How to save on gas

Here are 7 quick tips that will help you save on gas. With the price of gas rising once again it is important to take advantage of every money saving opportunity we can when it comes to buying fuel.

Tips to help you save on gas

1. Walk more to save on gas. Sometimes we overlook the obvious
2. Car pool to save on gas. Don’t think this needs much explanation
3. Get an oil change to save on gas. Your engine will run more efficiently
4. Turn off the air conditioner to save on gas. Most cars will gain at least 2 to 3 miles per gallon if the A/C is turned off
5. Properly inflate your tires to save on gas. Tires that aren’t inflated properly cause poor gas mileage
6. Fill your car in the morning to save on gas. Gas expands as it gets warm so less fits in the tank in the warmer parts of the day
7. Coast to save on gas. Old technique that still works. When you can coast instead of using the accelerator

Does anyone else have any tips to pass along about saving on gas?

You can also learn more about saving on fuel costs at this other blog.

Posted in Interviews, Potpourri | 4 Comments »

Social networking is a sign of retardation

Do you want to know the truth? Only idiots bother with social networking. Before you get your knickers all bunched up I want you to hear me out for a moment. Go log into your Myspace or Facebook profile real quick and have a quick look around. Ok, done?

…

Great! Notice anything different? Of course not! And that’s the whole point. Nothing changes. Aside from adding a few more meaningless faces and names to your “friends” list what have you accomplished? The truth of the matter is a bitter pill, but it’s time to swallow it. So called “social networking” is neither social, nor is it networking. But wait, there’s more good news!

Social networking can actually be more detrimental to your long term online health than you might realize. The problem is that we start developing content as if our social networks are our primary audience all the while forgetting the other 1.3 trillion people out there who aren’t in our friends list. If they were just part of the audience that would be fine, but we have a tendency to start dancing like clowns for our networks.

Now excuse me while I log into Reptile Geeks. I’m expecting a couple of more friend requests!

Posted in Blogging | 6 Comments »

Why do you still use Adsense?

Today I asked myself why I am still using Adsense to monetize my blogs and my websites with. After all I’m not the biggest Google fan out there and to be honest my space could probably be used more efficiently. But as I was thinking of reasons I shouldn’t be using Adsense something funny occurred to me. I want to use Adsense.

Why the hell would I want to do that?

First of all I’m lazy. I don’t want to spend hours researching and optimizing my sites to attract advertisers. I’d prefer to spend that time on content. Or sleeping. It is so easy to just throw a block or two of Adsense code up and let it generate revenue. That’s right, it still generates revenue. How much? Not enough, but not only am I lazy I’m also aware that just like hard work paying off being lazy pays off in its own way.

Beyond being lazy I’m also busy. Too busy for properly monetizing my sites? Apparently so. But here’s the bottom line - I use Adsense because it works for me. Because while I’m not getting rich I’m getting enough to pay for hosting each month plus a little extra. Which when you consider my hosting bill is $7.95 per months isn’t all that impressive. Would I like to make more? Of course I would. Would I consider dropping Adsense from my sites? At this point, no.

Is there any advantage to using Adsense?

For sites like mine that get less than 150 visitors a day each on average I’d have to say there is no monetary advantage except the fact that it makes me work even harder to try and get the sites ranking higher and higher for the keyword searches on the various search engines. I do know this as I work to rank the sites higher and I manage to do so my Adsense revenue increases. Magic? Hardly, just good old fashioned math. The more people see an ad the more likely they are to click on it. Simple as that.

As my sites gain readership however I will begin to notice an advantage to using Adsense which will be reflected in the numbers.

Should I use Adsense?

Only you can answer that question. Before you decide for or against using it you should take a good look at what your goals are in terms of monetization. Adsense isn’t a quick road to riches by any means and if you expect it to be you’ll just be wasting your time. There are several things you should think about when it comes to deciding if Adsense is right for you.

How well optimized are your sites for search engines?

The vast majority of people who click on Adsense ads come from search engines. Specifically from Google. If you have a very well optimized site that ranks high for your keywords you’ll do much better using Adsense than if you don’t. For example my site about snakes tends to rank within the first 1-15 results per article on Google. My click through rate is great (over 2.75% when I checked a little bit ago). At least it’s great compared to this site. On the other hand I get about 25-30 visitors a day there while well over 100 stop by here (despite not updating in what seems like months). That’s the power of keyword optimization when it comes to Adsense.

Is your website designed to maximize clicks?

Just throwing a few ads up isn’t going to get you clicks. They need to be presented in a certain way. If you’ve never taken a moment to look at Google’s Heatmap you should. One thing that has struck me is the fact that it doesn’t ever seem to change. Why not? Because it works. Google knows it works, and other Adsense publishers know it works. It makes money and that’s what Google is in business to do.

But it goes further than setting up your websites heatmap to emulate Google’s recommendations. You can have everything laid out perfectly, but if you don’t have good content you’ll get ads that don’t fit it. For example I’ve seen Adsense throw out ads about off shore oil drilling in an article I wrote on another blog about computers. I was at a loss for how that was happening until I read the article through a few times. I talked a lot about “drilling down to get to the problem”, “sometimes the cause of the issues are right below the surface”, “when you do this or that it’s like a geyser of power is released”… You get the idea. Adsense was doing its job and targeting perfectly for what I gave it. Now if Adsense was that far off track of what I was trying to accomplish I can only image how bad a search engine would have been thrown for a loop.

Do you ask people for clicks?

We all know it is against the rules to ask people to click on your ad spots whether Adsense or another, but you can encourage it without overtly asking. How? Write good content that is relevant to what the person reading the article wants to find. How do you do that? Good Great search engine optimization. How do you go about doing that? Write good content. What is good content? Content that gives the reader what they are looking for. How do you give the reader what they are looking for? Proper search engine optimi… Is it just me, or is this starting sound familiar? Do you understand?

If you want people to click on your ads give them reason to do so. Present good content and Adsense will 99.9999% of the time present good ads which will lead people to click. The very act of creating good content is the act of asking for clicks. Don’t create good content and see how many clicks you get. Produce good content and see how many clicks you get. Try it out and see if I lie!

Are you willing to use up valuable real estate for Adsense?

Sounds kind of odd, but will you willingly give your website real estate to Adsense when someone else might come in and perform better either at a flat rate or on a per click basis? Because that’s what you have to do during the duration while adsense is being shown on your site. I know for a fact that some potential advertisers won’t touch you with a 10 foot pole if you have adsense on your sites. So not only are you losing out on the space where Adsense appears, but also where it doesn’t in some cases.

Why do you still use Adsense?

Posted in Making Money | 2 Comments »

Getting started with niche blogging

Last July when I bought the domain name www.ablogaboutnothing.com I didn’t really have any ideas or expectations when it came to blogging. I only knew I had things I wanted to say and a blog seemed like a great platform to use to say them. For several months I posted daily sometimes even 2 or 3 articles a day. Needless to say I started to feel a little burned out after a while and slowed down. That slowing down process has been going on since January (2008) on this blog, but I’ve been picking up the pace on two other blogs I own. The first one pet-snakes.com is targeted at the snake owners niche. My other blog is an addition to my business website that I recently added.

Obviously two entirely different niches are represented by both blogs (snakes, and computers) and I decided to give everyone who might be reading this an idea of how powerful niche blogging really can be. I’m not going to get into boring details about traffic numbers or click through rates. While all of that data makes for good coffee table talk it doesn’t tell you what you need to know to get a niche blog off the ground. In this article we will take a look at three things in niche blogging that can either make you or break you. The topic you choose, who finds your topic useful, and your traffic.

Choose your topic carefully

The cliche that we hear all the time about blogging is to choose a topic you “love”. While that sounds great and even makes a great deal of sense it isn’t that simple. You need to choose a blogging topic you can stick with. It’s not enough to simply love the topic you need to be able to continually learn and grow in the topic. It is a daily endeavor. For example you might love woodworking, but you may not be inclined to learn much more about it. That wouldn’t be a good topic for you to blog about if you are trying to target a niche.

When I first decided to try out niche blogging after reading many articles from Maki at DoshDosh on niche blogging to pick up tips I sat down and created a list of possible topics I could blog about and asked myself some questions:

• What interests me?
• What do I know about?
• What am I willing to continue learning about?
• What will help me further my goals?
• What am I passionate about?

Once I answered those questions my once substantial list of possible topics was narrowed way down. I don’t remember the exact number but it went down from around 50 to about 6 or 7. Out of those 6 or 7 I narrowed it down to two to start with. Yes, I do plan on adding more from the list in the future but decided those two (snakes, and computers) would be the best investment in my time.

Make your blog useful

My two niche blogs serve two separate purposes but the point is that they both serve a purpose. The one attached to the business website is just easy computer tips. There’s nothing spectacular about it. In fact any of the tips I’ve put on there you can find in 10,000 different places on the internet. That doesn’t stop people from visiting it. And they come back because the tips are useful. More importantly it is a sales and marketing vehicle for my IT consulting business.

One the other hand is the blog about snakes which is a passion of mine. It allows me to share with others things that I have learned over the years. According to my Google Analytics stats I am around 76.xxx% of my traffic coming from search engines for Pet-Snakes. So you better believe every article I write for that blog is keyed towards ranking and converting search engine traffic. My Google Adsense CTR reflects this effort. I can’t give exact numbers but it is slightly over 2% which is great. Now if only the payout rate was a little better… On the other hand my search engine traffic to the business blog is virtually zero. But I make more money from it both in terms of Google Adsense and in terms of work it brings in.

Getting the traffic

For any niche blog the immediate challenge after getting it started is to generate the needed traffic. I say needed traffic because without traffic you’re writing to yourself and you will not continue doing that for long. There are a lot of traffic sources out there. My main two for the business blog are Yahoo! Answers and Craig’s List. In fact those two sites account for well over 95% of the traffic it generates. Fact of the matter is that trying to rank on a search engine was much more effort than I wanted to put into it so I opted for the easy way. For the snake blog I rely on forums that I am a member of, search engine traffic, and reciprical links from other websites for the traffic.

The point isn’t to tell you that you need to use any particular method to generate traffic it is to show you that there is more than one way to skin a cat. The important thing, particularly for a niche blog, is that you get traffic to your site that will find content they can make use of and pertains to their needs. For example I answer a lot of questions on Yahoo! Answers, but I don’t tag my answers with my domain name(s) unless the question relates to my blog. Why not? Wouldn’t it get me more traffic? Probably would, but it would almost certainly be useless traffic to me.

Posted in Blogging | No Comments »