These days, most people use Wordpress for blogging, it seems to be the easiest blogging software to set up, and with the large number of themes, plugins, and support websites, there is no reason to look anywhere else. Setting up a wordpress based blog takes around 5 minutes if you have an idea of what you are doing, finding a theme takes some time, and installation takes a few minutes. All in all, the process does not take long at all. What happens now when you want to monetize your blog, and you are unsure of how to do with by editing the files manually? Plugins. Plugins are amazing modules, which add great features to your website, and there are plenty of plugins available to help you inject advertising into your template.

Ten excellent Wordpress plugins for Google Adsense:

1. Adsense Delux
   AdSense-Deluxe is a WordPress plugin offering advanced options for managing the automatic insertion of Google AdSense or Yahoo Publisher Network (YPN) ads to your WordPress posts.

2. Adsense Injection
   My new Adsense Injection plugin just takes a random paragraph (or br tag) break in your article and inserts adsense code. It does one per story on multi-post pages (home, archive, category) and let’s you pick how many to show on single post pages. It lets you pick how many total ads to show at any time as well (0-3) and it lets you set the formats and colors you want it to randomly select from.
3. Adsense Inline
   Places Google adsense in blog posts.
4. Mighty Adsense
   Place code in wordpress without having to change templates. Ads are displayed in posted items, with the option to choose how many blocks its going to show up in a page.
5. Adsense Sidebar Widget
   An adsense sidebar widget.
6. Adsense Beautifier
   Helps with placing of images next to adsense. (Illegal)
7. Wordpress Adrotator
   Allows you to rotate your affiliate programs.
8. Earnings Plugin
   Shows you your adsense revenue in your admin area.
9. Adsense Profit
   Displays your adsense revenue to the public. (Illegal)
10. Author Adsense
    Enables blog authors to enter their Google Adsense Publisher ID and have ads displayed on their own posts generating revenue.

These are ten of a greatest plugins, which any Web Entrepreneur would die for. Take a good look and read at all of them, and decide which one will best suite what you are trying to acheive.

There are many ways to go about increasing your adsense revenues; These techniques range from correct placement to correct colour usage to a myriad of other things. All of these techniques are very standard, and almost every blog, which talks about adsense, will mention these factors which contribute to maximizing your adsense revenue. With a simple google search, you will be presented with 67 pages of results, which is around 670 articles on the Internet talking about these two fators, so basically what I am saying is that if you have not dealt with these two topics, I would suggest you go back to my three articles on getting started with adsense, and setting up adsense, etc. If you have read these topics, or you have done the basic colour matching and placement tasks, then it’s time to look a little deeper into increasing your adsense.

Inside your adsense control panel, there is a tab called ‘Competitive Ad Filter’, which is a sub tab of ‘Adsense Setup’. This advert filter system, if used properly can be highly effective. When looking at filter out various adverts from your website, there are two types of adverts, which you want to avoid: Made for Adsense (MFA) and Low Cost Per Click (LCPC).

MFA websites where authors purchase google adwords for tiny click through amounts of $0.01 - $0.05, to attract traffic to their website, which then houses more expensive adverts. It’s a clever idea and all, but for publishers who are running blogs hoping to make some supplementary income, it’s the worst thing possible. Think of it this way, if you are getting a decent amount of traffic and see between 50 and 100 clicks per day on your adverts, then you are doing well. But if these clicks consist mostly of MFA website adverts, your 50 to 100 clicks will be transferred into only $1 - $5! If your website could block these terrible low paying adverts, and you averaged around $0.20 - $0.50 per click, you would be earning around $20 - $50 a day! That’s an increase of 2000% simply by blocking these MFA adverts.

The whole point of the Competitive Ad Filter panel is to phase out these MFA and LCPC adverts, but how do we go about finding out which ones they are? We cannot click our own adverts and study the revenue pulled in, as this is against Google’s Terms and Conditions, although one sneaky way would be to move from one computer to another (avoiding the same IP Addresses and hardware serial numbers), but the amount of petrol and effort to do this, it really would not be worth it, so we need a better way.. (more…)

Something I have not mentioned, which does make a difference in gearing your website up to follow a specific niche is certain naming tricks. I have talked about key words, key phrases, titles and various other key elements of a website, all of which are vital with SEO, but when it comes down to the really small bits and pieces, there are a couple other little tricks of the trade.

I recently put a website up, purely for testing a few little concepts, I have been reading about. My results have been fairly good thus far; The website has only been running for two weeks, but I feel that two weeks is long enough for me to share this knowledge based on the yielded results.

Filenames do play a role in focusing a website around a specific niche. For this example, I will once again use a fishing website as my base. Instead of having files named: aboutus.htm, contactus.htm, why not label them: aboutfishing.htm and contactfishing.htm. These names appear in the source code of your website, and search engine spiders do see this. Use the keywords you have chosen to label your .htm/.html/.php files. It’s a simple task to do, and one which does make a difference, well my results show so at least. The second little trick is image files, which follow the same as above - name your images correctly. Let’s say, for example, that I went on a fishing trip, and took some wonderful pictures of the lake I was fishing in, and wanted to post these pictures on my website for my readers to take a look at. I download the photos from my digital camera, and uploaded them immediately. What I will find is that the images are named something along the lines of DSC1902 and DSC1903, and so on. Once again, take your time, and label the images correctly, and along your topic. The image names appear in the source code, and will be read by spiders.

Remember to always use alt and title tags when doing the above as well. Title and Alt tags are so often forgotten about, and they play a magor role in focusing your site around a niche. Here are examples of where you would use these tags:

<a href=”https://webtrepreneur.co.za/aboutwebtrepreneur.php” title=”About Webtrepreneur”>About Webtrepreneur</a>

and

<img src=”WebtrepreneurHeader.jpg” alt=”Webtrepreneur Header”>

I cannot stress how valuable it is to use these two tags when preparing your pages and posts. The website I put up, is a two page site, including everything I have mentioned above. I placed Adsense on the website, and submitted it to a couple search engines. I changed the content daily, followed my click throughs and statistics, and without over exaggerating, my traffic has almost doubling every two days. The Google adverts adapted perfectly to my topic, and the click through percentage increased as the adverts took onto the topic I chose. I have only made $40 in Adsense revenue on the website, but for two weeks, this is certainly not a bad effort at all. That’s almost $3/day for a two week old website, anyone who knows a bit about monetizing a website, will agree that that’s a good effort!

Give these little tricks a go, The Webtrepreneur would love to get some feedback from you, so I know that I am not the only one who has managed to make some extra dollars with a few simple tricks.

A common mistake made by bloggers and website authors is the rush to make money. Everyone who reads about making money with their blog, gets all excited and tries to hurry deep into the world of making money online, without thinking about the disadvantages of monetizing a site. We all know that a website covered in adverts is not appealing and often results in a snappy decision to try the next website in the queue. There are many things to take into consideration before placing adverts on your website, and I will mention a few below.

Directory Submission - Submitting your blog/website to an online directory is a great way to get inward links, and increase your traffic. The more directories you submit your website to, the higher your page rank will be. This said, many directories have a huge bias against accepting website strewn with adverts. If you start getting denied by directories, you will grow a bad name for your site, and this will influence your traffic heavily.

Reader Base - One of the best times to start monetizing a site, is when you already have a large reader base, of which many of the visitors and returners, which means that these people are interested in the content you are sharing, and will most probably not be put off by a few adverts placed carefully around the website. If you introduce adverts too soon, many readers will not remain loyal to your site, and rather look for another similar site, with less adverts.

Positioning - Before you can start placing adverts around and about on your website, it is important to have a look and see where the best placing will be. People follow trends, and there are certain areas which are signified with certain things. For example, most people recognise the header image of a site at the top left of the page, and similarily, most readers recognise a menu on the left hand side of the page. This is the same for adverts. You do want your adverts to be seen, but don’t want them placed in the same places as all websites, rather have a look at what your readers are most interested in, and place the adverts carefully around these areas, as this will increase your chances of click throughs. Placing adverts inbetween menu areas works really well, or placing adverts inline (within the content) is another successful method. (more…)