Archive for March, 2008

Having previously written about the Google Adsense Heatmap, I was keen to try out adsense blocks in more successful locations.

Google Adsense Heatmap: darker colours are ‘hotter’ areas

My first opportunity came with a project of my own to develop a custom Joomla template for a new website about chocolate, ‘I Dream in Chocolate‘.

Website Screenshot showing Adsense positioning

I planned the main Adsense location to take advantage of the areas highlighted in the Google heatmap, and created the Adsense blocks in Joomla using mod_html modules.

I didn’t go for the ‘hottest’ area, which I think is between the main title and content, as I thought this location might be over complicated to manage separately for different content items, and also less nice to look at. The current design adds a kind of white chocolate stripe to the page layout, though it does push the main content down a bit far, especially as I also added a link unit right above the top menu.

By keeping them near the interactive options and menu items, I hoped to take advantage of the visitor’s attention (and mouse) being in that area. At the same time, by using a different style, I have avoided them being actually mistaken for menu items and on site links (which goea against Google’s guidelines).

It does seem to be paying off so far: the following screenshot shows clicks for this new site have already overtaken my more well established site Stairway to Devon, which has the Adsense more out of the way. Bear in mind, many of the page views for the new site will have been caused by me working on it, so it’s actually been more effective than the figures suggest:

Screenshot showing Adsense results for different websites is gone: can’t show the actual numbers – it’s against Google’s rules unfortunately!

Inspired by these more encouraging results, I decided to add some better AdSense locations to this blog while upgrading WordPress at the weekend, following the excellent instructions in this link: ‘Upgrading WordPress‘ and this one: ‘How to add Adsense to your blog‘

Adding AdSense to a WordPress blog involves editing the WordPress PHP template files. I had some odd experiences, with AdSense blocks sometimes not appearing in some locations, or only appearing after several minutes (which I think is a delay on the Google setup end). It also required a lot of fiddling about with the CSS. But eventually I was able to get the following units set up:

1. Link unit at the top of the screen
2. Adsense Referral link between the page header and content
3. Google Search box in the sidebar
4. 2 Adsense content units in the sidebar: first a small one, then a tall one
5. Adsense content unit in the top ‘hot spot’, between the content title and paragraph text on the single post pages (which don’t have the sidebar)

While upgrading, I also tried setting up the options to ping WordPress’s list of practically everything, which should promote the blog a bit more widely, so I will be interested to see how these changes all work out.

Background: I’ve been launching and promoting a Devon directory, which promotes arts and environmental concerns alongside general clubs, blogs and business listings.

Click this link to view all posts about launching the directory

23/9, continued: Postcard advertising
Having ordered a load of free postcards and business cards from , I was ready to start some more intensive offline advertising.

Decided to start with Totnes, as I feel more nervous in Exmouth with it being my current home town, and also more importantly, it’s nice going there: Totnes is Devon’s most new age and hippyish town, chock full of artists and environmentalists (surely!). Even a newsagent’s in Totnes is probably well-targeted advertising for me.

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One of the first things I discovered in Second Life is that you need money to buy land or rent a shop front.
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I have to admire these strange and intricate works of art created by digital artist Alex Dragalescu.

This series of 3D digital portraits inspired by internet security threats was commissioned by the internet security firm MessageLabs.

Subjects include Phishing, the Netsky virus, the Ghost spyware program, Trojanagentil3, Russian 3 spam, and the Storm botnet.