Smart Adsense

I’ve talked quite a bit about blogging in this book, mostly because I know
from experience that it’s possible to make a very nice income from a good
blog but also because it’s still fairly new, so a lot of people aren’t making the
most of the blogs they have.

If you’ve got AdSense on your blog, there’s a whole range of different things
that you can easily do to increase your traffic and earn extra cash.

The first thing you should do is make sure that your blog is set to ping
rpc.pingomatic.com as soon you’ve updated. Pingomatic.com offers a free
all-in-one pinging service that covers all the large blog directories and search
engines. On Blogger.com, you can find this in your settings; other blog tools,
such as Movable Type and Wordpress have a similar option.

You should also set up an RSS feed to let people know when you update.
Apart from the fact that you can now place ads on your feeds, it will also
keep your regular users coming back to see more ads (and to see your latest
posts).

Instead of linking to the previous month’s or the previous week’s posts, each
page should also have its own link. Sounds obvious, right? And yet how
many blogs have you seen with one link to about twenty different entries?
One link per entry means more pages for ads, better links from external sites
and higher search engine rankings.

You should certainly comment on other people’s blogs, especially those that
write about the same sort of things as your site, but ultimately the best way
to get traffic to your blog is to make it good. If your writing is dull or difficult
to read, it doesn’t matter how hard you push it, no one will want to read it —
and those who do stay won’t stick around to click the ads.