Tastybuds

It has been 20 days since I started this blog, and although I am trying to build it up as quick as possible, it is a long process.

My initial goals were to get an average of 10 visitors per day, and 4 comments on my blog. The idea is that in addition to pure traffic, I am trying to build up a community of people interested in optimizing AdSense, and other analytics. In order to accomplish these goals, I set out to average a posts day, comment twice on 5 different blogs, and accumulate 20 posts.

I now have 35 posts, which is almost 2 posts per day. Commenting has been difficult for me; I commented 3 or 4 times on the YieldBuild blog, but I have not found any other blogs to heavily comment on. I think I have scattered a single comment on 6 other blogs, which brings my total to 10, but I still need to find blogs which I am deeply interested in.

How has this payed off? I am now averaging 3 visits per day, and have gotten my 4 comments. I still have a bit to go before I am at 10 visits per day, but feel I am beginning to get traction. What I am happiest about so far in terms of my progress is that I’ve managed to get a free lunch from one of my readers for blogging and commenting.

I also have begun to monitor my SEO process. Almost all my traffic so far has come from comments, but in the last day or two, more is coming from Google. My ranking for “optimizing adsense” has jumped from 89 to now 26. My next goal will be to get that into the top 10.

So what do need to do to finish off my first goals? Continuing to post at least once a day shouldn’t be a problem, but I need to really find more blogs that interest me and comment heavily. I will try to average at least one comment a day. I also have submitted a few articles to EzineArticles, and if those get approved, will submit more. My hope is to achieve my goals within th next 20 days.

Users who come to your site via Google, and other search engines, are much different than users who come directly to your site. Organic users know they are coming to your site and are familiar with it. Search users, on the other hand, are looking for something specific, which they may or may not find on your site.

Because these users are so different from each other, you should optimize your pages for each type of user. You can have different navigation structures, extra information for search users, special deals, or simply rearrange what you do have. It is difficult to know exactly what works best, but keep your key metrics in mind, segregate your audience, and optimize each one.

Even for something like AdSense, which you might believe has an overall “best” style and position should be tested for each type of user. You will often find that what performs better for one group of users will be quite a bit different than what performs for others.

Also, you might have different goals for organic users than for search engine users. For search engine traffic, you may want to drive them to register on your site; or you may want to immediately monetize them as best as possible; or you may want to lead them to a key information page. Whatever your goals, realize that they may differ for each audience segment.

A simple method to do this sort of testing is to cookie users that came directly from www.google.com, or any other sites you would like to segment. Then, for each page you display, and for your tracking software, look at the cookie, and act accordingly. Run the same exact test on both sets of users, and you may find the best result is different for each.

One of the most critical aspects of a testing and optimization is choosing proper segments. You can lump everything together, and run one test for your entire site, but the gains will be far less than if you were to run 3 or 4 tests, one for each segment you are interested.

You can segment on just about anything. One of the most obvious variables is pagetype. For example, if you run a blog, the front page may be structured different from your article pages, which might be different from your links page. Each of these pages might be able to comfortably fit a different amount of ad units (for example, your homepage might get one below each article, while your article pages might only have one on the right side). Even if you do have the same initial layout on all your pages, you will find out that the same exact ad unit will perform different on each page.

Another variable you can segment on is whether a user is logged in. Regular visitors behave differently than casual ones, so you you should treat them as such. Often, the best style for one set of visitors will not perform as well for another set.

Time of day, or day of week, is another thing you can split on. If your site is business oriented, you might see different types of users during regular work hours than on weekends. Weekend users might be better optimized for multiple units, while business users for a single precise unit.

The point is that you have a ton of information about your users, and you should use that information segment. Each of these segments may perform different, and you should optimize accordingly. Other ideas dr segmentation include:
Time on site
Browser type
Country of origin
IP
Users from Google
Category or topic of page

Not all sites will be able to segment on all of these variables easily. Also, some of these variables might or might not have a huge impact. But the point is that you should be testing as much as you can, and when performing your tests, you should break things down as granular as you can.

I have always been a bit lost when it comes to Twitter. I started off using it by following a few people who had blogs I read, but because I was only following these few people, I was pretty much getting their blog posts recycled back to me.

A short while ago, twitter bought Summarize, and turned it into search.twitter.com. This tool is very useful for quite a few reasons. First of all, you can search for your niche topics (like optimizing AdSense), and find people who have either just posted, or who are interested in your topic. This is similar to searching on Google, but there are some added benefits.

First of all, the content is much fresher, as many of Google’s results will be years old (although some of those can be good too). Second, if people are asking questions or are having difficulty with something, you can respond to them directly and immediately. So not only are you finding good resources, but you are establishing yourself in a community of people interested in the same topics as yourself.

As you begin to find these people on Twitter who share your interests, you can refer them to your posts, and if you have good enough content, gain some dedicated readers.

Optimizing AdSense is a fairly simple procedure to get started on, and you will notice the results very quickly. But as you begin to do more of it, you have to take into consideration the possible negative effects of your optimization. Many sites have multiple revenue streams, including display media, leads, and sponsorship. Is your optimization hurting those other revenue streams?

In order to get a good idea of the effect you are having, it is necessary to segment users into groups, and see how those groups are monetizing with AdSense, along with any other useful metrics you have access to. For example, how many pageviews per user are you getting with each test style? How many leads are these users generating?

Depending on your site structure, and what tools or partners you are using, getting the answer to these questions will be different, but the overall methodology should stay the same. One simple way to look at the overall site performance is to start each page with a cookie. If a user already has a cookie, you check which test group they belong to, and assign that value to a variable. If they don’t yet have a cookie, you randomly put them in one of your test groups, and give them the cookie for later pages in their session.

Once you have established a user in a group, you then make sure to pass this information anywhere it applies. For AdSense you will show the test style associated with that group. If you use a partner like shopping.com, you can pass in the test name for tracking leads from these users. For your analytics software, you likewise segment based on this test group.

Now instead of looking how just AdSense is performing, you can start to see a larger picture. In my experience, often what is best for AdSense often is a net gain for sites, but there are definitely exceptions. Using this framework, you can make sure that your testing gives you results that optimize your entire site.

Digging around the YieldBuild Blog, I just noticed a Trackback from “Optimize AdSense for your Blog”. Considering I am trying to find other bloggers in this niche, I followed the link to their site, and found that they are a blog that only writes snippets of other people’s blogs. The great thing is that all the posts are AdSense related. Not all of the articles are things I am interested in, as much of it is very basic, but it looks like I will be able to find many other bloggers through this resource that are writing about some of the same things I am.

I have been looking for some sort of centralized directory, but have been unable to find all of the bloggers out there who talk about AdSense. Both Digg and Technorati had very little in the way of “optimizing adsense”. So I am happy to have found this resource, and will definitely be looking around it for a while. I will let you know what comes out of it.

Part of what I am struggling with right now is deciding what format to post in to best get traffic. Although I would rather be worrying about writing extremely insightful posts, without readers, I have no one to discuss things with. So I am left wondering if I should go off on very technical rants that people might like if they knew about this blog, or if I should try to play the traffic game first, and then refine my audience. I think I pretty much have to do both; I will have a few posts which are very in depth and technical, but I also need quick easy posts that the masses can read in order to start building up inbound links. I wish I could just start with a dedicated group of users, but it doesn’t appear that that is an option.

I just read Seth Godin’s post on how to get traffic, and the number one item on his list of ideas is to create lists. I think this is dead on, and I have seen it elsewhere. People love lists, and they are easy to make. It is a way to highly concentrate a subject matter, and bring up many ideas very quickly. Also, many people hate reading long posts, and would rather just quickly scan the ideas, which is extremely easy if it is in list format. The downside is that if you rely too much on lists, you never really get to the heart of the subject. Lists are superficial, and they really do need backup.

So to try to reach out to the masses and get some traffic, I will start making lists in addition to my regular blog posts. I might as well start here with a list of things that I want to make lists of:

1. Best blogs that relate to optimizing AdSense
2. Best posts on optimizing AdSense
3. Posts that explain the details of creating a test
4. My posts I like most
5. Places to submit articles on AdSense
6. Variables you can tweak with AdSense
7. Ways to get traffic
8. Useful Wordpress Plugins

When I first started this blog, I had two main categories I was interested in: optimizing AdSense, and cooking. So far I have written quite a bit about the first topic, mothing about the second topic, and various posts about a few other topics.

There are a few questions I have, but am not exactly sure what yw “best” approach is, or what by approach should be. Everyone who looks into the matter knows that getting your self into a tightly defined niche is one of the best ways to establish traffic and a community. But what about the question of closely related niches and extremely different niches? It makes sense for me to talk about SEO and getting traffic, because anyone interested in opitimizing AdSense should also be interested in these topics.

Some of these people might even me interested in cooking, or rockclimbing, or other of my passions, although that number probably won’t be large. The reverse is even more true: if I attract a following of cooks, most will not be interested in SEO or AdSense.

But can this problem be solved merely by categorizing an tagging my posts in a well organized matter? Or should I create a completely seperate blog for those other interests. I know people like Dave Winer (http://www.scriptingnews.com) often combine anything they are interested together on their blog, such as technology, politics, and communities.

I’m sure as I do more of this, I will get more comfortable writing whatever I want to be writing, but I also think that since this blog is for a community of people, I should occasionally (or constantly) reach out to find what others want.

I just got approved by Google for my AdSense accout, and will try to get it up and running soon. Normally I would not recommend using AdSense before you are getting at least 500 page views a day, if not way more. However, considering AdSense is a major topic of this blog, I figured I should start using it the way most of my audience does.

The funny thing is that I have never actually used the standard version of AdSense. We get to plug into an API at CNET, and the use is quite a bit different. This will definitely be a learning experience for me, and I hope I will be able to share some of what I learn.

Many of the tips and strategies that I am used to do not apply, such as changing the font size changing the number of listings per ad unit, or using different font families. Nevertheless, I will start to play around in this new environment, and find new strategies for increased monitozation.

It will start off with figuring out if I can use one of the several WordPress AdSense plugins, or if I want to directly insert code somewhere. I will let you know how it goes.

Less than an hour after complaining about not finding any good competition for people optimizing AdSense, I stumble upon an excellent blog with many insightful thoughts on the matter. The blog is written by YieldBuild, a company that optimizes your ads for you. They are an excellent resource, and it pretty much was my plan to do a similar thing: write many useful tips and thoughts on optimizing AdSense, and then provide a service to do it

It seems like their system is completely automated, which is a bit different from what I was thinking, although I am sure their method is hugely successful. I prefer to use computer assisted testing, but also to work around the site, and integrate other pieces, something a generic program cannot do. Nonetheless, they seem like they have their stuff together, and I have already found numerous articles on optimizing AdSense that no one else seems to have written about. They have articles on other topics as well, but it seems like much of their content is geared towards increasing revenue of AdSense and other contextual ads.

The other interesting thing about YieldBuild is that they happen to have an office just a block away from where I work at CNET. I am sure I will be reading more of their posts in the near future, and trying to interact with them as much as possible. I can only hope to find more resources like them. Their blog is available at http://blog.yieldbuild.com