Monday, April 13, 2009

A Few Money Making Tips

Here's a short checklist of things you can do to increase readership, traffic, and overall visibilty on the internet. These things are all must haves if you expect to make money!

  • Write well and write often
  • Write what you know and what you like writing about
  • Stay with your general topic, and be informative
  • Answer comments kindly and promptly
  • Never make lame excuses for not updating
  • Keep your site neat and orderly
  • Your site should be easy on the eyes and easy to read
  • Toss out the trash regularly by deleting and blocking spam comments
  • Use social bookmarking icon links for Reddit, deli.cio.us and Furl and many others
  • Use Technorati tags on keywords in your posts
  • Make sure your readers can reach you by email or web form
  • Don't have more than 2 or 3 posts showing on the front (index) page
  • Make sure your site loads quickly with no major errors
  • Frequently check your site in all major browsers for appearance and readability
  • Leave relevant comments with your return link at other sites
  • Good content is most important
  • Don't distract from content with excessive buttons and blinkie ads in sidebar
  • Use relevant images in posts, don't over do it

Those are the most important ones I can think of at the moment but I'll probably add more in the future.

Free Adsense Tech Blogger XML Skin

Download a free copy of this Google Adsense optimized template. It includes special space allowances using the widgets in the heading area, the upper right sidebar and the lower left sidebar for three of the most popular and best paying Google ad formats. The widgets are useing the HTML/Javascript page elements for ease of use.

The ad space in the header is sized to 468 x 60 pixels, the upper right side is the 336 x 280 and the lower left sidebar is 160 x 600. You can use any combination of text - image ads, or all text. The lower sidebar widgets can be easily swapped into either the left column or the right column if you prefer the archives and RSS subscribe links closer to the post area by drag and drop on the page elements editor.

The header background image is easily replaced in the style sheet with any image of your choice, but it must be sized to 930 x 150 pixels, or you can use no header image and set just a background color for that section. The overall font styles and sizes are closely matched to the default ad text sizes.