The blogging universe changes at break-neck speed. I started this blog with Blogger.com till my needs outgrew the limited Blogger engine so I moved it to a WordPress blogging platform.

In the beginning of my WordPress blogging days, I wanted to try out all the different plugins to enhance my blog. I was tempted to add all these cute little buttons to “add my feed to Yahoo, MSN, Google” etc but I didn’t understand how it could help me increase my web site traffic. During my blogger.com days, I even put up a lot of “badges” of the blog directories I belonged to.
As you can see in my blog, there isn’t any “Add feed” or “blog directory badges” anymore. What I have right now is simply 2 links at the footer to my blog rss feed and my forum rss feed. I removed all of them because they are rather ugly, confusing, take up a lot of space, and because I now have FeedBurner to replace them.
Introducing FeedBurner…

FeedBurner isn’t new at all. I ignored it for a long time because I didn’t quite understand how it could benefit me. I used to think “Why do I need FeedBurner when my blog generates an RSS feed for me automatically?”.

Now I know better.

FeedBurner adds a lot of useful bells and whistles to my blog’s RSS feed that WordPress simply cannot do. Now I am able to track the number of people subscribing to my feed, limit the number of characters per feed item, and have my own FeedBurner feed page.

Take a look at some of my RSS feeds. Click on them and you will see a nice FeedBurner page with all those “add feed” buttons and a list of compatible RSS readers. The old feed was simply a XML file and if you clicked on it with your browser, you would see a bunch of meaningless text.

• Vincent Rich’s Internet Marketing Blog
• Vincent Rich’s Interent Marketing Forum

All my RSS feeds are now processed through FeedBurner. I think of FeedBurner as clothes for my “naked” RSS feeds. FeedBurner makes my RSS feeds look good. I highly recommend you to use FeedBurner if you have a blog. Take an hour or so to configure it at your blog. It’s well worth the effort.

Introducing Tagging…

Before I learnt about Technorati tags, the only tag I knew about in the internet world were HTML tags. Technorati tags are similar to HTML tags but they serve a unique purpose.

See those links at the bottom of this post after the words “Tagged As”? Those are my Technorati tags. I am very new at this and I think they are supposed to add this blog post’s link to a Technorati tag page.

WordPress has a built-in pinging tool that activates after you create a blog entry. Technorati.com is one of my ping URLs and after I ping them, they should visit this blog post and see my Technorati tags.

I actually hid my tags in my source code. Simply view the source and you will see some tags at the end of this blog post’s content. I am not sure if this will work with Technorati because I hid them from human eyes but I am sure a machine will be able to read it. The tags are still part of my RSS feed so I don’t think it will be an issue. I’ll have to wait and see.

Introducing Social Bookmarking…

I personally haven’t used these sites. You can bookmark this blog post at some of these social bookmarking sites by clicking on the square icons at the end of this post. I am not sure how these bookmarks will help my blog, I suppose they will help me get some incoming links to my blog when you bookmark this post.

Tagged As: Blogging, feedburner, internet+marketing, rss, tag+and+ping, tagging, vincent+rich

Categories: Blog Updates, Blogging | 3 Comments »

If you missed my previous post on my Major Blog Renovation, please take a look at the “before photos” to see how my blog used to before today. After watching Michael Cheney’s AdSense Videos (AdSense Videos review coming soon), I realised I wasn’t maximizing my blog’s Google AdSense earning potential. Therefore I made the following changes to my Google AdSense ads:

1. I dumped the leaderboard ad at the top of the blog

I wonder why I put this up there in the first place. I guess it was convenient to do so at that time. The clickthrough rates for this type of ad sucks pretty bad because it looks too much like an ad.

What I have right now is the 336 x 280 large rectangle ad you see on the top left of every screen below the post titles. I embedded the ad seamlessly into the content without using any HTML tables. You can resize your browser window and the text around will “wrap” perfectly around the ad. I suggest you view the source code of this page to see how it is done with a simple “div” tag around your Google AdSense code. It’s much easier than using a HTML table and it looks prettier as well.

I had to do a little bit of PHP programming to show this ad only on the the first post of the page to prevent it from displaying an ad at every single blog entry. If you’re interested to know how it’s done, contact me and I will send you the WordPress template source code. You can’t tell by looking at the HTML source code.

2. I removed the Google AdSense affiliate ads

I used to have these square Google AdSense ads at the bottom right of my blog. If someone registers after clicking on my ads and makes $100, I get $100 from Google AdSense too. I also randomly shuffle between this Firefox with Google Toolbar ad and I get $1 when someone installs Firefox with Google Toolbar.

The earnings from the Firefox ad was too pathetic to justify taking up space over there. Furthermore, I haven’t seen any of my sub affiliates make over $100 yet.

I replaced the ads with a tiny 160 x 90 link unit. Check out the “Vincent Rich’s Network” box and you will see the ads over there.

3. I am finally tracking my Google AdSense ads

I didn’t want to pay money to get a Google AdSense ad tracker so I didn’t track my ads for a long time. Then I stumbled on the open source AdLogger script while I was browsing some Google AdSense related forum. I bet some of the paid scripts are actually AdLogger modifications.

I can now track how many clicks were made on my site and which ad they clicked on. The default Google AdSense tracking ability can only track how much money you made on your web site but it doesn’t track which ad or which page the click came from. You can even prevent click fraud by limiting the number of clicks on your ads. If the number of clicks exceeds your desired number of clicks, your ads will automatically disappear to that click fraudster.

The road ahead…

I will have to monitor my Google AdSense earnings and my AdLogger logs to see if my current setup is actually more profitable than the previous one. I am confident the large rectangle will work better than the leaderboard but I have doubts about the adlink unit ad. Only time will tell….

Tagged As: Blogging, google+adsense, internet+marketing, make+money, vincent+rich

Categories: Blog Updates, Blogging, Google AdSense | 3 Comments »

I have decided to give my Google AdSense ads a little reshuffle. This will probably be the last post with the “old” Google AdSense ad layout. I’m going to make some changes and you will be able to spot the difference with my “before photos” below.

Moreover, I need to keep my blog up to date with the latest blogging technologies. I’m going to add stuff like FeedBurner RSS feeds to replace the existing blog feeds I generate with my WordPress blogs, social boomarking to let people bookmark pages of my blogs, and tagging on sites like Technorati.com.

I will cover these topics in greater detail when the my new blog layout is up and explain the reasons for doing so. I am very excited about this new blog update because it could potentially drive a lot more traffic to my blog.

Tagged As: Blogging, google+adsense, internet+marketing, make+money, vincent+rich

Categories: Blog Updates, Blogging, Google AdSense | 2 Comments »