Blogger YouTube channel revamp

The blogger team have revamped their YouTube presence with a bit of a facelift - including many new videos that cover hints and tips and they are promising lots more updates. Blogger users should find this a very useful resource.

Income from AdSense

A common question people ask about AdSense is how much income from Adsense can I earn from my website or blog and what is the average income from AdSense. Giving a figure for the average income from AdSense would be misleading because of the wide range of types of sites but working out the potential income for a site once you know the typical number of visitors and the niche that the website or blog is in isn't difficult.

Let's look first at how you might work out what potential income from AdSense that a site might get.  The most important measure first of all is knowing what the typical number of visitors per day is to the site.

So let's assume for the moment that your blog or website attracts 100 visitors a day and that each visitor only views one page. This makes the maths very simple - we can now work out that the number of impressions per day is 100. ( Note that you can do this the other way round as well - if you know the impressions and the number of unique visitors then it is easy to work out the typical page views per visitor).

Ok so we are now at stage one in working out our typical income from AdSense for this site. 

The second step is to know how many of these impressions will typically result in a click on an AdSense advertisement. Advertisers used to get clickthrough rates ( CTR) on their ads of 3% and beyond but these rates have been dropping for some years as visitors have become ad-blind and ad-averse.  If we assume that you site isn't all ads but that it is fairly well optimised re ad placement then let's assume you get a click through rate of 1%.

So in working out your income from AdSense we now know that for every 100 page impressions you can expect about 1 click on a AdSense advert.

All we need now is to work out how much we get per click and we know what the income from AdSense will be for the website - right? Well yes and no. Three are  so many different niches and they don't all cost advertisers the same for their ads and as a result the money you get per click can vary widely between differentt niches.
Lets assume for the moment that you are in a niche were you are attracting ads that pay on average 10 cents per click.

If you serve 100 page impressions you can therefore expect an income of around 10 cents per day based on these figures.

This gives us pointers to key things that you need to do to improve your income from AdSense.

Increase the number of visitors to your site
Increase the number of pages seen per visitor
Find ways to increase the likelihood that people will click the ads ( increase click through rate or CTR)
Make sure your blog or niche is attracting well paying ads - by using content that triggers the best paying ads
Find a good niche

None of this is rocket science but it does take dedication and hard work to increase your income from AdSense to levels where you are getting a substantial income. It can be done though - thousands of webmasters and bloggers have made a great income from AdSense and there is no reason that you cant do it to.



One more thing - Many people stumble with Adsense and either earn very little or end up getting banned. If this happens to you then try one of the many other programs available for earning income from advertising. Look out some of the other posts on this blog where you will find information about different programs.

Building an eBay business

eBay is a tried and trusted route to building an online business. Wordlwide eBay operates in more than 40 countries and has more than 200 million members, Almost 200,000 UK registered UK businesses buy and sell on eBay. It's a massive worldwide marketplace that offers incredible opportunities for anyone looking to build either an Internet only business or to enhance a more traditional business with a web presence.

One of the best guides to building a business on eBay is "Make Serious Money on eBay UK" by Dan Wilson.  This 300 page book with 33 chapters is an extensive and  complete guide to starting up a business using eBay It gives the full low down on both buying and selling on eBay and a wide range of other important information about building an online business.

 "Make Serious Money on eBay UK " gives the complete lowdown on how best to list items that you are selling, advice on sourcing products to sell, opening an eBay shop and how to really become a power seller.

Most of the advice in the book applies to people using eBay anywhere in the world but for UK readers it covers extra material such as how to register a business in the UK and matters such as business plans and accounts.

despite the books title it also contains a lot of advice on selling using amazon and information on using Google, and even advice about building and managing your own website.

This is a very comprehensive book which I would strongly recommend to anyone thinking of using eBay to start an online business. If you are already buying or selling on eBay then it is likely that there will be things in this book that will help you greatly improve how you are using eBay.

Viglink is Affiliate Programs made easy

Using Affiliate programs to monetize a blog or website can give you a greater return than Advertising programs such as AdSense - if you manage you affiliate programs  well.
With an affiliate program, such as for example the Amazon Affiliate program, you sign up with the individual merchant as an affiliate and then as you write your blog posts or website content you link back to that merchants products - usually using specially created links provided by the affiliate program. In this way the merchant is able to track your affiliate commissions.

One problem with Affiliate Programs though is that you will often want a fairly wide range of products and if you sign up to a lot of affiliate programs it can be difficult to manage all those programs and different types of links.


Rather than sign up to each merchant separately as an affiliate you can sign up for affiliate programs such a Pepperjam or Affiliate Windows which act as an intermediary between you and the merchants.  Even here though there are issues. There are a number of these types of programs so you will still have to manage a number of programs and different link types.

Viglink is a fairly new program which simplifies managing affiliate programs. You don't need to worry about finding and posting special links or even signing up to individual merchant's affiliate programs.  Viglink provides a simple code snippet that you post once on your webpage. From there on it converts all product and website links into affiliate program links behind the scenes for you. They are linked to a very large number of the best merchant and affiliate programs. This means that you don't need to go finding and joining separate affiliate programs and worrying about tracking your progress on each of them separately - Viglink does all the work for you.

I strongly recommend Viglink. If you want to monetize your website or blog but want the process to be as simple and quick as possible then Viglink is the program for you. Doing your Affiliate programs the Viglink way means that you can spend far more time creating content and improving your website. As any experienced blogger or website owner knows it's good, relevant and up to date content that drives traffic so that is where you need to be spending your time.  Viglink  means that you no longer waste time managing your affiliate links - you let Viglink worry about that and you are free to concentrate on the things that get people coming to your site.

Adwords Unacceptable practices

Practices Leading To Adwords Account Life Bans.

Recently I wrote about Google Adwords users getting banned by Google. This is an important signal from Google; it is affirming a business model built around the "user experience".

Google wants users to have a good user experience and that means it will control the quality of the Ads that it displays on it's advertising network.

There is little doubt that Google has suffered from becoming associated with poor quality sites that sometimes put visitors at risk.

It's latest act, driving undesirable Adwords users over the cliff, like a flock of diseased stock, is Google asserting that it is sticking to it's core commitment.

They are not going to state exactly their method but they will disable Adwords User Accounts ( for life) by identifying;

"unacceptable business practices and policy violations for poor-quality landing pages ,,,"

They say that these include but are not limited to :

• Data collection sites that offer free items, etc., in order to collect private information
• Arbitrage sites without relevant and original content that are designed for the purpose of showing ads
• Affiliate sites without relevant and original content that are designed to drive traffic to another site with a different domain
• "Get-rich quick" sites
• Malware sites that install software on a visitor's computer
• Poor comparison shopping or travel sites whose primary purpose is to send users to other shopping/travel comparison sites, rather than to provide useful content or additional search functionality.

Let's take an overview of these unacceptable practices;

Data Collection Sites
Google here is concerned with sites that exist simply to collect information from users - usually solely to support later marketing efforts. You may have seen sites that are basically offer you a free e-book or something to try to get your email or other ID information. They usually offer no other information of any value because that's all they are trying to do. They use this information solely for marketing purposes. Google says - "BAD" and they're out.

Arbitrage sites:
Ever been to a site where the top half of the page is simply Adsense advertising? Yes? Well the chances are that these are arbitrage sites. They use Adwords to buy cheap click traffic and aim to get you to click on their Ads at a higher click price paid to them. They pocket the difference between what they buy a click for on Adwords and what they are paid for a click by Adsense. Google says "NO LIKEY!" and they are banished.

Affiliate Sites without relevant and informative content.
People who use the Internet are looking for things but they are not always looking to be sold to. They want sites that have some interest such as opinion and information. Affiliate sites with no relevant and informative content add nothing but another click and web page between the person and their goal. They add nothing on the way of any value. Affiliates can play a reasonable role in the ecology of the Internet but on Google's patch they must add value of some sort.

Get rich quick sites
Check out on line adverts on sites which cover running an Internet hobby business and you will find Adverts for get rich quick schemes. These schemes almost never get you rich quick. The best will give you an income, even a reasonable one, if you work hard at them. The poorest may cost you money for no result. Thankfully advert servers such as Google are getting better at squeezing out those who make false promises about getting rich quickly.

Malware Sites
There is no defending people who would stoop to intentionally delivering malware or spyware to peoples sites. Google has been actively trying to remove such sites from the search results and it is rightly making sure that such sites can't exposed themselves to visitors by using Adwords. Few will mourn their passing.

Poor Comparison Shopping or travel sites
While some sites offer useful search and comparison features there are some sites which offer little real value for the user. They add nothing to the user experience. Google expects that such sites will add useful content or additional search functionality. Trying to use Adwords to promote "thin" sites will result in the Adwords account being banned.

Remember that Google applies it's rules algorithmically. In basic terms it writes a program that applies rules that test if a site fits one ( or more ) of these types. This type of programmed identification may not always be 100% accurate so if you are an Adwords user, or thinking of becoming one, then make sure you do not advertise any site that might risk being categorised as one of these types.

There are plenty of ways to make money from the Internet which give visitors value - if you do that then you will have earned your Internet income.
Google Adwords: About Disabled Accounts

Dont be in the slow lane on page load speed

The one sure way to find yourself left behind in the constant race for visibility on the Internet is to fail to react to the signals that Google gives out about the weight it gives to different factors when returning search results. One of the factors that looks likely to be added into Googles weighting on search results in 2010 seems likely to be page load speed.

You may perhaps find it surprising but page load speed is not yet among the many factors that Google reportedly takes into account when determining where a website comes in the search results. I say this is surprising because any webmaster worth their salt thinks about how users behave on websites - and it doesn't take a genius to work out that users will click away from a page that takes too long to load.

If most Websmasters try to make sure that their pages load quickly anyway then what's the big deal?

Although most webmasters do attend to page load time they often then forget all about this as they add more and more widgets and images and javascript and counters to their pages. Before you know it that lovely fresh site that you designed becomes bogged down with bloated code, poorly structured HTML, code that could and should be minified and adverts that load slowly.

Although the increased page load times may seem minor to you, and perhaps at first even to your users, these increased times might make the difference between appearing on the first page of the search results or the second page once Google factors page load speed in. So this is serious because on the Internet your search results position is your one guaranteed free way of getting visitors to your site.

So, given that Google are talking about including page load speed in their search results weightings, probably in 2010, what can you do?

The first thing is to head over to Google and do a search for page speed. Ok - you are all lazy so here is the link to Google Page Speed.

There you can download and install an addon to Google that works with Firebug ( you'll need to have that addon with Firefox as well)

Once you have it installed you just load up the site and page that you want to test , run Firebug and then run PageSpeed. It will analyse the page and tell you specifically where there are things that can be done to improve your page load time.

There are a long list of things that you may have to do and I can't deal with them all in this post. I will make further posts in the coming weeks and cover some of the strategies you can use to improve the loading time of your website pages.

Banned from Adsense and Adwords - Don't be!

Banning of Adsense and Adwords accounts happens all the time and it's worth taking the time to carefully read the terms of service and policies for both programs. If you are at all serious about delivering good content, advertising it and monetising that content then your Adsense and Adwords accounts will be valuable to you. There are other companies you can go with. Indeed it is sensible not to put all your eggs in one basket. But for most serious webmasters AdSense and Adwords are core programs.

There has been a recent spate of Adwords users getting banned who have had previous warnings or who have in some way infringed the program policies. The bans are lifetime bans so you should take this seriously.

It's not clear what has triggered this particular wave of bans - there may be some users who have in the past engaged in arbitrage practices with AdSense. Most of the banned people simply got a letter saying they had broken the program policies and that they were banned for life.

So here's a tip - if you haven't recently checked that your site, it's content and your ads all comply with the AdSense and AdWords program policies then do it now. Don't wait until you get a goodbye e-mail from Google.

Reliable webhosting

Getting reliable and good value webhosting is very important if you are developing an affiliate or other online business. I have used a few and I still have accounts with four different web hosting companies.

One of the companies I use is heart Internet who are a UK based website hostnig company. they offer a wide range of hosting packages which include cheap starter options all the way through to full dedicated server packages.

I have had very good service with this company and have been running one of my larger websites with them for some years now as well as a few smaller sites on their cheap web hosting packages. Like all good companies they support all the facilities you would expect in terms of PHP , installable scripts and so on.


Typically around £2.75 per month
Perfect for beginners just starting out and looking for a bargain, the Heart Internet Starter Pro web hosting account is still packed full of features. More about the starter webhosting package


Home Pro Hosting Only £8.99 per month

Thanks to its generous web space and bandwidth allowance combined with a massive one click install script library (including WordPress), the Home Pro hosting account has been designed for those looking to take their site to the next level. More info on Home Pro



Possibly the most advanced shared hosting account on the market right now, Heart Internet's Business Pro account offers no limits hosting at an unbelievable price. More Info



The UKs number 1 reseller hosting package. 100% white label with no limits on how many websites you can resell. A full API is available to all resellers.More Info

Facebook Spammers Massive Fine

If you are an Internet marketer and you have been tempted to use Spam big time to try to improve your income from your online marketing activities then the message from a recent court case in the US is - don't. Not unless you have very very deep pockets and a really fat wallet.

A US District Court Judge in San Jose recently awarded the social-networking giant Facebook $711 million in damages in an anti-spam case filed against online marketer Sanford Wallace - known as the "Spam King." In addition to financial damages Sanford Wallace may face jail time. This is not the first time that Wallace has had judgment against him for spamming as he already owes $234 million to MySpace.

Many commenters however say that the federal court's decision this week probably won't act as much of a deterrent to future spamming of social networks.

Wallace was found guilty of violating the CAN-SPAM act and the social networking site is hoping a separate criminal action will eventually send him to jail for gaining access to users' accounts without permission and sending unsolicited mass junk e-mail.

The ruling will send a severe warning to the major spammers out there that they could face severe consequences when they are caught spamming. Like others though I have my doubts if this will make a major dent into the problem of Spam. The spammers always like to think they are one step ahead of us and the sites and spam filters that we now all use. This action may cause them to pause and regroup and come up with other ways of spamming us but its unlikely to stop the problem. I guess that for as long as there is "online Viagra" there will be spammers.

Maximising Adsense CTR and best paying Ads

To get the best income from Ads when using Adsense ( or any other Ad serving programs) you must regularly monitor which ad units are getting the best CTR ( Click Through Rate) and also monitor which ads are earning you the most per click. With these two pieces of information you can make sure that you are getting the best from your Ads.

People sometimes think that Adsense automatically matches the best paying Ads to the Ad unit on your page which has the best CTR. You may be surprised to hear that this isn't the case. lets see why this might be important by looking at an example.

Consider a web page which has two ad blocks. A and B. Ad block A comes first in the HTML of this web page - so Adsense delivers the best paying ads to this Ad unit and lower paying ads to Ad unit B. Lets imagine that Ad Unit A is a banner ad unit at the top of the page and Ad unit B is an ad unit at the bottom of a post. So far so good then eh?

Hmm. What if Ad unit B actually has a better CTR than Ad unit A? If you think about it this is a real problem. What you want is that the best paying ads are shown in the ad unit that gets the best CTR - but this is not what happens!

Because Ad unit A comes first in the page HTML code Adsense will serve the best paying Ads to that ad unit - so you could be losing out on significant ad revenue!

So that's the problem - what is the solution?

What you need to do is to ensure that the Ad Unit with the best CTR is the first one that appears in the actual source code of your page. If your ads are placed inside

 <div> 

elements then you can make sure that this ad block appears first in your ad code but then use CSS positioning for example to make sure that when the ad displays it appears in the position that you want.

This is a really important tip to get the best of your AdSense so if you want to maximise your income from AdSense using this tip then you must understand CSS positioning.

Affiliate Marketing if it aint fun dont do it

There are things in life that start out as great fun and after a while start to seem more like a chore. Affiliate marketing and making income from ads on a blog or website can be like that - if you are not careful.

Some people start a blog or a website solely to make money. If you are one of these people then good luck to you. I hope that your money making motivation carries you through the days when your interest in your website or your blog is dropping. Because it will drop, and you will need to remind yourself that it was all about making money and maybe that will keep you going.

Creating good quality content for a blog or website can be hard work. Don't get me wrong here - it's not slave labour or anything - but it does take effort. It's much easier to keep putting in this effort if your motivation is about more than just making money. It's much easier if you actually enjoy writing and you are genuinely interested in your subject.

This is why the fundamental advice to anyone just starting out is to develop a blog or website that reflects the things you are interested in or a subject you feel strongly about.

If you are running a blog you will need to produce content regularly and you are much more likely to be able to do this on a subject that you know and care something about.

When you write about something that interests you you will write with passion and you will make strong clear points that people will enjoy reading.

If the fun and interest goes from maintaining a particular blog or website then don't beat yourself up over this. It has happened to all of us. Leave that site for a while and ask yourself if you are truly writing about what interests you - then do it.

If you approach things this way then you are much more likely to build a solid blog or website. Do this and the money will flow and you will be still enjoying what you are doing in the future when your site is really earning money.

Internet Income from Advertising tips for 2009

Despite the doom and gloom in world economies there is no reason for gloom about Internet Marketing and Advertising for 2009. There is every likelihood that 2009 will see further major growth in online income from advertising and affiliate marketing. Whether you are a beginner or a seasoned marketer this is the time to roll up your sleeves and get on with it and not a time to roll over and play dead.

Let's look at some trends that may influence the state of play for affiliate, pay per click and related Internet income programs in 2009.

The first thing to note is that many major companies are just beginning to see the benefits for them of online marketing in all it's forms so we should expect that companies who have not so far used Internet marketing much will continue to expand in this area. This will provide further opportunities for Internet marketers to make income from advertising.

Internet marketing is generally much cheaper, better targeted and often more effective at converting to sales that other forms of advertising such as print, radio or television. In a tightening market company marketing execs will want to get the biggest bang for their bucks and it will be hard for them to reach any other conclusion but that Internet marketing delivers this in spades.

Many companies will also decide that the way to ride out the hard times is not to pull their horns in on marketing but to push harder and if possible increase their market share.

These trends seem likely to largely balance any tendency for companies to reduce advertising budgets. Overall budgets may fall but with big companies increasing their spend there will continue to be opportunities for smart Internet entrepreneurs. Given these trends the hope then must be that Internet marketing activity will hold up fairly well.

Consumers may be less likely to make speculative purchases and seem more likely to base purchases on a deeper level of pre-purchase research. They will do much of this online so marketers offering information with value should as always fair well.

Historically marketers have often put much energy into building email lists and marketing by email. This will continue to be important but the trend towards increased use of Feeds such as RSS and Atom means that these are becoming extremely important marketing routes.

Sites which "add value" will be the winners in 2009. Consumers will be browsing and shopping smarter than they have ever done. Sites which can offer an interesting and compelling experience while they do their marketing will also be winners. In times of recession in the past the entertainment industry has often gone for glamour and glitz and a "feel good" approach. Consumers don't always want more doom and gloom when times are hard !

For site owners it remains important to monitor in detail how your keywords are performing. Search results are not static and neither is the competition for your keywords. You will need to continue to work hard to dominate search results on your chosen keywords and you should be prepared to research and identify new related keywords so that you are broadening and firming your search base.

While there are techniques that can help your keyword performance nothing gives results like top quality well written content. Content as always will remain king both for your site visitors and for the search engines. Creating good content around your chosen keywords remains the most effective technique to build a robust site that delivers targeted visitors.

Quality blogs in particular are loved by Google and are one of the best ways to secure good rankings where they have regular fresh targeted content. Site owners will continue to find that site promotion through article marketing to bloggers and news sites and through reviews will continue to be highly effective.

Social Media will continue to dominate and some of the larger companies may finally begin to master how to use social media. Blunt advertising on social media outlets has tended not to be the most successful and companies will continue to look for ways to tap into the millions of social media Internet users. Video sharing sites such as YouTube seem to be going from strength to strength. Indeed there are now TV shows which highlight the "best of" such homemade videos. Marketers who can find ways of using this media in an entertaining and informative way will do well.

So as always with the Internet things never stand still and they wont in 2009. There's no reason though to despair about making income from ads or affiliate marketing. Just remember that the competition wont be going away - it will be leaner and meaner so you will need to work hard and smart to deliver good income from ads.

Affiliate Program Teenagers

Be Special Be Yourself for Teenagers Affiliate Program Earn up 40% commission per sale with this Affiliate program that promotes a collection of inspiring stories for teenagers. This is a high rate of commission and the site sells the material in both e-book and hard copy format. This affiliate program is probably best used with a site that focuses on family issues and teen age problems and issues. The primary market for this book would be the parents of teenagers.

Remember that there are a range of ways for promoting your affiliate program once you have signed up. You can put up banners, you can write a short article on the stories, you can even promote the material through friends and colleagues. The strongest affiliate recommendations often come through people who have used the product , service or book themselves and who are then able to recommend it with some conviction.

Affiliate Program Beauty Shop

Beauty Shop Affiliate Program
The Beauty Shop Affiliate Program offers 10% per sale and a ninety day cookie. The Beauty Shop Website has a full range of skincare , haircare and cosmetics products and is very professionally presented. The website takes a full range of currencies and can be promoted in any market. This Affiliate program would be most suitable for matching with a women's or girls blog or a website aimed at women. To join the program just follow the link above.

Remember that the better you match the affiliate programs that you join to your website or blog then the more success you are likely to have with your affiliate marketing methods.

Blogger Buzz: Your blog, your data

Blogger have just released a very useful feature which allows you to import and export your blog posts. You can do this either within the same blog like an archive system or to help you transfer posts from one blog to another. The import export feature is in the settings> basic page and is extremely easy to use. However as with all new features it is advisable to try it out on a test blog before you use it for real.

This should make it much easier to consolidate blogs and to move posts from dead blogs to live ones. The format for the export is the Atom XML format and it also exports and imports the blog comments so that you dont lose anything. An excellent feature.

Sponsor and Advertising Disclosure

This blog operates in compliance with Federal Trade Commission rules.

As part of this compliance this is the disclosure policy of this blog.

• I attempt to make as much money from this blog as possible - because I am a rational blogger who believes in Free Enterprise.
• I try to make every post a paying post by attracting people to read my blog.
  
• I want every link on this blog to be a paid link for me. If a link is not paying me then I will look for one that does.
  
• I try to get the products that I write about on this blog for free. I will encourage you to do the same.
• You should always assume I got a product that I reviewed for free. If I didn’t get it for free then that's my foolishness.
  
• I dont Tweet much but if I did I would try to make them pay.
  
• If you submit information to this site such as your email then it will only be used for the purpose given - usually to provide you with useful sponsorship information. I don't give away any information you submit to me.
  
• If there is a legal and moral way to make money from this blog then hopefully I will be using it.
  
• If I get paid to write about a product or I am advertsing something that does not mean I will positively endorse it - I may slate it. What you will find here is honest opinion.
  

Is Adsense or Affiliate Marketing best for you

If you have a blog or website and you are wanting income from adverts to generate online income then which is best for you - AdSense or Affiliate marketing? The space on your pages is valuable and limited and so this is an important question.

AdSense is the most popular of the Pay Per Click advertising programs that are available. You will see AdSense ads on all sorts of Websites and blogs. There is a good reason for this - AdSense is easy to sign up for and easy to use and most importantly it is very easy to generate a steady stream of small scale income from AdSense.

To make a good income from AdSense though you really do need to get lots of people visiting your site. The amount that you get paid for each click is generally not very high and so you need lots of readers and lots of page views if you are aiming for a good income.

There are a number of ways of improving your performance with AdSense. One is to ensure that your site content is well focused and that the ads that AdSense is delivering are as high paying as possible for the niche within which you are operating.

At first sight it would seem that AdSense wins the AdSense versus Affiliate marketing competition hands down. But things are not that simple.

With Affiliate marketing you will get paid usually only when someone actually purchases the product that you are promoting. This is a much rarer occurrence than someone just clicking an advert out of curiosity.

On the plus side however you will find that the amounts that you are paid for a successful affiliate sale are much much higher than your standard payment per click through AdSense. If you target your site content very closely to your affiliate offers then you can considerably improve the percentage of people who come to your site looking for just the offers that you are promoting. It doesn't take many such sales for you to start making substantially more than you would with AdSense.

So is there a winner? Well not really. You must think carefully about how you match the advertising content of your site to the sites content. In many cases the best way to go is to use a combination of Pay Per Click advertising and Affiliate marketing. You may even be able to sell advertising space directly on your site.

Only careful monitoring and targeting of your content and the advertising on your site will produce good online income. AdSense and Affiliate programs therefore both have an important role to play in generating the maximum income from your website or blog.

What is Niche Blogging?

What is niche blogging and why should you care anyway? Well, niche blogging is one of the ways to get your blog a focused stream of visitors and it is one of the ways that you can improve your income from blogging and income from ads on your blogs. It's simply about focusing your blogging onto a narrow subject range so that your blog does well in the search engine results.

Niche blogging is not right for every blog of course. Two of my other blogs for example are very wide in their scope. I blog about anything that takes my fancy on them. They get a good readership and I enjoy blogging on them. They even make me money.

Niche blogging though is about focusing the attention of a blog down to a narrower range of things. This blog for example is in the Internet marketing, publisher affiliate and advertising income niche. This blog is still fairly broad within that niche but it is still a niche blog.

Blogs can be focused even more narrowly on a niche of course. If I focused this blog solely on Affiliate programs for example this would be an even narrower niche. I could then go further and focus even more narrowly on one affiliate program.

The advantage of niche blogging is that you may stand a better chance of coming higher in the search engine results when someone searches for something to do with that particular niche. The visitors who come to your site will be very much the ones who are looking for information about that particular niche. This is of course helpful if your advertising inventory is also focused on that niche.

Personally I like narrowly focused niche blogs for their ability to get focused visitors. I do think they sometimes make it harder to get people interested in your blogging and involved in a "conversation". So. I use niche blogs but I also blog more widely on other blogs, including this one.

There is no doubt though that if you choose your niche carefully and match your niche with well selected Advertising inventory then niche blogging can be very rewarding.

This is why some people get obsessed with "high paying keywords" in their quest to maximise their income from adverts. If you know that keywords related to "insurance" for example pay a high rate per click in AdSense then it seems to make sense to make a niche blog about insurance.

The problem with this is that some niches are very crowded. Many people have thought of this before you have and even a narrow niche blog may struggle to get anywhere in the search results.

The secret, if you can really call it a secret, is to find a niche which is not crowded, and , very importantly one which you will enjoy writing about.

Put AdSense code in a Blogspot Blog

This is basic but it is something that many newbies scratch their heads about when they first get a blog and an AdSense account so here is a walk through on how to put AdSense into your blogspot blog.

First things first. You must have already signed up for a blogspot blog and have some posts on it with some reasonable content. Then you will have signed and been approved for AdSense. In AdSense you will have generated some AdSense code and now you are ready to put it into your blog. OK?


Well first of all you don't actually need to get the code from your AdSense log in.

There is a gadget that you can use in blogger that makes all this very easy. Go to the layout tab in your blog editor. Then look for the "page elements tab". You now see the layout of your blog in graphic form.

Click Add gadget and then look in the list for the AdSense gadget. Click on the + sign and a page comes up as shown in the picture. Choose the format ( size ) of the add that you want and the colors. If you haven't already linked your AdSense account you will need to give your identifying information and thats it. You save the gadget and make sure you have dragged it to somewhere on the page layout where there is room for the ad size that you have selected.

If you want to generate the code in your actual adsense account then you can also do it another way. Simply get the code then add a HTML gadget on your page elements page. When the HTML gadget is open paste the code into it. Save the gadget and you ads will show.

Multiple Domain Unlimited Bandwidth Hosting

Back in August I posted briefly about signing up for a Multiple Domain Hosting Package with unlimited bandwidth. I thought it would be useful to give an update about this and reflect a little more on why Multiple domain hosting on one account is so useful for someone trying to develop income streams on the internet.

Trying to find the right web hosting package with all the services that you need at a good price is the Holy Grail really. I use three webhosting providers at the moment ( leaving aside the free web hosting packages that I use).

Currently I have packages with GoDaddy , Heart Internet and, most recently a multiple domain hosting package with HostMonster.com .

Heart Internet has been a very reliable hosting provider and they were the first paid webhosting service that I signed up for. I have stuck with them because they have been very reliable and their support is very responsive. they are not cheap though and I have been a bit frustrated by the fact that I cant host more than one domain on my account.

As for GoDaddy , I have very mixed views about them. I find that their navigation to control various aspects of your hosting account is not always the easiest to find you way around. Otherwise it's a pretty good and reasonably reliable service.

Both of these packages don't really make it easy though to host an unlimited number of domains on the one account and my Internet activities have reached the stage where I really need multiple site hosting on one account.

When you are running a number of affiliate promotions you will tend to need specific landing pages and sites relating to those promotions. It looks better for visitors and is more effective in terms of generating advertising and affiliate income. It's much easier if you are managing multiple sites like this if you can do it through the one hosting account. It's also important , depending on the kind of sites that you are running, that there shouldn't be too much restriction ( if any) on your Bandwidth usage.

I did a lot of looking about before I settled on HostMonster.com. The account comes with PHP 5+, CGI, MySql and a host of features together with cpanel. And it really does have no limit on the number of domains that can be hosted or the Bandwidth that you can use.

It's now been over two months since I signed up with them and I have been very pleased with my new account which is costing me $4.95 a month - excellent value. I have moved and set up five domains now on this account and I will be moving the majority of my domains over during the next few months. The process has been fairly straightforward but for those who are nervous about this I might post about the process of doing this in more detail in the future.

I am not often in the habit of giving glowing recommendations but I can give a hearty thumbs up to Host Monster.com - their multiple domain hosting package has really exceeded my expectations.