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21st century started with contextual advertising and since, many people are trying to gain an income from that. Sometimes it looks like snake oil business, sometimes it looks like treasure hunting. Some people / companies made great money from it while the majority of people could not pass a certain level of income.

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.

Recently, I moved a couple of my blogs from wordpress to blogspot. The main reason for this was my hosting service. It has been nearly one month that I started using blogspot often as a blog service. Now is the time to make some comparison as well as suggestions on how to choose a host for your blog.

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.

It’s obvious that good content always brings visitors in. More important than good content is good and vertical content which means putting emphasize on a single topic.

If you look at blogs in the Technorati top 100, you will find out that almost all of them are vertical in the sense of topic they are publishing posts about.

What are the reasons that vertical content is profitable than mixed good content? Well, primary reason is search engine optimization and the leads that search engines create.

When you look at websites or other resources that claim to provide high profit keywords, they often look like meaningless. They are usually not meaningful. If there is one keyword, of course there is nothing to talk about meaning. One word is meaningful, naturally. I am talking about phrases. There are phrases that sounds silly for the first look. However, they are not phrases for everyday life. They are simply search terms that users put in the search box.

At this moment, remember on some searches we made on the net brings results like one or two words are in a sentence and the third word we are looking for is in another sentence or another paragraph or sometimes even on another post or article at the same page.

Now this is where the vertical content plays a role. Since sincerely writing on a topic and nıt trying to stuffing keywords in your writings would result poor search engine results, search engines try to collect data not only in terms of a single post or article or a block on your web page. Instead, they try to understand your topic on a variety of measures.

So, when you feel very competent on a subject, then what you have to do is to write different aspects on that subject in a single web site.

You can choose the catch-all way and put a variety of subjects in one blog or website, but then search engines either put you in a wrong category in terms of a topic or they would not get your subject at all. This is also why blogs concentrated on a certain subject always have better search results. This is because of the structure of a blog. On any front or archive page in a blog, there are 10 posts on average. If they are almost on same subject then it is very easy for a search engine robot to identify and connotate your blog with that subject.

This is of course also very important when it comes to related text advertising. On any given day, if you have at least tens of posts in your blog on a certain subject and you suddenly post something entirely different or something very short, ads sontinue to display in the context of your subject in general.

As a conclusion, if you blog for fun then you don’t need to stick with a certain topic. If you are blogging for the purpose of making money out of text advertising then you should pay attention to create vertical content. You’ll be more profitable that way.