A Review of Optimizing AdSense, a Google Training Program

Do you publish a website or blog that you monetize using Google AdSense?  Then Google has a self-help training course just for you.

Introduced last month, the Optimizing AdSense course provides a:

• Self-assessment tool to determine holes in your AdSense knowledge today;
• Series of videos, along with a list of additional reading resources, so you can learn at your own pace online;
• Certificate of completion for those who finish the course.

This article will give you an overview of what you can find and whether the course is worthwhile for entrepreneurs, small business owners and their staff.

Getting Started: The Assessment Tool

 

Here at Small Business Trends, we have used Google AdSense since March of 2004 — for over 10 years.  Our first earning day was March 30, 2004.  We were still on a blogspot-hosted domain back then.  That day back in 2004, the site earned a grand total of 48 cents!

Woo-hoo, we made some money!

But then reality set in.  At that rate, it would be fine for extra side income, but hardly be enough to run a business and pay salaries on.  I knew we’d have to do better if this was to become a real business.

Fast forward 10 years.  A lot has changed.  Today, Google AdSense is one of several revenue streams we use.  Our traffic has grown dramatically since then.  And now one of our team members handles more of the AdSense day to day than I do — yet I still have my fingers in the pie.

But you’d think that after 10 years, we’d be experts at AdSense — or at least that I personally, as the CEO of a Web publishing business, would be an expert and know everything there is to know.

Fact is, I don’t know everything – not by a long shot.  That’s in spite of 10 years of experience using AdSense in our websites.

That was driven home when I took the initial assessment.

To get started with the Optimizing AdSense course, you must register. You tell Google your AdSense publisher number (an individual ID assigned to those who display AdSense in their websites).  Then you are presented with an assessment tool — 15 multiple choice questions.

It only took me about two minutes to test my knowledge. The good news is that for each question I answered, I was correct.  But for 5 of the questions, I had to choose “I don’t know” as the answer.  So my score was 10 out of 15.  Not so great.

For each question where I said, “I don’t know” the tool was intelligent enough to direct me to which section of the course I should review. That way, I could find the answer for that question.

That’s a big plus.  You get a to-do list of exactly what you need to work on.  You don’t have to wade through information you already know.  Instead, you can focus on the knowledge holes you need to fill.

Optimizing AdSense Course Organizes Your Knowledge

One of the best things about this course is the way it is organized — and I’ll explain why that’s important in a moment.

The course starts with an introduction, and then it is set up in three sections (“units”) covering areas that have the potential to increase your site’s earnings:

• Unit 1:  How to attract higher paying ads to your site.
• Unit 2:  How to increase your click-through rate from readers and get more clicks.  This is mainly about where your ads are placed on the page, sizes of ads, and the colors and styles you use.
• Unit 3:  Showing more ads on your site, including adding ad units and fixing technical issues that can lead to more ad impressions.

Each unit consists of a group of videos. Most of the videos are short and snackable — 2 to 4 minutes long.  That means you can fit them into your schedule when you have a little extra time.

Online advertising is complex.  There are a lot of technical concepts and terminology, and more than a few acronyms.  Do you know what RPM, CPC, CPM and CTR mean?  If you don’t, you’re not alone.

All of these concepts and acronyms can quickly confuse newbies, or those who don’t have a lot of time to spend on AdSense.  There are plenty of blogs and other places online to find information. But it’s hit or miss.  There’s so much to learn, that without good structure it quickly becomes a disorganized jumble of information.  You can end up more confused than when you started.

Having an organized structure for how to think about your revenue from AdSense, and which elements to tweak and experiment with, is extremely valuable. When information is organized logically, you feel less overwhelmed.

In case you prefer to read instead of watch, there’s also a text version of each video.  The text version makes for good notes to refer back to later, also.

After each video there are a few questions to test your comprehension and knowledge of the material covered.  There are also links to additional resources in the form of blog posts on the official Google AdSense blog or help topics, to drill down for more information.

Optimizing AdSense Can Help With Your Staff

 

The Optimizing AdSense course not only helps the business owner or website owner, but if you have staff, it’s a terrific tool to train your team.   By encouraging your employee to take the course during work hours, you’ll be investing in the person.  And it won’t cost you a dime in pricey conferences.

And, of course, the better your team is at generating AdSense revenue, the better for your company and everyone in it.

Who should take the course? Employees who are responsible for generating AdSense revenue, those responsible for content, and even those responsible for Web design — all can benefit.  Ask each employee to demonstrate he or she has earned the certificate of completion at the end (pictured above).

And if you are looking to hire a contractor or employee and want to verify that he or she understands AdSense, you have two choices.  Ask to see the person’s certificate of completion for Optimizing AdSense.   Google stresses that this is a “certificate of completion” only.  The other option is to find a Certified AdSense Partner under Google’s official Certified Partner program, and engage their services.

Can Optimizing AdSense Make a Difference?

Optimizing AdSense is great for beginners, and useful for intermediates.  As my personal experience above shows, being “intermediate” isn’t necessarily about how many years of AdSense experience you have.  Rather, it’s about how deep your existing knowledge goes.  The course held a lot of value for me personally, and I could see benefits for my team who are all beginners or intermediates.

The key, though, is to not stop with the videos.  To get the most out of this course, read through all of the material you are pointed toward.  The videos should be considered only the beginning of your learning journey.

Let me give an example of why that’s important.  I learned from reading the “additional resources” that there’s a report that will show how ads are targeted to a site — and for me it was eye-opening.  To back up for a moment, ads can be one of three types:

• Contextual (based on your content – the Google AdSense spider crawls your site and delivers ads that are related to your content);
• interest-based (based on the interests a user demonstrates from other sites he or she has visited);
• placement (ads that an advertiser specifically places on your site).

There’s a report in your AdSense dashboard that will tell you which types of ads run on your site, and how much each type earns. Prior to watching the video and drilling down into additional readings, I never paid attention to that report.  It’s called the “Targeting Types” report.

When I ran the report I learned that a decent percentage of our AdSense ads were placement ads, i.e., placed specifically by advertisers who wanted to be on our sites. But one thing caught my attention.  Those “placed” ads did better than other ads — by a substantial margin.  (By policy, publishers are not allowed to disclose statistics about earnings, so that’s as specific as I can get.) Now that I know those placement ads do so much better, we are motivated to create more custom zones to help advertisers better target where on the site they wish to appear — and “sell” our ad inventory better.

That’s exactly the kind of golden nugget that can make a difference in your AdSense revenue.  Here’s a sample video in the course, about creating custom channels to help you attract more of those valuable placement ads:

Summary

Optimizing AdSense is a well-structured course for you and your staff.  It organizes material in a logical progression.  That way you do not waste time on what you already know.

It presents the information in small chunks so that you can learn at your own pace. The course helps train your team on basic concepts, so you don’t have to spend the time.  The certificate of completion is a way to assess that your staff digested the information and understood it.

Over the past year Google has made a number of changes to the AdSense program.  The Help materials have gotten easier to understand.  The dashboard has been improved.  Google is now delivering more advance-warning messages to publishers about violations of AdSense Terms and allowing a period of time (usually 3 days) to correct the violation, instead of just bringing the hammer down with no warning.

Together with the Optimizing AdSense course, the improvements are positive steps for the entrepreneurs and small businesses that rely on Google AdSense revenue.

The post A Review of Optimizing AdSense, a Google Training Program appeared first on Small Business Trends.

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AT&T tells lawmakers DirecTV deal won't guarantee lower prices

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AT&T tells lawmakers DirecTV deal won't guarantee lower prices

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. lawmakers grilled AT&T Inc and DirecTV on Tuesday over a proposed merger that some Democrats and public interest groups fear will result in higher costs and less competition.

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HubSpot’s Timothy Dearlove On Why Content Marketing Isn’t A Shortcut

Timothy Dearlove is a Senior Channel Consultant at HubSpot. Recently, Tim shared his inbound content marketing perspectives with Small Business Trends, focusing on how inbound success can make good marketing campaigns awesome and why content marketing is not a shortcut. (Warning: Tim’s ready to ruffle a few feathers about infographics!)

Small Business Trends: What are the content drives that inspire HubSpot the most in its mission to make the best use of content for everything from email marketing to blogging?

Timothy Dearlove: I think you have to start with a pretty basic principle when it comes to creating a successful content plan.

You need to care. When you write with passion your audience can tell. Competition for eyeballs and attention span is high online. As a writer you are competing against lots of other free content. One factor that separates good content from great content is how much the writer cares about the subject material.

I get push back all the time. Certain industries always say, "Well how can we write passionate content on selling nails or manufacturing washers?"

One of our biggest Inbound success stories is Marcus Sherdian, who saved his pool business by blogging. He genuinely cared about pools and helping people with pools. Content marketing was his venue for channeling this. As Marcus demonstrated, if you can channel your passion and helpfulness through your content, you will be successful.

So just care. Care about what you do and who you are helping with your content. If you start with that, the views will come.

Helpfulness is another key drive. We talk about this all the time. We bring it up at meetings. We discuss it on our internal social boards. Be remarkably helpful. Surprise everyone you interact with by how helpful you can be.  We approach all of the content we produce through that lens. How will this content help the person reading it?

Small Business Trends: How does content make an impact on SEO (search engine optimization) and social media?

Timothy Dearlove: Content and SEO are like warm pie and ice cream. Could you eat them separately? Of course! But aren't they so much better when served together?

When it comes to on-page optimization (making sure your site is well optimized with keywords that your target audience searches for), if you have a static site, there is only so much you can optimize. Every new page you publish is a chance to optimize that page for important keywords. Every new blog post represents a new chance to rank for a keyword phrase.

We also know that Google will crawl your site more frequently if you are producing fresh content.

Small Business Trends: What about off-page SEO?

Timothy Dearlove:  A wesbite page's ability to rank depends, in part, on the quantity and quality of the sites linking to that page. Producing a fantastic blog post is something other people will want to reference in their own content. One piece of advice I give to my customers when it comes to producing content that garners links is to write a blog post that other writers would want to use as a reference for their own work.

For example, I might want to write a post about the effectiveness of sending out a social post on the weekend versus a weekday. To do this, I can either do my own testing or better yet, I can find someone who has already done the research. When I find the blog post that contains data on Tweeting on the weekend, I will link to that blog post in my work.

Having trouble getting your content linked to by other writers? Write a post that is super helpful and full of propriety research. It's not easy, but it's worth the effort.

Fresh content tends to perform better on social networks where you encounter a short shelf life for when a social message is relevant. The better your piece of content is, the better chance you have of it gaining traction with your social networks.

Small Business Trends:  What is keeping more businesses from fully exploring the value of content marketing?

Timothy Dearlove: You could rephrase this question in a number of different ways and get the same answer. Why did I never learn Portuguese?  Why did I stop training for that marathon?

Time and effort. Content Marketing is not a short cut. It's more cost effective than traditional marketing. It can lead to better lifetime value from your customer base and a lower customer cost of acquisition. We like those things, right?

But it's not easy to churn our great content and it also takes quite a bit of time. In my experience, I see quite a few marketers give up on a content strategy too soon. If you are starting from scratch it's going to take multiple months or even an entire year to start bringing in a consistent flow of qualified organic traffic. That's a long time, but you never get there without the work you put in over that first year.

Also, it's hard. I want to write a really helpful eBook. Ok, so first I need to do research on my Personas. I do interviews to help define my persona and what they would want to read. Now I need to research the content for my eBook. Then I need to write the darn thing, design it, make it look nice. Finally, I need to promote it (this is where HubSpot comes in by the way) and build a conversion path for it.

That's quite a bit of work. For just one eBook. It's an easy way out to give up on a content plan before you let it mature to the point where it helps grow your business. For some people, the results don't match their efforts quickly enough.

Small Business Trends: What are the three most critical mandates of inbound marketing?

Timothy Dearlove: I am a pretty big nerd when it comes to Inbound so I won't limit myself to just three. How about I break it down to four? The actions summarized in HubSpot's Inbound Methodology form an ideal mandate to follow.

Start with attracting the right visitors to your site. You want to balance the challenges of getting the right people to your site with the right volume of total visitors. Thousands of visits from unqualified traffic are fairly useless.

When you have qualified visitors coming to your site, you want to make sure you are converting them into leads. Turning anonymous visitors into actionable contact information.

This is where effective conversion paths and good content offers come into play. After you have leads, you need to focus on closing these leads into customers. Segmented lead nurturing campaigns go a long way to aiding in this effort.

Finally, the last mandate is to delight your customer base. Turn them into promoters for your business.

Small Business Trends: How important is a highly shareable infographic?

Timothy Dearlove: I am most likely going to ruffle some feathers here, but I don't think Infographics move the needle that much. Now, as a caveat, you can produce a really nice, well researched infographic that will work as part of a blog post. Too often, marketers take a shortcut when they produce an infographic. They use bad data or cover a subject area that's already been covered in depth.

I subscribe to Rand Fishkin's viewpoint that a marketer is smarter to spend time producing other kinds of "visual assets." If you are going to put an infographic together, make sure you do the research. Always remember, the primary goal of portraying information in that format is to take complex data and make it digestible.

Small Business Trends: How does content make an impact on email marketing and lead generation?

Timothy Dearlove: Content is a key element for effectively managing the buyer's journey from start to finish. Email marketing and lead nurturing are really effective ways of ensuring your prospects have the information they need so that they can make an educated buying decision.

When we talk about the buyer journey of a typical customer, it starts with education. A website visitor has a problem and needs a solution. You produce content to help that visitor with that problem.

After the first conversion with the educational piece of content, you then need to nurture that lead. We typically find that leads are not ready to talk to a sales rep right after they consume an eBook or White Paper (or any piece of educational content). What you have done is begin to talk to this lead, but that conversation is happening virtually.

Are you going to hard sell five minutes into a conversation after answering just one of your prospects' questions? No. You need to have a content plan that adapts to this line of thinking. This is where email comes in to play.

With email marketing and lead nurturing – two channels a marketer controls - you can make sure you send your prospect all of the content they need to make an informed buying decision. After they download an eBook, you might send them pricing information or a recorded webinar that walks the prospect through your product.

What you are trying to do is give the prospect all the information they need.  They will do their own research as well, but you can rest assured that they can always lean on your emails to find what they need.

The post HubSpot's Timothy Dearlove On Why Content Marketing Isn't A Shortcut appeared first on Small Business Trends.

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Pinterest Introduces Faster Location-Based Search

Pinterest is introducing a faster location search to make better use of some of the site’s other location-based features.

The social pinning site introduced Place Pins about six months ago, letting people pin their favorite travel destinations, local guides and locations.

In a recent post on the official Pinterest engineering blog, engineer Jon Parise, who helped build the new Pinterest feature for search, explains:

“There are now more than one billion travel Pins on Pinterest, more than 300 unique countries and territories are represented in the system, and more than four million Place Boards have been created by Pinners.”

For local businesses, the implications are pretty obvious.

As Alisa Meredith of Scalable Social Media reports, local businesses can pin their profile in conjunction with their listing on Foursquare (another location-based platform) and encourage fans to do the same.

Faster local search will allow customers to find your location much easier when looking for products and services like the ones you offer in your area.

You can also pin other places of interest in your region making yourself a resource on local information your customers may want to discover beyond your brand.

The key change in the new Pinterest feature is the installation of a one-box place-search interface which Parise says is more intuitive than the two box interface it displaced.

The new box allows entry of both the place name and location of your query rather then separating each element into its own box.

One example would be an entry like “city hall San Francisco” with Pinterest returning the results most closely matching the query.

In cases of more ambiguous search queries, like use of the location “Springfield,” Pinterest’s new place-search will return multiple possible interpretations of the searcher’s intent. (In this case, it might be results like Springfield, MO; Springfield, IL; Springfield MA; etc.)

The new Pinterest feature is already available for Web use and on iPhone and iPad. Pinterest says it will soon be coming to Android too.

The post Pinterest Introduces Faster Location-Based Search appeared first on Small Business Trends.

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