StumbleUpon helps you find great websites

A friend of mine showed me the StumbleUpon toolbar about a year ago and now I just love it! It's an add-on for Internet Explorer and FireFox that allows you to click a button and it will take you to a random site on a topic that you choose, such as cars or web development. There are two other buttons on the toolbar - "I like it" and "No more like this", so anytime you are looking at any site you can give a thumbs up or down, and your vote gets saved in the database.

The sites it shows you are recommended by millions of other people, so you are almost guaranteed to see great, helpful sites. You wouldn't have found these other sites without StumbleUpon.

Warning: it can be very addictive!

Use AdSense Gold to optimize your income!

I found this product about a year ago and it paid for itself within about a month! It's not a scam or a waste of money - it is simply a tool to track which of your Google ads are working the best.

You can see what sizes work best, colors, positions, even which URL is clicked on. Then you can start trying different colors, sizes, and positions and scientifically choose the best settings.

It's not uncommon to triple your income! I hate for this to sound like a commercial, but I just want to you realize how important testing is when it comes to advertising. And it helps to have proper tools.

If you want to check out this $97 product, here is the link: Adsense Gold

Rotate Google AdSense colors automatically

Have you heard of "banner blindness?" It's a common condition where your visitors subconsciously ignore the banner ads on your website. Their brains automatically "tune out" anything that looks like an advertisement. It's not their fault though, and you can do several things to help reduce this blindness.

One trick to use is rotating the colors of your ads frequently. I wrote a piece of Javascript to randomly pick colors for my ads, then I used a program called Adsense Gold to see which colors performed the best.

I recently found out that Google can randomly choose between up to four color palettes. All you have to do is configure them in the AdSense Setup page. I found this tip at:
http://www.funponsel.com/blog/archives/2005/10/01/randomly-display-different-adsense-ad-layout/

First AdSense ads make the most money

I just read on Google's AdSense blog today that the first Google ad that is loaded on your page is usually the one that pays the most money. Technically, it is the first ad found in the raw HTML code.

What you'll want to do is see which of your existing Google ads has the highest click-through rate and try to put it at the top of your HTML code. Unfortunately it can be very hard to rearrange your HTML objects, but if you can figure it out, theoretically you will make a little more money!

Post on Google's blog:
http://adsense.blogspot.com/search/label/Optimization

Placing random images next to AdSense ads

I've read several articles about placing small graphical icons or images next to your Google AdSense ads to increase the click-through rate (and income). The idea is that the visitor's eyes will be attracted to the image and then see the ad right next to it.

I experimented with this idea with my site, http://www.howthemarketworks.com/ , last year and it did actually increase my clicks by 10% or more!


The problem is that this can be against Google's policy, so you must be very careful how you implement it! They basically don't want the visitors to think the images are associated with the ads.

Welcome to the blog!

This is my first entry in Blogspot, so of course it will be cheesy and boring!

I plan to share many things I've learned about creating great websites over the last few years.