AIS sites

[caledoniaman]

I've put together a couple of AIS sites, each coming from a different perspective and would appreciate the input of any AIS/Adsense experts on here.

The first site relies on returning subscribers and is a site about Junior (semi-pro) football in Scotland:-

http://www.scottishjuniornews.co.uk

The second is more your traditional AIS site where users enter via search, land on the site and then hopefully b***er off somewhere else via a google ad link.

Any thoughts on design and on which of the two models (subscriber or non-subscriber) is more effective?

[SLEE]

whats the second link?

[caledoniaman]

Sorry. The second link is http://www.britishandirishcastles.co.uk

[sarahA]

Not the design so much but on your castles site you've copied your content from MS Word and TinyMCE has kept the lovely word formatting creating 29 errors on the first page alone - simply by having word tags that only exist in the world of MS Word   You may want to redo those or copy into the code editor in WP and not the WYSIWYG.

Your football site is presumably doing better, which I'm guessing is from getting the attention of those who attend or play at the matches. You may have luck with a subscription service on this site, depends what type of service you intend to offer and of course whether your visitors are prepared to pay for it. However on both sites at present your AdSense additions are a little too outstanding. That can work for some people, but it makes your sites come over a bit heavy on the adsense as it's noticeable. I'd blend some of them in more so they're not instantly noticeable and doesn't detract from the site so much. Whilst it's nice to have visitors come in, click a paid link and go elsewhere thus earning you money, at present you'd be better building up the marketing figures to be able to enter into the arena of places such as Text Link Ads. With the apparently soon PR update you should hopefully get a bit of PR assigned to you which will be useful.

[caledoniaman]

Thanks Sarah,

I presume you refer to the articles about Edinburgh and Tantallon castles? I wrote these myself in word (I submitted these to Ezine and Articlerich so I did them in Word to get the word count right) and then pasted them in. I'll tidy these up tonight.

With regards to the blending in of ads. I've read about two schools of thought on that, the second being to colour the ads in red and yellow due to some research about how users see these colours. Originally the ads were blended in and doing fairly poorly so I 'coloured them up' a bit and clickthroughs have picked up. I'm still personally a fan of blending though and I may go back to it. I guess I'm just experimenting just now.

I'm not sure how my users will react to a subscription service on Scottish Junior News. I think a subscription model would put more pressure on me to provide regular information or updates. The junior football world is sometimes not the best publicised (hence the popularity of this site) and obtaining information from clubs is incredibly difficult at the best of times. With a kid on the way, I don't really want to commit myself to that level of work on a regular basis for what would be a paltry enough return.

I've a couple of ideas in the pipeline for other sites and I'm going to put them into action in the coming weeks. In the meantime, I'll mix and match the blended and the standout as an experiment on what is the most popular.

Any thoughts on that as an approach?

[sarahA]

Yeah as I mentioned, some people have luck with blended ads, others fare better with having their ads stand out. It is simply a case of experimenting. You could try a simple A/B test, use a little PHP or ASP to randomly show one or the other ad block. Give each its own channel and then compare the results, see how it goes. If you don't get many visitors to the site then you'll need to do this for a while to get a better average. Same for the positioning, channel each one so you can see which works and which doesn't, afterall there's no point in having an advert block somewhere if it's never clicked on, or makes perhaps 10c a month.

If the junior football is a rare thing then that could be your niche to work on. Lack of time can be a major factor (especially with the baby due) so perhaps put up a message on the site asking for contributors, maybe those who go to more games and may fancy doing a brief couple of paragraphs write up. You'd be suprised how people are simply impressed by having their thoughts and content on a website. Alternatively ask your visitors for the content by simply posting up the match details, perhaps the score once you can get it and simply say 'where you there? what did you think of it?'. It may take a while to get going perhaps but once people start to interact on the site and with each other then theoretically you may be able to just sit back and let them do the work!

Oh and yes, sorry I meant the articles on your castle site that had the Word formatting in.

[caledoniaman]

Morning all. Another quick question. My clicks have gone up by about 400% in the last few days but I'm still earning buttons. Literally 3 cents or so a click.

How do I ensure that the ads displaying on the site are higher value. I've set my filter sites as recommended on other AIS sites but I'm obviously a bit of a beginner so wondered if anyone else had any more tips.

I'm aware that the highest paying ads sit at the top of any ad block. Is it a case of putting on smaller ad blocks so there is less room for the cheaper ads? This would presumably reduce visitor choice though and affect clickthrough rates.

Any help welcome.

[sarahA]

Are the ads displaying relevant to your content? If not then you can target certain sections of your content as a kind of 'this is what my page is about Mr AdSense bot', and then when the adsense bot comes around it'll see you've prioritised part of your content for it and it may then produce more relevant ads, and the more relevant the ads are the more they're charged. ie. if you've got an advert for chocolate displaying on a site about spots, then the advertiser won't be charged as much as if their ad was on a site about chocolate, as it's a less relevant placing. So you need to ensure what's displaying is relevant, also look at the ads yourself and determine whether you want them there. We run a tattoo site and at first half the google ads were for tattoo removal, which, whilst higher payers, wasn't very popular with the visitors! So we had to filter all of these tattoo removal sites out.

Also, use the Adwords sandbox tool to see whether you can expect to make much more on your chosen subject - https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal Put in your keyword, look at the results on what people are bidding on and how much they're bidding for. However, as daft as it sounds, you don't want to put a high estimate in the cost box. It pushes the other advertiser's prices up for some reason. You want to find out the price of the advert for the 4-6 position as that will give you a more accurate figure of what you can expect to make. Here you can then see more worthwhile key phrases which you may be able to work into your content or alter your content to target a little more.

Less ads does usually mean the ads on the site are the more worthwhile ones, but then again if the advertiser has a budget for the day and that budget is met then the advert will stop showing and will automatically show a lower priced one. Also, don't forget, they can block your site, so make sure your site still looks appealing to the advertisers as well as your visitors.

[Charisma Bypass]

Forget Adsense.  Adsense will only ever make you beer money (unless you are able to make and promote many thousands of adsense websites per day).

Adsense is so 2005, baby  

The new thing is selling your own products, think of it like this;  "1 product at $20 is equivalent to an awful lot of Adsense Clicks".

[caledoniaman]

I agree, and for the time being, I'm only really interested in tinkering. What 'own products' can be sold though?
This is where I draw the blank.....

[caledoniaman]

Ok, so I've added a few filter ads in on my http://www.britishandirishcastles.co.uk site and all of a sudden I'm getting completely irrelevant ads. Manual Lymphatic Drainage is not necessarily of interest to castle lovers I'd imagine.

Any ideas? Wits end here....

[Mr Anderson]

Ok, so I've added a few filter ads in on my http://www.britishandirishcastles.co.uk site and all of a sudden I'm getting completely irrelevant ads. Manual Lymphatic Drainage is not necessarily of interest to castle lovers I'd imagine.

Any ideas? Wits end here....

You'll just have to keep adding to the filters until you get as close as possible to what you want displayed, whilst bearing in mind that you may not get exactly what you want if the ads just aren't there.

[sarahA]

Have you used the comment code supplied by AdSense to target certain phrases/paragraphs of your content which you want to be deemed as keyword rich? Also remember, if you remove irrelevant ads, you may (as in this case) end up with more irrelevant ones as adsense possibly doesn't have any others to display. Do a search on google and see what displays in the AdWords results. That's sometimes a good indication of how many adverts are available for your subject. If there aren't enough then you may want to consider reducing the amount of adverts displayed or try and target another subject that can run alongside it eg. nearby hotels / b&bs that people could stay in to visit the castle and the area.

Perhaps on each post you include at least one place for people to stay. Maybe look out to see if there's some sort of hotel booking affiliate scheme with one of the online hotel booking services, and perhaps you can push people in that direction too.

[Whatever]

Further to Sarah's post, see this one - http://www.activereservations.com/hotel/static/en/distributors.html

[sarahA]

One of my clients uses active reservations. Just don't ever go to their support for help! Took them about a week plus 3-4 hours on the phone to simply get the right link for me to add to my client's website so people could book into their hotel

[sponna]

Forget Adsense.  Adsense will only ever make you beer money (unless you are able to make and promote many thousands of adsense websites per day).

Adsense is so 2005, baby  

The new thing is selling your own products, think of it like this;  "1 product at $20 is equivalent to an awful lot of Adsense Clicks".

But it can be still be very worthwhile if you get decent traffic and select your topic(s) well - we currently still average £350 plus per month from a couple of sites....