I have tried various different advertising configurations, and have found the “vertical format” to be the most effective. What I mean by that, is instead of using: Banners, Leaderboards (and other “horizontal” ad formats) to integrate: Square/Rectangle Boxes, Skyscrapers (and other “vertical” ad formats) into the content of the webpages on your website(s). I have found this to particularly increase the performance of PPC (Pay-Per-Click) advertising using G**gle’s Ads**se Program.

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There seems to be a lot of MMO blogs being sold so far this year. I’ve seen onemansgoal.com get sold for a price I believe was about 5x more than it was actually worth. I have no idea what transpired with johncow.com but saw the blog for sale a few times on Sitepoint for $50k. Bloggingexperiment.com also sold recently, and I saw no less than 10 more smaller sites go up for sale as well but didn’t have enough interest to follow them to see what happened.

I see on Sitepoint that Blueverse is now being sold, and for $10k no less. I think it’s a decent blog, with decent rankings and some income, but no way in hell I would pay $10k. Everyone knows that in all likelihood the revenue and subscribers tend to drop, at least a little, when a specific blog changes hands. I just can’t see paying 20x the monthly revenue. It’ll probably take longer than that to make back your purchase price with the drop. This is also not the first attempt at this sale, which leads me to believe that I am not the only one thinking this way, and why the blog hasn’t sold earlier.

The MMO scene is much too saturated. In my opinion, I wouldn’t even dream of taking over someone’s blog at such a rate unless the Alexa was in the top 100k, it beat all it’s competitors in SE rankings and the revenue was steady and provable for the past 12 months.

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I mentioned Adsense yesterday and wanted to throw out a few tips for optimizing your ads or how to increase your click through ratio. I’m not going to lie, I’m far from an Adsense expert! I’ve experimented with various sites over the past few years. I’ve changed ad sizes, colors and placement of the ads, as well as new ways of optimizing my pages to attract more visitors while increasing the CTR at the same time. I’ve tried so many different combinations that I think I may have confused myself! LOL

The image below is a “heat map”. While most blogs will have different layouts, this image will give you a good idea of what placements work best when placing your ads. The darker the color, the better the placement. You’ll see why I never purchase any ads I expect to get clicked on the footer section of other sites. Outside of a text link to “maybe” help increase your PR, the footer is the least likely place that your visitors will click on ads. Of course the best placement is above the fold just above the content that is directed at your visitors.

I’d like to defer to a much more knowledgeable professional for additional tips. I’ve been reading Grizz’s blog for quite some time and have learned a great deal about bettering my Adsense from this site. Here’s one of his posts to get you started, and I highly recommend subscribing! - Optimization tips for Adsense

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I told you not long ago about what I was doing with Adengage, which is to find cheap but effective advertising, and it’s been turning into a great return for me.

In the past few days I have been able to generate thousand of clicks from Adengage for a total of $52 in advertising for 7 days. As you can see from the photo above, I’ve already made back my advertising investment, and then some, and still have 5 days left in the campaign. I’m going to let it run for a few more days to see how it performs, and if all goes well, I plan on upping the ante by doubling the advertising and seeing of the ROI follows suit.

This won’t work for every site. I’ve been lucky enough to find a great combination, where my ad is very attractive on the advertising site, and the niche I’m in is HUGE, so the visitors are constantly on the prowl for more no matter how much content you give them.  And it’s not just finding sites that will garner you thousands of clicks, but also having your site optimized for best Adsense performance. I’m going to do a post later today, or tomorrow, on good placement of Adsense ads for a better CTR.

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I noticed early yesterday that my stats for Adsense were showing extremely little activity. I got nervous and thought my sites were down at first, then of course starting thinking dreadful things such as being banned from Google. I figured my account was safe since I was still able to login, and I know I haven’t broken any of their rules.

I got curious and wandered over to the Adsense forum at Webmasterworld. I found out quickly that everyone around the world was experiencing the same issue of delayed stats. Luckily we were all able to confirm to one another what we were seeing but many weren’t pleased that Google themselves weren’t acknowledging the problem and keeping us aware of the issue.

Well, they listened. By the end of the day there was a new page at Google announced, a known issues page. This page will keep everyone aware of any outstanding issues that Google is working on, and any workarounds if applicable. Excellent addition!

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