Top search engine Google recently put an end to its AdSense referral program, but it has already introduced a new revenue-generating option for AdSense users. Google recently announced on its AdSense blog that they had launched a new feed advertising system, which makes it possible to earn money by putting AdSense units in RSS feeds.
The feed advertising program will include both pay-per-click and pay-per-impression advertisements. According to Google, they will be specifically targeted to the type of users who view RSS feeds. Content authors can customize the advertising in several ways that are specific to RSS feeds; they can choose how often the ads are displayed throughout the feed, as well as the minimum entry length they should be applied to. Google AdSense Help Center now provides a section on “Getting Started” and “Troubleshooting” the feed advertising system, and the AdSense blog offers a short explanatory video with screenshots of the new system.
When using any RSS feed advertising system, advertisers should take into consideration the kind of people who will see their ads. Generally, it can be predicted that people who subscribe to feeds are at least fairly skilled in using computers, spend enough time on the internet to have an interest in subscribing to these feeds, and have their own computers (rather than only using publicly available computers). Free RSS reader applications are available for almost any operating system, so anyone who can afford an internet connection has access to them. Users with recent browsers like IE 7.0 have built-in RSS support, so they might be somewhat more likely to use it.
This new Google AdSense program gives web site and blog operators another opportunity to generate advertising revenue, if they produce RSS feed content. As with other companies which are introducing feed based advertising, it also provides Google advertisers with another promotional option. On the other hand, some readers of RSS feeds are displeased with this change; such feeds were previously free of ads and other “clutter” often found on web pages. This was probably to be expected; sources of information seldom remain ad-free unless they require a subscription fee or are operated by the government.
On a more positive note, Google’s new feed advertising program may encourage some web site owners to introduce new RSS feeds, even if they were previously reluctant about using RSS. However, feed operators should be careful not to overuse advertising in their feeds, keeping in mind that this could cause some users to unsubscribe.
Many people that have blogs today run them using WordPress. WordPress fortunately has a few plugins that can help optimize your blog for search engines. Here is a little more information about five those plugins.
1. SEO Title Tag allows you to optimize the title tags in your WordPress blog. Since title tags are quite important in SEO this plugin is also important. You can override a post or page title tag with a custom version as well as reverse the order of the blog name and the title making your post’s title more SEO efficient.
2. Head Meta Description lets you add dynamic meta descriptions automatically. It uses the first few words from your post though so put your important keywords in early.
3. The Ultimate Tag Warrior lets you include your tags as Meta Keywords in the header of tag pages and single post pages.
4. The All-in-One SEO Pack allows you to define your home page title, description and keywords, use categories for meta keywords, avoid indexing of duplicate content and autogenerate descriptions.
5. Google Sitemap Generator creates a Google compliant sitemap of your blog. Google sitemaps are important because they can help you get indexed by Google.
Using these five plugins can really help your blog returned higher in search engine results. But, you still need lots of unique content that is updated frequently and is relevant to your market. Otherwise Google and the other search engines won’t care how well you optimize.
A new year has begun, and it isn’t too late to start a blog if you haven’t already. It is easy, and can be entirely free, to create a blog. Here are a few of the top reasons you might want to start a new blog this year…
EARN MONEY: There are many ways to earn money by running a blog, including some income opportunities which are not available to non-blog web site owners. One way to earn money is to use sponsored blog advertisements from services like PayPerPost, Blogitive, and others. These services usually require blogs to have existed for at least a month (in some cases, as long as three months), so the sooner you start, the earlier the date you can start earning from them is. It is also possible to generate income from advertising systems like Google AdSense, or by attracting new visitors to your web site so they will purchase your products or services. As an alternative, some bloggers request optional donations from readers, often via instant payment methods such as PayPal.
GAIN EXPERIENCE: Your blog can be provided as an example of your work when applying for some types of online job opportunities. Such jobs can include writing, blogging (at someone else’s web site), some types of editing or proofreading, web design (if you can design blogs yourself), and possibly forum moderation. Operating blogs can also give you practice in writing, editing, managing comments, search engine optimization, and creating ad revenue. On the other hand, if you don’t have the time or expertise, it is not particularly expensive to have someone else perform one or more of these tasks for your blog.
EXPRESS YOURSELF: Another one of the reasons to start a blog in the new year is that blogging is a good way to express new ideas or theories you may have. Unlike with other web sites or publications, your ideas won’t have to receive an editor’s approval before they will appear on your own blog. If desired, you can also receive feedback from others about what you have to say. Additionally, blogs can help draw attention to important issues which are being ignored, or connect multiple events or pieces of information in a way which has been overlooked. All of this can be combined with earning money, using the above-mentioned methods.
When writing new entries in blogs, their titles should not only be descriptive and attention-getting, but also help make them easy to find in search results. Here are some tips on creating great SEO (Search Engine Optimization) titles for blogs you are writing.
1. Put words and/or phrases in the blog entry titles which people regularly search for. Preferably, these should be sentences or keywords which have not already been used by a massive number of other blogs and websites.
2. Use words from your blog entry in the title; don’t put the word “automobiles” in the title and only use the word “vehicles” in the body of your entry. This is beneficial for SEO because search engines give priority to blogs and other web pages which repeatedly use words the user searches for, not just in their titles. Remember that the title’s phrasing must still be appealing for search engine users to click on.
3. If the blog website itself has a fairly long name, put it after the titles of your individual blog entries, not before. Another option is to put the name near the top of the page, but not in the title tag, and use the titles just for describing the individual blog entries.
4. Unless your information is very time-specific, don’t bother writing the date it was posted in the title. An entry from 1999 about photography techniques is probably just as relevant today, but having the date in its title makes it appear outdated and distracts from the rest of the title.
5. When writing new posts for your blogs, determine the titles after you are finished (unless you have particular keywords already in mind); you will have a better idea of how to describe it and which SEO keywords to use in the title.
6. Don’t use individual entry titles which are too long or short. Aim for a title length of four to ten words, as fewer than four words is not descriptive enough, while over ten (possibly fewer if they are long words) is bad for SEO because it will only be partially displayed in search results, with the remaining words replaced by an ellipsis. If the most important word is near the end of a very long title, its meaning could be lost.
Keeping these tips in mind should be helpful in writing great titles which are effective for SEO, thus bringing a larger amount of traffic to blogs which have been optimized in this manner.
No one indicator can be reliably used for measuring a blog’s level of success; several different factors have an impact on how much success it can be considered to have achieved. Criteria for measuring the success of a blog also varies depending upon the goals of its author.
One important measure of success for a blog is how many repeat visitors it receives. If many of the same people return to it daily or weekly, the blog’s content is probably of interest to them, updated regularly, and considered to be of good quality. It is less costly in time and money to retain repeat visitors than to promote the blog to new readers. If statistics show many people reaching the blog without a referring URL, they are probably typing it into their web browser’s address bar or accessing it from their favorites/bookmarks. A blog can still be considered to be a success if most of its readers come from links on other web sites, but it will be more dependent upon the other sites and may suffer if they disappear or change ownership. Positive comments to blog message postings, and voluntarily links from other web sites, can also be seen as indications of a blog’s success in offering interesting, high-quality content.
Some bloggers desire to earn advertising revenue or promote a product/service they are selling, while others want to express an important opinion or do both. Measuring success is somewhat different for each of these goals, but receiving a substantial amount of “traffic” or “hits” is important to all of them; all want their message to reach as large an audience as possible. While bloggers most interested in expressing an opinion may be satisfied if enough people read their blog posts, bloggers who want to earn advertising and/or sales revenue will be displeased with a large number of readers who are unresponsive to their promotional efforts. This may be a problem of attracting the wrong type of readers, or because the blog is improperly designed to encourage purchases or clicks on advertisements. Measuring how much success a blog has attained also depends upon how long it has existed; if it was started a couple weeks ago and already has several readers who frequently visit it, this is a greater indication of its successfulness than if it were several months or years old.
Overall, measuring a blog’s level of success involves determining the number of voluntarily-placed links to it, regular/repeat visitors, positive comments regarding it, total number of readers, and the advertising or sales revenue it generates.
RSS Submission for your Blog or URL is a great way to build links back to your website. Here is a list of RSS Submission links that are not in most automatic RSS Submission or PING lists. In addition, none of these should require a user name or password.
Blog and Ping is at term that is applied to systems that utilize blog and ping (short for pingback) to deliver content to sites. Every blog and ping promoter has a different sales pitch. The commonality to all blog and ping sites, is that they ping sites such as Blogger.com as a means to deliver the search engine spiders to your website.
The entire purpose for blog and ping is to attract search engines to your site and let them spider the rest of your site on their own. Blog and ping may not be as effective as it was during its inception. However, blog and ping still play a pivotal roll in promoting your site.
Here is a good list to keep handy if you manage your own site. If you use Wordpress, you can add this list for automatically ping after every post. Simply add the list in your admin under Options…Writing after scrolling to the bottom of the page. The current default entry is http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
Blogging, Social Media | seowhitehats | December 27, 2008 | 
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