Many people think that creating a website and placing ads on it is an easy way to make money online. The only thing they are right with is that certainly, displaying advertising on your website or blog is a good way to make money online, but it’s deeper than they think.

Placing banner ads is like an art, depending of your website you will have more success in certain positions than in others, so you need to try and see what works for you. For our luck, the act of displaying advertising is not a new thing and there are some strategies which you can follow in order to have a start mark.

Before start displaying ads in your website you need to ask yourself some questions:

• What is the user trying to accomplish by visiting my site?
• What do they do when viewing a particular page?
• Where is their attention likely to be focused?
• How can I integrate ads into this area without getting in the users’ way?
• How can I keep the page looking clean, uncluttered and inviting?

Remember that is very important make the visitors feel comfortable in your site. If you place banners everywhere, they will not find content to read and they will automatically leave. So where should you place your ads? Let’s analyze the following heat map:

 

In this heat map you can see that some locations tend to be more efficient than others. The colors fade from dark orange (strongest performance) to light yellow (weakest performance), which normally are those  placed bellow the fold – banners, i.e. when you need to scroll down to see the banners.

A banner near from rich content tends to be clicked because the reader has its eyes focused in that area. Also those banners which are in the bottom of the content are clicked for the same reason. At the end of the content many websites have bookmark buttons, which make that area a good point to display a horizontal banner.

Talking  about the sidebars, you can see that people tend to watch the left sidebar more than the right one. The reason of this is simple, the most of the languages are read from left to right and unconsciously, the eyes catch better the banners of the left more than the banners of the right.

Remember that is really important to try different positions and banner sizes in order to know what works for your website. Depending of the structure and layout this heat map may not be applicable. In the case of blogs, in almost all of them you can see a sidebar on the right, but in absence of a left bar and due to the blog’s nature the people tend to watch the right sidebar.

So be creative and remember to not disturb your visitors with plenty of banners.

Nowadays, the blogs are one of the bigger sources of information on Internet. There are many facilities that services like WordPress, Blogger and Typepad provides, giving all the basic resources to create and manage a blog, for free. Due to this, many people over the Internet have given themselves the opportunity to create a blog and experience its managing, writing about their hobbies, day to day activities or whatever their want. Now, the question is: why the blogs became so popular?

What Make Them So Attractive?

You never asked you this question? Me neither, until now. The blog is a great way to communicate many things such information, experiences and news. Many people who use their blog to write about their daily experiences, commonly do it to share all that information with their family and friends, without monetary aims, just for fun. Other people use their blog to share tutorials, giving away all their knowledge. The reasons can be many, they can feel good just doing it, others do it because their content is limited on Internet, or just because they are getting paid.

In any case, the reason why the blogs are so attractive is because they are readily accessible. Being on Internet there are several opportunities, because it can be consulted by everybody whenever they want, from any place of the world. This propriety of popularity is what has made the blogs so attractive for everybody. In addition of that, the opportunity to edit your blog easily by writing new posts and keep informed to the people who read your content.

Their Presence On Internet

Wherever you look, there is a blog. If you type anything on Google, whatever the topic, at least a half of the results will be linked to a blog. It seems like the blog became more easy to create and edit than a standard website. If you check a company’s website, you will see that they will have a section reserved to their blog, where they announce their latest products or offers.

Of the way in the blogs were established on the Web, they caused the birth of communities which offer all the support the blogs need. Communities like BlogCatalog can provide you thousand of blogs related to any topic. Something curious that I noticed is that all the communities are getting connected with the others, for example if you are a BlogCatalog or MyBlogLog user, now you can see the activities of your friends on the others networks like StumbleUpon, Digg, Twitter and more.

Something amazing is happening there. If you noticed it, everything is getting connected, even more than ever. When it happens, the blogs will be the most popular method of socializing on the web, altogether with the social media networks.

Pinging is a very important action that every blogger should do everyday. Refreshing the concept of ping provided in the last post, ping is a computer’s network tool used to test whether a particular host is reachable across an IP network. When you ping a service, it means that you are sending a signal and it will answer with a “pong”, taking a look on your blog for new content and update it in the server.

As you can see, pinging is very important for us, the bloggers. With this tool you can refresh your content or feed across the web: search engines, technorati, social media networks and may be another service like web profiles, and you can use it to let other people know you’ve updated your blog. This gives you a big SEO advantage, it ensures that your content will be seen immediately by search engines and indexed quickly. This can help you to rank your posts for less-competitive keywords.

How To Ping ?

Pinging your blog is a really easy task and you can do it in different ways. When I started blogging the past year, I used the service provided by Ping-o-Matic!. It lets you ping your blog on many services like Technorati, Weblogs, FeedBurner, Blogrolling etc etc… You just need to put your blog URL and feed URL (optional), check the services which you want to ping and press the ping button. Then, Ping-o-Matic will send pings to all those services and your blog/feed content will be updated instantaneously on these sites!

That is a good way to do it, but it is boring because it’s manual. For our luck, there is a way to do it automatically with wordpress ( I’m don’t know about blogger or other platforms but probably is something similar ). WordPress automatically notifies to all those popular Update Services that you’ve updated your blog by sending a XML-RPC ping each time you create or update a post. In turn, Update Services process the ping and updates their proprietary indices with your update. Now, people browsing sites like Technorati or Sphere can find your most recent posts!

WordPress makes easy the manual task of checking all your services at ping-o-matic, by listing Ping-O-Matic’s server (rpc.pingomatic.com) by default. All you need to do is sit back and let it work for you!

Where to add or remove pings on wordpress?

By following this steps you will be able to add or remove pings to your wordpress blog:

1. Log in to your WordPress weblog.
2. Select “Options” from the top menu.
3. 
4. Select “Writing” from the sub-menu.
5. The last option on the page is “Update Services.” You will see a text box with probably the ping-o-matic ping by default "http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping", but you can add more pings if you want.

Is recommendable to ping each service separately instead using Ping-o-Matic (http://rpc.pingomatic.com/) ping. For example, I recommend you to ping Technorati directly with every new post and update, instead waiting for ping-o-matic to ping our blog. The following is a list of english blog pinging services:

http://api.feedster.com/ping

http://api.moreover.com/ping

http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping

http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2

http://ping.amagle.com/

http://ping.bitacoras.com

http://ping.blo.gs/

http://ping.feedburner.com

http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php

http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php

http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php

http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/

http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2

http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/

http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/

http://rpc.newsgator.com/

http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping

http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2

http://topicexchange.com/RPC2

http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2

http://www.blogoole.com/ping/

http://www.blogoon.net/ping/

http://www.blogsnow.com/ping

http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi

http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/

http://www.newsisfree.com/RPCCloud

http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php

http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2

http://www.wasalive.com/ping/

http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/

If you use one of thus services, place the related link into your Update Services text box to ping automatically your blog on it . If you are not using wordpress as blog platform, search in your panel of a pinging tool, I pretty sure it must be there, the only thing that you need to do is to add the url of your service and start to ping your blog across the web!.

Question by Terrah’s Dawn :

What do you know about Traffic Exchanges like Dragon Surf, Surf4theEarth, Traffic-Crypts etc… I’m trying them out now. I can’t seem to get useful info on how to make real money with them. Some claim up to $200 a day with this stuff. Just wondering if you know anything about them. Thanx again Mr. Javo for another great blog. (yes I’m a subscriber)

Ok Terrah, that’s a good question about blogging. Over the web there is a lot of programs to exchange traffic, I mean that with those programs you can get traffic to your website for free, but how them works?

Programs like EasyHits4You, Surf4TheEarh, DragonSurf, LinkReferral…brings you unique visitors daily because they all use a ranking system. This system is basically an “slave measurer” and I say “slave” because in these programs, to be ranked higher you need to -for example- visit 30 sites daily, review 5 of them and add 2 to your favorites. So by doing this everyday you get ranked in the top, bringing you the most of traffic to your website….but imagine to do that everyday with 5 exchange traffic programs?

It Worth?? I don’t think so.

In addition, I think that all those “visits” doesn’t worth. To be ranked higher, the people visit your site for 20 sec or something like that…That people who visit your blog does it for the ranking and not to meet new sites. To verify this, check in your site statistics for the pageview time of those sites and you will see that this time is not longer than 1 minute.

But however, all those program find the way to attract more users by paying them for referring people or visiting websites. That’s how they keep their users visiting over and over again the same websites. That’s like a vicious circle, once you enter you can’t leave it then!

My Personal Recommendation

When I managed the blogspot blog, I used like 1 month one of those programs. It provided me like 80 visits per day and I was wonder for that, when I began to use that program I simply love it, but then I start to check the statistics….When I saw the pageview time from that site, I leave it instantly!! really it doesn’t worth, by joining to those kind of programs you will be an slave for a time after you noticed that it doesn’t worth and you will end leaving it…

What is a canonical URL? I was reading something about that in some forums, so don’t worry if you don’t know, I also didn’t. Around Google, canonicalization is the process of picking the best url when there are several choices, and it usually refers to home pages. Canonical essentially means “standard” or “authoritative”, so a canonical URL for search engine marketing purposes is the URL that you want the visitors to see. Depending of how your web site was programmed or how your tracking URLs were setup for marketing campaign, there may be more than one URL for a particular web page.

For example, most people would consider these the same urls:

• www.example.com
• example.com/
• www.example.com/index.html
• example.com/home.asp

Technically all those urls are different. A web server could return completely different content for all the urls above. When Google “canonicalizes” a url, try to pick the url that seems like the best representative from that set. The problem of most search engine marketers run into deals with domains and sometimes if a domain is not setup properly, the domain URL (domain.com) and the www domain URL (www.domain.com) are considered as individual web pages, websites completely different but really both are the same and that’s a big error from the search engines side. Since both pages maybe indexed by Google, you could get hit for duplicate content and at the very least you would be splitting your link popularity.

An easiest way to protect your site is to redirect all forms of your domain to one “standard” URL, a canonical URL. To do this, you need to have some code lines in your .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]

With that lines, I’m forcing to search engines to load http://mrjavo.com/ when someone type www. or http://www., you can try by typing some of those links on your browser and you will see how http://mrjavo.com/ will load, that’s because all those URL are technically “the same”.