The Best Google AdSense Forums
Since I’ve been spending more of my time reading forums, I thought it would be a good time for me to point out a couple of the best places to discuss and learn about Google AdSense. To add a little suspense (dunh, dunh, dunh), I’ll go in reverse order of my favorites from 3 to 1.
(Disclaimer. This is just my opinion, I’m sure others have different preferences.)
Here we go.
#3 Google Community AdWords & AdSense forum
I have just recently ran across this forum so I don’t know much about it yet. It runs on phpBB and has an attractive theme and logo. The discussions appear to be a little lean with most threads having between one and four replies. I will have to stop by this site occasionally to keep my eye on it.
#2 Webmaster World Google AdSense forum
This may be the most popular site as far as Google search results go, but it’s not my favorite. It runs on Webmaster Worlds own homebrew BestBBS. I find the discussions to be more matter-of-fact and not as friendly as my #1 pick. I think the theme/color scheme do more harm than good for this site. The whole look of the site is a little on the boring side and just doesn’t feel compelling. That make any sense? Just doesn’t make you want to contribute I guess is what I’m trying to say.
#1 Digital Point Google AdSense forum
This one is my current favorite if you couldn’t tell by me bestowing my #1 ranking upon it. The main reason why is because of the excellent discussions. Most everyone is friendly and helpful when someone asks a question. Try as I might, I can’t help myself from looking at the latest “I had my first $100 month” thread.
The site runs the very popular vBulletin and has nice green theme. As far as traffic, this board has extremely lively discussions with most treads having several responses. There is some more separation between topics since there is a separate forum for Guidelines / Compliance, Placement / Review / Examples, Reporting & Stats, and Payments. This separation helps keep the forum on topic.
Oh, Digital Point also has ad revenue sharing. This allows you to post your AdSense publisher id and the site will show an ad that is linked to your AdSense account in the upper right hand corner. This supposedly DOES NOT violate the AdSense terms of service. I look forward to participating in this when my blog leaves stealth mode.
You Should Always Click Your Own Links
Woah, woah, woah. Calm down there. I’m not talking about clicking your own AdSense links. I’m talking about the links you put in your posts. There are a couple or reasons to do this. This first reason is glaringly obvious, and that is to make sure that your links actually work. This step has helped me out several times and kept me from either posting a dead link, or getting an error from a faulty copy/paste of the address.
This could also be the result of how I compose entries for the site. I will usually write the entire post and then come back at the end and insert the links. I do it this way because when I’m writing I get in the flow and don’t want to interrupt my train of thought. Your style may vary.
The second reason is because of OCD. Yes, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. No, I don’t have OCD (Must. Wash. Hands.). Let me explain. I theorize that starting a website could be a trigger for OCD. Think about it. You’ve taken the time to come up with an idea for a site. You think of a cool name for it. You go open a WordPress.com or Blogger account and you make that first post. If you’re like most people you send a mass email out to all your friends to tell them about it. The very next thing you do is? Anybody? Check your stats. After that you decide to add a cool new picture to your site. And then you check your stats. And check your stats, and checkyourstats.
This is where clicking the links on your page comes in handy. Let’s say you link to the latest “making money online” article by John Chow. Nawh, that won’t work. He get’s waaay to much traffic to notice a couple of clicks. Besides, he’s not a statwhore. Is he? 
What about Tyler Cruz. Would he notice? Granted, his blog isn’t quite as popular as John Chow’s but he is still close to the mid-to-upper echelon of blog money makers. I wonder if he would notice?
Admittedly, this option probably works best when you link to moderately popular blogs rather than to a superstar just because there is a much better chance they will be refreshing that StatCounter page instead of an AdSense window.
There’s only one way to find out. Click. And I’m not talking about some Adam Sandler movie.
WordPress Theme Changes
Since I’m the only visitor here you won’t have noticed the Wordpress theme changes that I’ve made recently. Thankfully for you, random future visitor, I’ve captured the progress via screen shot so you can pretend you were actually here. I’m by no means a professional web page designer, but I am proud of my amateur status. I do visit a lot of blog design/tips & tricks type websites and one of my pet peeves is when a someone actually does redesign their site but they just assume everyone remembers what the page used to look like. That’s like getting a face lift and not taking a before picture.
I based this design on the K2 theme version 0.9.5 RC1. Here’s a screen shot of what the site looked like with that theme. Click for a bigger version. One exception to my pet peeve rule from above is that I had already installed the Image Headlines WordPress plugin before I took the screen shot. Damn.
I’ll spare you all the gnawing and thrashing that I did when trying to modify the theme and show you the first version I was happy with for all of about 14 seconds. Actually that’s not totally true, I have kept a lot of the layout from this version but the header and logo have all changed since then. This is the way the site looked, minus the filler text, when I took the site live.
I thought the logo was too tall and I wanted a smaller header so in the next revision I changed the logo, positioning, and size of the header.
Still unhappy with the logo, I came up with the current one that you see.
In this final shot you see what the site actually looks like right now. Again, I just put this up because it’s inevitable that I will change the look of the site and by posting this I (and you, hopefully) will always be able to see it.
At this point in the design stage I again do most of the work on the header since it really is the first thing you see when you come to the site. I removed the sill shape on the right side, used a black to silver gradient as the header background to lighten the page up, and added another glossy button. I also came to the realization that I didn’t really like the redish/marroon color and went blue with it. I’m much happier with this scheme.
I’ve tamped down my desire to make a really dark site which is usually my first inclination on any site I design, but I’ve still been able to keep it somewhat in the shadier color region. Hope you enjoyed the picture show.
A Little Clarification
I wanted to clear up what might have sounded a little confusing over the last couple of posts. Rather than ramble on I’m going to do it question/answer style just to make it a little easier.
Q. Why do you have AdSense on this site already when you don’t have any traffic?
A. There are a couple or reasons. First, this goes along with the little “experiment” that I’m trying out. Like I’ve said before I’m not submitting the site anywhere (yet) but I like to use AdSense ads as a part of my site setup. By looking at the types of AdSense ads that are displayed on the site I can tell how well or often I’m being crawled by Google.
Q. So what, why does it matter if Google is crawling your site since you just started?
A. Because if Google isn’t seeing it then most likely no one will see it. How many people do you think are just going to type www.techky.com into their browser? Well, so far just one.
Q. Ok, that makes sense, but don’t you also know that making money with AdSense is all about finding a niche and drilling into it?
A. Yes, I also know that. You must be reading the same Digital Point forums that I am. One thing that almost everyone who owns a niche site will tell you is that you should have an interest in the topic you choose or you will burn out pretty quick. This place will be pretty narrowly focused but I also want to enjoy it so that’s why you will see me talk about TV shows and about my X.
It’s late and I’m sleepy. Maybe I’ll continue these tomorrow if I can think of some more.
AdSense Problem Fixed
This post ends up being the end of an impromptu three-parter. Parts one and two for your perusal. Last time I said AdSense diagnostics showed that my robots.txt file was blocking their web crawler.
I think this problem stems from when I first created this WordPress install and set it to private while I was customizing the theme. During this “private time” I was writing some draft posts and also getting the look and feel just right before I unleashed the Google search hounds. When I finally decided to publicly post I stil had the private option checked and didn’t realize it until later. The date I went public (the 21st) also corresponds to the date the site was last crawled as evidenced by the diagnostics.
Usually when you make a new post in WordPress the Ping-O-Matic tool will notify all the relevant engines that you have a new post. I’m not sure why this system wasn’t working. The solution I came up with is a little different. I created a Google sitemap and submitted it to Webmaster Central. Webmaster Central is a place where you can monitor how often your site is crawled by the Googlebot and also submit your sitemap. I can go into how to generate a sitemap in a later post if the need arises but just to wrap up, I am now seeing relevant ads on my Xterra filter post. Ahhh, much better. Even with no visitors.
AdSense Problem Identified
As I said in the last post, I thought something fishy was going on with my ads since they were so narrowly focused on one single topic (b l o g s) even though I have written about other things. It has been my experience through other sites that even though ads may not be properly targeted to the specific topic you write about, they vary when you write about a different subject.
I’m not sure why this didn’t occur to me sooner, but I finally decided to check the Google AdSense diagnostics and lo and behold I found a problem. As you can see below it says that the Robots.txt file is blocking attempts to crawl the site and hence this place hasn’t been crawled since the 21st. So, that’s why I’m since such narrow ad focus.
The thing is, I don’t actually HAVE a robots.txt file. Not one that I can see anyway. It’s not a hidden file, I checked for that also. Hrmph. I’ll do some more research on this and report back tomorrow. No new visitors today by the way.
Quick Update
No other visitors have shown up, so the first one was a fluke. This isn’t a surprise since there isn’t a lot of content yet. I’m still sticking to my experiment and not commenting or listing the site anywhere else. This is starting to be more and more difficult since I’m getting impatient, but I’ll hang in there a little while longer. And really I would rather make the site “public” with as much content as possible. That’s what I keep telling myself anyway.
I do still have the Google ads up on the site but something unusual is happening. Almost all the ads are b l o g related even though I wrote the Xterra piece. I expected to see the ads diversify more than they have. I’ll check into this to see if I can figure out why.
The TV Shows I Watch
Prepare to be shocked. Seriously. To some of you the following entry will be unbelievable. I swear that all of it is true. It’s really quite astonishing when you see it all written down. Here we go. These are all (that I can think of right now) the TV that I watch.
- American Hot Rod
- American Chopper
- Survivor
- ER
- Heroes
- Curb Your Enthusiasm
- Attack of the Show!
- The Sopranos
- Big Love
- The Wire
- 24
- The Daily Show
- The Colbert Report
- This Old House
- The This Old House Hour
- This Old House Classics
- Inside This Old House
- Ask This Old House
- The New Yankee Workshop
- Bob Vila
- Dirty Jobs
- Myth Busters
- Pardon The Interruption
- Grey’s Anatomy
- The Office
- Lost
- American Idol
- Real Time
- My Name Is Earl
- Monk
- Psych
- Nip/Tuck
- Reno 911
- South Park
- 30 Days
- Family Guy
- Driving Force
- Studio 60
Wow. Those aren’t in any order because I just wrote it as I thought of them. I’m sure that’s also not a complete list. How you may ask is it possible to consume that much crap on television. To state it simply, Tivo. Or for those less fortunate, DVR. It’s not as simple as just saying Tivo though. It’s actually two Tivo’s and a cable company provided DVR box.
There is one modded 360GB Series II Tivo in the living room hooked up to the big screen (*link dead), another Series II Tivo in the bedroom that mainly records the wifes “soaps”, and there is the dual-tuner DVR in the living room that also delivers the HD content. If you’re keeping score at home it’s possible to record four tuners worth of shows at a time. Also, as a backup, you know in case a live game runs long and I happen to miss part of a show there is always EZTV *updated EZTV.
Cheap Nissan Xterra In-Cabin Microfilter
I suppose a post like this doesn’t really belong on this site, but what the hell, it wouldn’t really be a blog if we didn’t go on a tangent now and again would it. So I’ll call this category “In Other News”.
First I’ll set this up with a little backstory. I drive a Nissan Xterra. That pretty much wraps up the backstory. Anyway, I take the car to the dealer to get the oil changed and it also happens to be time for the 30,000 mile maintenance. I know, I could take it somewhere else besides the Nissan dealer and get this done much cheaper. Actually the oil change price is relatively competetive with the other places that I would consider taking it if you don’t consider the 7 Minute E-Z-Quik Lube’s that charge 12.95. But I don’t always trust those places since I’ve had some bad experiences with them before (looks like yer’ oll pans got a dent in it).
So the Nissan service department quotes me a price of around $709 to do the whole 30,000 mile maintenance. I hurriedly tell them “thatsok, I think I’ll just have the oil changed this time around”. The service manager tells me that they will go ahead and inspect all the usual 30,000 mile stuff for free just to see if anything is in need of immediate repair. I begin hearkening back to experiences with the Jim Bob’s Auto Repair’s of the world that I used to deal with and expect them to try to screw me. Oddly enough, they do the inspection and it doesn’t happen. “We changed the oil and everything looked fine except (here we go) your In-Cabin Microfilter needs to be replaced,” he says.
I ask him how much it is and he tells me it will be $89. I tell him I think I’ll do that next time I’m in. I pay for the oil change and head home where I promptly start checking online for this filter. I check out the excellent Xterra Owner’s Club forums and bingo, the first search I do there brings up a link to XterraParts.com. I find the filter there for $27 plus shipping which will bring the total to about $37. No tax. Just like that I saved myself 50 bucks.
Not content to just take the first deal I see, I search around and find MyNissanParts.com and they have it for 21.99 plus shipping. No tax :). I order this one for a grand total of $30.49. I got it via FedEx today and I’ll probably install it tomorrow. You can’t beat saving $60 with about 10 minutes of searching.
First Visitor
Just as I finished the AdSense and Visitor Update post where I said there had not yet been any visitors to the site, I happen to go check the stats one last time and the first visitor has arrived. They were from Jacksonville, New Brunswick, Canada. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. They weren’t referred from a search engine so I’m guessing the first visitor was actually a misspelling of some type. One last tidbit of information from this visitor is that they were using Internet Explorer 5.5. That is quite outdated.
One down, many to go.
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