To be honest, I haven’t really started exploring enough contextual ad programs. All of you know about Google Adsense and Yahoo, but there’s not enough data compiled on the smaller CPC programs like Bidvertiser, Clicksor, and the like. I will be testing several of them on different sites that I have in order to see which ones work better for me. I will be sharing this information with you within a month or so, including statistics such as how much my revenue increased/decreased, how relevant the ads were, the revenue per click, etc.

Look for a post on this on November 25th.

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So now you’ve made a site, what steps can you take to improve your site? I won’t cover any traffic increase tips in this post, but rather I am going to give a few pointers on how to improve your actual site and site content.

Consider if your site is user friendly. Viewers like it when they see a nice clean site that is easily navigated. Take a look at monkeypeaches.com. This site looks extremely cluttered especially on top and the side navigations. It’s hard to read everything and harder to navigate through their content. This is an example of how not to design your webpage. Instead make sure you have an easy navigation layout. Viewers should not be confused by how to find content on your site.
Make your site more eye appealing. The following is an example of a site that is not eye appealing. You can view the actual site at Hkfilm.net.

First of all, the main banner that is displayed is blurry. A good site should use graphics that are sharp and appealing to the eye. Having a site that has blurry images is a huge turn off to any viewer that might be passing through. Secondly, the colors used are horrendous. The extreme blue and red hurts my eyes, and they make the site hard to look at. Aim to use moderate colors instead of extremely contrasted colors. Third, the font used is Times New Roman, which is a good font for Word documents, but not an appealing font for webpages. Webpages should use sans-serif fonts such as Arial, Tahoma, and Verdana. Times New Roman makes the font slightly harder to read, but more importantly, the font makes the site look too old-school.

Don’t have broken links. I can’t stress this one enough. If you are planning to add a section to your site, don’t link to a filler “coming soon” page. Not only does this put off visitors, but it can prevent your admission into directories such as DMOZ.org. It’s even worse if you have a bunch of 404 pages. It’s a good idea to make sure your site is completely finished before you launch instead of launching first and then adding the content later.

Continually update your site. If you don’t continually add new content, the search engines will visit your site less and less. Viewers will also decide not to come back unless they see that the site is constantly updated. Why do sites such as Google News keep getting visitors each day? It’s because there’s something completely new each and every day that prompts people to come back.

Alert to people that new content has arrived. Make sure that you write somewhere on your main page that you’ve updated such-and-such. It’s even better if you promote new content with an image that represents this content. One of the better sites that does this is IGN.com and gaming sites in general.

Keep the flash to a minimum. Flash is good for some sites, but in general it is better if your content is in text. Search engines can’t read any content that you’ve embedded in flash, so you will be losing a lot of visitors if your whole site is flash based.

Avoid popups. Yes you will probably be tempted to have popups on your site. If so, don’t add them to every single page. Popups are a visitor’s worst nightmare, and for the most part the average visitor will avoid coming back to a site that has popups. You can still generate traffic, but you will be losing a lot of potential customers and/or regular visitors.

Your site better offer something. You MUST offer some sort of service on your site. No one wants to go to your site if you are talking about your dog (unless you are being funny). Your job as a webmaster is to inform, teach, entertain, or otherwise keep a visitor busy with page content. Anything else, such as spamming ads all over the place, is a sure way to lose traffic and regular visitors.

Provide professional content. U dun wan 2 have txt tat reads like dis. You’re not typing in AIM, you are providing content to a visitor. Make sure you have no spelling errors, grammatical errors, or typos in your content. If you have staff, make sure they adhere to the same rules.

Good luck with your web endeavors.

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This article will mostly discuss placement techniques for contextual advertising that can dramatically raise your revenue from clicks. Contextual advertisers include Yahoo Publisher Network, Google, and Adbrite. These ads usually display a link followed by some description text or the url of the link.

Tip #1 - Placement
Ad placement is crucial for a website. Ads that people can’t see won’t be clicked on, so make sure the ads are located in a prime spot that will generate interest. The best spots for an ad is on the top fold of the webpage, meaning the viewer can see the ad without having to scroll.

The most clicked on ads are ones that are embedded within content. For written content I prefer the ad placement that is shown below.

This ad placement is successful for a number of reasons. First, the linking text stands out on the screen from the regular text. This helps to make the ad stand out more and gives a better chance for the viewer to actually read the ads. If I was writing an article about increasing revenue and you see an ad for “making money with your own website” you might be enticed to click it in order to gain some more insight on the matter. Secondly, since the ads are embedded so close to the text, it’s harder for the viewer to miss. Ads located on the sides are oftentimes looked over, which is exactly what you DON’T want visitors to do.

Tip #2 - Ad Blending
Some users will also click on ads if you blend the ads well with the rest of the content, but usually these clicks are generated on accident as you are essentially “tricking” your visitors into clicking ads by making the links seem like pages of your site. You should combine the methods mentioned in the first two tips, using ad blending on the navigation parts of your site, while making ads stand out more when they are embedded within content. An example of ad blending is shown below.

Among all the contextual advertising publishers, Adbrite is one of the easiest to modify the code in order to blend the link well with your webpage. Below is an example of a page that has embedded Adbrite ads with their own page links. As you can see, the ads look just like links to pages on their site. The other big dogs in the CPC business, Yahoo and Google, don’t have ads that blend in as well. This is why I reccomend that you choose Adbrite for a 2nd-tier CPC network.

An article that I found useful regarding ad blending can be found here. You can try this guy’s method to ad blending and see if it provides results.

Tip #3 - Images next to ads

Putting small, relevant images next to ads has shown to drastically increase ad revenue. The reason is because this attracts attention to the ads, and people are tricked into thinking that the picture is content related to the ad. Some publishers allow this method, however it seems like Google and Yahoo prohibit this. Read the TOS on certain publishers to get more info on whether this is allowed or not.

Tip #4 - Make the ads relevent

The best part of contextual advertising is that the ads are relevent to your site (Adbrite does not have this feature, they just put up generic network ads). Google and Yahoo both target their ads decently well, but Google Adsense definitely has the best ads that are relevant to your site. To increase ad relativity, make sure the keywords that you want ads for are repeated throughout. For example, if I wanted to display ads related to “making money” I would repeat the phrase making money many times on my page. If you want to be making money, and making money is what you want, then make sure that you are making money by implementing these ads well. It’s also best to spread your keywords throughout the page instead of concentrated in one area like above.

Tip #5 - Keep to one theme

This kind of ties in with making your ads relevent, but make sure your website concentrates one one certain type of category. For example, GameSpot.com is a site that focuses on games, while IGN.com has sections over games, movies, comics, cars, etc. GameSpot, if they used Google Adsense, would be serving the most relevent ads - gaming ads. While IGN, if they used Google Adsense, would be serving ads about all sorts of things because they have so many sectors. If a gamer goes on IGN and sees an ad about Japanese Movies, they probably won’t be enticed to click. Of course, these statements are just theoretically speaking, the main point is that if your website is focused on one topic, the ads will be better served to your target audience. If you have a website that covers many things, it will be harder to generate ads that interest your users.

Tip #6 - Do your research

Each publisher allows you to create separate channels for your ads so you can track how each individual ad unit is doing. Look over your ads and see which ones are performing the best, and then make a judgement as to which ads you should keep and which ones you should alter or get rid of. Constantly looking over your statistics is a key factor to increasing your ad revenue.

Stay tuned for more blog posts about increasing your ad revenue.

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So you want to create the next big thing. The next youtube, the next myspace, maybe even the next eBay, but you don’t know where to get started. You want to make a profitable website, but you’re not sure what niche you want to target. Hopefully today I can help you make your own site by revealing some of the methods I’ve used to create my sites.

Now it is likely that the website you are about to make might have been made already. When Myspace founders created their social networking website, there had already been tons of sites similar to it on the web. At this day and age, many good ideas have been taken and it’s now harder and harder to make a site that hasn’t already been made.

Fear not, even if you can’t think of a great one-of-a-kind site to make, you can always improve or alter something already invented. Take CyWorld for example. It’s a social networking site like Myspace, but it has been successful because it created a more friendly and nice looking environment, uncluttered unlike Myspace (which adds tons of ads). It also adds some cool features like your own avatar which can represent your moods, feelings, and thoughts for the day. Although the site isn’t as popular as Myspace, it is plenty good enough to generate a crapload of revenue, and the site is gaining popularity by the day.

You may remember the days before Google when we used to use Yahoo as a search engine. Then Google came along and dominated the search engine market by providing the real content that users wanted. The same thing happened with Myspace and Xanga (Myspace eventually overtook the old blogging site), and the same thing might happen with Myspace and Cyworld. Take this as inspiration - if you take a model and improve upon it, there is a good chance you can surpass the original.

So let’s say you don’t even have a model yet. Well first ask yourself what you are interested in. If you like basketball, is there a site you could make involving it? If you have any hobbies, perhaps you could make a site about it? My friend is an avid video game player so he decided to make a website about video games. Although there were plenty of gaming sites on the web, he made his unique by sharing his own personal views on certain games. In return, he got many endorsement deals, began getting free games, and earned money off of affiliate programs. It sounds pretty obvious, but you should only make a site that contains content that you are familiar with. It’s not a wise choice to create a site about video games unless you have experience with video games. Likewise, it’s not a wise choice to make a webmastering blog if you just started webmastering 101 with Ms. Chapman at your local Middle School.

Although it’s best to come up with your own idea, many clone websites these days are making loads of money. Flash Arcades and Myspace code sites are hot, but this also means it is harder to promote and advertise them. Blogs are also hot, so if you have an interesting life or if you can teach people something (like I’m doing right now - hopefully), then you can make money with a blog (I hope to cover blog-writing in-depthly in a later article). Another trend these days is Social Networking sites made through the use of the pre-made script PHPfox. Flash arcade sites are using scripts such as Game Site Script. These are just two examples of pre-made sites that you can copy and make revenue out of. You’re not on the path to Youtube 2.0, but you still have a shot to make a revenue-generating website.

Still, being the aspiring webmaster you are, you are bent on creating something that is completely original and unique that can also make money. To help you a little bit more, let’s venture back to 2005 when the Milliondollarhomepage was created. He was just a normal student (read his blog), but he somehow came up with this brilliant idea, or maybe he was just lucky that his idea took off, in my mind the idea wasn’t that great at all (it’s hard to see those ads!), but it turned out that the site was a success. The moral behind this story is to follow your crazy ideas. Take risks, be imaginitive, delve deep into your head to find something unique.

There are three basic steps that will help anyone create a site. First, think and evaluate about topics that you have an interest in or have experience in, second, keep the ideas fresh and always brainstorm new ideas, third, obscure ideas are never stupid, what you think is stupid may become the next big thing. Hopefully I’ve helped to give you some tips and hints that may lead you to create your next site.

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