Interview with Denis Bernardy - Question 4 by Free Blogging Advice Guidelines project

Interview with Denis Bernardy
Question 4
(read Question 3)

How can I get more money from AdSenses? What are the magical places to spot AdSense blocks on my blog to get more clicks? Legally, of course.

That would more of a question to AdSense specialist - I am afraid I am not. But I can give you a few pointers because quite number of my customers are. And they've been asking me to allow for AdSenses in the locations that they find more interesting.

So, one of them is just beneath the title of your post. Top left floating AdSense block. You have the title and you have the content, the correct location - the one that should get the most clicks - would be to the left if you float it, let's say 240 x 240 pixel wide advertisement or 260x 260, I don't remember the specific format. But anyway, that location - top left of your post, because you are reading left to right. So, you read the title and bang! So, that's the place where the click rate is pretty good.

The second location is in place of the navigation menu. That qualifies more as a dirty trick then anything. But you know Google tends to say that this is a perfectly legal place and it's fine to do that. So you can basically have this one line - strip of ads that looks a bit like a navigation menu, and then you can get some pretty good clicks from that because people will think it's a navigation menu of your site and just click the ads.

There is another great place, still in that area, you make it span over the width of the entire site, over the content. I've seen this done on a site, absolutely fantastically well done. What the guy had done is he put 4 images of super models, his content was basically all keyword loaded stuff. And he had this big title like "How to become beautiful in two weeks worth" or something. The only thing you could see when you have a small screen that you see when you logged into his blog was this title which was very catchy and then he had pictures of these 4 models in bikinis running forward and so on and 4 ads just underneath. They were just calling to get clicked with advertisement related to creams and diet pills and things like that. And then there was his blog content which obviously was changing from a day to the next which was there just to generate the ads. I would assume this is more shady, barely acceptable as Google is concerned. But I've seen it used quite a number of times. I can imagine that site must have been converting extremely well. I wouldn't be surprised if he had 20% click through which he was boasting. 20 or 25% CTR when normally it's 1% or something like this.

There is the last place which is interesting and this is changing head here, this is UI guy, the User Interface guy who's talking - the top right of the screen. It's excellent, because in European languages people read from left to right. And most people are right handed. So what happens is that spontaneously when you open a web page you move your mouse out to the top right of your screen. It's the most natural thing to do.

So when you pick up your mouse and look for your pointer, immediately after, your eyes spontaneously go to the top right of the screen. And that's a good place for an ad.

Denis, I heard from you that your new version of Semiologic can be a big helper to the people who will be positioning let's say AdSenses or some other textual blocks or whatever inside the post. This is related to more freedom that you are giving to people in the section of widgets. Can you tell a little about it, because it's really up to the AdSense placement topic and very important.

Sure, but before I do that - a quick reference on how it was in Semiologic until now. Until now we've been using a software of my designer called Ad Spaces. Basically it's in overlay, so you have the web site and you have to impress a layer of ads on top of it. And that's how Ad Spaces work. And then you would say I want an ad in a header, here's the ad that gonna go in the sidebar or this is the ad that's going to go before the titles and this ad will go after the titles, and so on.

And we've been managing that from a completely separate interface in Semiologic. And I had this constant stream of end user requests which were related to "Well, I'd like to hide my ads when my regulars come" or "I'd like to show the ads only when someone comes from a search engine" - displaying ads based on the context.

We've introduced that in Semiologic 5. So in Semiologic 5 you can, when you create your ads, also set when it's going to be displayed. The default would be to display to all the time, but you can also decide to display the ads if the user is not a regular visitor so I am showing the ad else the user is coming from a search engine and I show the ads XXX times else and so on. It's a slightly modified version of plugin called Who Sees Ads which was as I may recall 2nd prize in WordPress plugin competition. So, I've improved it and sent couple of my changed to Ozh, not all of them, but a couple.

So, we've added widget support, and every ad creates a widget that you can then insert using the widgets. The widgets in Semiologic 5 is a complete transformation and goes beyond anything ever seen in the WordPress world. We've been addressed a lot of customer questions like "I'd like to place this piece of information in between my title and the content" or "I'd like to be putting this piece of text here, how do I do this?" - in the past I've been answering all sorts of questions related to that.

I had the plan to generalize widgets in Semiologic, and Semiologic 5 has done just that. The entire canvas - you can drag and drop the widgets within it: before the content, before the entries you can add ads, if you want to invert the header and navigation menu and put the ad in between the two or beneath the entire thing - just drag-drop widgets in there, if you want to add related posts in your sidebar - you can, and if you on second hand that a related post should be more in a content itself - you can do that as well, if you want to have a small piece of text after each post to prompt users to subscribe to your blog - it's just a drag and drop, and if you want to insert the ads wherever in the canvas - you can do that as well. And better yet, I've also introduced widgetized interface that allows you to say this widget shows on the front page, but not on static pages, it should also show on category and tag pages - and so on. And you can turn them on and off based on context.

It generalizes in a certain manner what we've been doing with Ad Spaces and it takes WordPress to whole new level.

We can say that without any technical background and games with HTML stuff people can naturally do almost anything they wish with the widgets. Not just simple 2 or 3 columns as it has been before. They can play with the major column of content as well. Anything they wish.

Absolutely.

Read Question 5 about cross linking solutions in blogging.