Make Money Online

Do you find yourself often going off-topic with posts in your blog, or posting something you knew was not in-line with the rest of your blog’s content, but you just had to post it?  You may be losing out on ad revenue if your AdSense ads follow you and show off-topic ads as well.  Luckily, there’s a solution.

Section Targeting for AdSense let’s you tell AdSense which parts of your text should be emphasized or ignored when matching ads to your site’s content.  This let’s you go off-tangent occasionally with your posts while keeping your ad targeted.

How do you implement Section Targeting for AdSense?
The good news is that it’s a simple process, but you do need to use a little bit of HTML (I would say that basic knowledge of HTML is a necessity for anyone serious about blogging online).

You would insert the following tags before and after your desired section to emphasize for AdSense:

<!– google_ad_section_start –>
This is the section of your blog that you want AdSense to emphasize, and should be contained in this space between the start and end tags.
<!– google_ad_section_end
–>

If you have a section within your post that you want AdSense to ignore, add a (weight=ignore) to the start tag like this:

<!– google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) –>
This is the part of your blog post that you want AdSense to ignore.
<!– google_ad_section_end
–>

Using Section Targeting for AdSense will not result in immediate changes to the ads being served by AdSense on your site or the page on which you used Section Targeting.  It can take up to two weeks before their crawlers will take the Section Targeting into account.

While you can have as many AdSense Targeted Sections on your blog as you’d like, you do want to make sure that the majority of your site’s content is contained within the section targeting tags.  Section Targeting for AdSense is NOT a good way to try and get specific high-value keyword ads to appear on your site.  It is against AdSense program policies, and may also result in less-relevant ads or PSAs (Public Service Announcements) appearing on your page.

Signed up for my Google AdSense today, and put my first adsense ads on the blog (over to the right).  When you sign up, you’ll want to read many of the resources that Google has available for you, including Google AdSense optimization tips, the Google AdSense Blog and Common Questions about Google AdSense.

The AdSense application was quick and easy.  You just need to identify the url of your primary website, and provide some personal address & tax information to be able to receive payments.  Your first payout will come after you’ve reached $100 (How long will this take?).

I am currently just implementing AdSense for cCntent, meaning that ads will show up that Google deems relevant to your site’s (or a specific webpage’s) content.  I will most likely implement Google’s Adsense for Search soon, but that is a lower priority for me.

My last post indicated that I was going to be moving forward with my favorite blogging platform — TypePad — but I may now also give some consideration to moving my family blog(s) to Blogger and/or WordPress as well.

Why am I doing this? The answer is simple — Search Engine Optimization. Search engines (Google especially) put special importance on inbound links and their relevancy. But they also seem to be able to detect multiple links coming from the same IP address and don’t count these as highly as multiple links from different IP addresses. By maintaining different blogs (each with their own domain name, of course) on three different blogging platforms, and interlinking them through my blogroll, these inbound links will carry more weight.

Additionally, since I control the linking method, I will also be able to customize the "Title" tag in the outbound link to embed keywords in the link (WordPress includes this field as a default part of their linking method), as well as review my various blogs in relevant posts on each of the other blogs. This will help in establishing relevancy for each of the inbound/outbound links amongst my blogs.

So I’ve spent the last two days exploring different blogging platforms that will suit my needs in moving forward. In the end, I ended up keeping this blog to what I hope is its long-term home at TypePad. It seems to be the blog platform of choice for many bloggers, and has a whole host of customization options that should suit me in moving forward.

In reviewing platform, I reviewed Blogger (Google’s platform), TypePad and WordPress. Here’s my run-down:

Blogger
This is where I started this blog in January. Fairly easy setup, and free. For the casual or non-professional user, I think this is a great place to start. Why? There just are not that many options for you, which means that it is simple and hard to get confused. You can also point your own domain to your blog for further customization. Blogger recently launched new improvements, but still seems to be a bit behind its competitors.

Pros
- Simple and Easy-to-use
- Not confusing
- Can point your own domain name to your blog

Cons
- Limited upgrade options or advanced features
- Limited number of stock themes/layouts

TypePad
I have run the blog for stashSpace and Online Video Sharing on TypePad, am currently subscribing to their Pro-level account, and have been quite happy with their service. Indeed, I plan on using their service for my projects moving forward. They have an abundance of themes available for selection, offer domain mapping, have widgets readily available for incorporation into your blog, and have overall been easy to use.

Pros
- Many available templates, easy to customize
- 1 GB of storage and 10 GB monthly bandwidth ($14.95/m)
- Unlimited blogs
- Domain mapping
- Guest authors

Cons
- Confusing dashboard navigation (small issue)

WordPress
This is the blogging platform of choice for Robert Scoble’s Scobleizer and Michael Arrington’s TechCrunch, and a quick glance at the feature set shows you why. Advanced features abound, and the process for posting is quick, clear and easy. Their free product is full-features, you can have multiple blogs and their credit-based purchase system for add-on features let’s you pick & choose to add features as and when you need them. I also look forward to comparing their built-in statistics tracking to what is available through Google’s free analytics.

However, their free product does not allow for any advertisement — Google AdSense, Amazon, or other — which is an obvious roadblock for my whole purpose being here.  There is not an upgrade option either to allow for advertising, without upgrading to their $250/month VIP program.  What was a very appealing platform is now a discarded option.

Pros
- Many available templates, easy to customize
- Pay for features as/when you want them
- Unlimited blogs
- Domain mapping
- Nice statistics tracking

Cons
- No advertising/affiliate upgrade option

While researching Pay Per Post, I came across another site — SponsoredReviews.com — which seems to be a take-off on PPP, with a twist.  Rather than having the advertiser set the price of a post, SponsoredReviews allows bloggers to set their own price, and have advertisers come to them.  Alternately, bloggers can look to a list of opportunties and decide for themselves whether the price being offered is worth the effort.

The lowest price of a review seems to be $10, although a post through SponsoredReviews will theoretically take more time to generate than for PPP.  On the positive side, SponsoredReviews requires disclosure on all posts, as well as a 3:1 ratio of non-paid content to sponsored content.  I couldn’t find if there are any limits as to the number of reviews one could conduct per day.

So I registered for Pay Per Post (PPP) last week, and have been excited about getting started with them.  I will be posting disclosures with each paid post or review, and placing these under a new category "Sponsored Reviews", along with any other appropriate tags. In reviewing the Terms of Service, there are a couple of points that you need to make sure you understand prior to moving forward with PPP. 

First, you can’t just start a blog and start generating paid posts.  PPP requires that your blog be aged a minimum of 90 days, and have at least 20 original blog postings prior to submitting your blog for approval.  So if you’ve been considering jumping into online blogging to make money, start as soon as possible so that you can start the clock ticking.  This time will also allow you to get experience with your blogging platform, and get used to posting to your blog on a regular basis.  I know that come April 1st, I’ll be submitting this blog for approval to get started.

Second, understand that you will most likely not make a lot of money with PPP.  While there are opportunities that pay in the $15 to $50 (or more) range, they are usually reserved for established blogs with high Page Ranks or Alexa Rankings.  The majority of opportunities that seem to be available for the more "Run-of-the-mill" bloggers are in th $7 to $10 range.

Third, you cannot establish a blog for the sole purpose of being paid to post.  PPP has a limit of three paid posts per day per blog, and requires to have non-paid posts placed between the paid opportunities.  This means a minimum of 6 posts a day per blog, for a maximum of around $25/day or $500/month for a 5-day work week (remember, the goal here is flexibility, right?).

Finally, PPP requires that either each post carry a disclosure, or that you have a site-wide disclosure policy regarding the acceptance of financial considerations in return for blogging about certain products.  I think that I will actually do both, to ensure that my readers can easily discern between my normal posts and paid posts.