Adsense Nonsense, My Bad

I have become smarter. After complaining about the misalignment of Adsense ads with my blogs, I went in and did a bit of reading about keywords, which was a concept that was buzzing in the back of my brain as I bitched about the ineffective nature of my Adsense content.

Sure enough, most of the problem was my fault. The key is that there are some nuances between normal, everyday writing and writing on the internet. Most of you out there likely know this stuff already, and are snickering at my stupidity, but for me, a relative noob, this was unknown.

In short, to align your Adsense content with your blog content, you've got to get a few often repeated keywords into your writing. Once I started sprinkling around these keywords, the content of my Adsense ads started making a lot more sense.

Just think of the millions I've lost by not knowing this sooner! :)

Adsense Nonsense

Sometimes the Adsense ads on my blogs make perfect sense. Other times I feel like I'm communicating with someone who doesn't speak English.

When I was writing Nintendo Wii impressions, my Google ads were about signing up for baseball camps to increase your pitching velocity.

My Final Fantasy ones assume that I'm talking about the MMORPG game Final Fantasy 11, and immediately pepper my visitors with ads about buying and selling gold. This would be fine if I were actually talking about Final Fantasy 11, but I'm not. It's the one game I'm not going to play in the series.

Now, for some reason, the past two days I'm only getting the public service ads for hurricane relief on the Final Fantasy board. Sigh.

Time to look at some other options.

Post

Yesterday I was thinking about the zillions of things that I could do with my blogs, and trying to prioritize them in order of importance.

Although I'm only a month into this, one thing that is becoming clear to me this: the single most important thing I can do with my blogs is post.

So many days in the past month, I've had a couple of hours to spend on my blogs. I'd start out by tweaking the design. Then I'd go register on some indexes. And then I'd read about blogging on some other sites. Two hours later I hadn't added anything to my blog and I'd wrap up that day's effort.

This shouldn't happen. The first thing I should attend to each day is to create a worthwhile post for each of my blogs.

Opening Links in a New Window

This is a great tip over at the Blogger Forum's regarding getting links to open up in a new window. I wouldn't have thought of this one, but it makes tremendous sense and is so easy to do:

Blogger Forum Link Tip

Focus

I've been blogging for exactly one month now, and one of the things that has become apparent is that there are a million things to do with a blog. You can post, work on generating links, improve your blog's design, read/comment on other blogs, examine advertising and affiliate options, enroll in blog indexes, etc. The list goes on and on.

The problem is never figuring out something to do. The problem is figuring out what is the best thing to do.

Goals

Goal setting is key. To that end, I want to make sure that I have a clear idea of what I want to do with my blogs. At the moment, I have four main blogs:

Final Fantasy: Lost in Japanese
This is a blog that recounts my attempt to play all the Final Fantasy games in their original Japanese.

Kaboom Review
A site to review action movies.

Subtle Fun
A site to review games, books, interesting products, and useful websites.

Blogspection
This blog, which is mainly a journal of my blogging experience.

With each of these blogs, my goal is simple:
Make a quality, profitable blog.

My main goal is to make something good, and my priority will always lie there. I do not want to sacrifice the quality of the blog in order to make money. Advertising will be unobnoxious and clean. I will only recommend stuff that I like.

Setting Amazon Link Boxes Inside Posts

I finally took some time tonight to try and figure out how to correctly set those little Amazon "Buy Now" boxes inside a post, so they float various places in the text. I tried to find this information somewhere on the web, but I had no luck at all. The following is a step-by-step explanation how I got this done.

Here is a typical chunk of box link code from Amazon:

<iframe src="http:URL&CodingFromAmazon" style="width: 120px; height: 240px;" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>

I've removed the long link for brevity's sake, but the key part is the style command. As it stands now the link will block out all kinds of text in your post and generally look crappy. Below is a screenshot of the above code set in a post.



Ugly. We want the text to flow around the picture, but it doesn't. To fix this, we'll add a the following code (in red here for easy viewing) to the style line:

<iframe src="http:URL&CodingFromAmazon" style="width: 120px; height: 240px; float: left;" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>


This allows the text to wrap around the right side of the box:



It's still not perfect however, as the text is too close to the box. To fix this, we'll add a margin command to the style line:


<iframe src="http:URL&CodingFromAmazon" style="width: 120px; height: 240px; float: left; margin: 5pt;" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>

This adds five points of space around the box. Much prettier!


Alternatively, you can float things to the right by changing the word "left" to "right". That's actually what I was trying to do all along. Here is the final page on my action movie review site with the Amazon box set exactly how I want it:

Kaboom Predator Review

I hope this helps make it easier for some people to accomplish this. Keep in mind that I am very much a hack when it comes to things like this. If you know a better way, I'm all ears.