doesn’t work, and here’s why:

• You only get to place one ad unit.
• You have no control over finding the ’sweet spot’ for the ad unit.
• The ads are usually poorly targeted (this is getting better).
• People develop ‘banner blindness’.

I know people like being able to read full postings in their feed reader, and there are at least a dozen other reasons for full posts from pleasing your users to mobile offline computing, all of which are completely valid. However if your website depends on generating adsense revenue to survive, then bring them to the site and show them the ads there.

100dollar-perday

Jim at BlogKits asks if anyone would like to share their success or failures using Google Adsense to generate revenue for their blog? He writes - ‘I’m curious as to whether or not you have made it work, and to what level? Making just enough to make it worth it?’

This is a question I get asked every few days by entrepreneurial bloggers - it is a tricky question to answer because Adsense do not allow publishers to share details of how much they earn or how their ads perform. I am also hesitant to answer it because I was always taught not to talk about money or how much you earn. However I get asked it so many times that perhaps its worth writing a progress report of how Adsense is going for me - so let me share a little of my own experience without getting into specifics.

Rich?
Adsense has been a very worthwhile venture for me - it has not made me rich, however it could. I started using it because I wanted to find a way to cover my ISP and hosting fees for my blog. I now make a good living from it. Whilst it is not my only source of income from blogging at present (I use affiliate programs, sponsorships, text ads to name a few of my other income streams) Adsense is currently the largest source of money from my blogs. I’m unable to go into specific dollar terms except to say that it pays my rent and is well on the way to giving me a deposit for a home.

More than I’ve earned before
I’ve just taken a look at the last 12 months of Adsense earnings and the total is beyond what I’ve earned previously in a calendar year in any other job (not that I’ve ever been in law, medicine or any other highly paid profession). Of course the first few months of the last 12 were no where near as good as the last few of 2004 so I’m expecting the next 12 months will be significantly higher as the exponential growth continues.

I’m not writing this to big note myself (I’m just an ordinary guy who is working hard at making an income from his blogs) - rather I am keen to spread the news of the opportunity that Adsense presents. I’m also not blogging to become rich - I do it to earn enough to be able to volunteer time to other community activities that I have a passion for.

What’s the catch?
So yes - Adsense has been successful for me. However let me qualify what I’m saying here before I start sounding like a ‘get rich quick without any work’ type motivational speaker.

Making the income that I’ve earned with Adsense (I’ve been using it for 18 months now) is not a walk in the park - this is not ‘easy money’. As I’ve written numerous times before - I work long hours (its 12.36am as I write this) and I’ve taken a long term view of it (in the early days I was earning less than I did when I was 7 and getting pocket money). I post 20-30 posts per day and work hard on networking and ethical SEO. Blogging is my full time job. You get out what you put in.

I don’t just run a single general blog - my approach is multiple blogs (I currently run 17) on niche topics which I aim to post daily on. My traffic levels are not massive but they are reasonably substantial with around 16,000 unique visitors to my site each day.

Adsense is not for every blog or every blogger. Some topics are a lot better than others - and it is not always the blogs you think that will be successful that are. Its a fickle game and one that you had better be ready for some bumps in the road in. Some months can be lean whilst others can be breathtaking - it is feast or famine and at times it all feels rather surreal. I am taking things one step at a time and am not putting all my eggs in the Adsense basket as I know it could all disappear tomorrow.

Adsense Tips
I won’t expound all my tips here - I’ve written extensively on how to best use Adsense in my Adsense Category and have a series of my best Adsense tips that starts here.