anthroblogia

I just started a new blog called Tropical Gardening as an experiment in different, more focused/hobby type blog – aka a ‘niche’ blog. Just to see what it’s like and to try out ways of attracting traffic to it. It should be quite fun – I’ll be concentrating on just using photos from my garden and brief commentaries, and it will also be a way of keeping track of changes in the garden. It’s always nice to see how things have grown over time It means there'll be less gardening posts on this blog though - I want to concentrate more on my research here.

For this blog I use Serendipity - it’s an open source platform that I’d recommend to anyone out there, but actually most blogs I see are using Blogger – although Wordpress seems to be more popular with the dedicated ‘problogger’ types. For the new blog I’m using the typical Blogger platform, with a blogspot address; this has proven to be a good idea so far as I get to experience what most bloggers do. I hadn’t used it for a few years, and it’s got a lot more user friendly, with easy ways to change the layout, add blogrolls, etc.


Anyway, I put Adsense on it, but since it’s the same account as this blog I can’t tell if anyone is clicking on the other one. So, decided to separate them in ‘channels’, but when I indicated the url for the new blog I got an error message telling me “URL cannot contain a Google host”. I googled that and got confused with this
Google Sites Help answer that said

“At the present time Google AdSense code can not be used with Google Sites. Any code that has been added through a gadget or iframe will be rejected by the AdSense team.”

WTF? Weird! Why does Blogger have an AdSense widget and all that if you’re not meant to use it?? Is it possible, as Debt Prison suggests, that they are going to pull all AdSense from all Blogger sites?? That would be a major move – there must be a massive amount of people who use the Blogger/blogspot platform for some AdSense revenue. If AdSense was not allowed on Blogger, they would surely all migrate elsewhere.

Then I found a forum where ‘farmboy’ says

“Just login to your adsense account as usual and create the code complete with channels, colors and whatever else you want. Copy the code.

Then go to your blogger account, click to add a HTML/Javascript feature and paste in the code.”

It worked for me! And now I have the two channels

So, in any case that's a good solution to that problem but I still wonder about this 'no AdSense on Google site thing'... Anybody got any idea?


**Update 14/10/08** See the comment below for an explanation. Also, I covered up more information on the screenshot because, according to ABC Blog Tips

"Do not disclose confidential information about your account like the CTR, CPM and income derived via individual ad units or any other confidential information they may reveal to you. However, you may reveal the total money you make as per recent updates to the TOS."

So in fact I was covering up the right thing, and showing the wrong thing! Argh! There's a list of 18 of these 'Don'ts' on his blog if you're interested.

Woohoo! I finally got round to installing Adsense ads

OK, my noobness is glaringly obvious, but I’m interested to see how it does.

I’ve shifted the Nuffnang ad to a banner at the top, which is recommended as one of the best placements for ads, and the Adsense is on the top right.
There are various eye-tracking studies out there which confirm this - such as this one which shows the gaze going top left to right, down then up left and down again:

This one shows more concentration on the left side:


I may consider moving the sidebar to the left eventually, but we’ll see…

In any case, I have still to get one single ad from Nuffnang, which is a bit disappointing as I have achieved their minimum of 20 unique visitors for a while. I’ve averaged about 550 per week for the last month according to their stats, of which 26% are from Malaysia which makes… hmm… 20.4 Malaysians per day on average. Oh well, maybe it is too little after all…