I had an email discussion with Lee regarding outbound links the other day. We were going to review blogs here at dS until we decided it would render too much exit points for our readers. Now outbound links is good, but just like everything else in life no matter how good something is if you get too much of it it’s never good.

Darren at ProBlogger.com seem to have the same struggle in this matter:

I know of numerous Adsense publishers swear by not giving their readers any links to click on their sites unless they go to another page on the site or unless they have some money making ability.

I personally don’t mind other competing outbound links. Most of my blog have many of them and seem to do well - in fact I believe they are part of the reason my sites build traffic (a story for another day) - but I suspect if I took them all off today my Adsense CTR would go up and that I’d probably grow my page impressions. I guess it’s about making choices to do with your blog’s priorities.

I still honestly think that creditting our sources are necessary, but while maintaining a good balance of the blog-ecosystem we need to use outbound links sparingly in order to build good readership. Don’t show your visitors out before they would like to, it’s almost rude!

Any input on this? Leave a comment below.

You want to make money from your blog right? Of course you do, if not then this post isn’t for you and I suggest you don’t read any further. Otherwise please read on..

How difficult can it be to setup a blog that generates daily cash through the use of Google AdSense? Not difficult at all, in fact I’m going to give you my own personal tips to a successful start in optimising your blogs for Google AdSense. This wont make you rich overnight, but if you stick to the advice given you will notice an improvement and over time you may even start to make bucket loads of cash!

Tip 1
Google AdSense works best when your blog sticks to one subject area. If you must have a personal blog (aka online journal), keep it separate from your money making blog ideas. Don’t try and mix keyword rich content with your personal blog, unless of course you only ever talk about one subject like a hobby for example, or your online journal is based around a central topic.

Tip 2
Choose a subject and stick with it long enough to be sure whether it will work or fail. Simply trying something out for a few months does not constitute a proper test of your blogs earning potential. You should aim at running your blog for several months, checking your Google AdSense reports for increasing profits each month. For example, I nearly gave up on UrbanSkaters.co.uk until I noticed that each month my Google AdSense takings were increasing by roughly 10-15%. I made nothing in the first 3 months, then it slowly started to climb.

Tip 3
Got more than one idea? Then build separate blogs for each of them. Running multiple blogs can be easy, you just need to be sure you’ve got the time and motivation to update them at least 3-5 times a week. Never try to combine two separate subjects into one blog, this only confuses Google AdSense and you will never achieve the higher paying ads that are targeted at sites with better keyword scoring.

Tip 4
If you give up on a blog and decide not to update it anymore. Keep it online if you can, because people will still visit and you may get the odd click here and there which will add to your Google AdSense. Anything is better than nothing! Try another blog idea, register a new domain name and start over. Repetition is the mother of success baby, yeah!

Tip 5
Keywords are key. (MORE ON KEYWORDS ANOTHER TIME!)

Have you got any tips or advice ? Then please leave your comments below.

Apparently Weblogs Inc, the blog media company founded by Jason Calacanis and Brian Alvey has been bought by AOL for a staggering $20 million (or so i’ve been told). That’s twenty million dollars my fellow bloggers! Holy mother of blogs, that’s amazing. I was also shocked to learn that Weblogs Inc were making an average turnover of $1 million plus per year on Google AdSense alone bringing their overall takings each year to roughly $2 million.

How would you like a new way to make money with your blog or website? Sure, AdSense is great, but what if you can have something alongside that can help you earn more revenue from your traffic?

Introducing Chitika eMiniMalls, a fine way to help your visitors find the products they want while making a little something on the side.

Chitika eMiniMalls is a contextual advertising system, so it may interfere with AdSense Terms of Service. Fortunately you can switch-off the contextual abilities by targeting (and rotating) specific products. This enables you to stay compliant with Google and allows you to run eMiniMalls with AdSense.

If you’re already a member you could simply add the following lines in your eMiniMalls code:

ch_non_contextual = 1;
var ch_queries = new Array('laptop', 'ipod');
var ch_selected=Math.floor((Math.random()*ch_queries.length));
ch_query = ch_queries[ch_selected];

Please note that you may (should) change the queries to your own corresponding products. You can enter full product names if you want, like “Canon Powershot S2 IS”. One way to find out about what products to showcase is to search Amazon.

I hope this little review would help you build a better blogging experience with an extra treat in mind.

Source: Quick Online Tips

Blogger users have been granted an easier way to integrate AdSense with their blogs. Google recently launched a built-in AdSense interface within Blogger’s main panels. Making money from contextual advertising has never been smoother than this.

Podcasting is a portmanteau word combining the words Broadcasting and iPod. The term Podcasting is misleading in a way, because to listen to a Podcast you don’t need an iPod and you certainly don’t need one to broadcast either.

Let’s say for example that I wanted to broadcast this blog in the format of a radio-show, so you could listen to this blog instead of reading it. First I’d need a microphone and some recording software (windows comes with a simple voice recorder as standard). Then I’d sit myself down, grab my coffee and get totally wired (very important), then when i’m ready start recording the show. When that’s done it’s time to convert my recording into an Internet ready media format, such as MP3 or WMA for example. Then the final step is to simply upload the file to my web server for everyone to download onto their portable players, or simply stream over the internet on their computer.

You may also choose to get fancy and add some jingles or other cool effects into your Podcast. The more professional and friendly your Podcast sounds, the more likely people are to download the next broadcast.

Obviously podcasting will consume a great deal more bandwidth than your standard text based blog, so make sure you check with your webspace provider about storage and bandwidth limitations.

A while back I talked about the latest anti-splog (blog spam) measures over at blogger.com (aka blogspot). While that was a great tip for visitors browsing blogspot blogs, it still didn’t give the rest of the world a way to report spam from non-blogspot blogs. So after much searching and digging around in my favourites folder and google, I came across Splog Reporter:

Splog Reporter allows users to submit splogs they encounter to its database. The data is complied, confirmed and made available to search engines that wish to optimize search results for their users. Ultimately, the users who submit splog to Splog Reporter benefit from the accumulation of this data through search engine improvements.

Bring it on….

Ping is the method to let some well-known sites know that you have recently updated your blog. This is a little bit different in concept than the traditional ping, which you use to ping a computer on a network to see if it responds or not. When you ping your blog, it sends a note to the site you pinged letting that site know that your site has fresh content. People visit these big web-sites, often, to find out a list of recently updated sites. The whole wide web is so big, that it is almost impossible to see another site being updated without having a reference to it. You can bring that reference to the attention of the people through the pings. One of the most famous site that falls into that category, and has been around for a while, is Weblogs.com .

There is one basic rule we should follow when using this technique; if we update our blog every 5 minutes during any time period, we should not send a ping every 5 minutes. While it may bring in more visitors, sending a ping repeatedly within very short time spans may actually get a site banned from the site that is receiving the ping, as such a technique is also used by those who simply wish to have their site noticed more often, whether or not they have updated content on their sites.

Many blog publishing tools offer you the option of pinging Weblogs.com or some other popular sites. There are several places you can send a ping to, which is a problem today as webmasters and writers have to ping numerous sites repeatedly to let them know that the site has been updated. One of the online tools that allow you to ping numerous sites at the same time within one interface is Ping-O-Matic.

Since our first post about BlogExplosion I’ve noticed some pretty radical improvements on their site lately. The most noticeable being a complete face-lift of the entire site. I’ve got high expectations for BlogExplosion and apparently, so do they:

BlogExplosion is continually upgrading features and making improvements on a daily basis. Please excuse the non-stop work in progress and watch as we build BlogExplosion into one of the leading blogging resources on the internet.

I couldn’t agree more.

Did you know that if you have a Yahoo account, you also have a free blogging account with Yahoo called Yahoo! 360°? Similarly, did you know that if you had a Microsoft Hotmail account, you also already had a free blogging account with Microsoft called MSN Spaces?

Both sites allow you to post with editors that help you post pictures and change fonts for your posts. With Yahoo 360°, you get a domain name like http://360.yahoo.com/username , where “username” is your Yahoo user id. With MSN Spaces, you get a domain name like http://spaces.msn.com/members/yourname, where “yourname” can be anything that is available and that you wish, even if it is different than your MSN username. MSN Spaces is also integrated into MSN Messenger. MSN allows you to update your blog through the online interface or through your mobile phone. Yahoo allows you to post your entries through the online interface, mobile phone, and also through the Yahoo Messenger.

To see an example of what can be achieved with Yahoo 360°, you can visit the Yahoo 360° blog page. You can do the same, to see some examples of a MSN Spaces blog, at the MSN Spaces directory.