There are no shortcuts
When you are trying to build a blog and hoping to make a little money in the process, it can be discouraging if you are not building consistent traffic. It can be especially discouraging if your traffic is going down. This is when it can be tempting to look for “the easy way.”
What do I mean by this?
You’ve all seen the sites that are clearly automated content – often scrapped from “free content” or article sites. This can be enhanced by the use of automated software that can generate a blog full of content in seconds. Or “autoblogging” software that can post RSS content to your blog on a scheduled basis. Sure, this creates content, loads of it, on a regular basis and “content is king,” right?
That is true to a certain extent. It may get you some random traffic from search engines. But it is not going to propel you to the top of the blogging world and it is not going to create a sense of community that keeps users coming back for more.
You need to sell yourself to your readers. Develop a community.
Here’s a thought – check out Technorati’s Top 100. Do you see anything there that is auto-generated content? I’m going to tell you that you won’t.
I recently read ProBlogger: Secrets for Blogging Your Way to a Six-Figure Income
I have digressed from my original point, but I highly recommend this book for all levels of bloggers and have included a link to the book. If you are thinking of (or already are) blogging for income then you owe it to yourself to read this. (It is even available in a Kindle edition, which is what I read. That way I could highlight and make notes and transfer that to my PC for reviewing later.)
Back to my point. Rowse and Garrett point out in this book that if you are not unique in the marketplace, you are not going to develop readers. If you do not develop readers, you are not going to grow traffic. No traffic = no income. It is that simple.
“For a blog to be successful, your content needs to be useful and unique to your readers.”
If you focus on short-cuts like auto generated content, you are not giving your readers anything unique that they can’t find somewhere else. While it may be frustrating, especially in the early going, you need to stick to your game plan (you do have a plan, right?) and not be tempted to find an easy way out. That “easy way” is not going to gain you anything in the long run.
5 Search Engine Optimization (SEO) blog posts you need to read
So you want to build a better blog? You’d love to earn more money from your ad space and then quit your day job. But how do you do that? We all know the simple answer – TRAFFIC! But building traffic never seems to be quite that simple.
It doesn’t have to be that way! Employing simple SEO (Search Engine Optimization) strategies and developing good writing habits can put you on the road to becoming a blog master. We’ve assembled some must read blog articles to tell you how to do exactly that. Read on!
Blogging for Dollars – Steps to Success
Two things are easy in the world of blogging -
- To believe that you can make a lot of money with your blog. (Don’t get me wrong, I believe this is actually a true statement.)
- To get discouraged trying to monetize a blog and quit.
So if 1. is a true statement, then how do so many people end up at point 2? Because they find out it is actually a lot of work. Read this post »
Optimizing Adsense
Are you using Google AdSense to monetize your blog only to find that the ads are not relevant to your content? If that is happening on your site, you are going to have a tough time making any money with AdSense. The best returns come when the ads actually fit with your content. But aren’t you at the mercy of the Googlebot to determine what your content is? Well, the answer to that question is both yes and no.
Googlebot will look at your content for relevant keywords and determine what ads should be served on your site. However, you can help the bot along with what content is relative and what content to ignore.
First, think about your content. You might need to modify your writing style a little bit to utilize keywords, and to avoid pronouns. The use of the word “it” really means nothing to Googlebot and other bots because they don’t know the “it” to which you are refering. Try to avoid pronouns.
Also, consider how much “extra” content is on your page beyond the post. Do you have a jam-packed sidebar with links and links and more links (coupled with a widget or three)? Do you have a lot of extraneous items on the page? These can throw off the bot as well since they are not necessarily relevant content.
And now, here is the trick you have all been waiting for: you can help Googlebot along to determine what content to consider for Google AdSense with a slight modification to your page markup. I am going to assume that you are a WordPress user, but this technique can be modified for other software, and is a complete snap if you are using straight-up HTML.
Google provides some markup (an HTML comment to be exact) that will tell the Googlebot where to look for content and where to stop looking. My suggestion is to put this markup into your WordPress template wrapping “The Loop.”
<!-- google_ad_section_start -->
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->
Use that for any other key sections of content as well (although, I think for most applications, wrapping the Loop should cover the main content for the page). If you have some material that you want to make sure Googlebot ignores completely, you can wrap that with
<!-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) -->
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->
It may take some time for you to begin seeing changes (Googlebot will need to revisit), but this implementation should help you improve the relevancy of ads shown on your site and, hopefully, more clicks.
Good Luck!
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