Your Goal: Make Your Ads Look Less Like Ads

The biggest problem facing AdSense is “banner Blindness” so it’s important that your ads looks less like ads and equally important that your ads are located in the right places.

Sounds a little shady.

Let’s start with the ads location.
The most important part of any web page is the center and your title header. So it’s important that we place one set of ads under our title header and run them from left to right.

You want to run the ads again in the middle of your article. In most cases people leave after reading a little of what you have to say, by the time they reach the middle of your article they may be ready for something different.

And I’d run the ads down the left side of the page above your navigation and try to make the ads look as much like the navigation links as you can.

“Blending The Ads In”

The border color and background color of these ads should match the background color of your page. This helps the ads blend into the page and look less like ads.

The links for these ads should be a little darker then your standard blue (#000080) but the link for the advertiser’s url should be something that does not stand out.

The rest of your site should use link colors that are not the traditional blue and ones that blends into the site and do not stand out.

This will make the AdSense links stand out more on the page then any of the other links, but you should also use the same darker shade of blue (#000080) links for your navigation. You want the AdSense links to look like navigation links and not ad links.

What to expect from your site.

Friday is normally a bad day because everyone is getting ready for the weekend while Sunday is normally the best day because everyone is hanging around the house with nothing to do and waiting to go back to work.

The search engines that convert the best are in order are

MSN
Dog Pile
Yahoo
My Web Search
Earthlink
AOL
At the bottom of the list is
Google

“A New Way To Buy Links”

I'm not sure how many people have herd of or taken the time to take a look at the www.payperpost.com site.

The idea beyond the site is a good one, your able to pay a group of bloggers to blog about your site or product.

Lets say you have just added a new forum to your site and want to get the word out. You can pay around $10.00 per post and have bloggers blogging about your new forum.

But here's what I see happening.

Anything that can be used for good can also be used for bad.

Let's say I have a new dating site and need to get links to the dating site. All I have to do is sign up and get the bloggers to blog about my new dating site.

I can even tell them what link I want to use.

Before long I have 10,000 or 20,000 links coming to my site from bloggers.

Now if we add in the recent Wal-Mart scandal along with the recent Google Bombing, it's easy to see a trend coming on that Google will have to do something about.

I'm thinking that blogs may not work as well as they currently work on Google by the end of 2007.

The attack was originally aimed at 70 Republican candidates but was scaled back to only 50 because they could not find articles bad enough to link to.

The idea was to find trustworthy sources that had written articles showing the candidates in a bad light then linking to those articles to cause them to appear at the top of the results for the candidates.

Chris Bowers is the one heading up this Google Bombing and feels that other candidates should do this on their own in the future.

Read more here

The Bigger They Are The Harder They Fall

Blogs can be both a blessing and a burden and the rise and fall of Richard Edelman makes that very clear.

Richard Edelman from what I understand is a stand up guy whose blazing a trail for marketing with blogs and wrote the WOMMA rules of ethics.

He has said things like;
"We rise to a higher level: We believe that word of mouth marketers have a special relationship with consumers and must go above and beyond the normal expectations of marketing ethics and honesty.

"We believe in honesty and transparency at all times: Honesty of relationship, opinion, and identity, respecting the rules of the forum, rising above the minimum requirements in privacy and permission."

But that was not the case when he was hired by Wal-Mart and created the fake Walmarting Across America Blog.

Now he's been caught and a lot of bloggers are not wanting to forget and forgive.  
I'm thinking that a lot of the problems come from his being a member and writing the rules of ethics for WOMMA.

I decided to add the PPC ads back to my forum and a couple blogs I own.

I had gotten out of this for a while but the money is a little harder to walk away from then I had first thought.

The first time out we did around $10,000.00 a month but built a lot of junk sites and spent almost what we made in advertising and building more junk sites.

I now feel that the first step is building quality sites and making sure each site has an alternative way to make money.

Since by web design business is already established and I have a forum on that site, I decided to start there.

The big problem with forums is that most of your site visitors are the same people returning day after day and they become blind to the ads on the site.

I've put a good bit of thought into this and decided the best way around it is changing the ads every time someone takes an action on the site.

We added in both pictures and ads for our other sites in with the PPC ads. Every time the browser refreshes you see something totally different.

This should keep people looking at the ads and cure the banner blindness problem that so many sites suffer from.

I'm not sure how it's going to work out yet but thought I would ask for other's opinions on this.

But I found out that blogs come set up with a nofollow tag.

I guess someone didn't think we should be given a choice.

I'll be removing mine, I just feel like I'm a big girl and I'm able to decide who I want to link to and who I don't want to link.

Matt Cutts stepped in to make sure we knew when to add them.

Q: “If one were to offer to sell space on their site (or consider purchasing it on another), would it be a good idea to offer to add a NOFOLLOW tag so to generate the traffic from the advertisement, but not have the appearance of artificial PR manipulation through purchasing of links?”

A: Yes, if you sell links, you should mark them with the nofollow tag. Not doing so can affect your reputation in Google.

Guess Google will be telling me what colors to use on my site next.

Here's what the tag looks like

What the NoFollow tag looks like:

Instead of linking to a site with

<a xhref="http://www.site.com">Site</a>

The link would now look like

<a xhref="http://www.site.com" rel="nofollow" >Site</a>

I'll be removing the tag from all my blogs this weekend.

I've decided to start me a site for translating English sites into Spanish.

A market of more than 35.3 million, or 12.5% of the U.S. population, are Spanish speaking.

It's a pretty good size market to be passing up. We've hired 4 new people for handling the translation side of the business and hope there will be a need for more soon.

I’ve been playing around with some blogs for the last couple days and I’ve decided that I like the whole blogging idea.

As a matter of fact I’ve even decided to build a couple blogs that are selling products as well as looking into other ways that I can make money with blogs.

One thing that really interested me was the PayPerPost better known as PPP. It seems to be a fairly new idea but one that has a lot of potential.

I’ve found 4 companies that are doing this but was not impressed by any of them.

1.I couldn’t figure out how to work their site.
2.Had some things going on that were just scary.
3.Was coming but was not here yet.
4.Was wanting to sell text links on my site.

It’s a bit upsetting since I really like the idea, so I’ve decided to take one of my sites  and set up a private forum where Advertisers can meet bloggers and work out how much the advertisers are willing to pay for a product review.

I’m not planning on making any money off the site, it’s just a meeting place for bloggers and advertisers.

The bloggers get the chance to make a little money and the advertisers get to gain some traffic and make a little buzz about their product or site.

Think about having 10 or 15 thousand bloggers blogging about you and your company.

Seems like a win, win opportunity to me.

I’ve been doing some thinking about this as well as talking to people on another forum and I’ve come to the conclusion that there are a couple bad problems with this.

Lets say I have a website that I want to rank for dating.

One of the biggest things needed when trying to rank for a competitive keyword is links. At one time a lot of people were buying links to help boost their ranking in Google.

Google was upset about this and sites have penalized and banned for buying and selling links.

But now with the blog’s PayPerPost we no longer have that problem. We are able to buy links and look around and say we were only paying for a site review.

Think about it, for $10.00 a post your able to buy thousand’s and thousand’s of one way links.

How is Google going to be able to tell the real post from the paid post?

PayPerPost has made this easy, the purchaser of the post has the option to make you add a tracking code into the post that will allow the purchaser to track the traffic coming from your blog.

Google can go looking for that tracking device and start banning blogs that are using it.

Just a thought but this might not be as good I had hopped.

I’m sitting here with a friend of mine trying to explain what a blog is and how it works. So I needed to make a post and this is that post.