3 Tips for Best Site Design January 30, 2011 | Posted in AdSense & Contextual Advertising | Leave a Comment

Content & Article Writing

The best site design for your online business is a natural outcome when you follow these 3 tips...

1) Limit your color palette.

The use of too many color families is a tell-tale sign of an amateur. We amateurs love to snazz it up! But it distracts the visitor and "feels amateurish." So pick two to three complimentary colors.

Use a splash of color (spot color) for extreme accent points. Experiment with colorful elements within your site photos and other graphics. But limit the colors in the underlying images and background that make up your L&F.

The same holds true for font coloring.

Where Are You on the AdSense Pendulum? December 29, 2010 | Posted in AdSense & Contextual Advertising | Leave a Comment

AdSense & Contextual Advertising

It's all too easy to be seduced by Google into plastering AdSense ads all over your website ("adsense adnauseum"). Sure, it may (or may not) make you a few more bucks...

But, in the long run, your site's credibility and appearance counts, too.

In the "old days," website owners worried about placing AdSense ads, period. It made the site look "commercial." So if they did place ads, they'd make them almost invisible (ex., small and at the bottom of the page or tucked away in the right column).

A/B Split Testing for Your Google AdSense Ads October 29, 2010 | Posted in AdSense & Contextual Advertising | Leave a Comment

Google AdSense & Contextual Advertising

While quick and dirty testing of your Google AdSense ads can give you some answers over a long stretch of time, A/B testing can give you answers in a much shorter period. How? By testing two different formats, colors or placements simultaneously.

How To Do A/B Split Testing

Google has provided some code that will allow you to make a change to the ad you're already running, letting you run two ads, each one appearing 50% of the time. This will give you more accurate data than making changes one after the other.

There are a few things to remember when doing A/B split testing...

Google AdSense - Test Which Ads Work Best For You October 28, 2010 | Posted in AdSense & Contextual Advertising | Leave a Comment

Google AdSense & Contextual Advertising

We've covered various strategies for maximizing your Google AdSense income. But how do you know which ones work best on your site? Experiment and test.

How To Do "Quick and Dirty" Testing

Your testing does not have to be complicated to give you good information. You only need to track two things... the number of impressions, and the CTR. These two numbers will give you all the information you need to make the right choices.

A larger number of impressions will give you more reliable information. And as the CTR increases, the number of impressions needed to make an informed decision decreases.

For example, if you're getting a 5% CTR for one page and 1% for another, you may be able to decide that the increase (or decrease) is accurate and reliable after only 250 impressions. But if you're getting 0.1% CTR vs. 0.15% CTR, you may need 10,000 impressions to be sure (although you would probably want to change BOTH those pages due to the very low CTR).