Then I decided to take her opinion into consideration too. Let’s just start with what I am going to say. It’s not nice to see that adsense income decline but there are lessons from this. I think the most important lesson is that people click on adsense ads really for the reason of being interested in the offer. We understand that because when there is a financial crisis, the click through rate declines. Pay per click cost didn’t decline too much, at least in my personal experience. So, from this data in hand, we can clearly understand that encouraging clicks do not help on increasing adsense revenue.

Encouraging clicks is strictly prohibited by Google anyway but people always try to find a way to encourage people within the rules. This is not going to generate any further income. People still try it because they think adsense ads are there to trick visitors into clicking them. They don’t think adsense as a process. In fact, adsense is a process as I have written earlier about contextual advertising and it involves those steps:

1. You have a meaningful article on your page.
2. You can be found among search results and you are in a relatively decent position, let’s say your page comes up between #1 and #50.
3. The search terms are related with your topic of your article.
4. There are enough adwords clients that need to show their ads on such a page when it is found with such keywords.

Let’s come to where adsense needs more effort in total quality management.

Some advertisers are eager to pull visitors to their website and they design and prepare the copy of their ads to be very attractive. Those advertisers usually decrease the overall level of quality in adsense because they are after quantity, instead of quality. The type of advertising Vered talks about is this kind of advertising.

However, with this financial crisis and lessons from that in mind, push marketing doesn’t make sense. When a visitor has the incentive of buying a product that she is interested in, she is going to click that ad anyway.

Thus the most important part lies in advertising visibility, that is putting the ads on places where people are not affected by ad blindness.

I was going to write more on this but I must stop here because blogger.com is banned in Turkey and I want to follow those news. I’ll continue to discuss adsense total quality management later on.

At this point, we should talk about “smart pricing”. Smart pricing is a technique that Google Adsense program uses. They have written only once about smart pricing. There is not much detail on how this operates. Briefly, if your web site creates too much clicks without ending up with any conversion (which means a sale, a subscription or any other criteria which is set by the advertiser or google adsense, for instance having visited more than one page in the destination web site or spending a certain amount of time in that web site) your web site is then being smart priced for a period of time. This is when you see 20 clicks on an ad which only brings $0.20, for instance. Those numbers are not exact numbers and I am not an adsense professional, so don’t take them as the ultimate truth. I am just telling this to give you a rough idea. I even don’t know whether this smart pricing is still being used or not. This is personal experience and knowledge from my own readings over the web.

This notion of smart pricing should give us another clear idea what adsense is all about. It is designed with the intention of being profitable for every player in the game. Your visitors are part of that game too. According to this perspective, putting adsense ads on your web site is like an additional service that you offer to your visitors. So, it is also meaningless to use plugins to set advertising visibility such as “no ads for friends”, “ads only for visitors who come from search engines”, etc. Advertising may be evil on many levels but Google Adsense is less evil in comparison to other types of advertising. This is the essence of Adsense and other similar contextual advertising systems.

Now let’s come back to the view that advertising sucks. This is the point where I suggest a more thorough total quality management for adsense. Adwords clients must understand at least what I have understand so far. Only than they will design meaningful ads instead of sucking ads.

There is still more to say about that. For instance, about our economic system as a whole. Because you never see an ad that sucks when it is about an absolutely needed good or service. Ads suck mostly when they are about a good or service which is not really necessary. Of course this is also a subjective issue but anyway, sometimes you can decide that only by using your intuition.

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I don’t think that those bans are related to Adnan Oktar, because he was suing in Istanbul courts, however this one was a decision of Diyarbakir court.

UPDATE: (see above update) There is still no information about the cause of the ban but everybody suspects Adnan Oktar who is responsible for most of the bans in Turkey. He is bringing any content on the net to the court which supports Darwinism and mentions his name as a creationist. But whether he is involved or not in this recent blogger.com ban is still a suspicion.

Blogger.com is censored in Turkey. I’ll keep with details posted later. The ban created a huge response in Turkish bloggers almost immediately. We just see this when we try to reach blogger.com or any blog on *.blogspot.com:

blogger.com censored in Turkey

image credits: Aylin Özdemir

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We also see many, many successful bloggers like Robert Scoble or like Dooce.com, where comments reach at hundreds. For people who see the amount of comments would think that as a criteria of successful blogging. When they think like that, they would see only a little or no comments as an indicator of failure.

But it is not. Comment amount is not an indicator of your success. If you ask questions on your blog post and nobody comes up with an answer, then you may conclude that nobody cares but apart from such exceptions, it really doesn’t matter whether people comment on your blog or not. Recently, I met a couple of new readers from Facebook and they told me how helpful my posts on moodr are. Most of them pointed to one or two posts to be most successful and helpful. Those posts didn’t received any comments. Yet, people were very satisfied with them.

When a blog goes popular, other bloggers just go and comment there in order to gain visibility for themselves. When Darren posts something new or Tina posts something new, most of the time, people are there to comment for their own visibility. I don’t mean that all of those comments are not useful. There are very useful conversations on many blogs through commenting for all of us to benefit. I just try to add to my argument that amount of comments on a blog post is not an indicator of that post’s success.

So, bloggers usually expect affection in the name of comments and that’s pretty understandable. They put great effort in a post and tens of comments under that post is an instant gratification for many of them. However, know that this is not a criteria and don’t get upset when you don’t see any comments. Look at your statistics instead. How many people read that post, and what is the bounce rate of this post? If the bounce rate is low then you can surely conclude that your post has been successful.

The same is valid for pingbacks and trackbacks but not as much as comments. For backlinks, gaining visibility is again a primary motivation for linking. Don’t get upset by that either. But they are more important than comments because they built long term traffic into your blog. The only way you can get them is the usefulness of your post.

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On the other hand, when time passes and your blog starts to get extraordinary attention, you may want to learn tips and tricks on how to optimize your wordpress installation and how to minimize resources it uses. Here are tips and tricks about just that.

First and foremost, you must use caching. WP-Super Cache is the best option for that. WP Super Cache caches your posts and pages as beautiful pure html files so your server doesn’t use resources for php output. Other caching plugins don’t do that (at least I don’t know of any other). Others usually just caches the content and continues to use php cycles to deliver output.

The second important thing you have to keep in mind is that WordPress’ custom 404 (page not found thingie) handler uses too much cpu cycles. This isn’t unique to WordPress. Any other CMS like Drupal, TextPattern, etc. who uses custom 404 handling also uses more cpu cycles than any normal, usual 404 page. What to do about that? Use Google Site Maps plugin in order to inform Google faster when you have deleted a post. This plugin automatically generates a Google compliant site map and submits that to Google everytime you make a change in your content. Apart from that, there are also urls that are seeked by robots and they also can generate 404 error codes when not found. One example in my mind now is the favicon.ico file. Favicons are used by many web sites for bookmarking urls. You have to place one in your root directory because every robot I know looks at your root directory for that file. Moreover, not only robots look for favicon.ico but also many browsers look for it when users want to bookmark your blog. Many modern browsers also look for it because they display it in the tab. The best practice is, go create one and place it in your root folder. Favicon.cc is my favorite place for creating favicons and downloading them into my computer and then put them on my host. It’s very practical and free.

Same holds true for your feeds. Use Feedburner for distributing your feeds. Since your feeds will be distributed by feedburner and not by your server, you will have this load minimized too. Your domain.com/feed will be checked (almost) only by Feedburner and this is at most once or twice a day.

There may be other examples for would be 404 files that don’t come with your WordPress installation. You can make up your own examples too. Either way, you have to find a way to create them or handle them. So far, I don’t know of any plugin which handles that issue. Maybe it’s a good idea to build one. It should check for common known urls on your blog which may be requested often by robots, search engines, and like, and maybe creates them for you.

Third, comment spam also puts another weight on your WordPress installation and that eats your valuable CPU cycles too. Akismet is NOT a solution for this because a comment or a trackback or a pingback will hit your server and be recorded for evaluation anyway. WP Spam Free solves this problem by not allowing comments from agents which are not a browser. Since many bots who works for dropping spam comments and trackbacks to WordPress blogs do not recognize and use JavaScript, this plugin checks whether comment owner’s agent can recognize javascript. It’s a wise solution. It also informs normal users who turned javascript off so that they don’t get surprised when they are not able to post comments.

Those three factors are what I have experienced so far with my grid server. I think this can be the first post in a series because as time goes by I would experience new cpu cycle hungry factors and find solutions about them. So I’ll post them too. One thing I am not sure about is wp-cron.php and admin-ajax.php files. It looks weird but it seems like they eat more cpu cycles when you don’t post frequently. But this is just a guess. I’ll post about that too when I am sure of them. So, please subscribe to my RSS feed if you find this post useful, there are more to come.

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I created another user in my WordPress installation. That’s very easy, you just go to users on the right of the WordPress admin menu and add a new user, of course with a different name than yours. You can also set its password and other details there but that part is irrelevant with what we are going to do. Then go to post(s) you want to export exclusively and edit them by changing their author. You can do that in the post editing page below the editor.

Then go to ‘manage’ and select export. There, you will have the option of restricting posts you will export to a certain author. Select your newly created author for exporting his posts. Then click ‘download export file’ and you are done. You have an export file where your selected posts are included. Now you can use that file for importing them on any other WordPress blog provided that they have the proper version of WordPress, I mean supporting this export – import thing.

For more practical options, when you need a temporary place to export & import your posts, just use WordPress.com. Go to WordPress.com and create a new blog for just that. Don’t forget to set privacy options there so you don’t have duplicate content in case search engine robots hit your carrier blog at the time. It may be also proper to close the blog for normal visitors too, according to what you do with that blog.

Using a WordPress.com blog is especially a necessity when you transfer posts from Blogger (blogspot) to WordPress because self hosted WordPress still lacks that functionality. The option is there but it doesn’t work (taking about 2.6.2 at the time of this writing).

Well, it’s that easy. Now let’s discuss the scalability of WordPress when it comes to hundreds of comments. In my case, WordPress was not able to handle them for me. Both the amount of comments (900 plus) and the traffic was heavy on that single page. There wasn’t any issue with the server. The traffic and the server load this page created was equal to any page that would receive the same amount of traffic and attention. Pagination of comments is a solution but it didn’t work for me because I find existing plugins immature. The only solution to this in the future might be that WordPress have built-in, nature pagination feature for comments, like in Drupal. Most probably that was why Dooce made the switch to Drupal from WordPress. She opens her posts to discussion rarely (only every four or five posts) and she receives thousands of comments under those posts.

If your receive less than 100 comments on your posts than WordPress is scalable for your in termes of comment load handling. But if your receive hundreds of comments on each of your post than WordPress may not be the best option for you. Of course there are ways for handling this however a naked WordPress installation is just not sufficient to handle 1000 comments effectively.

Let’s go back to our transfer business. That’s how I did it. I mirrored the post with all the comments to a WordPress.com blog and everybody looks happy now. Don’t forget to close comments and pings while you start exporting those posts because it is very possible to receive comments after you have started the export process and those comments will get lost.

Another tip: I copied everything for that post. The text, the url and the exact date and time. Then I have recreated the same post with the same url with the same date and time. Then I closed the post for comments and only opened them for pings. I also stated in a single comment that discussion is now going on in another address, in a mirror. Now, things are fine. Everybody is happy, including me.

One last thing that I have learned from this experience: It is a wise thing to close comments after a period of time you have published a post. I think one month is convenient. Otherwise, the post’s comments turn into a forum instead of a discussion of what you have written.

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The default wordpress theme is a great failure. It is of course very famous because it is the default wordpress theme. First off all, it is not standards compliant. Especially the order and usage of CSS selectors are catastrophic. I will only name one for now. There is this header part, then there is this blog name section which correctly marked as h1. But then there is this description section marked as a div. This is the most common failure among amateur “web masters” who are just introduced to web standards. The description section should have been coded as a p class=”description” or p id=”description”. There is no need for a div. This is a big error but this is maybe the smallest semantic error in the whole wordpress default theme.

The CSS file is exactly a turmoil. There are many classes identified more than once and that makes it very confusing to work with them. The use of ems are a complete failure. So much that when you change an h2’s em value, it shows up in different sizes gradually. No, of course I am talking about the same class of h2! It is in the commentlist section. Go see it for yourself. Change the em value there, for instance change the em of h2 from 1.2em into 1.6em, it ends up showing growing sizes as comments continue.

And no, I am not using Internet Explorer. I am testing everything on Firefox 3, Internet Explorer 7, Konqueror (Safari), Internet Explorer 6, respectively. I can’t waste my time to tell all the errors in this default themes CSS file. I want to go into some other catastrophe that the web suffers because of those default and classic wordpress themes.

Many advanced wordpress themes are built by tweaking the default one or the classic one. And that’s a good thing, because once they put those two templates into wordpress core and ship them together, there is no reason as not to be sure about they are the right thing to go from. However, unless you strip all the CSS at once and start writing CSS from scratch by using selectors and classes from the template source, it is impossible to produce a coherent design. It’s awful. Look at the CSS file of the theme “White as Milk”. The author clearly state it in the CSS file as a comment:

THE FOLLOWING CODE IS DERIVED FROM THE DEFAULT “KUBRICK” THEME.

THE STRUCTURE AND LAYOUT IS IN MY OPINION, NOT THE WAY CSS SHOULD

BE ORGANIZED, BUT FOR NOW I AM LEAVING IT THE WAY IT IS TO KEEP

IT CONSISTENT.

As a matter of fact, since almost all themes are derived from the classic or default layouts, it is almost impossible to change and tweak them for the majority. It’s not sufficient to know CSS, you have to master it to a degree where you can find some other people’s errors in it and fix them.

The classic template is not as faulty as the default template but it is also very deceiving. For instance, it doesn’t have a real footer where stands below all the content and sidebar. Instead, the footer stands just under the content. It is not compatible with the widget functionality of a standard wordpress installation. Even not with the latest version shipped!

Briefly, this is a shame. Many wordpress users just think that they don’t know enough CSS. They are wrong. CSS is in fact quite easy but it depends on good mark-up on the template side, and clearly written CSS files. The beauty of CSS and web standards is in their usability, easiness, practicality.

I don’t think that those faulty history of the default and classic templates of wordpress is going to end here. They couldn’t fix it for years right now. It looks like they are even not aware of what is wrong. The turmoil still continues with K2.

I had to heavily tweak the default template files on a very detailed level. This was meaningless. This can be a whole lot better.

I hope somebody pays attention to work on a such important issue.

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Well, those are the questions that remained unanswered. There has been a couple of weeks now that I host one or two blogs on blogspot and there is also adsense installed. As with the adsense share, I can clearly say that Blogger doesn’t have a share on your adsense income. You can see this in your adsense control panel too.

For any web site or blog, whether it is intended for making money or not, navigation is an utmost important issue. I can clearly say that blogspot is weak on navigation. Of course there may be third party templates for blogspot that provide a decent navigation but not everybody has the reach and technical knowledge to use them. The most ugly thing with any Blogger blog’s navigation regardless of which template it uses is the “older posts”, “newer posts” navigation. The url you get to when you click those navigation links are pretty ugly. They are neither user friendly nor search engine friendly.

On one hand, it is a fact that there are no use in such navigation in terms of search engine optimization because they are not time-less. Every second or third page of a blog is being changed constantly and there is no meaning in indexing them as page 2, page 3, etc. On the other hand, for the sake of usability, every url at this time should be readable by naked human eye. And this is a problem with blogspot.

Moreover, blogspot forbids to index labels for search engines by its robots.txt file. Look at any blog on *.blogspot.com/robots.txt and you’ll see that access is denied. What I told in the above paragraph is also valid for labels though.

Apart from those navigational issues, I can say that any blog on blogspot doesn’t have less chance than any blog hosted elsewhere. Blogspot itself is a competitive domain and so are blogs hosted on it. Fear not, you will be indexed quite normally when you blog on Blogspot.

As with the monetization part, it is extremely easy to put adsense on any blog on blogspot. However that doesn’t mean they are optimally placed. For instance, it is a huge trouble for an html/javascript illiterate person (who consists the majority of blog users) to place adsense within the blogpost, for instance under the title or under the post body. You have to use escape characters and there is a big chance that you end up with messing adsense code which is against the TOS.

Having said that, for people who can optimize adsense placements and are html/javascript literate, there is no reason not to suggest blogspot for a profitable money making blog on the web. At least it is a whole lot better than wordpress.com at this time where you cannot put ads on your blog in wordpress.com.

Hence, 6% percent of the Technorati top 100 blogs are on blogspot. Advantages are you are always ready to get dug, you are at the hands of Google.

Moreover, Blogger team is constantly making improvements in the overall quality of Blogger. You can see some of them in the Blogger Draft. On nice example of this is the comment box embedded below the post.

In the final analysis, there is no significant difference in terms of pro-blogging between blogspot and a blog hosted elsewhere.

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On the other hand, some may need to have their blog monetized instantly. This can be fast and bring you a relatively less income however this is a method anyway.

To achieve this, you have to mimic blogs like boing boing. This imeans, you will become a news blog. By news blog, I don’t necessarily mean a political one or a blog about finances, that’s not necessary. You have to have editorial skills and you have to pick posts and articles, images, videos, any interactive thing that may interest people and then post about them. By “about them” I mean that you will not copy and paste them. You will select a blog post, and blog about that post. You will select quotations from that post and use them in your own post and comment on them a little bit.

That’s what boing boing does and they are very successful. They are successful in their editorial skills. They choose wisely, they don’t choose randomly. And remember, there are around 30 posts on boing boing every day.

If you believe that you have this editorial skill and you can also make wise selections around the blogosphere and the web, you may quickly establish a user base and a little profit by doing that. I assume you have already made the optimization about where to put ads. I am not going to talk about this here because that’s another story.

By blogging about blogs, you are going to build backlinks and they will help you grow in your search engine visibility. It will be much better if you keep this meta-blogging in a vertical manner. For instance, you can only choose to blog about blog posts that are about parenting. Or only about cars or only about gadgets. Get it?

Since you are going to post about 30 times in a day, this would bring quick attention for search engines. Search engines love updates.

Other blogs that keep this strategy are: kottke.org, the blog of Matt Mullenweg (he is not doing this for monetization purposes but he is a good example for what I am trying to tell here anyway), and many other blogs about web 2.0, widgets, themes, etc.

There is one other advantage in this. Such meta-blogs do not exist for a variety of topics. There isn’t any famous one about recipes, flowers, art, etc. which means there are already niches out there.

A drawback of this strategy is that you have to put content everyday. Because what you do is not time-less. You will be about actuality. You cannot say after six months, “that much content is enough for me to post less from now on”. That’s not possible. You will see sudden drop in your traffic and thus in your advertising revenue.

I can’t suggest this strategy for myself but this doesn’t mean that it is not working. It does work, I have done it in the past and I was successful. However, for myself, I want to build an hotel now so that people come and go and pay their rent… endlessly.

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If you dream about having some extra dollars or finally go solo with the help of your website / blog then you have to know and understand a couple of things and you have to be patient. So what are those key points?

When it comes to programs like Google Adsense, blogs look like very successful and people usually think that they should have a blog to achieve the material success from such programs. That’s irrelevant. The success of blogs come from sustainability. Successful blogs keep themselves updated several times in a day and this brings search engine visibility. Why? Is it because they update regularly? Not only that. If you update any website regularly and add meaningful articles to it that doesn’t only mean that you are updated but also means that you are growing in quantity of articles. The more pages you have, the more search engine visibility you will gain. This is simple to understand. If I have one page on a certain topic and it is usually found from search engines with certain keywords than this means I can have a decent traffic. If I have a couple of good pages than I would have several decent traffic. If I have thousands of pages in my website, than it is near sure if not hundred percent, that I will have at least tens of pages which would get quite well amount of visitors from search engines.

However, I am not talking about a random success. I am just telling that you don’t know exactly what will attract your visitors and you have to be willing to track your successful pages about why they have attracted so many people. Is it the topic? Is it the advantage of low search engine competition in that area? Is it because you have used good keywords in an optimum level of quantity? You have to look and think about those factors.

And what about page rank? I have a blog post that is #1 in the search results among 4.810.000 results. The page rank of the blog is 3 and this single page’s page rank is 1. What about that? The moral of the story is, don’t get obsessed with page ranks. This is not the only example that I can give you. I have many single pages that rank within the top ten results on Google and most of them have a page rank of 1 and others do not have any page rank assigned at all.

Moreover, what do you imagine when you hear the word page-rank? There are tens of Google search pages in tens of different countries with domains accordingly. This is one factor, a variable. Another variable is that any web page can be found in search results via very different keywords. Example: you reach this page on Google while looking for successful blogging and you are in France, using Google.fr and somebody else is searching for page rank effect on contextual advertising income and finds this page and she is in China. Another reader does a search for “success” and don’t come up with this page because it will be the 18th million result.

So, can you get that? Imagine a web page with a page rank of ten and that doesn’t mean it will show up in search results in every search related with that page. Therefore, don’t get obsessed by page-rank.

Let’s go back to income / search results relation. The page that comes first among 4.810.000 results do not have any effect on my adsense income (I didn’t create a channel for this single page, maybe I should create and check but I know this because said blog is not very profitable either. This is because of the low traffic). Because there aren’t any related adwords client to evaluate this page. Thus, people come and go to the web page and they don’t really see a hundred percent related ad on the page. If they would see, they would most probably click on them.

So, success comes when:

1. You have a meaningful article on your page.
2. You can be found among search results and you are in a relatively decent position, let’s say your page comes up between #1 and #50.
3. The search terms are related with your topic of your article.
4. There are enough adwords clients that need to show their ads on such a page when it is found with such keywords.

The above scenario is the most profitable scenario for keyword advertising, in my humble opinion. Of course, you would also make money when a user comes to your page via some different way (that is not with the help of a search engine) and clicks on your ads. The more ads and the page are relevant in context the more you will earn.

Other scenarios would include that there are several web sites linking you properly on the subject of your page and people come from those links. At this time, it is also important how they link and what the linking page is about. If your page is about flowers and it is linked from a web page which is about bees then this would not be as profitable as a related search engine result.

Then how do I go about creating profitable pages on the web? Find something that would help people doing their job in hand. You can write how-to articles about anything you can be sure of yourself. If this helps people than you will gain visibility.

So, keep in mind that what I tell you here is not about being a famous blogger or web author or content creator. This is about being found via search engines and thus getting clicks on your ads because everything is in harmony: search terms, the subject of your article and the advertisers subject. So, being Robert Scoble is something else, it would create a benefit, an added value when somebody reads Scoble writing about a web conference and while reading he or she finds an advertising about what she needs and clicks on it. Because in this scenario, there is fame included. The advertiser know that quite a few people with a need and want to buy a geeky product would read Scoble. See that this is also something contextual but in that case, Scoble does not need search engine visibility. He can also gain page impressions via direct traffic (that is somebody opens her browser and types in his blog’s address). Also, be sure that Scoble made this fame by working hard about blogging. His blog is full of useful information if not knowledge.

These are some key factors that you have to understand if you feel like trying problogging.

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Well, let’s look at what you want to do with your blog. If you trust your creativity and believe that people will enjoy reading whatever you write, there are two options in my mind. You should whether choose wordpress.com or blogger.com. Here is why: both services are very easy to maintain. If you want to monetize your blog, blogspot is the way to go because it is very easy to implement adsense on your blogger blog whereas this is not difficult but impossible on wordpress.com. Wordpress.com doesn’t allow publishing ads on your blog.

If you say that you are not creative up to par, you will need tools and facilities that will make it easier for people to visit your blog and read more and then come again. And this is usability. Usability in navigation, usability in content creation etc. In this case, I recommend you a self hosted wordpress blog. For a self hosted wordpress blog, I can suggest you liquidweb.

Blogger is better than a self hosted wordpress blog based on some criteria. If you are good in coding, then I would suggest you to use Blogger because they are also very scriptable. However, with the introduction of new Blogger layout system, you have to be en experienced coder because you need to know how to “escape” some of the characters between two blocks of Blogger layout tags. This is difficult for a beginner and very prone to syntax errors. Wordpress is not the same. On any self hosted wordpress, you have thousands of different documentation in your hand and even if you are a beginner you can mess with code as much as you want without harming your blog too much.

And this is needed for any blogger because there is always the need for customization. You may want to display ads only on certain posts in certain categories on your blog or you may want some archive pages to look different than ordinary pages in your design. Then a self hosted wordpress is the way to go.

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