Page Layout

I was reading a forum (V7N) which led me to a very professional blog. Their topic was  five hints on using adsense. It reminded me how useful I have found blogging to be to help me learn and  think through some of my challenges. So I’ve started a series of posts on revenue trying to improve my thinking and revenue.

Lets get specific and look at my educational kid games website.  Its  the top site for learning games for kids and is a top site for the more general learning games.  An astute reader will note that I’m also pushing it up for educational games. The traffic is good.

We recently improved the revenue by framing the ads. Previously, the content was in gold frames and the ads were just sitting there. So we experimented by putting everything in frames. Now I’m drinking margaritas by the beach. Actually, not but the point is that it helped.

We could mix the ads in more with the content but I think that might hurt the site. 

One obvious problem with the site is how often we take visitors to other sites. For instance, the entire preschool section takes them elsewhere. 

One thing that works well is when we bring other sites to us. Youtube videos under science songs does this well. I wonder if I can talk SpellingCity with their vocabulary games  into doing this…?

Advertising ad placement. The banner across the very top of the page is no longer very effective. We’ve learned as an audience to discount it. Similiarly, I find the big skyscraper down the side doesn’t do very well for the amount of real estate it takes. The best designs mix the advertising in within the content. This explains why the 300 x 250 is now so popular.

The best Mondrian design that I’ve seen for harvesting clicks in the kids market is primarygames.com

Revenue through advertising

I have some sites that I monetize through advertising. I’m starting a series of posts to collect my thoughts on optimizing revenue. This will just be an overview of list of issues or posts to come.  I might edit this in the future as I think of new topics.

Page design. Where to place the ads? Disguised or highlighted? Big, small, few, many?

Industry specific sizes?

Sources of ads, what networks?

What approach?  CPM, PPC, PPA or affiliate?  Sell by the month, quarter, or year?

Adsense – ads, search, and link ads.

Stickiness versus revenue.

General versus specific networks. Tribal Fusion, ValueClick, Amazon, Ebay, Yahoo, Adsense, Adify,

Admanagers.

Tags, categories, organization

I write a number of blogs on a few different topics. I’m thinking of starting a new one. The idea is that I’d like to keep a blog that deals with the issues that the head of a small (3-100 people) online business manager must deal with.  Unlike all my previous blogs, I’d like this one to be well-organized.  So, prior to starting it, I thought I’d take a few minutes and define my tags or categories. In short, I’ll try to get organized.

Marketing: SEO, PPC, Email marketing, Online advertising
Revenue: subscriptions,  Advertising
HR: benefits, management, communication,
Operations: credit card processing, support, hosting, registering, backup
Strategy & Finance:

Frustration with Google Analytics

We are a pretty savvy organization with a few people who spend hours a week trying to discern some truth from Googles analytics. The reality is it’s really hard for us to find much real truth from analytics.

1. We have some flash pages. Somehow, google fails to track people through the iframed flash pages so our data is inaccurate in cases where people look at our demos. Of course, the demos are key to our sales pitch.

2. Often, we can’t reproduce the same historical data two times. I don’t know why. But given how much human error there is in pulling these reports, we’ve started requiring all significant findings to be verified by researching it multiple times. Somehow, Google’s sampling technique seems to provide data that varies by 25% and 50%! At first, I didn’t believe but we can reproduce variations with all of us watching it on the big screen. Same analysis, just different results. Weird.

3. How goals set up in Adsense PPC and goals set up in Google’s analytics for CPC related to each remains a mystery to us. We’ve never been able to reconcile the data from the two systems.

We’ve talked to Google’s people who call us periodically (we’re a big enough adsense buyer to get random cold calls from Google newbies) and so far, we’ve not much any real progress on these issues.

Google PageRank – A bit useful, very misleading

Here’s the fact. The green bar labelled google page rank is a little bit useful and can be very misleading.

How is Google PageRank Useful?
1. It is a good indicator of  the general position with Google. Green means ‘go.’  No green, means that it is either a brand new site or a problem site. It’s time to study it.
2.  Communication. When Google went on their kick to stamp out paid links and link advertising, their way of communicating with websites prior to dropping their position in the search engines was to drop their visible page rank.  I know people’s whose page rank went from 6 to 0.  All of a sudden, they were paying attention to the guidelines.

How is it Misleading?

As best I can tell, the visible Google page rank is a simple count, arbitrarily time-delayed of incoming links. It counts SPAM links, multiple links on a page, multiple links from the same domain, and totally irrelevant links all the same.  As such, it is often not at all correlated to the real weight that Google assigns to that page.  But, being lazy and it being there with the Google name on it, we often all fall into the habit of relying on it. Shame on us.

Homeschooling Info for each state

I’ve been very interested to learn about the different approaches to education in the states and how many different sources of info there are on learning about them. I found a good list with homeschooling info on almost all of the states.  Here:

State Homeschooling Info

• - Alabama
• - Alaska
• - Arizona
• - Arkansas
• - California
• - Colorado
• - Connecticut
• - Delaware
• - Florida
• - Georgia
• - Hawaii
• - Idaho
• - Illinois
• - Indiana
• - Iowa
• - Kansas
• - Kentucky
• - Louisiana
• - Maine
• - Maryland
• - Massachusetts
• - Michigan
• - Minnesota
• - Missouri
• - Mississippi
• - Montana
• - Nebraska
• - Nevada
• - New Hampshire
• - New Jersey
• - New Mexico
• - New York
• - North Carolina
• - North Dakota
• - Ohio
• - Oklahoma
• - Oregon
• - Pennsylvania
• - Rhode Island
• - South Carolina
• - South Dakota
• - Tennessee
• - Texas
• - Utah
• - Vermont
• - Virginia
• - Washington
• - West Virginia
• - Wisconsin
• - Wyoming

Learning about writing great keyphrases

Google advices people to study their choice of words carefully since some keyphrases can teach you about success, others are in education in writing failure.  Here are some catchy phrases which while they might interest people, tend to confuse the spiders.  There’s a before and after list for your learning pleasure:

Before:

Writing Resources

• Elementary School Online Writing Instruction
• Four Types of Sentences and the Effect of Punctuation
• High School Writing Overview
• How Graphic Organizers Help Students Master Writing
• How Writing Rubrics Improve Writing
• Middle & Secondary School Writing Overview
• Paragraph Writing Secrets: The Four Essential Elements
• The Writing Process: The Steps to Writing Success
• Writing Prompts Motivate Your Child’s Writing
• Writing a Better Book Report

After:

Time4Writing provides some useful resources for people teaching or learning to write:

• Elementary School Online Writing Instruction
• Types of Sentences
• High School Writing Overview
• Graphic Organizers
• Middle & Secondary School Writing
  
• Paragraph Writing
• The Writing Process
• Writing Prompts
  
• Writing Book Reports

Personalized Search – How many levels?

I’ve heard and experienced the effect of personalized search.  So, for instance, if I google a term like online homeschool  while I’m inside my igoogle account, I find that this site: http://www.homeschoolonline.org comes up first.  

But, when I logout of my own igoogle account, I find that this site is third.

Here’s my question. Is Google also logging my IP address and providing some level of customization based on preferences exhibited by that IP address?

I”ve also heard that google customizes for IE and Firefox based on some algorithmic-based differences of interest between these populations. What do you think?

Backlink Checking

I’m trying to compare two sites when I don’t have access to Googles Webmaster tools for either of them. So whats the best  backlink checker tool (free):
http://www.backlinkwatch.com/
http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/
http://www.seoelite.com/
Yahoo Site Explorer  is free and quite accurate.

Learning Domains & SEO

I was recently approached to purchase domain called Learning Time dot com.  How much would such a domain be worth? Other domains that I have considered.

Math City
Learning Games Learning Games Learning Games Learning Games (four variations)

How to decide which domain can bring home the bacon and which ones will just such $9 out of pocket, year after year?