Macalua.com

What’s wrong with the Where Now is the Citizen on Mars blog?

I got quite a few Ask Marc requests during the holiday break but I had to put those on hold because I promised myself a search engine optimization (SEO) and blog-less vacation. But business is business, so here’s our first client for 2006, Major Tom of Where Now is the Citizen on Mars? who also wants to know What’s Wrong With My Blog (sorry MT just had to do that hehe)

Hi Marc,

Greetings,

I have been to your site and I wonder if you could review my site Where Now Is The Citizen On Mars? for some advice of placements and optimizations.

Yours truly,

Major Tom

This is the first time I’ve been asked to review a blog and I’m pretty psyched to do it. I feel like Andy Hagans on one of his Monetization Makeover quests.

First Impressions

I’m not a regular reader of Where Now Is The Citizen On Mars but from what I see (comments), the blog has quite a following. Most political pundits do. They have loyal readers who come back day in day out. Usually, these readers and the author consider each other family. They’re that close.

This is where your problem lies. Yes they’re reading your blog and posting comments by the hundreds each day, but chances are your loyal readers aren’t clicking any of your ads. It may be because of click fatigue. They’ve probably been seeing the same ad for the past 3 months. Most blogs have this problem and no amount of URL tagging or content optimization will completely rid your blog of these ads. They just keep coming back. My advice would be to not try at all. Let Google decide which ad to display. They say they know what’s best for your site (revenue wise) and I’m tempted to think they really do since AdWords/AdSense is their only honeypot.

SIDE OBSERVATION: The 336×28 ad unit under each post title at Macalua.com only displays 2 ads but AdSense revenues from this blog are at an all time high. Draw your own conclusions.

So how do you overcome click fatigue? Get new visitors to your blog. These new visitors have a higher chance of clicking PPC ads, especially if it’s the first time they’ve seen the ad. Search engine marketing (SEM) is a numbers game: X Traffic : $Y. Increase your traffic substantially and more often than not, your site income will follow. This is especially true for monetization methods such as PPC and affiliate marketing.

My review will focus on these areas:

• Ad Placement Tips - if your new visitors can’t see your ads, they can’t click on them can they?
• Traffic Building Tips - get more visitors to get more ad clickers

Just how do you get new visitors? That’s what search engine optimization is for.

Where to Place Those Ads

I’ll breeze right through this section. Why? Well, Google has published the AdSense placement Bible already, i.e. the AdSense heat map.

If that’s not enough, Andy Hagans has two articles on the subject which directly apply to your situation (here and here). You may also want to check my Creative Google Ad Links Placement and Practical AdSense Tips posts.

I Want More Traffic

You need two types of traffic: search engine traffic and referral traffic.

Traffic from Search Engines
Search engine traffic you should understand by now, you being a member of SEO Philippines and all. For those that don’t, here’s a simplistic example: somebody types [citizen mars] in Google. Your site comes up first for that keyword phrase. That somebody clicks on your link and arrives at your blog post about [citizen mars].

The SEO tips and techniques in the three starter SEO ebooks you received after signing up to the SEO Philippines Mailing List has all the on-page and off-page tips and techniques you should be doing. Those tips apply to all websites, including blogs.

Traffic is usually a function of link popularity. It’s no secret that heavily linked sites get a SEO boost. With that in mind, compare your site’s link profile with two other blogs in your niche, Connie Veneracion’s House on a Hill and Manuel Quezon III’s Quezon.ph:

Citizen On Mars

• Google/AOL - 61
• HotBot - 61
• MSN - 1,816
• Yahoo!/FAST/Altavista - 1,280

House On a Hill

• Google/AOL - 769
• HotBot - 769
• MSN - 5,766
• Yahoo!/FAST/Altavista - 19,300

Quezon.ph

• Google/AOL - 1,230
• HotBot - 1,690
• MSN - 19,654
• Yahoo!/FAST/Altavista - 7,230

Referral Traffic

The other type of traffic is referral traffic. For blogs (and for most websites too), referral traffic is the holy grail. It gives you street credibility and plays a big part in your organic SEO efforts. Nick Wilson over at Performancing defines the ultimate source of referral traffic:

Im talking about links in the body text of authorative blogs in your topic area — blogrolls do work for this as well, but to a much lesser degree.

Read Nick’s article as it outlines in detail the benefits of referral traffic. Take heed, getting the best bloggers in your niche to link back to you will often be a futile exercise. So you can imagine how happy I was to get linked to from Jeremy Zawodny. Unless you genuinely get their attention via post masterpieces, you really need to working at building rapport with these power bloggers. To get links from such high levels, you need honest to goodness networking and a lot of link baiting skills.