There is a good look at the Pros and Cons of Contextual Advertising over at Online Journalism Review today. Here’s a couple of snippets. Firstly a look at successful use of Adsense – they go to the usual suspects including Jason Calacanis:
‘For a general news site, the breaking news sections might not perform as well as lifestyle, travel, business and technology. One great example of a fertile ground for contextual ads is Weblogs Inc., the network of blogs set up by entrepreneur Jason Calacanis. Calacanis has used AdSense to help jumpstart his business as he also sells display ads on his 80-plus blogs that are very targeted into vertical categories — from digital photography to babies and pregnancy.’
And on the topic of relevant ads a quote from my favorite Adsense expert:
‘“Bloggers have a harder time with relevancy, particularly on their blog index page when they post frequently,” Slegg told me via e-mail. “Because Google indexes about once per month, writing a single entry about popcorn right before the [Google] bot visits can result in popcorn ads for about a month, even if the majority of the posts are about a tech subject. Targeting on individual blog entry pages is usually very good. This is why many of the news sites running contextual ad programs do not often run ads on the pages that change frequently, such as the index page and the subsection pages, but run it on the articles themselves.”’
Overall it’s a useful article which is worth a quick read if you’re starting out with contextual advertising.
Darren,
I just posted on a site commenting on procrastination, I said that they were not a machine and therefore could not expect ot post like one.
You seem to post like a machine, do you ever sleep? How do you keep up this momentum?
I know you are human though so what’s your secret?
Well I’m definitely human.
My secret – hmmm – I’m not sure it’s anything more than working long hours on my blogs. I treat what I do as a full time job – and do a lot of overtime.
I also listen to my body (and wife). If it (or she) tells me I’m working too hard I take a break/holiday/coffee/walk around the block. If it (or she) tells me I’m being lazy I work a bit more.
Wish I had a sexier secret than that – I guess it’s just the ability (and fortunately circumstances) that allow me to focus on blogging for a lot of hours each day.
“because Google indexes about once per month”
I saw in the source html of one “big blog” ( I don’t remember which one) that there was a meta tag asking the robots to revisit every two days. Is that possible? Is it a good practise?
Thank you, Darren.
Hello Josue,
I know I’m not Darren, but I’m going to stick my nose in here :)
I assume you’re talking about the ‘revisit-after’ meta tag? It simply instructs a robot not to come back before x amount of days and most search engines ignore it. It was developed for a specific purpose/search engine and in my own experience, it does nothing for SEO rankings. There is also a discussion taking place on that subject at the High Rankings forum, if that was the tag you were referencing.
Darren, you do have some super Jedi posting skills that I completely envy…when I grow up, I want to be just like you :D
thanks for that answer Teli – spot on.
Josue – I’d be happy for Google’s bots to visit my page every day, or more. It means new posts are getting indexed quicker.
From what I understand it visits your site more frequently the more highly you become ranked and the more it sees you frequently updating.
After doing 4-5 posts a day for a week all while working 10 hour days at my “day job” I finally gave up and took a whole day off from both. Amazing how watching Stargate SG-1 and Atlantis for close to 24 hours will rejuvenate you. :)