Tastybuds

For lunch today I had an awesome lamb burger from Universal Cafe, which is just down the street from me. I like the restaurant because they change their menu every day, and almost everything is delicious in there.

This lamb burger had goat cheese, arugala, aioli, and caramelized onions on a nice toasty bun. Think it was the first time I had a burger without ketchup or barbeque sauce, but it honestly didn’t need it. The oozy goat cheese was enough of a sauce.

I just got my first traffic from Google after more than 30 posts. All of my other traffic so far has been from comments or trackbacks from other blogs. But even though the majority of traffic isn’t currently coming from Google, I am guessing that that will change soon.

I should have started earlier, but I just began monitoring where my site ranks with various search terms. This is an extremely important excercise, as it correlates to how often people will find me. A search for “danny gabriner”, currently only ranks third, after my LinkedIn and Facebook profiles. I should be the number one listing, considering that term is my domain, but because I never write it out, and those other two sites are massive, I could see why I am behind.

More imporant terms to monitor ate things like “optimizing adsense”, which is written on every single page, and I often write about. This is a highly competitive search term, and when I first checked, I was number 83 on the list. However, after only a few days, I have jumped to number 28. Once I get into the top 10, I expect quite a bit more traffic from this query.

A related term that gets far more searches is “optimize adsense”. I don’t write this term nearly as much as I should, and currently rank 133. As I become more concious of the important search queries that relate to my topics, I will focus on the SEO factor, and plan on tracking my progress in the Google rankings.

In addition to seeing where I rank on Google, I will be using Google’s AdWords Tool to find the keywords that are most imporant to me. Robert Scoble recently wrote a post on the lack of knowledge of this tool, and he is right that most people could gain heavily from it’s use.

My next steps are to compile my list of important keywords, and then I will start continually tracking and trying to improve my ranking on Google. There are so many SEO techniques that we all know to gain traffic, but this will actually give me a good idea of my progress.

One change you can make to your Google AdSense campaign which will have enormous impact is getting your ad units above the fold. I have often seen gains of over 50% by moving from beneath the fold to above it. The increase in performance will not always be this much, but there are plenty of gains to be had.

Being above the fold means that your ad unit is visible when you first load the page, and that you don’t have to scroll down at all to see it. One thing that many people forget is that because people have different sized monitors, and use different screen resolutions, the fold can be in different places for different users. Make sure you play around with different settings and different browsers to make sure your ads are above the fold in each scenario.

If you can’t be above the fold for whatever reason, you might also want to try placing your ads on the bottom fold. Users often scroll to the bottom of the page, so this can be a valuable piece of real estate.

As always, make sure that you test plenty of different setups, as sometimes the unexpected ends up being the most valuable. That said, it is almost always worthwhile to get your ads above the fold.

If you want a simple color scheme that
performs well, just look to Google. The blue title, black text, and green URL is usually a style that performs extremely well. Not only does it perform well, but users are used to it, and it us visually appealing.

It makes sense that this style would perform well, considering Google is the master of analytics and they settled on this. Also, blue was the original link color of the Internet, so people are used to clicking on it.

A variation to this is to change the URL color to grey or black. Sometimes this performs a bit better than the green, and still looks pretty nice. As always remember to test as much as you can. This should only me used as a starting point.

If you are looking for a simple, easy way to increase your monitization of AdSense, just increase the font size of the ads. The difference it makes varies per site and page, but I have seen over 40% gains by switching the titles from 12px to 14px.

The obvious downfall of doing this is you could reach a point where the ads are so ugly you are driving people away from the site. But by testing properly, you can make informed decisions that from my experience, almost always lead to upping the font size. To keep things looking as nice as possible, I generally only change the title, but there are times when changing the text and link of the ads helps as well.

To start off, I normally set up a test channel for every font size from 12px to 24px for the title. I sometimes add in test channels to increase the size of everything else from 12px to 14px, but this can be done later. Almost immediately you will see a pretty linear correlation between font size and CTR, but it should become pretty pronounced after each channel gets 15,000 impressions. Then I choose a size that I feel comfortable with keeping in mind the monitary impact. Sometimes there isn’t much of a difference between 24px and 20px, so I choose the smaller of the two (although usually there is a pretty big difference).

Remember that if you don’t have enough traffic to perform the test, you can always just make a change in the style, and watch the before and after effects.

When you have AdSense setup on your site, and are trying to optimize it to get more revenue there are two main things you can do: make changes, and run tests.

There are many simple changes you can make which will almost be guaranteed to increase your RPM, such as increasing the font size, changing the font from arial to verdana, or adding a red hover color to the title text. These are things I usually do when I first get started optimizing a site, or when a site doesn’t get much traffic.

The number one thing you need to have before you begin testing is traffic. At a minimum, I like to get at least 10,000 impressions per test bucket, and usually at least 5 buckets. That means that if you want your test to finish in under a week, you will need at least 7,000 pageviews per day. On the higher end of things I often use 15 buckets, want 70,000 impressions per bucket, and am only testing one pagegroup of a site.

It is really all a sliding scale. Testing gives you knowledge to make changes. But you can also use knowledge from this blog (more on that later), friends, or intuition (which doesn’t always pan out, but often does). I am too impatient to test unless I can do a lot of it quickly, but really it is possible for any level of traffic.

After reading blogs for several years, I have now decided to write my own.  This is my second attempt, although my first was pretty lame.  About a year ago, I got into the hype of making money online, and thought that if I made several blogs, and stuck AdSense on them, I would suddenly start making lots of money daily.  I created 6 different blogs on Blogger, and made it a goal to get 5 or so posts on each one.  I don’t even think I made it past 10 total posts.

This time I hope its different.  I still don’t exactly know where I am going, but I am less interested in making money (immediately), and more interested in writing my thoughts down and finding like minded people.  Of course it still is a big challenge and game for me, but I don’t yet know what my goals are.

In this latest round of thinking about blogging, two major thoughts came to mind.  The first would be to write as much as I know about optimizing AdSense (This is the primary responsibility of my job at CNET), and show that I am an expert in the topic.  I would give out all of my knowledge, and then offer my services to publishers who wanted to let me optimize their sites.  With many sites, making a few minor changes can literally lead to doubling or tripling of revenue, and so I would ask for either a cut of the gains, or a flat fee.

The other topic I am pretty passionate about right now is cooking.  I just started getting into some of the basics of cooking, such as making my own stock, growing herbs and food on my deck, buying as many seeds as I could for making spices.  My thoughts were that I could share some of this extremely basic knowledge with everyone, and convince people of the joys of cooking.  Finally, I could make money off of this by starting an e-commerce site that sells one of any number of potential products: seeds, tea, sauces, stock, smoked foods.

These two ideas of making money are just dreams that may or may not happen down the line.  My interests might shift, and I may never get enough traffic to be able to monetize well enough.  So for now I am simply trying to find an outlet for my ideas and knowledge, and I will see where that takes me.