Technology

A couple of months ago Google made some significant changes to their AdSense program when they re-did the clickable area, which caused a lot of people to lose money. I know personally that my AdSense income dropped by at least $70.00 a month as a result of this change, and I’ve heard from several others that are have had the same problem.

Anytime there is a change, it is only natural we take the time to step back and look over the situation in the hope of finding a way to improve it. One post I ran across recently was written by Josh titled 10 Ways to Increase Your AdSense Income. In his post, Josh covers a bunch of methods people should consider when trying to maximize their clicks.

Two important tips:

2. Target competitive niches! I don’t care what anyone says about MFA sites, they work! I’m not talking about spam sites, I’m talking about high-quality, informative sites that are in a high paying market! Some of these niche sites can bring in $5-$10/day after only a couple days. When you’re making over a $1 per click you don’t need much traffic to make money.

3. If a site has a CTR of 1% or less, remove it from your site. Although there is some controversy as to whether or not CTR causes “smart pricing” to kick in, it’s just not worth risking. At least remove Adsense for a few weeks and see if your overall adsense income rises. If so, you were probably hit with Google’s Smart Pricing. If that site in particular was causing smart-pricing to kick in, consider a different monetization model.

And one tip I’m not so sure about:

8. Do not go by Google’s heat map. It’s a good visual aid for some layouts, but there are just too many variables. The effectiveness of any layout will be determined by color, style, niche etc. so testing is always your best bet!

Click over to check out the rest of the list!

Oh my, look how far we’ve come!   Back in 1996 I was a junior in high school and about the only time I spent online was in America Online chat rooms or running my Wu Tang Clan eClub.  I also remember trying to find ways to download games for my Texas Instrument calculator.  We all had e-mail addresses, but most people didn’t have personal websites or spend much time surfing online.   They certainly didn’t go there with the intention of finding information, it was more for entertainment.  The popular browser at the time was Netscape Navigator, though Internet Explorer 3 was starting to gain popularity.

Knowing what we know now, it is truly amazing how far the internet has come in only a little over a decade.    A student of Michigan State University recently took a look back at the Internet in 1996 to get an idea of what websites looked like because he was to young to truly remember.   I really enjoyed the post and bet you will also!

What is your favorite memory of being online in the late 1990’s?

We are already a couple weeks into 2008! It looks like most of the review posts are finally over and things are starting to return to normal. Here is this weeks installment of technology talk:

• Crestock has posted their 50 most popular web design, blog posts, and cheat sheets of 2007. If you do any web design, this is a useful post to read through.
• Karthik of Shankri-La has posted his top Greasemonkey scripts for Gmail 2.0. This is probably the most complete list I’ve seen yet.
• Advertise Space has posted 7 reasons you should be advertising on blogs. It is generally a good practice once your blog has started generating some income to set aside a portion of it to apply towards advertising and continuing to grow your blog.
• Josh Spaulding has posted 6 underutilized ways to increase search engine rankings. I always love to read others opinions in this area and Josh does a great job in this post of focusing on internal link structure and other areas where you can improve your blog.
• I ran across this list of funny Windows error messages. Some are so crazy that it is hard to believe they aren’t photoshoped (or maybe they are!).
• 2Spare.com has posted the 10 Creepiest Old Advertisements. Creepy is a good word because it is just hard to believe that advertisements used to look like this.
• Garry Conn offers his thoughts on having a Robots.txt. It took me awhile to get the hang of them, but I’ve enjoyed a lot of success with a Robots.txt file and recommend everyone have one.