Introduction
Understanding how Google's AdSense program is not easy. In April, 2004,my good
friend and reader
Bob Hale
began to coach me in the intricacies of AdSense. It would be years
until I had any real understanding of how the AdSense program worked and how to optimize
it for income.
Advertisers who pay Google AdSense to place ads on my webpages, do so in an auction. It is
very important for you who want to earn income using AdSense, to fully understand and
appreciate what this means to you!
Google AdSense basics.
Awhile back I published a story in MsTioga Magazine about the Google AdSense program.
In order to better understand what is written in this story about using custom domains,
I suggest that you take a peek at this prior story first.
Ranking is important to publishers
When you create a blog and place AdSense ads on your blog's pages, you are defined by the
AdSense program as a publisher. Advertisers are the companies or individuals who pay AdSense
to place their ads on your pages.
Advertisers want to place their ads on pages that will give them more bang for their
$bucks$. One of the tools that advertisers use are rating services. And one of the more
popular rating services is Alexa.
If you take a look at Alexa's site and view my "vagabonders-supreme.net" traffic ranking,
you will see that today it is 1,173,180. This is a very terrible ranking. The lower
the ranking, the better the rank. For example, the #1 ranked site is Yahoo.
New Blogger
When the new version of Blogger was introduced somewhere around late 2006, I was unable
to publish "The Adventures of Tioga and George" under my domain name. Without getting
too technical, I had been publishing using FTP [File Transfer Protocol]. FTP allowed
me to publish my blog under my own domain name which is "vagabonders-supreme.net".
Under the new Blogger, I was unable to continue using FTP. I had to publish using
Blogspot.com which is hosted on Blogger's servers.
This one change caused my traffic
rankings to plummit because a great part of my readers visit my blog. Only my other
webpages continued to support my traffic ranking.
The miracle of the Custom Domain Name!
Blogger offered what seemed to be a perfect solution. I would continue to publish using
Blogger's "BlogSpot.com" which is hosted on Blogger's servers, but Blogger would "point"
or "publish" to my domain name.
This would mean that when you read "The Adventures of Tioga and George" you would
be on the "vagabonders-supreme.net" website. Traffic ranking should zoom to our proper
position. Advertisers would pay more for ads placed on my website. Wow!
However, Blogger's custom domain routine would not work for me! I was forced into
remaining on BlogSpot.com.
To be continued!
[This is Part #1 of a 3-part series.]
