The following are the best known steps to increase your chances of being successful in your blogging career. These are just plain vanilla practical tips.
1. Know yourself.
The first and foremost thing is to know what you are good at. An easy way to gauge an understanding of yourself is to observe and catch yourself at frequent times and see what you do more and what you do best.
The best common factor to these two things will help in finding your niche.
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You might be good at cooking, painting, writing stories, have good experience in dealing with latest gadgets, programming, or networking.
Once you know what you are good at, it's like half the ocean is crossed. The remaining is just some dedication, commitment, discipline and consistency.
2. Take action.
Now that you know what comes easily to you – your thoughts in your particular field or niche - put them to paper. Write whatever you can so you can share with the world.
If you see some usefulness to that, chances are very bright that others who share similar interests in some corner of the world also finds it useful.
Blogging world is exactly that platform for you to express this interest. Ultimately, taking action is what will help you get more traffic, income, followers, fans, fanatics, etc.
3. Understand the Technicalities.
Ok, two most important factors for a successful blogging career have been established. But it's of no use if you do not know and understand the other piece of the puzzle - if you want to earn income from your blog.
When I say technicalities it covers SEO – Search Engine Optimization, AdSense Policies, Social Media, Affiliate marketing and all their related technical insights which can be mastered only after working at it for some years, consistently.
If you see Google AdSense as your primary advertising agent, then you ought to know their policies and rules. One main thing to know is that Google AdSense allows only a maximum of three ad units per page. Your website might have a lot of pages in it, but a single page can contain only three ad units or less.
What is an Ad Unit?
We'll understand this better with an example. Let's say you want to order 3 T-shirts for your three cousins. They all come in different sizes. One is
Large, the other
XXL and the other
Small. Ad Units are something like these t shirts. You can add Ad Units in many different sizes and dimensions. It could be 728x90, 300x250, etc. Additionally, Google AdSense has also started supporting custom sizes and responsive ad units which is in beta as on today. These will be seen by advertisers and they will offer to place their ads in these unit slots. Thus, Ad Units are like plates used to serve ads. But to do that advertisers should also understand what content can go in to your ad units.
This is where your Custom Channels comes in to picture and helps tremendously.
What are Custom Channels?
Custom channels tell advertisers what kind of ads can be placed in an ad unit. As a publisher it's your work to create these channels so the advertisers can find your placements and offer ads through Google AdSense.
As you can see, both - ad units and custom channels go hand-in-hand, in tandem with each other. Google allows a maximum of 500 Custom Channels that can be created.
4. Insights. Learn from others.
What I am going to tell you now took me a very long time to understand and to put to practice. But this was not just an idea – it was like a revelation to me when it occurred. The funniest thing is that I always knew this and it was always in front of me. But only after I spent time and put this in to practice did I understand the grandeur of life itself – that unless we take action on our insights or knowledge – change, for the better, will not happen!
Google AdSense gives us extensive guidance and information on how all these things are put together and in short, how it all works!
Ad Units, as said before, comes in various sizes and dimensions. Some of the ad units will fare better than the others – you can check it in your Google AdSense account, under 'Performance reports'. If you know about CPC – cost per click, some ad units get more
CPC and also more
Ad requests.
If you see the above table from the
Performance reports section, it highlights the top 3 'ad requests' from advertisers who are bidding, the highest clicks that a particular ad unit achieved and the top 3 CPCs. If I have to choose the best option for my website, I would take all these three factors in to consideration and then decide appropriately. It differs from person to person and blog to blog. There is no finite answer.
Since Google AdSense offers a maximum of three ad units per webpage, some people do that big mistake of keeping three AdSense widgets placed in three different pages within the blog layout page and just start expecting it to fetch more clicks. What this does is that all three units are placed in a static position on ALL your pages in the blog. This means with time all your visitors would create a sense of ad blindness and will start to ignore the ads in your blog or website. But instead of placing three AdSense widgets in a standard position, just keep one at a standard position using your blogger layout screen. But let that one be with high CPC and high ad requests.
For the remaining two ad units, we will deal with it little differently - add them within your blog posts. After your ad units are created, go to your 'My Ads' screen in the Google AdSense account and customize your ad unit with a good descriptive name, a size that performs well (you can get this info too from Google AdSense account under 'Performance reports'), add some back up ads, and stitch some custom channels in to your ad unit. Remember, all your custom channels should be checked as Targetable to the advertisers.
Choose your ad styles wisely: this is where you can determine the look and feel of your ads, especially the text ads. You can customize this by selecting styles that match your blog design, so that the ads blend well with the blog content. Sometimes, this works the other way round as well. Your Ad can stand out, grabbing attention with different contrasting colors when compared to your blog content. Just see what works well for your blog or website. With time you can definitely get a grip on this.
To summarize this particular point, it's only wise to visit other niche websites and learn from them periodically. Learning never stops. There's always something new.
5. Adding ad units within posts.
I mentioned in point # 4 above about placing ads within posts. You might think that this is a 'check box' selection within the blogger layout screen. Yes, that's one option. But what I am going to show now is done manually.
Go to your Google AdSense account, my ads section. You will see all your active ad units there. You will also see an option called 'Get code' beneath the ad unit. Click and copy the code to your clipboard.
Now head to your post – preferably that has large traffic magnetism among your other posts. Edit the post and go to its HTML view. Find a location where you think is fine – doesn't spoil your reader's experience at the same time it grabs the reader's attention gently – of course if you've done all the above steps correctly, you might also get a related and relevant ad. Paste the code there. Update post and exit.
Check your post and you will find that the ads start showing up within the post. You can also use some HTML attributes like 'float: right;' so your ads don't push your blog content down and instead shows up on the side along with you content.
6. Bonus tip
Google Link units are mostly forgotten by new bloggers. And they are never used until it dawns on them how useful they are! These are just plain text ad links that help in getting more clicks. These can be placed near your blog content's tags, categories, menu tabs and related posts area to name a few.
Conclusion
With a mix of a good sized ad unit that has large number of ad requests and CPC, with a creative and promising custom channel, and placing the ad unit within posts where required – you will start seeing a bump in the graph of your AdSense income and you'll only see it increasing day by day, provided you are also consistent in writing quality content, checking your CPC and ad requests periodically. This happened to me.
