Most of the Blogger templates are not very well designed when it comes to search engine optimization (SEO). In fact, it is easy to spot even the most elementary mistakes if one bothers to open the template in the html view.
Thus, every blogger who wants to make money online should read some of the SEO guides available. It is not necessary to read any difficult theory or thick books, as there are some very simple to follow tutorials available on the Internet.
One of my favourites is the Complete SEO Guide for Blogger Templates. After reading the short tutorial, I was able to do some important tweaks in the templates I use.
I warmly recommend you to read the tutorial. If you, like me, use Blogger for your niche blogs you certainly should do the necessary tweaks to be sure that as many readers as possible can find their way to your blog.
Monday, 13 April 2009
Thursday, 9 April 2009
Changes in Amazon Affiliate program
For some time, I've tried to make money with Amazon.com's affiliate program. The success has not been spectacular, as my readers have bothered to order only two books so far.
Now Amazon has decided to limit the associates' possibilities of making money with the program:
As far as I understand, this means that the Amazon Associates are not allowed to use Google Ad program to get more readers and potential customers. It seems that the affiliate program has worked too well and Amazon wants to cut the referral payments down by limiting the monetization potential of the program.
I hope that we won't next read that search engine optimization (SEO) is forbidden, as well.
Now Amazon has decided to limit the associates' possibilities of making money with the program:
After careful review of how we are investing our advertising resources, we have made the decision to no longer pay referral fees to Associates who send users to www.amazon.com, www.amazon.ca, or www.endless.com through keyword bidding and other paid search on Google, Yahoo, MSN, and other search engines, and their extended search networks. If you're not sure if this change affects you, please visit this page for FAQs.
As of May 1, 2009, Associates will not be paid referral fees for paid search traffic. Also, in connection with this change, as of May 1, 2009, Amazon will no longer make data feeds available to Associates for the purpose of sending users to the Amazon websites in the US or Canada via paid search.
As far as I understand, this means that the Amazon Associates are not allowed to use Google Ad program to get more readers and potential customers. It seems that the affiliate program has worked too well and Amazon wants to cut the referral payments down by limiting the monetization potential of the program.
I hope that we won't next read that search engine optimization (SEO) is forbidden, as well.
Wednesday, 8 April 2009
Full feeds or partial feeds, that's the question!
Many bloggers cannot decide whether they should publish full RSS or Atom feeds of the blog or not. During the last year, I have experimented with both partial and full feeds but I have not reached any final conclusions.
The arguments for both cases seem pretty valid. But let us analyse the case and the common arguments first.
Partial feeds are necessary
Many bloggers find that it is best to publish only partial feeds. It is difficult to monetize the feed as there are problems in adding AdSense ads to the feeds.
From this point of view, publishing full feeds causes less readers to return to the actual web site. Most of the readers use only feed readers and consequently they never click the ads. Because of this, it is not possible to get the highest possible AdSense revenues.
Content piracy
Some bloggers are afraid of content piracy. There is simply no way to stop people reusing the content you've created.
But on the other hand, it is almost as easy to recycle content even in case of partial feeds. Someone has even translated at least one article from my Linux blog to Chinese. Well, I'm quite happy with that as the guy linked the translation to my blog. In this way, I got some new readers from China.
Case for full feeds
It seems that publishing full feeds at least slightly reduced the number of AdSense clics in my other blogs. But on the other hand, only after I started to publish the feeds in full, the number of subscriptions really started to grow.
So if you have an idea about how to monetize the feeds in a way that is not dependent on AdSense, you might well see the publication of full feeds as the optimal strategy.
At the moment I try to make at least some bucks with Amazon Associate program by recommending books that can be bought from Amazon. So far, the sales have not been spectacular, but at least the affiliate program provides me a way to make some money with the feeds.
The arguments for both cases seem pretty valid. But let us analyse the case and the common arguments first.
Partial feeds are necessary
Many bloggers find that it is best to publish only partial feeds. It is difficult to monetize the feed as there are problems in adding AdSense ads to the feeds.
From this point of view, publishing full feeds causes less readers to return to the actual web site. Most of the readers use only feed readers and consequently they never click the ads. Because of this, it is not possible to get the highest possible AdSense revenues.
Content piracy
Some bloggers are afraid of content piracy. There is simply no way to stop people reusing the content you've created.
But on the other hand, it is almost as easy to recycle content even in case of partial feeds. Someone has even translated at least one article from my Linux blog to Chinese. Well, I'm quite happy with that as the guy linked the translation to my blog. In this way, I got some new readers from China.
Case for full feeds
It seems that publishing full feeds at least slightly reduced the number of AdSense clics in my other blogs. But on the other hand, only after I started to publish the feeds in full, the number of subscriptions really started to grow.
So if you have an idea about how to monetize the feeds in a way that is not dependent on AdSense, you might well see the publication of full feeds as the optimal strategy.
At the moment I try to make at least some bucks with Amazon Associate program by recommending books that can be bought from Amazon. So far, the sales have not been spectacular, but at least the affiliate program provides me a way to make some money with the feeds.
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