Okay, so what is your average eCPM? My ads run on a gardening/aquatic article site, as well as participating in the adsense revenue sharing with DP. My eCPM is terrible, $0.03. The past 2 days...I've made $0.03. Any tips on getting a bit more income from this? My blog site with the articles is http://articles.cupargardencentre.co.uk. Thanks
What about putting the ads line at the bottom of each article, and then using the "Read the Rest of this Article" idea to increase your page views? This would increase the amount of impressionas as well as navigation clicks through your blog. Right now it looks like you are posting ... what .. four to six articles a day, but only three are showing up per page. If those three don't grab my attention, then I'm gone... but if one did, I'm reading the whole thing there without any navigation and if I got my answer or got an idea from it... %70 of the time I'm probably gone.. "thanks for the tips.. out of here" .. A comment that is a bit out of my depth (certainly not an expert in this area), but.. from the peanut gallery, shouldn't you have some sort of green and blue design, if only a small highlight picture, for an aquatic gardening site? That red/brown theme seems unappealing to me, and rather bland. ... again, peanut gallery comment. Your ads seem really washed out.. maybe that is intentional, I don't know. I'm not really a color-scheme stratagem expert. I just know what I feel when I hit the page, and I don't "feel" like reading the text or continuing to go through articles. You might want to check your bounce rate. I would guess just from experience that it is above %50. Recently I've been using the referral Ads from Adsense and then writing up articles that either promote or suggest checking out the particular service, company, game, whatever.. that is getting some good response.
glennhefley I do understand your points, and a new wordpress theme for aquatic/gardening is on my list of things to do. Unless, of course, someone can suggest a freely available theme? I have thought about doing the 'click here to read the rest of the article' thing, but haven't figured out how to get wordpress to do it, I'm using Wordpress 2.3.1, if you're familiar with it? And also appending adsense to the bottom of posts, not quite sure how to do that, unless, of course, you are referring to manually copying and pasting the code into the footer of every article I post? Hmm, maybe on second thoughts a new template which is SEO/adsense optimised may be my best bet! Cheers
Some thing else, and that is to keep in mind what eCPM really is.. its not what Adsense is "paying you" for each 1000 impressions, .. it is what your site "is earning" per 1000 impressions. You are getting "pay for clicks" not pay for CPM... http://adsense.blogspot.com/2006/02/ecpm-what-exactly-is-that.html The eCPM is only an indicator value to help with adjusting ads, nothing more... You probably know this but I've had several clients in the past (just about all of them) who get this mixed up.
Oh.. that "click here" thing is easy.. just put in <!--more--> where you want the page to break. Now, as a writer.. I know something about this. Try to always put the <!--more--> break at a point of tension.. A good example of this is on my current blog article Billion Dollar Game of Hide and Seek ( http://www.glennhefley.com/blog/ ). If you look at the placement of it, if I put it down a few more lines, instead of where I'm at, the tension has been released in the reader (I answer the question I pose). The stratagem here is to make the first part of the article the hook, and your line before the <!--more--> the bait... in a nutshell.. Nutshells are such handy things, they hold so much these days But keep in mind that this strategem is to create more interaction and thus increasing our CPM, which... if we are not increasing our clicks, lowers our eCPM.. , which is sort of the point I was bringing up in my last post, .. and that is keeping in mind what our eCPM really is... Hope I'm helping and not just spreading chaos and confusion.
My eCPM for today is $20.40 dollars. The problem is that I made a grand total of $0.12 today. So looking at that number seems more like ... mental masturbation. Glenn you've given some great advice that I'm going to really try to incorporate into my blogging. Thank you!
I just got off a chat with a designer friend of mine, and she suggested that you leave the wordpress theme the way it is and experiment with altering the color of your ads to a green and blue theme, and also adding in small title post images at the beginning of each article which have a blue, green feel to them.. pictures of aquatic plants and such.. like I do with some of my articles on the blog I linked to earlier. She suggests (and she's the expert in this area, not me) that if your images attract the eye, they will create "sympathy" attraction to the ads. ... sounds like witchcraft to me, but I'm a primitive mind in that particular jungle. When you do add in a image, to format it correctly and make it look nice you could use this code ... <img src="http://sourceofyourimages.com/nameofyourimage.jpg" align="right" style="border:none; margin:5px;"> Using the align tag there (left or right, will put your image next to the text. The style part pushes the text a bit away from the image so the words aren't right up against the image and it looks better. Removing the border is good so that if you want to use the image as a link it looks better as well. Anyway, just thought I would forward her thoughts to you..
Thanks alot Glenn! Really great advice. For now I have just added a free 'adsense' template I found online. Doesn't look great. In fact, it doesn't even look good, but it'll do until I've got a bit of spare time to get a theme knocked up. I'll get those breaks implemented right this minute! Thanks alot.
Seems we both posted within seconds of each other I've changed the theme for now, I'll run it for a few days, if traffic or income increase I'll keep the new theme for a few more weeks, if not it'll be back to the old theme and I'll implement your image and adsense ideas. Thanks alot for the help, very much appreciated.
Um.. well ... now you make me feel bad that I opened my well-meaning-amateur mouth... your other scheme looked better ... why don't you switch back and change the ads to a blue-green and put in some article images instead.. I think you will find that this will be more effective than the scheme you have there.. that's ... well.. not very inviting is it? I read an article not long ago that came from a study done on how long it takes for a visitor to decide whether or not to read the text on a web site based on how the web site looked... and it was less than 3 seconds.. just barely enough time for the web site to finish loading.