Building Backlinks

When it comes to building backlinks, some ways are definitely better than others. Buying backlinks is probably the worst way. Not only will it cost you money, but it might actually hurt you ranking with search engines. IMHO, link exchanges aren’t much better. What you need just as much (maybe more) than quantity is QUALITY. So, how do you get QUALITY links? With work. You may have heard that making money online is easy. Probably the person you heard it from is a:been doing it a long time (so of course it’s easy… for them), b:lying, c:trying to sell you something, or d:both b and c are correct.

If you want backlinks (and you do), you need them to be good backlinks. You can’t beg, borrow, or steal good backlinks, but you CAN build them. There are many free platforms where you can post about whatever topic your page is about. Squidoo has been very good to me. I’m also experimenting with HubPages and multiply, both of them look promising.

Google Adsense Earnings

Is it possible to make money online? You bet!!! In fact, I have several sites set up with Google Adsense, and I’ve made… about $32 total since last February. Since their payout threshold is $100, I figure I only have about 19 more months before my big payout. Actually, that’s not fair to Google. None of my sites are optimized, and most aren’t even about topics that would lend themselves to doing well in an Adsense campaign. Most of the sites average about 0.4% to 0.5% click rate on the Adsense ads. One site is around 2% though, and another is almost at almost 3%. The question is, what should I do to increase my earnings? Obviously I should work at increasing traffic, but what is the best use of my time?

I have two sites that get the majority of my traffic. Both of these have click rates of around 0.4%. One of them is an Alumni site for my old High School and the other documents my activities in one of my hobbies. Putting a lot of time into the High School Alumni site is probably a waste of effort. Even though it’s in the first position of Google search results for a certain term (high school name alumni), the content doesn’t lend itself to targeted Google ads, and the people visiting the page are interested in connecting with former classmates, not buying something. My hobby site also ranks well for certain search terms, but the vast majority of the traffic is to one specific page that happens to have EBay listings (more on that next time). I don’t want to mess around with it too much and screw up my EBay earnings.

The two sites with fairly good click rates don’t rank well in Google but still manage to draw a fair amount of traffic. They are also about subjects that have better potential both for traffic and well targeted Google ads than my other sites. It would be better to optimize these sites according to Adsense guidelines and try to increase traffic. I also just launched a new web site that has excellent potential for traffic and targeted ads. I’m anxious to see how it does over time. It would be nice to earn $100 each month instead of $100 every 28 months.

Sincerely,

Xiaohua

Adsense Friendly Wordpress Theme

One of the things  a lot of bloggers like to do is monetize their blogs, and a fairly popular way to do this is with Google Adsense. If you’re using Wordpress as your blogging platform, there are many pluggins that are designed to help you integrate Adsense ads into your Wordpress blog. Unfortunately, I’ve found these to be a pain to set up. It can be difficult to get the ads placed exactly where you want them, and even when you can the dimensions of the Adsense units rarely matches the dimensions of the regions your theme gives you. This is true even for many themes that claim to be “Adsense ready.” I was helping my husband set up a model railroading blog and he was having a heck of a time finding a theme that looked OK for his subject matter and also worked well with Adsense. I did a little Googling around and found a list on Dosh Dosh of 18 Wordpress themes that are supposedly optimized for Wordpress. While most of the themes listed didn’t look that great for a model rairoad themed blog, the first one did. We installed it on my husband’s blog and the ads came up instantly and displayed nicely. The theme is called ProSense and can be downloaded here. One thing I noticed is that it doesn’t seem to have support for excerpts. No problem, just go over to wordpress.org and grab the Excerpt Editor plugin.

Sincerely,

Xiaohua