Writing great blog post that captures your audience probably has everything to do with your success to make money online.

Why?

Great content will always attract humans, search engines, and anyone who is interested in that information.

How do I write a blog post and capture my audience?

Well, there are numerous ways to do it but I can share you my strategy to this.

For me, I focus on satirical, humorous writing that will make the reader laugh.

Why?

The world is full of great information.  Especially the internet, you can go to 10 different blogs for the same information.

To have a competitive edge, you need to differ from your fellow bloggers.

Let me ask you a question.  Would you rather read a boring, monotonous blog post or a funny, interesting blog post?

Of course, most people would favor the latter.

Now, you need to write each blog post with a topic in your mind that is so worth reading and worth the reader’s time.

Let’s take an example.

I write a tech blog over at Zedomax.com.  Now, there’s so many thousand tech blogs out there, and most of the sites cover what everyone else covers.

To differentiate, I only pick the most interesting gadgets, DIYs, and tech news with emphasis on anything that I can make a joke out of.

The big blogs like Engadget and Gizmodo both cover every inch of tech news including which Sony execs had for breakfast.

Basically, I am the human, humorous, interesting comedian-filter for those big blogs while inputting some of my own niche topics.

Again, the world doesn’t need more MBA graduates to write long and boring blog posts that might be very accurate but still very boring.

What the world needs is simply writers who can describe an event in couple sentences with ability to make someone laugh.

Well, this blog post might have been very long and boring, perhaps I am a hypocrite.  Fuc*.

The best niche market I have found for Adsense ads really are the local niche markets.

What do I mean by “local” niche markets?

These are regionalized, localized markets that have an audience of one city, one county, or in other words, a small audience.

Why would you benefit from such a small market?

Well, it’s really common sense.  Because the audience is so small, your click rate skyrockets.

What is a “local” niche market?

Well, the “best” Adsense performer blog that I have is SFOneOfAKind.com.  It’s a blog about luxury real estate in San Francisco.

I cannot tell you more details than it’s the best performer as far as CPC (Cost per Click) is concerned.

It’s actually one of my “dead” blogs that I’ve began to monetize and blog as of lately.

There are tons of other “local” niche markets you can find such as “New York City Automobile Blog” or “Los Angeles Best Restaurant Blog”.

These are niche blogs that cater to only a very small portion of the internet audience.

Because the audience is so small, there’s more competition among the advertisers so in return, you the publisher can expect higher CPC.

Of course, this isn’t the case for everything, it’s always best to rely on trial and error.

Do you have a “local” niche market?

These local, niche market maybe the undiscovered gems among niche blogs and you my friend, just been told of another Adsense secret.

Now, go take your medicine and make a couple local, niche blogs to try it out yourself.

Make Money Online on July 4th Independence Day!

Just kidding, go have some fun and watch the fireworks. (if your city is not blocked by fog like mine)

Now, if you have been blogging for awhile now, you probably understand that majority of your readers are people who use simple English.

What do I mean?

Well, on all my blogs, more than 30-50% of my traffic comes from international countries other than English speaking countries.

Why is this?

Well, people from those international countries who can speak/read English, are very interested in English written blogs.  But do not assume that those audience can understand your perfect, complex English.

How do I write a blog post?

You need to simply 5 sentences to 1 sentence.  You need to use words that even a 4th grader can understand.

In other words, write short and simple, while taking the trouble not to use big words such as “eponymous”, “advocate”, or any words that might usually be used on an SAT exam but not in real life.

Sure, you are a professor and you need to use big words but do understand if people in the world can’t understand you, you won’t be very popular.

If you are trying to make money online, keep it simpler.  If you are simply blogging for fun, ignore anything I say in this blog.

A lot of the bigger blogs out there “are” targetting English users only but you can differ and get more readership through using simple words and sentences.

Even for me, English is second language, and I can understand that it’s frustrating to look up the dictionary when I don’t understand a word.  (Of course, I SHOULD look up the dictionary but we are not blogging to educate people, we are blogging to provide good information, FAST!)

Do you know why there are so many 13 year olds who blog nowdays and are more successful than most 20 year olds?

Answer is simple.  People in general (as in the Internet population), cannot understand college-level English as they come from all over the world.

Heck, next time you read some of the comments in your blog and you will see that a lot of your readers cannot even write correct English.

Do not worry as this is great if you can get your message across.  Just stay away from becoming an English teacher and do use simpler words.

If you don’t believe me, take a look at icanhascheezburger.com, even their domain name is spelled wrong.  (Btw, the blog grew from nothing to like top 100 within less than a year!)

Optimizing ads require the publisher to put great emphasis on analyzing his/her data daily until maximum ROI are reached.

How to go about it?

Well, to put it real simple, you need to place your ads in different locations with different ad sizes for 1-2 days each and find out which position and which ad gives you the highest payout per click.

Work with Clicks than Impressions

Getting lots of impressions can be great for earning some money with Adsense if you are getting over 100K impressions per day. Otherwise, those impressions do not convert to cash and you need to find a good ad position that will make your readers read the ads and click if it is interesting.

For example, you can have a site with 1,000 impressions per day. At best, 1,000 impressions equal less than a dollar.

On the other hand, let’s say you get 20 clicks out of those 1,000 impressions AND you get paid 50 cents per click, that’s almost $10 in click profits for the day.

You just made $10 over $1, a 10 times difference between trying to make money with impressions vs. clicks.

The easiest way to optimize your website is to study other successful websites with a similar theme and check out where they placed their ads.

Usually, the biggest money making sites will also have their ads placed where they’d make more money, thus where people would click the most.

Conclusion

Clicks = CASH

Impressions = BullShit

Well, I hope that helped you and I will try to update this blog daily from now on. I have been so busy golfing and didn’t have time to blog but let me see if I can start multi-tasking too.

I highly recommend you do not use TNX or TLA to sell links.  These are only cheap and fast way to get your blog’s pagerank.  You might make some money but that will never compare to the money you make selling private ads.

I guess it’s really a choice of the blogger but selling links is like selling off your reputation.

Why?

Well, search engine is built to find the most relevant information.  Selling/Buying links really are black-hat methods although there’s no clear definition to that yet.

Technology is moving so fast and all you can do is sell links to make couple quick bucks?

If money is really the problem here, I really suggest you to stick some Adsense ads in front of your content before selling links.

Eventually, all the link selling companies will go out of business and all the links you’ve bought will become useless.  It’s a painfully hidden secret that TNX and TLA does not want you to know.

Why even bother with drugs (TNX or TLA) when you don’t need it?

Stick with white-hat methods, even selling reviews on your blog might hurt you.

Next time, I will show you how to garner some more Pagerank using simply and easy methods.

Okay, Missy over at Groovyvegetarian is my friend and I am not picking on her but here’s what she’s doing wrong:

Now, as you can see, she has a 468×60 ad when you go to the homepage and she has a 336×380 ads on single pages like here:

Now, here’s two things she can do to make a lot more money with Adsense and optimize her ads.

1. She needs to put a 336×380 ad OR TWO 250×250 ads side-by-side for her homepage.

2. The ads are still in default Google colors, she need to change the colors so it blends into the mild red she uses for her AHREF colors.

With the two changes, I am sure that she will get 2-3 times more clicks.

With so many people used to being “ad-blind” as they call it, if you make your ads look like Google ads, no one will click and no one will be interested in it.

By blending your ad colors into your blog theme, you can expect 2-3 times more clicks, thus 2-3 times more revenue.

Sounds like a simple idea but it works.

So if you are still using default Google ad colors, I highly you change that. (that means you Missy!)

Here’s a great explanation of how Google’s Adsense and Adwords advertising/publishing program works.

Basically, there’s an internal auction of all keywords and advertisers get to bid on them. So the CPC is really determined by advertisers.

Now, it’s up to you to find out which Publisher’s program gives you the best CPC for your money.

But how do they actually work? There are several steps in the process.

1) Each advertiser enters a list of keywords, ads, and bids.

2) When a user enters a query, Google compiles a list of all the ads whose keywords match that query.

3) The list of ads is then ordered based on the bids and the Ad Quality Scores, which measure the relevance of the ad to the user.

4) The highest ranked ad is displayed in the most prominent position, the second highest ranked ad gets the second most prominent position, and so on.

5) If the user clicks on an ad, the advertiser is charged a price that depends on the bid and Quality Score of the advertiser below it. The price charged is the minimum necessary to retain the advertiser’s position in the list.

via Googleblog

Well, I admit that I have been testing out Yahoo Publishers program in the last couple days.

Yahoo Publishers Program is basically Adsense from Yahoo.  It launches about a year and half ago and it’s been steadily growing in number of advertisers and publishers.

Zack Johnson even made over $400K in just couple months.

But that’s not the point of this blog post.

The point is that I did a test with Zedomax.com and have found that:

1) Google Adsense provides better context-matched ads, meaning more people will click on your ads because they are more relevant.

2) Yahoo provides better payouts per click.  (This might vary but for tech, this proved to be true)

3) You need to try both and test out to see which program gives you a better payout at the end of the day.

In conclusion, I am making 2-3 times more money now with Yahoo Publisher Program for Zedomax.com.

Why?

Because certain niche topics get better payouts with the Yahoo Publisher Program.  For Zedomax.com, I actually get only 60-70% of clicks compared to Google Adsense, yet Cost-per-Click is about 3 times higher, so I end up making 2-3 times more money at the end of the day.

But I think this will only work if you are already getting a high number of clicks.  If you are getting less than 10 clicks per day, you might not see as a big differece.

If you do get more than 10 clicks per day, I highly suggest you try them out.

I haven’t tested all the blogs so I might start doing that one by one and see how well it does for my other blogs.

Remember not to put Google ads and Yahoo ads on the same page, that’s against the ToS.  However, you can put them in “different” pages and see how they perform.

Well, I’ve been doing some testing lately and also analyzing different sites for which AdSense sizes perform the best.

In all, it turns out verticals and horizontals perform the worst.

The best performing ad sizes are the rectangles.

I also did a test with which rectangles perform the best.

The bigger your rectanges, the better they perform.

336×280 pixel rectangles outperformed every other sizes by 3-5 times.

I told you before to put the ads on top of your content. Now, if you are not using rectangle sizes, you are not taking advantage.

The rectangles can be a little bit annoying for your readers but heck, you need to make money blogging.  If you have great content, you really need to take advantage, readers will still come if you have a lot of ads.

Try the rectangles, especially the big ones, I bet you will make 2-3 times more if you have not been using them.

Of course, there can be variations, but with the 10 blogs I tested, results always came out the same.