Want to get on the Web fast? Want to get on the Web cheaply? Website templates may or may not be the best choice for you. We have several things that you should definitely consider before investing your sweat equity in a template driven website. Find out what they are and then make your decision on what is best for your needs. Click our post title to read the article on Design-World Watch.
Monetizing Your Blog – the Reality of Making Money
Before you monetize your blog, or your website for that matter, it is important to consider your traffic and intentions before you insert code or change your site’s layout to accommodate ads.
Case in point, www.StreetSoldiers.com – AdSense advertising was added to the site three years ago. The addition of the ads affected the overall clean look of the site and had not been planned for by the original designer. Although the ads were styled to match the site, they looked like they were an after thought. After three years of click traffic the client got a check for $100 for Google. You look at the site. Was it worth it?
The key to monetizing your blog and website is one, traffic, and two, that the items you are promoting are a match to the services you offer. In my case, I make a nice side income on clicks in on Google AdWords referrals, but I make pennies on other ads. (I have tested monetizing my own blogs a number of times and in different formats.) I sell, service, manage, and write about Google AdWords and so the promotion of AdWords effectively works for my site. However, when I say nice side income I mean specifically that in three months Google has paid me $180. You may consider that high or low, but that is the reality of what I generated.
If you are getting under 200 unique visitors in a month, you will never make “real” money with AdSense. What you as a site owner have to decide is, is the dilution of your message and disruption of your page layout appropriate with the return on investment. Monetizing may work for your site or it simply may be an annoyance for site visitors.
See Your Site Like a Search Engine Spider
When you want to check out what you’ve done on your web page to see if it is search engine friendly, you can use this smart online tool to take a peak.
Why is this tool valuable, if you are using scripts, Ajax, spry, layers, or grids in the implementation of your website, sometimes you need to know can a search engine see the content of what I am doing? This online tools shows you what a search engine will see.
If you didn’t think that keyword density was important on your page, run your own page in the tool and you will see that all you see is text, text from your text-based navigation, text from your content, and your meta tags. You won’t see JavaScripted items, but you will see the text included from the links.
One thing that I found today that I will be correcting is that I do not have a space at the end of my navigation links and so when the spider sees my site, the see words run together instead of separate words in some cases. Wow, very valuable especially when the words are top keyword which are important for the spider to see and help with your organic position.
Run your own site through and see what you see. Remember to enter your URL in the syntax with the http:// in front of it. Enjoy!
Contact Forms – Best Practices
For contact forms the best practice is to keep it short and to not require too much information. You will have better success in clients completing your contact form if you do not require more than an email address and first name.
On my own site, I require only the email and first name all other fields are optional. I do provide quick and easy check boxes and radio buttons for interested parties to let me know which services they are interested in, but I do not require much information. On ad landing pages, I require nothing but ask for first name, last name, email and phone number only, no address.
I have found that clients will typically find a detailed contact form prohibitive and will choose not to complete it, so when you do a contact form on your own website, make it simple, keep it short, and require few fields.