Before I begin to answer this question, I would like to let you know that I in fact own several topsites lists.  Not that my explanation would be unbiased or favor topsites lists, but I just wanted full disclosure.  With that said, it is my opinion that topsites lists are a handy tool to use if you are looking to increase your SERPs.  You of course have to use other methods for building backlinks, but they are just one more tool to use.

 Things to look for in a topsites list

You should always look for topsites lists that are in your niche.  Submitting to a general topsites list will not help you much because top sites lists usually require two way (reciprocal) links.  If you find a topsites list in your niche, make sure and check for unrelated/bad links before submitting to it.  A well run topsite will only link to sites within their niche.  Another thing to look for is a good design to the topsite.  If it looks like the owner of the topsite takes a little pride in their topsite list, then it will be more likely to pay you good dividends in the future.

 How do I find a topsites list in my niche?

The best way to find one is to use a search engine and search for “niche rank” or “niche top sites” where niche is your website niche.  Another easy way to find a topsites list is to look at some of your competitor’s sites and look for small buttons saying things like “Vote for this site” or “Ranked #3 on sometopsites.com”

As I mentioned I operate a few topsites - Here are some you can add your niche site to:

Green Top Sites

Aquarium Rank

Recipe Top Sites 

I have been in the webmastering for profit business for about 4 years now.  I have read and studied to the Nth degree about things such as ad placement, SEO, backlinks, niches, CPCs, or eCPM.  While all of this information is handy, I have come to one simple conclusion over the years: For a website to be successful, the webmaster must believe in the content he or she is writing.  The sites I started because I was genuinely interested in the subject I was writing about have always outperformed the sites I made because I thought they would be good earners.

Not only are these sites that I am interested in the best earners, but they seem to be the sites that take the least amount of work to maintain or add new content to.  I cannot say for sure if it just seems like less work to write for these sites or if it is indeed less work to write for these sites.  For one thing, if I am writing about something I am interested in, it takes a lot less research to make coherent and helpful content.  Another thing is that I am quite certain my sincerity comes through when I am writing about things I truly enjoy.

My little tidbit of advice for those of you who are just starting in the webmastering game is to figure out what it is you believe in - what it is that you are passionate about and build a site around that.   Just because it doesn’t rank in the top 250 CPC niches doesn’t mean it can’t earn very good money.  What it does mean is that you aren’t going to have a ridiculous amount of competition writing the same boring content on the same boring subject.

Go ahead and give yourself a site to believe in.

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As of February 2008, Google Adsense requires that all sites that show Adsense ads must have a privacy policy that informs users that a thrid party (Google) may collect information about them via cookies and click tracking. It is easy for webmasters to add this to an existing privacy policy or just to create a privacy policy. I have done that for all of my websites, but it is a little different for a blog. As a solution for hotblogster.com, I have decided to simply write a post informing users of our privacy policy.

Well,  I gave Chitika Premium ads a shot and it just could not compare to my Google Adsense Earnings.  With a similar number of impressions, Google outperformed Chitika Premium an amazing 80:1 over a three day period.  On top of this, many webmasters are reporting the same decrease in earnings.  It seems for many webmasters that Premium doesn’t even pay as well as the old Chitika.

Well I decided to try the new Chitika Premium Ads today on Aquariumlife.net.  I get a lot of US search engine traffic so if Chitika keeps its promise of high eCPMs on sites that have US search enigine traffic, I may decide to use them on a full time basis.  Here is what Chitika says about their Premium Ads:

• Extremely High CTR and eCPMs
• Chitika|Premium Behaviorally Targets to Your Search Engine Traffic (and more!)
• Compatible with Google AdSense

I will keep you posted on the outcome of the Chitika Premium Ads.

One of the most important things you can do to drive traffic to your website is to get search engine traffic.  The undisputed leader of search engine traffic is Google.com.  As many of you may know, one part of how Google determines your search engine ranking is based on how many quality backlinks you have to your site.  Successful webmasters have always submitted their sites to listings in directories with the goal of increasing backlinks to their sites.  The question now is:  Has google reduced the value of listing in these directories to the point that is no longer helps to submit to them.

 There has been much discussion on the subject on webmaster forums on the Internet with no clear answer.  My personal view on the subject is that directory submissions are still a viable way to increase pagerank and increase search engine traffic.  The key is that directory submissions must be made intelligently and purposefully.  Never use an automated directory submission service or script.  Any directory that would allow your link to be approved with this method is undoubtedly allowing “bad neighborhood” sites to be approved as well.  If you really want your site to be listed with hundred of viagra, gambling or porn sites, then automated submission is the way to go.

Using a few simple rules for directory submission should ensure that you are not wasting your time.

#1 - Always manually submit your sites.  This ensures they get listed in the right category in the directory and give you a chance to see if the directory is any good.

#2 - I am not going to say never pay to get added to a directory.  I will just say that there are plenty of quality directories out there who will let you submit for free.  If you find a really great niche directory then a paid submission may well be worth it.

#3 - Submit often but not in huge numbers.  I usually submit my sites to about three directories a day.  It is not a huge amount of work that way and it elliminates any risk of being sand-boxed due to generating too many links too quickly.

#4 - Check out the directory before submitting to it.  Make sure its not full of spam sites or made for adsense sites.  Another great thing to do is to check it out in archive.org to see how long it has been a directory.

 With all of the uncertainty, I am going to conduct an experiment.  My newest site (still in development) is VeggieSoaps.com.  I am going to only submit this site to directories to see what kind of page rank and search engine results are produced.  I will update this site to see what progress is being made with only directory submissions.

It can be a real pain to switch back and forth between contextual ad networks such as Google Adsense or Yahoo’s YPN.  Still, it is good to check from time to time to see which ad network will perform the best on your website or blog.  One of the easiest ways I have found to manage your advertisements is to use server side includes.  On my websites I have an include statement to add the advertisement code to each advertisement area.  It is easy to create a server side include and doing this will allow you to change all or some of your advertisements simultaneously. The normal method for adding contextual advertisement code to your website is to cut and paste it onto each of the ad areas.  The problem with this is when you make an update to color or decide to change advertisers, you have to change the codes on each page.  Server side includes will allow you to overcome this obstacle.

First of all, I need to create a file to hold the advertiser code in.  I usually name them by the size of the ad, but you could name them for specific pages, or even areas on a page.  Let’s assume we are creating a server side include file for a 160×600 ad.  We simply create a file called 120×600.inc and place the code in it. 

Now, instead of placing the actual advertiser code in my 120×600 advertisement area, I just place the following code:

<!–#include file=”120×600.inc” –>

This statement does reproduces the code contained in the .INC file and adds it to the web page.  That is all that is needed to use server side includes.  Now the beauty of this technique is that to edit all of the 160×600 ads on your entire site, you just need to edit the contents of the 120×600.inc file.

I often save different versions of the different .INC files in folders that describe their content.  For instance, I may have a ypn/120×600.inc and an adsense/120×600.inc file.  When I want to use adsense, I copy the file in the adsense folder to my website document root and every page is instantly updated.  When I want to use ypn, I copy the file in my ypn folder to once again update every page. 

 A word of caution:  Most contextual advertisers will not allow you to use two different contextual advertisers on the same page.  Make sure that you update all of the files at the same time if you have two different ad formats on the same page.  I do this by copying an entire folder of INC files at once to ensure they are all updated with code from only one publisher network.

What is eCPM?

eCPM is earning per 1000 impressions.  For instance, if you have an eCPM of $2.33 then you are making on average $2.33 for every 1000 times an ad is displayed.  If you have 2 of the ads on each page, it would only take around 500 pageviews to earn $2.33.

What is Page eCPM?

Page eCPM has a different calculation method.  It calculates earnings based on the number of times a page is displayed.  Thus if you are displaying 3 ads on one page it will still only calculate 1 page view.  If you have a Page eCPM of $2.33 and have 2 ads on every page then it would take 1000 pageviews to earn the $2.33. 

What does AdSense have to do with this?

All of the major advertising networks except one use standard eCPM to calculate eCPM numbers.  Yahoo Publisher Network, Valueclick, Tribal Fusion, and Burst, are all fairly standard so comparing eCPM numbers between those networks can help publishers choose which is the most profitable.  AdSense, however uses Page eCPM for its calculations.  This skews the eCPM figures in their favor.  For instance, if you had a site with 3 ads on every page that was earning $3.00 eCPM with AdSense and only earned $1.50 eCPM with YPN then it would be easy to mistakenly conclude Adesense was more profitable.  In reality the Page eCPM of YPN would be $4.50 compared to AdSense’s $3.00 eCPM.  Likewise if actual eCPM was used to calculate AdSense then AdSense eCPM would only be $1.00.  Either way once the figures are compared apples to apples, what looks like a decrease in profits by 50% when switching to YPN is actually a 50% increase in profits. 

What does this mean to me?

In my experience AdSense has still been the better earner on most of my sites but one should be careful when choosing which advertising network to use.  If you notice that earnings are way up even thought the eCPMs don’t seem to indicate it then it is probably a difference in calculation methods - particularly if there was no large change in the traffic to your site.

Are you looking for a good advertising program for use with Google Adsense? Chitika may just be the solution you have been looking for. As long as you use Chitika in non-contextual mode then it complies to the Google Adsense terms of service. In Chitika’s support center it says the following regarding use with Adsense.

“Chitika cannot speak on Google’s behalf. However, some of our clients who have contacted Google have been informed that it is ok to use eMiniMalls with Google Adsense when used in non-contextual mode. By default, the eMiniMalls code is set to be non-contextual.

eMiniMalls service has no exclusivity conditions. You can choose to use eMiniMalls with any other ad service. If you are concerned about Google AdSense exclusivities, then please note that our eMiniMalls are not text ads and they don’t even look like contextual text ads. We display products and best offers for those products from various merchants.”

Chitika eMinimalls will perform much better if you add keywords to the listing. This will help to ensure that the ad displayed on the page is relevant to the content on the page.

Bloggers and Webmasters have reported particular success when using Chitika eMinimalls on articles that review specific items. You can simply plug in keywords for the item being reviewed and the reader has a quick and easy link to click if they are interested in purchasing. I have used Chitika eMinimalls in combination with Adsense on aquariumlife.net and it has generated an additional 15% overall revenue. Given that the placement is at the very bottom of the pages it seems to be a good combination. I am doing some experimentation with eMinimalls in more prominent locations and I will report back on its effectiveness.