Photo taken from Digital Free Photo © L. Kliko. The summer has just started and I already have a new review for the summer campaign, and the best part is that it comes from a good friend of mine with whom I have not been in touch for many months now! In case you did not keep track with previous events, I am referring to the “Get a link on TopTut.com blog - FREE!” links giveaway. You write a short review of my site, and get a link on TopTut.com, but please read the details before posting a review to avoid any confusions later. This is a great way to get a quality backlink, especially for new blogs, and remember - I will link to anyone who reviews my site and the review does not have to be possitive!

Also, best review of the season gets a backlink on the sidebar of toptut.com for the next season, and the “winner” of Spring reviews is slacker jack. Once again, thanks for your awesome review mate and good luck with your blog. (Link added to Featured Sites column).

Here are the bloggers who reviewed this blog from June 1st to August 31st:

********************************

Jo wrote a review on Get a free link on TopTut.com

Jake wrote a review on www.toptut.com

A Little of Everything wrote a review on The great pr update and more

********************************

Most people say that a blog without comments is like a forum without posts. That’s not true, at least for me as I run a few blogs and a few forums and can say with full confidence that you can keep blogging away even if no one comments or even visits, however, forum where no one posts automatically turns into a dead ground, on which no one wants to step in.

TopTut.com has a decent traffic and rather small amount of comments made weekly, some of which are even negative, nonetheless I do not implement any of the tactics I am going to reveal here, simply because I don’t care how many comments this blog gathers. I know I share useful info, I know people do read, I know visitors return, and that’s pretty much enough for me. But anyway, since most of you do want to see an annoyingly long list of comments below each post, here are a few basic tips.

1. Deactivate the “nofollow” ref. This is probably the fastest and easiest way to get comments from a big amount of readers (including accidental guests) daily without any hassle. All you need to do is download the Nofollow Case by Case plug-in, install it, and put a badge or write in big letters somewhere on the most visible position, that this blog “follows” or something similar, which will let the visitors know that leaving a comment in your blog will count towards their website’s ranking. Basically, this plug-in removes the default “nofollow” ref from each external link in the comment, and therefore allow every commentators to get some links love off your blog. I implemented this technique on my other blog, Now G Net (which is PR3 and I assumed people would want to get some PR3 backlinks) and ever since the plug in installation I get a few comments daily.

The disadvantage of this tactic is that you end up with tons of irrelevant comments; for instance I happened to visit a blog that “follows” in which the admin posted how bad she felt today, describing her rather crucial health problems… with a comment bellow “Very useful info, I enjoyed reading, thanks for sharing! I bookmarked your blog for further visits”. Oh? Well, bear in mind that no matter what you will post, 50% of your comments will be of that nature (if not this exact text), be it your funeral announcement or SEO essay.
2. Give top commentators a sidewide link. This strategy requires more hassle on visitors part, and continuous participation, while the top ten commentators get a featured link on the sidebar / footer of your blog. If your blog is still small, the upside is that people can easily post a few comments and make it to the top 10, while the downside is - after a few comments they won’t bother to maintain the activity, knowing that the blog is not very popular and their comments count won’t be massively beaten any soon.
Read More  "3 ways to increase comments on your blog"

Yes, you are saying ‘what the f…’ now, seeing this post nicely embedded in Google Adsense (biggest contextual ads network) from all sides and Kontera in between, yet I come and advice you not to use it? You got me wrong then, I will not advice you not to sign up with Adsense, Yahoo Publisher Network or MSN (I actually do advocate it in general) and most definitely I will not advice you to get rid of your existing account, but, I want to bring to your attention some down sides of monetizing your website with contextual ads.

First of all, what are contextual ads? These are just link to other websites on the body of your pages, related to site’s content, and since you get payed per click (PPC model) you have to place the ads on so-called prime positions of your website and spare a lot of space for them, otherwise they might not be noticed. And all this you are doing to… to make people leave your site. Did you think about it? You get paid for loosing visitors. If contextual ads are your only way to make money off the site, and you really don’t give a damn if your content will be read / viewed, - then it’s perfect. But what if you have other ways of income, such as affiliate sells, subscriptions, donations? Once your visitor left, the chance of him coming back and continue bring you revenue from other sources or clicking other ads is very slim, and I am sure you do realize it. So think about it, you get a few cents compensation for every visitor you wave good bye to.

Secondly, niche plays a significant factor. Some relevant keywords pay a few dollars per single click, while others (and actually many of them) pay a few cents for a click. This means, if your website is targeted to low paying keywords (or better said - created for the niche, where ads are paying low and the competition is small), you can’t possibly make much, unless you have really crazy traffic. This, however, does not mean your content is bad or not interesting or not worthy, it can still potentially make a lot of money (from donations, subscriptions, affiliate marketing, direct ads sales etc), but not from contextual ads.

Lastly, PageRank does not matter when it comes to contextual advertising. PR8 sites that choose to place PPC ads can still get 1 cents off each leaving visitor, while another PR0 websites can easily generate a few dollars per click… Having said that, contextual ads are better for beginners who can’t sell direct ads to advertisers yet (due to low traffic or lack / low PR), while the sharks out there, with high PR’s, are practically wasting space. Just imagine how many text links you can sell directly to advertisers in the place where your skycrapper is located, and how much can you earn monthly…and does your PPC network cover it..?

Read More  "Reasons NOT to use Contextual Ads on your website"

While many business men and developers will tell you that the only way to make money is to think outside the box, this is not the case when it comes to AdSense.

Why? Because the “box” is exactly what makes the most money in PPC programs. When I say ‘box’, of course I refer to the Medium (300*250) and Large (336*280) Rectangle or Square (250*250) ad format. These ads format are considered to have the highest Click-Through-Rate, especially when they are placed at the top position, according to Google’s Heat map.

How true is it, or is it a myth? Well, I heard about this myself from another blogger who implements a medium rectangle AdSense ads in the beginning of each post and bragged about his high CTR. Since I’d not do it on a blog because I believe it ruins the reading experiences and distracts from main content, I choose to place a medium rectangle on my eCards service website, in the prime position. Here is a screenshot, with highlighted ads.

Yes, the ads are right in visitors face and this could not be the best idea if you want to maintain a more “clean” look for your website, but the result is, the CTR of rectangle ad in the center is above 12%! No, I am not exaggerating. I guess this is just the special charm the ‘box-shaped’ ads have, and you will hear a lot of publishers confirming that these 3 ads formats, together with Wide Skyscraper. Try these formats and I am sure you will see a difference in your CTR percentage.

It seems like I am slowly starting to live up to my domain name - toptut.com

If you search google for “Top Tutorials”, this blog is, evidently, result number 4, out of 63 millions. Not perfect, but not bad either. I am also 3rd result for “gloss button psd”, and some other nice keywords matches that surprise me when I look at the stats.

Now that CSS has been taken to a new level and even a graphical graph can be generated in a cascading style sheet, Ajax and other web based applications compete with and against each other, showering us with impressive innovations.

Want to give your design some interactivity, without the knowledge of programming complicated Flash and Java applications? Here are 3 code snipets that will make your life easier, and your design funky and vivid.

swfIR - The best application I came across, ever. Easy to install, 4 steps only and you give your site a very dynamic, fresh look.
Read More  "Code snipets that make the design groovy"

How can you determine if your website is, most definitely, a failure? The common belief is, if your website has no visitors, it’s a sinking ship. No, this is not true. If your website has no, or little traffic, all it means is that your site has no incoming links, no one knows about it, no one spreads the word, no one advertises it. How can you know if product ‘A’ is good, if no one tried it, and no shop sells it?
So lack of traffic is not a parameter, what is the right factor then? If you ask me, a website that has no returning visitors traffic, is what I’d call a failure. Now you gonna ask why, since everyone always measure website’s success by the number of unique visitors, rather than returning. The thing is, if I advertise now on some super popular website, I’d drive 10,000 unique visitors a day to my website, only thanks to the advert banner that looked tempting and tricked people into clicking. However, if the next day or week none of these thousands will come back, what does it say about my site? That it was so interesting so that no one bookmarked it? That it was so fascinating that no one dropped by later to check for updates? That it had so much unique content that people just left and forgot about it?
Yes, I do thinking that returning visitors is the invisible, yet powerful feedback, an indirect way to tell the site’s owns - congrats, your site is a success and is worth coming back to.

You can normally see “returning visitors” in blogs though the Feed Burner, which displays the amount of daily feed readers of the blog. The data is, however, not very accurate as it only refers to bookmarks and feed readers. Not all the feed readers go to the website, (some just read through the feed and don’t bother to drop by). Returning visitors who followed other paths do not count, so here is an example of returning visitors of this blog, compared to those that count as feed readers, the difference is not big, but it is present.
Feed Burner Readers vs. Stats returning visitors:

Just to sum up the analysis: Yesterday I had 106 returning visitors, yet only 70 subscribed readers, while on Tuesday, there were only 62 returning visitors and again, 70 readers. So if you wanna calculate the average, just sum up both and divide by two.
My site represents rather avarage stats, normally out of every 100 visitors, only a few come back later. Why is the world so cruel? Because, unless you have very very targetted traffic, and unless you provide a mind blowingly unique content that grabs the visitors by the throat and at the same time showers them with free stuff and useful downloads, they don’t really have a reason to return.

So, if you have no traffic yet, don’t panic, it does not say anything about the quality and importance of your website on the net (yet). Moreover, if you have 20-30 visitors a day and no returning visitors, don’t panic either, your website was to exposed to big enough audience (yet). But, if your website is getting more than 2k hits daily and no one ever bothers to come back… Oh well, probably it’s CRAP

Even if you were using AdSense for a few years now, you might still not be aware of the fact that the ads, which show first in your html’s code - have the highest bid. It’s important to emphasize that I refer to the code, and not to the actual position on the page as often CMS templates with a several files mislead the publisher. For example, let’s take a classical 2 columns WordPress theme, with navigation at the right, and say you placed one banner at the footer of your page and a big add at the beginning of your navigation column. Visually, the big ad at the beginning of the right-handed navigation menu is first, but, since the code is “read” from left to right, your footer ad will be the first one (and consequently with the top paying ads), while the apparently upper ad on the right side will be second and get a lower paying ads, click on which will result in lesser revenue. However, since it’s on the upper part of the page and likely to get viewed and clicked more often then the footer banner, your pay-per-click will just be unjustly lower than it could be.

Solution

Just go the other way around and make sure that the ads, which are located at the “prime” spots of your website (I strongly suggest to optimize the “prime” spots in according with Google AdSense heat map) and place the “first” adverts there. If you are unsure how the ads ended up, just view the code of your site, once the ads are places and see which ad slot comes first. If you work with channels or different colours / ads formats, you won’t have a difficulty identifying which code belongs to what ads spot. This will guarantee that the biggest amount of clicks will fall on the top paying Adsense ads, which will either increase your revenue, or won’t let it be reduced if the amount of clicks on your ad goes down (happens due to lack of traffic, normally).

It sounds simple, and indeed it is, so do not let your fancy and complicated layout steal your website’s material potential.