After seeing a loss of about 40% in my AdSense earnings over the past few months I have decided to alter my ad unit styles and placement on my blog to see if this new new position and ad types work better for me. I use the All in One AdSense and YPN! Wordpress Plugin myself because if its flexibility and the fact that you can turn it off on individual posts, or enclose custom html code around the AdSense itself (such as if you want to wrap it in a table).

I wrote a post about how the placement of Google AdSense is important for you to be successful at monetizing with AdSense. I need to take my own advice and start experimenting more with various placement types and trying out different ad units. The last time I tried a different Ad Unit and placement was about five months ago and I only had 350×250 ads on the top right portion of my blog posts. I was earning about $30 per month with these Ad Unit styles and positions, but when I switched to a 468×90 banner in the center location of my posts, I saw my earnings drop consistently and 3 months with the new style and placement I saw earnings average between $15 and $20 per month. This is a 40% drop and I am back to adjusting my AdSense size and position.

So I am using a new wider skyscraper on my right had bar and testing out 350×250 ads placed in my posts in the bottom of the articles to see if this experiment nets me a higher AdSense per month. I would rather have my AdSense at the end of my article instead of cutting in the center of my article anyway. Wish me luck on my AdSense experimentation I eventually wanted to reach $100 per month in AdSense earnings but seem to be stuck at the $20 dollar mark per month for a year now with little growth.

-Dragon Blogger

Now that I have opened myself up to being a contributor blog and accepting guest posts from some other bloggers I realized that wordpress by default does not give you an easy way to keep track of who submitted a guest post for review.  You have to manually check your Edit Posts section and weed through to find any contributors who have submitted a post for review and I had forgotten for a few days and was late publishing a few guest posts at first.

A Wordpress Plug-in called Dashboard Pending Review solves this problem easily.  Once you install the plug-in you get a new module on your Wordpress Dashboard that lists all posts that are Pending Review just like the “Scheduled Post” plug-in shows which posts are scheduled.

This makes it much easier to manage and administrate the various articles and posts that are submitted for review and are up and publishing in the next few days.  I highly recommend this plug-in if you run a contributor blog where you approve posts that are submitted for review manually.  It will help you keep track of submitted posts so you can see them immediately and without having to search or click on extra steps to find them.

-Dragon Blogger

I upgraded Wordpress to 2.9.2 yesterday after reading that it fixes a potential security vulnerability where registered accounts on your blog can see posts sent to the trashcan. This could potentially have lead to revealing information you may not have wanted to reveal to people who are registered on your blog (readers or other contributor accounts). If you run a blog that requires registered users or you have contributors on your blog I would highly recommend you upgrade to Wordpress 2.9.2 as quickly as possible to plug this hole.

So far I upgraded 3 of my blogs and haven’t noticed any negative side effects, all my plug-ins are intact and my blogs are working without issue.

-Dragon Blogger

There are many things bloggers can do, but even more things that blogger shouldn’t do and one of those is clutter up your blog with too many ads, images, and overly busy backgrounds that distract readers from the content of your post.  Here are some tips bloggers should follow when designing the layout for their blog.

Less is More

The less clutter you have on your blog, the more people can focus on the content.  You want the reader to notice your “header” and then be drawn to the content almost immediately.  Unless you are trying to showcase an advertisement or affiliate ad on your sidebar or header area, you want the readers eyes to gravitate toward your article naturally.  You can do this by making sure your font and text clearly stand out against the background area, this is why 95% of the blogs use white background with black text, it contrasts and stands out.

Keep your blog background to a minimal, if you must use patterns or a photo then edit it in a paint program and either make the image faded (black) if you use a black background for your blog, or white if you use a white background for your blog.  By making the image/picture or background fainter you want it to not be as noticeable or draw the readers eye as much as the content/post area.  Nothing distracts a reader more than having a splash of colored images, pictures or items to look at all over the page that distract from the article.

Animations = Distraction

Again, unless you are really focusing on a user clicking or paying attention to something other than the content area, animated banners, gif’s and backgrounds are very much a distraction from reading plain text and even when reading text the animated gif’s will cause a readers eyes to notice them and pull attention away from the content.  Use with caution and deliberate intent, not just for fun or to try and “brighten your blog” as you can cause more harm than good.  A year ago I visited a blog that always made “pixel” rain fall all over the page while you visit, these pixels would rain over the entire page including the post area and sometimes obscure the text as the rain passed over it.  This is not a good way to keep a reader interested in reading your article.

Reduce Page Load Time

Again, less is more and the faster your page loads and the reader can read your content the better.  If you must use a background image then make sure you use a “gif” file which is much lighter weight and significantly smaller to load in memory than a jpg or png file.  (though you are limited in image quality and how many colors, often you can find a balance).  You want to minimize the number of scripts that call external blogs, especially ones in post that cause distraction.  I myself have too many items that load from external sources and am working to sculpt the page load times of my blog (though my page load times are about 50% better than they used to be).  You have to keep in mind that more readers are starting to visit from mobile devices which don’t have as fast connections as cable modems, and if your page loads quick over broadband it may be much slower from a mobile phone browser.

Summary:

You want to make sure that you draw your readers into your content before they go looking elsewhere, often a reader will quickly scan the rest of your site to see “what else” is on there after finding your article from a search engine.  I am not going to show examples of “bad websites” because I don’t want to offend anyone, but I do want to point out Ileane’s blog Blogging Wire which recently updated themes and uses a theme which very much draws a users focus directly to the content by making the sidebars very minimal and making the post area stand out in clear contrast.  It is worth looking at for an example in how to draw a readers attention to your post area.

-Dragon Blogger