Improving monetization of my blogs

There are a lot of things I do to check on how my blogs are doing online, besides logging in to Google's Adsense page and seeing how much money or how many ad views there have been today.

One of the things I do is check the Search Engine Saturation of my sites, especially new ones or ones that haven't been fully indexed in the engines yet.

Another thing I do is use the competitive ad filter to filter out ads that I don't want to show up on my blogs for whatever reason. Generally it's not because they're "competitive" sites to me, it's because they're pretty much "spam" sites in my mind.

Take for example my online role playing game blogs - I have one for World of Warcraft and one for RuneScape at this time - most of the ads for these blogs are places you can buy gold pieces for real dollars. I personally don't like my sites to be slathered with a whole bunch of companies selling exactly the same thing, I want my ads to be a nice mix of things related to what I'm writing about. So, I do this:

1. Venture over to http://www.thebizbank.com/adsense-preview.php
2. Feed in the address of the website I want to review ads for.
3. Filter the site URLs of any ads that I don't want to have shown on my site
4. Copy that filtering information across to my Google Adsense configuration

The filter list that comes across needs a bit of tweaking to be most efficient, but not a big deal. It's just better to have

domain.com

in the filtering list instead of

www.domain.com/runescapead.html

which is a false URL btw, but represents what some of the filtered information comes across as. If you just put in domain.com then the filter is broader and more effective. Of course, if the same site offers multiple ad types for multiple things they offer, you're also filtering out those other ads as well. My assumption is that if you're selling RuneScape gold, you're not going to be offering a helpful tips and tricks website too.

I tend to go through this process whenever I notice one of my blogs take a nosedive in earnings. And for some reason that nosedive always seems to occur in the wee hours of the morning, so I wake up to cruddy results in the AM. Ah well, as long as I catch the bad ads and filter them out (ie: I was getting Title Company ads on my RuneScape site for some reason for a few days), I should be okay.

Of course, one day I'll fill up my filter list on Google and I'll have to start a second Adsense account JUST to be able to filter more!! Hopefully not soon however.