wangarific

Adsense loads the highest paying ads first, so it’s recommended that you load your highest CTR ads first to maximize advertising revenue. In my last post, I didn’t discuss the mechanics of changing the order of your Adsense (other than offering up some CSS code) because I wanted to address it better today. In that post, I said you could use fancy CSS to do it, and that is certainly one option, but here’s a simpler javascript way of doing it.

In addition to increasing revenue, you can use this strategy to improve your site’s load time. The general consensus is that when loading a page, you want to load javascript last whenever possible. That’s because most browsers render the page from the beginning of the source to the end and will pause whenever there are any delays, such as when loading javascript. If you’ve ever wondered why some people recommend that you use the height and width tags on images, that’s why (images also take a relatively long time to load, so if you can specify their screen dimensions then the browsers can continue rendering).

Here’s what the approach will be:

1. You will put an empty <div> block as a placeholder for where your ad will appear.
2. You will put a hidden <div> block in the footer that contains your Google Adsense javascript code.
3. You will add two lines of Javascript code to be executed on the window.onload event. The two lines of code will append your Google Adsense javascript code DIV to your empty placeholder DIV and then unhide it.

1. Empty DIV Block Placeholder

Stick this line of code, changing “GoogleAdsenseBlock” to something descriptive, wherever you want to insert Adsense:

<div id="GoogleAdsenseBlock"></div>

2. Hidden DIV Block in Footer

For each one of your DIV Block placeholders, add a hidden DIV block in the footer:

<div id="GoogleAdsenseCode" style="display: none;">
<strong>[Google Adsense Code]</strong>
</div>

Here’s where the Adsense blocks are being loaded, so order these from highest CTR to lowest. For example, if you have a header and a sidebar block, you would want to load the sidebar’s hidden DIV block first (assuming it has a higher CTR).

3. Shuffling DIVs with Javascript

Once you’ve created all the empty placeholders and loaded the Adsense javascript in hidden blocks, it’s time to stick them in the right places and make them visible.

<script type="text/javascript">
	window.onload = function() {
		document.getElementById('GoogleAdsenseBlock').appendChild(document.getElementById('GoogleAdsenseCode'));
		document.getElementById('GoogleAdsenseCode').style.display = '';
	}
</script>

The first section tells the code to execute whenever the window.onload event first. The first line of actual code takes your footer DIV block and appends it the placeholder. The second line takes away the display: none, which was hiding the second block from view.

Are there drawbacks to this? A small one. When you load your site, the page will initially render the page without the Adsense and then it will pop in once the page has completed loading (that’s the onload event firing). This is necessary or Internet Explorer will get upset.

Mucho gracias to Ed at Semplice, who came up with the code.

When you first start blogging, it’s very tempted to sign up for Blogger.com blog. It’s free, it’s fairly easy and intuitive to use, and you can be up and running within minutes. If you have absolutely zero technical know how, using a free service like Blogger or WordPress.com will get you a live blog faster than any other option. That convenience comes at a cost.

Lack of Control

The biggest reason I advise against using a hosted blog platform like Blogger.com or WordPress.com is because you aren’t in total control of your site. While you never have to worry about Blogger.com “going down,” you are subject to its whims. One absolutely wonderful site, Bankdeals.blogspot.com (now living at DepositAccounts.com), recently experienced quite a scare. Ken at Bankdeals has been writing about banking for what seems like eons. You can expect to see a dozen posts a day on the latest banking news and his consistency is almost legendary. However on one fateful day, every single post he had ever written disappeared. There was some sort of technical hiccup somewhere, out of his control, and his content was gone. Thankfully he was able to recover almost all of it and I think that was part of the impetus to move to his own site.

You Can’t Accumulate Link Equity

The second reason, behind control, is that the currency of the web is links. When you write something linkworthy, and people link to you, that’s a valuable indication that you’re a valued resource on the web. As you accumulate link equity, your site rises in the eyes of both your peer sites and search engines. The problem with accumulate link equity for a site on a hosted platform is that you are accumulating link equity for Blogger, or WordPress.com, or some third party service. Your site doesn’t actually benefit.

Hosting Your Own Isn’t Hard

Finally, hosting your own site isn’t very difficult. Many hosts these days have one-click installation for WordPress and one-click upgrades, meaning you just have to tell them you want WordPress and they handle the technical aspects of installing it, standing up a MySQL database, and making sure all the credentials match. Before the popularity of blogs, it wasn’t quite so simple but nowadays the market has responded by making it simple.

In the coming weeks we will have an expert, Mrs. Micah of Blogcrafted, write a guest post on how to move your site from Blogger to your own hosted WordPress site. If you want to earn money from your site now or in the future, you will want to host your own site as early as possible. The longer you wait, the more painful it becomes.

When I left my full time job to manage Bargaineering.com with 100% of my time, I was both ecstatic and terrified. I was ecstatic because now I could devote 100% of my work time towards something that afforded me 100% of the spoils. I was terrified because now I was 100% responsible for every dollar entering my bank account. If things performed well, I reaped the rewards. If things didn’t, I suffered the losses.

My response to both was to work more. If I was going to go down in flames, I wanted to know that I did everything I could and didn’t shirk on a minute of work. If I made the wrong decision but I worked it as hard as I could, I’d be happier with the result than if I made the wrong decision and half-assed it.

The recession of the last year didn’t hurt our income one bit, which was surprising since financial services were destroyed, but likely contributed to smaller rates of growth than in year’s past. On the whole, I’m happy I pursued Bargaineering full time because I suspect, had I half-assed it, we’d have been hurt even more by the recession. On the other, my level of work life balance is a bit skewed.

I do spend a lot of time working on various projects, this site included, and many of them are passion projects. I write a scotch blog because it’s a fun hobby. My wife and I write a travel blog because it’s a chance for us to chronicle our vacations. But for bread and butter work, I’m going to restraint myself to the typical “work week.”

Free time has the capability to clear your mind and refresh you in a way that gives you a better angle on a problem. It also gives your brain a rest. As anyone who has ever pulled an allnighter knows, the studying you do at 5 AM just isn’t as good as when you started.

On January 8, I blocked some filtered categories from appearing in the Adsense blocks. My guess was that it would cost me a few dollars, hopefully not too many, and that it would result in a much better user experience. Fewer people would be clicking on Get Rich Quick scams and the world would be a better place.

To measure the impact, I looked at the seven days preceding the change and compared it to the seven days since. The difference? eCPM fell by 6.8% and the CTR fell by 7%. While that sounds like a lot, it’s half of what was excluded. The eight categories I excluded accounted for 15.6% of recent earnings.

It may be a little early in the game for comparisons, Google Adsense may need more time to adjust to the exclusions, but the drop wasn’t as big as expected.

Have you filtered out some of the categories? Any early results so far?

Out of all the people in the world, I email my wife the most (awww… isn’t that sweet?). However, when she quit her job last year and went back to school for her Ph.D, I had an annoying problem every time I drafted an email to her. When I would start typing her name in the To: box, it would always suggest her work email address. And every time, I would have to navigate to one of the other email addresses Gmail had on file for her.

It was only a minor annoyance so I let it go for a few months but it turns out the solution is quite simple. GMail maintains a list of your contacts even if you never add them to your address book and it uses that list to help you auto-complete email addresses. Gmail is currently transitioning between the “new” GMail and the “old” GMail.

New Gmail

In the new Gmail, getting to Contacts has changed – you can find it by clicking the little red triangle to the right of Gmail at the upper left hand of the screen.

From there, the instructions are the same – you can just click the checkboxes and start deleting contacts. You can search for individual contacts in the search bar to find the person you need to remove.

Old Gmail

To remove an address from the list, do the following:

• Click on Contacts in the left sidebar, it’s under your labels and above Tasks and the Chat box.
• Then click on All Contacts to show your list of contacts.
• Check the boxes that you want to remove, then click Delete contact(s) all the way to the right.

I circled the Contacts link in red and the Delete contacts button in green, here’s what it looks like:

That’s it, no more auto-completing old email addresses that don’t even work anymore.

One of the great benefits of using WordPress is that it comes with so much free stuff. You can download a multitude plugins to extend the functionality of WordPress. You can download thousands of themes to change the look and feel of your site. WordPress itself gives you a window into that theme so you can customize every aspect of your design. All of this is possible without any background in software development and therein lies the beauty of open source software and the open source movement.

However, one problem that new bloggers often commit is that of overtinkering.

When you first start your blog, it’s often good enough to download a theme that pleases aesthetically. All too often, and I myself suffered from this, we feel that we should be tinkering with our theme so that it doesn’t look the same as every other blog that downloads that theme. What we don’t realize is that when you’re first starting out, the theme is less important than the content.

Themes are important, don’t get me wrong, but don’t over think it. People get their first impressions within seconds of viewing your site and as long as you have a professional looking theme that is easy to read, you will do fine. Wait until you have hundreds of visitors a day before you start playing with the theme. Wait until you have thousands before you start thinking about buying a theme.

You might be surprised to learn that all of my blogs use free themes. Most of your visitors will not know you have a common theme (you have to at least change it from the themes that come with the WordPress package, that’s too generic) and the ones that do won’t care.

If you’re curious what theme Bargaineering started out as… it was equiX, a free theme that is no longer available. Over the years, I tinkered with it (once it made sense to) to achieve certain goals and today it doesn’t look at all like equiX. Totally free.

Jeremy at GenXFinance.com has been dealing with a vexing problem lately. A series of random websites with the cz.cc TLDs have been using his Google Adsense javascript code to pump up his impressions and driving down his clickthrough rate. Over four days there were nearly 600,000 impressions and zero clicks.

While it may seem a bit harmless (no click, no revenue right?), this is actually something that is quite dangerous. First, Google is always on the lookout for abnormal behavior and this certainly qualifies. Second, there are CPM based ads and in that case the advertiser would’ve been charged, Jeremy would’ve made money, and almost certainly booted.

In Jeremy’s case, it was probably harmless but this is something that can be completely avoided. Google Adsense gives you the ability to block your Adsense publisher ID from being used on any other sites. You can control this by logging into your account, clicking Adsense Setup, and then Allowed Sites.

Here, you can add all the allowed URLs who can load up your code. You always want to do this because there is little benefit, and a lot of risk, for unauthorized sites to use your code. They can do this by looking at your source code and copying the javascript code.

Just remember to add new sites if you put the code on them!

Every year around this time all the blogs about blogs write about how you can add a little php code snippet to your footer so that you never again have to manually update the copyright year. Here’s the code snippet that displays the current year:

Copyright &copy; <?php echo date(‘Y’); ?> [Your Blog Name]

The date(‘Y’) part will display the current year.

While this is great advice, putting the copyright notice, with or without the year, is entirely unnecessary. I think most of us do it because everyone else does and because it doesn’t have any drawbacks. In the United States, and many other places, you are automatically granted a copyright to your work. You don’t need to register it. (you can do the poor man’s copyright, which is where you seal the work in a letter and send it to yourself – the postmark asks as the date)

How long does the copyright last? It lasts 70 years after your death (csusa.org).

So as you can see, putting dates at the bottom of your foot is really unnecessary.

Chances are your website has some reference-types of posts that are refreshed every year. In personal finance, there are plenty like IRA contribution limits or the income tax brackets. One great strategy that can help you accumulate more links is to make the post URLs dateless and shuffling the content around each year.

For example, let’s say you have a post on 2009 IRA contribution limits with the following URL:
http://www.yourblog.com/2009-IRA-contribution-limits.html

In 2010, I recommend that you use this URL for the 2010 version of the post:
http://www.yourblog.com/IRA-contribution-limits.html

When 2011 rolls around, create a new page:
http://www.yourblog.com/2010-IRA-contribution-limits.html

Move all the IRA-contribution-limits.html content into the new 2010-IRA-contribution-limits.html page and update the IRA-contribution-limits.html version with the updated information. The titles of the pages themselves should retain the date, it will help the reader know more clearly what year the information applies to.

This lets the dateless URL accumulate links, thereby increasing its link profile, while keeping the data fresh and accurate. This also gives people a chance to find the archived reference information should they need that as well. This won’t pay huge dividends at first but after a few iterations, you will see good results. At the very least, your site won’t be competing with itself.

Here’s a mistake that you might be making and not even realize it. Google puts the most valuable ads in the first Adsense block that is loaded. In this case, “valuable” means the one that generates the most revenue for them and, subsequently, you.

Specifically, they load the ad that gets the highest % of clicks times the cost per click to help decide which ads are the most valuable. The algorithm is more detailed than that but for our purposes that sums up all we really care about it.

One common mistake that many bloggers make is that they don’t load their highest converting Adsense block first. When you look at your page’s source code, it should appear higher than the other adsense javascript calls.

An Example Common Error

The left sidebar is usually the block with the highest CTR, however it may not be the one that is loaded first. A lot of websites put ads the header, like beside the website logo, which is usually loaded before the body of the post. The left sidebar might have a higher CTR but your header Adsense block has more valuable ads!

How can you fix this? In this scenario, you will need to use CSS to move parts of the page around so that you can put the javascript near the bottom but have it appear near the top.

To do this, you’ll need to wrap the Adsense javascript code in a div tag and then play with the CSS to get it to appear correctly.
<div id="GoogleAdsenseAd1">
Your Adsense Code
</div>

Then add this to your CSS stylesheet:
#GoogleAdsenseAd1 {
width: 468px;
height: 60px;
position: absolute;
left: 140px;
right: 0px;
bottom: 0px;
top: 350px;
}

Tweak the settings as necessary to have it appear where you want to. Good luck!