Make Money from Blogs » Customization

How to create a static page for your WordPress blog ?

ashish — Thu, 08 Jan 2009 18:24:51 +0000

The default view for a WordPress Blog is a page where you have multiple columns (depending on the theme you have selected, whether it is a 2 column or 3 column theme, or the more rare 4 column theme), and you have a list of posts, with the most recent post being at the top and so on. As you write posts, your previous posts recede to lower down the page, and eventually vanish off the first page. One byproduct of this is that you can customize the page in many ways, but you cannot modify the main content of the page.
However, there is no such thing as Never. It is very much possible in WordPress to have a desired front page, and this page replaces the default posts page. This gives you the flexibility to add your own text, your own design, your own graphics, and so on to the page. The only difference in this case is that your posts page is one level away now.
So how do you do this – consider a WordPress Blog such as http://info-about-cancer.com. Log into the Admin section of the blog, go to the Pages section and create 2 pages. One of these pages will be the default Home Page and the other is a page that will host the posts. You need to name the pages appropriately. Leave the posts page blank, and for the other page, add the content and design and so as you would like for the front page (you can name this page as ‘Home Page’) and then Publish the 2 pages.
Now, go to the Settings -> Reading section, and view the available options. Select the default option in the ‘Front Page Displays’ section to be ‘A static page’. For the Front Page, select the option to be the newly created Front Page and the other to be the Recent Posts page. And you are all set.

Caution: In some themes, the option is set to show all the created pages, and include one ‘Home’ page as well. With the above changes, the Home is actually the Front Page, and you would end up with 2 entries that lead to the same location. It is preferable to edit the code for the page display so that the entry for Home gets removed.

Placement of Ads in different positions – the heat map

ashish — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 19:30:08 +0000

One of the most important points to consider when trying to make money from ads on web pages is the proper placement of ads. If you have done some studies in this area, you could have come across many people trying to sell their secrets of Ad placement or how to make more money from properly placing Ads. However, the basis of many secrets of ad placement is how the human eye perceives ads, how they fit into the page, and whether people notice the ads or ignore them. And the basis for much of this is something called the ‘Heat Map’. The Heat Map specifies positions on the page that are much more likely to catch user attention, and other places where users are likely to ignore the ads.

The Google page for the Heat Map specifies more details: Certain locations tend to be more successful than others. This “heat map” illustrates the ideal placing on a sample page layout. The colors fade from dark orange (strongest performance) to light yellow (weakest performance). All other things being equal, ads located above the fold tend to perform better than those below the fold. Ads placed near rich content and navigational aids usually do well because users are focused on those areas of a page.
Keep in mind that while the Heat Map is a good starting point, you need to spend more time on trying to figure out how your users read your page, and the amount of ads and their placement such that they earn the maximum money for you. This will not be a one-time activity, but something that is likely to take several iterations before you reach a higher level of earnings.

Selecting sites to search while using Adsense for Search

ashish — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 14:20:23 +0000

In using Adsense for Search, if you have a network of blogs, you would not want users to move away from your site. Adsense for Search would have the option of behaving like a normal Google search, showing the same results as a search on Google.com. However, this has been recently changed and the Adsense for Search allows you to specify a list of sites that will be picked up in the search (and will thus not be a regular Google search).
Google allows the following customizations in terms of selecting the URL’s that will be part of the search:
Depending on how you enter the URLs of your sites, AdSense for search will allow users to search different content, as described below.
* Individual pages: Entering www.mysite.com/mypage.html will include only the mypage.html page on www.mysite.com.
* Entire sites: Entering www.mysite.com/* will include all the pages on www.mysite.com.
* Parts of sites: You can use wildcard patterns to include just certain parts of a site. For example, www.mysite.com/*about* will include only files on www.mysite.com that have the word ‘about’ in their name.
* Entire domains: You can also specify an entire domain using *.mydomain.com. If you specify mydomain.com, we will automatically convert this to *.mydomain.com/*. If this is not what you want, you can change it back in space provided.

This is overall a great feature that allows you customization of the Adsense for Search program. In the next article, we will see how we can actually host the results of the search on the pages of our own web site.