Take advantage of Adsense URL channels
Many bloggers choose to add articles to free sites in an effort to make some extra money on the side and to draw more attention to their own blog. Many of these sites allow you to enter your Google Adsense account info into your profile in order to collect any revenues that your article may earn.
If you are a blogger, chances are you have already created a Google Adsense account. This account is likely used to place pictorial and text advertisements on your blog. Both types of content ads are very easy to track with useful Adsense reports. But how do you track the money you are earning through the free sites?
The answer is actually quite simple. You need to create what are called Adsense URL channels. To access this area in your account, click on the Adsense Setup Tab, and then on the Channels link right below it. There is an area that says URL channels that you will need to click on. From there, simply click on the add new URL channel and type in the URL that you want to track.
There are tricks to entering your URL. First, you want to make sure NOT to include the “http://www” portion of the address. Second, if you want to track all of the articles that you have posted on the site, enter the URL of the site – not your specific articles. Third, if you want to track each article individually then you can add the specific URLs.
Tip: Plan accordingly when you setup your URL channels. Google Adsense will only allow you to track a total of 200 channels so you need to make sure you are tracking the most important ones!
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Filed under Blogging Tips, Make Money Blogging
Encrypted blog footers
One of the most annoying things I have encountered in the blog world is encrypted footers in free blog themes. Anyone who has used free blog themes has likely encountered this very problem. There are a lot of talented designers out there who place their blog themes out on the web free of charge. The downside – many of these free blog themes have links and other random information in the footer.
Now it takes a lot of time to create a functional blog theme that is widget friendly, Adsense friendly, free of errors, and a million other things. I have no issue with the designer requesting that the links they leave in the footer remain as they are if you want to take advantage of their free blog theme.
What I do have a problem with is the encryption. If you are going to offer a blog theme to users, they should have reasonable access to all parts of it so they can customize it as they need to. No blog theme is going to be a one size fits all solution for every blogger. There are things that are going to have to be tweaked.
I like to put a link to my blog’s privacy policy in the footer of the theme. If the blog’s footer is encrypted, I can’t do this. As I do use Google Adsense, having a privacy policy on my blog is mandatory. This means that in certain situations I have to place the privacy policy in a less than ideal position.
Yes I do realize that encrypted footers can be hacked, but this is not my desire. I simply want access to them so I can tweak the things I need to. A bit of a rant – but encrypted footers are annoying and unacceptable!
Filed under Blogging, Blogging Tips
How important is my blog theme?
How much time do you spend surfing the internet every week? How many blogs do you think you visit on any given day? What is it that attracts you to explore a new blog after you have found it?
For me, I need to find the blog visually appealing. I don’t want to see the original wordpress theme on a blog. I want to know that someone has spent time to make their blog more interesting for their readers. I like images, but you’ll notice I don’t really use a lot of images on my own blog. Why? For the most part, I believe images would clutter my blog while adding little value.
Now if I had a food blog, I would certainly use images to demonstrate the items that I was talking about. A food blog without images would be like looking through a cookbook without pictures. Blah. I’ll pass. I think images are better suited for certain types of blogs and not others.
Instead of using images to attract readers, a blog theme can accomplish this same objective. If you have a large budget for your blog, you can afford to have a talented designer create a fully functional custom blog theme. For those of us with smaller budgets, there are PLENTY of free blog themes that are perfectly adequate to achieve success.
The trick with finding a great blog theme for free is to be willing to invest time in the hunt. There are millions of themes available and it will be up to you to spend the time sorting through numerous websites and thousands of themes until you find one that is suitable for your blog. Even after you find one you like, make sure you test it out fully to ensure there aren’t errors or other issues that will take away from the quality of your blog!
Filed under Blogging, Blogging Tips
Is blogging obsessive?
Ask a blogger how much time they spend with their site every day, every week, every month. You might be surprised by the answer. Most bloggers with successful sites spend many hours making sure links aren’t broken, comments aren’t spam, and articles are posted regularly.
Successful bloggers will enjoy the challenges of getting readers and improving their search engine ranking. These things do not happen over night, which means there is a lot of effort that needs to be invested before results are seen.
Once you do start seeing subtle improvements, it will fuel you on to continue growing your blog. This is where things can be obsessive. Most of us are saddled with a full time job in addition to blogging. This means that blogging (and all things associated with blogging) occur during the evening hours and weekends.
Now if you are juggling a full time job, a blog, and a family, you probably have found yourself torn on more than one occasion. I do believe blogging can get obsessive and this can be a problem. One of the easiest ways to get around this issue is to get your family members involved with the blog.
You can have someone monitor the comments on your blog for spam and delete the inappropriate ones. If someone is particularly good with Photoshop (or whatever graphics program you use), have them edit images for your blog. Get creative and think of interesting jobs for family members. Then you can enjoy blogging and spending time with the family all at once.
Filed under Blogging, Blogging Tips
Managing your blog while on vacation
Getting a blog established takes a lot of effort and time. Once you have a successful blog, it can be extremely difficult to walk away from it in order to take a vacation. Your readers get used to a routine and if that changes, you risk losing them. There are a few things you can do to ensure that your blog will continue to operate smoothly even while you are away on vacation.
The first thing you need to consider is how frequently you post on your blog. You will want to continue this same pattern. The easiest way to do this is to spend some time in advance writing articles for your blog. Then you can schedule them to post on the days while you are away.
There are a few instances where posting your articles in advance is not an effective way to run your blog. This is particularly true if your blog focuses on current events. If this is the case, you need to find a guest blogger that can post articles in your absence. Of course you need to be confident this person will post quality articles on the days when it is necessary.
As your articles are posted, your readers are likely to add their comments to them. Along with legitimate reader comments, your blog may also be subjected to spam comments. It is important to keep these under control while you are on vacation. You can do this with a great spam filter like Akismet. If spam comments are a serious problem on your blog, you may consider disabling comments altogether until you return.
Whenever possible, it is always nice to have someone back at home (who is trustworthy) keep an eye on your blog. They can fix any issues that pop up so you don’t lose your readers! It also never hurts to let your readers know you will be away if you have established that type of style on your site.
Filed under Blogging, Blogging Tips
Rid your blog of spam comments
One of the most annoying things that bloggers will encounter is spam comments. It takes a lot of hard work to think up and write new blog posts. Great comments are your rewards for these posts. When these comments are lost in the midst of a bunch of spam comments, it is very frustrating and devalues your blog.
To overcome spam comments, consider activating a plugin that comes installed with WordPress. Akismet is a great anti-spam tool that will help you keep your blog filled with only the good comments. While I’m specifically referencing the WordPress version of Akismet, this product is also available for other popular blogging platforms!
In order to activate Akismet, you need to get an API key. This is easy to do and there is a link included directly from the plugin’s info in WordPress. All you need to get your API key is an email address. Keep in mind that Akismet is free for personal bloggers. If you make more than $500 a month on your blog, Akismet asks that you purchase a commercial license for their product!
Once you get your API key and Akismet has been successfully activated, you will need to click on tools to monitor this plugin. The Akismet tool will show you everything that has been flagged as spam on your blog. You will then have the option to approve the comment if it was accidentally flagged.
Every comment that is flagged as spam goes into the Akismet database. This actually makes the plugin stronger as future comments from the same person will also be captured in the spam filter. Over time, you will notice the amount of spam on your blog has decreased tremendously!
Filed under Blogging, Blogging Tips
