Make Money Online Blogging

Here's something you might like to know if you are trying to make money online using Adsense, if you are interested in making money online, especially if you're new to it (like me). Rule No. 1 : Don't shoot yourself in the foot! I have a number of blogs - this one, one on the stockmarket, one on meditation, and until recently one on technology news.




I have Adsense ads on them (you may have noticed them down the side or up on top somewhere) that are supposed to bring in some dough (doh !). The ads are also supposed to be relevant to what the blog is about. However, on my technology site I noticed that all I was getting were Public Service Ads, which may be very useful to someone but were not what I expected.



I tried re-configuring the site, playing about with the layout and the template etc... etc... and got nowhere. I even wrote to Google (yes I was that desperate!) - they sent back their computer-generated response of course (as they all do - Ebay are masters at it) which told me nothing, or rather told me so much as to be totally useless, as it gave me no clue as to what was going on with the ads.



Then I had a moment of insight! Eureka! I remembered that one of my posts was about a company that generates electricity from the stuff that comes out of the rear end of pigs (very successfully too), and that in the post I had not used the word 'manure' or some other scientific term, I had instead gone for the more colourful 's' word :-) (silly me). I realized in my moment of insight that Google possibly doesn't like profanities, or any other unpleasant or vice-related vocabulary and that my blog had been classified by Google's spiders as 'unsuitable' for its ads ! The solution I decided upon was to abandon the blog and create a new one.



It turns out, however, that this was probably a bit of overkill, but as a newbie of course I didn't know this at the time. Apparently this is a common problem with Google's Adsense site rating system and the way round it is to use 'section targeting' . Briefly put "Section targeting allows you to suggest sections of your text and HTML content that you would like Google to emphasize or downplay when matching ads to your site's content"



The main use as far as I was concerned would have been to highlight the offending 's' word and tell Google to ignore it which you do by putting :-





google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore)





into your HTML code, check out the full details over at Google help (see below).



Other people have had similar problems. For example if you put the word orange somewhere in your post, you are liable to get all sorts of ads for mobile phones. There are better examples but I don't want to mention them here for fear of getting on the bad side of Google's spiders again.



You can find a whole load of information (more than you want probably!) over at Google itself, in Google Adsense help do a search on 'Section Targeting'.



So maybe I'll revive my ex-blog and play around with their section targeting to see what pops up! So if you've been getting the Public Service Ads and don't know why, it might be something in your text, which you need to instruct Google to ignore. :-)