Devil Works

Can summarise the changes to Google Adsense for me ?

I get presented with a really long page with all the terms and conditions and all I really want to know is what has changed since the last time.

I’ll keep taking the skip option until I don’t have a choice. Though I have plenty of time. Changes don’t start till the 28th May.

After the first couple of months I stopped reading the adsense optimisation tips that Google automatically sends me each month.

The main reason is that unless your very new to creating websites for money making purposes then they haven’t anything new to tell you.

The other reason is that Google wouldn’t think for a second that there is better ways to make money than stacking your sites with Google products.

I have a funny feeling that the whole idea of killing pagerank for sites selling text links is so that people replace them with Google inventory.

Here’s some of the clever tips that Google provided me this month

Adsense for Search adds both functionality and revenue to your site.
You are not currently using Adsense for Search on your sites.

Okay, I agree to this one, but in the past when I’ve used Adsense for search the revenue has been tiny. So I haven’t bothered to replace the code when I’ve changed themes. If I was getting 10,000 hits a day I may reconsider my position on this one.

Referrals can add incremental revenue to your site.
You are not currently using Referrals on your sites.

Google recently reduced payouts on referrals by massive amounts, I won’t waste my time for the pittance they are offering.

Placing more than one ad unit on a page often generates more revenue.
Many of your sites only contain one ad unit.

I know this, it’s obvious. Though doubling the number of ad units on a page doesn’t always mean double the revenue. I have one site that has a link bar at the top then 3 decent size ad blocks throughout the template. 95% of my Google revenue on that site comes from the link bar.

I know it doesn’t pay to bite the hand that feeds you, but it also doesn’t hurt to check the source and quality of the food before you eat it !

I’ve got some big plans for my web sites this year that involve a lot of database work and some minor server customisation so to save hassles later on I’ve decided that I should move hosts now rather than later. I’m currently using a reseller package that I got a couple of years ago. Compared to what’s on the market now I know I’m paying too much for what I’m getting but web hosts never seem to upgrade their offers as time goes by.

I’ll either be looking for a VPS or managed dedicated solution. I guess I’ll decide once I’ve done some shopping around.

I thought about doing this myself but I don’t think I could maintain the interest in it. So I’m putting the idea out there for anyone else to run with. Listen Up…..

I’ve been subsrcribing to John Chow’s blog just about since it began. It used to be an interesting read for me but these days he is posting several times a day and a lot of it isn’t relevant to my interests anymore. For some reason I’m still subscribed but tend to skim through a lot of the posts.

My idea is to post a weekly digest of Johns posts, summarising what they are about and linking to each of the posts. John has over 15,000 RSS readers and even if you only get 5% of his readership subscribing to your blog for the digest posts then that would be 750 new readers. I know I’d be one person to subscribe, I waste far too much time looking at his dining reports and paid reviews of things that I’ll never need.

Another reason is that very few of John’s posts are time critical, so if they don’t show up in your feed reader for a week it’s unlikely you’re missing out on much.

If you’re the first one off the block with this idea I imagine you’ll get link baited from John Chow, John Cow and maybe a few other blogs.

Maybe my ideas not new and someone else is already doing this, if so let me know and I can get some of my precious time back…… and waste it on Facebook.

Hmmm, writing this post I’ve just come up with another idea……. not sharing that one though, I’ll save that for when I have the resources to put it into place.