Yesterday, Google invited me into a new AdSense program called custom placement packs. As part of the program, they wanted me to focus on 300x250 ad units above the fold as they are the ones they are selling. They also encouraged me to use Ad Placement. I've converted my top three blogs to use a 300x250 ad unit above the fold. I've also started tracking individual ad units. I'll report back later. You can preview my new layouts with the 300x250 ad units.

• iBLOGthere4iM
• The RSS Blog
• Meta-MySpace

More on the new program...

• Webmasterworld
• SERoundtable
• Nooti
• casthompson

Well, I've been testing ReviewMe now for more than a month and I'm pretty much prepared to say that it's fake and pointless. In that month plus, I've received three reviews. The first review was completely off topic for the targeted blog. The second and third review were relevant, but I received them in the 24 hours that followed me saying that I had never received an on-topic review request. That's simply too much of a coincidence. I'm now suspecting that the last two reviews were faked by ReviewMe in order to persuade a better review on this blog.

Initially I accepted the invite from ReviewMe solely because I found it had more ethical guidelines than PayPerPost, which concealed the fact that their posts were fake. With the change in policies at PayPerPost to be more open and with my experiences indicating that ReviewMe is faked, I'm more in favor of PayPerPost and I might even try them to find out if they are worthy.

More

• http://www.reviewme.com/
• http://www.webvertization.com/?guid=20061228124522
• http://www.webvertization.com/?guid=20061216110613
• http://www.webvertization.com/?guid=20061214080329

Earlier this month, I reported two minor issues with FeedBurner FAN network; that they were having performance problems and that my FAN earnings had dropped off a cliff. The performance problems seem to be disappearing and I haven't really noticed them at all these last few days. Alos, my earnings were down 85%, but are now only down 65% month-over-month. A slight improvement. At one point, I thought the earnings had fully recovered, but that last only a day. Rick Klau left a reply comment to explain that Q4 advertising tends to be a very strong.

I'm continually amazed at the unprofessionalism demonstrated by BlogAds. Are they so successful that they can get away with lying to their publishers and not answering their emails? As I've already written, I've had constant problems with BlogAds not expiring properly. Thrice, they lied that the bug was fixed and each time it quickly reoccured. The last time I complained, they didn't even bother replying to the email I sent them.

As part of a last effort to get my BlogAds producing, I tried joining more BlogAds networks. This is something that I've tried before, but I was only able to join a couple networks. In my effort I was told by BlogAds to email the network managers. My immediate thought was that this was lazy on their part. Couldn't they manage this themselves internally? Obviously not. I emailed the network admins and not one of them replied to my emails. Not one. When I complained that none of the network admins were replying to their emails, the response was that you sometimes have to send them many emails before they take action. Who runs a company this way?

Some interesting notes about my AdSense stats.

• Thursdays are my best click days with 5 of the top 9 days in aggregate clicks. Two Tuesday and 3 Mondays make the rest of the top 10.
• Wednesdays are my best impressions days with 4 of the top 8 days in aggregate impressions. This has nothing to do with Adsense, but rather my website, but its interesting that none of those Wednesdays are in my best click days.
• Thursdays are also my best CTR day with 3 of the top 5 days in CTR and 4 of the top 10. Again, no Wednesdays. But there are a couple Mondays, couple Tuesdays and couple Fridays.
• Fridays are my best CPM day with 3 of the top 5 days in CPM and 4 of the top 10.
• Thursday are again my best earnings day with 4 of the top 9 days in aggregate AdSense earnings.
• March is my best month with 7 of my top 10 days in aggregator earnings occuring in March. Oddly enough, I vacation every year in March.

It seems every month, a new major issue is raised by YPN publishers. This month, a recurring bug is confusing YPN publishers. Read more at Search Engine Roundtable. YPN has been around for well over a year and still seems to be struggling with bugs. Not a good sign. Some previous issues...

• Yahoo bans users for non-U.S. traffic.
• Yahoo bans users for MySpace traffic.
• Yahoo showcases spammer.

Here we are one year later and YPN is still only available to U.S. tax payers. What's up?

There's actually a formula behind making money with blogs. I'm going to explain it in a series of articles, or at least attempt to. This is part one of The Blogging Formula series and the content will be added to Ten Steps to Professional Blogging. The specific topic of this article is Term Value. Whenever you write a blog entry, the entry has some short and long-term value. Some blog entries are mostly short-term, while others are longer in term. Blog entries that have longer-term value, tend to create more real value, since the recurring revenues over time tends to exceed one-shot revenues.

Let's first look at the value of a short-term blog entry. This is an entry that is read by your readers in the days following its publication and rarely ever read again. The reason its never read again is because it has little residual value beyond the initial read by your readers, it doesn't get linked, it doesn't get any Google juice, maybe it doesn't even get indexed by Google. Here's a graph that shows a typical reading pattern for such a blog entry over time. Within 2 or 3 days, the hits tapper off quickly to nothing or near nothing.

The second type of blog entry is one that has long-term value. This type of blog entry gets re-blogged by other bloggers and becomes well indexed in Google. As people read related blog entries, they click thru to your blog entry and the hits tapper off slowly, but never really stop. You might also have written on a unique subject that is rarely blogged but often searches.

Up to this point, I've simplified the set of blog entries. The truth is that the two blog entries I describe are extremes of a scale. Every entry your write is somewhere along that scale. Further, the height of each curve depends both on the size and quality of your audience, and the quality of the blog entry. If you are Cory Doctorow, then your curve is much higher than mine and almost everybody else's.

Now think of these curves in aggregate. When you write more than one blog entry, then these curves are stacked on top of each other to determine your new visitor count. If you write blog entries with little residual value (type1), then you'll always have to blog new content to keep your hits at a constant level. On the other hand, if you write blog entries with lots of residual value, then with each new blog entry you'll actually be increasing your number of daily visitors.

The question becomes how do you write content with residual value? Very simple. Use weblog analytical tools to determine which of your blog entries are producing residual value. And don't try to guess which blog entries will produce longer-term values. I'm always amazed how the most insane of my blog entries get the longest term value. Note also that a high quality article does not necessarily have long-term value. For instance, writing about Y2K would have very little residual value. Writing about how lucky it is to get married on July 7th, 2007 would also have little residual value beyond August.

I'm currently having difficulty login into AdSense. I get the error message "Sorry, service is currently not available. Please try again later." Others are reporting similar. This doesn't seem to be a scheduled outage. Anybody else have similar problems or know anything? And I was having such a good AdSense earnings day :-(

Over the last six months as I tested FeedBurner FAN, I've been impressed at the growth in revenues. For December, it was my 3rd biggest source of revenue. Unfortunately, the honeymoon seems to be over. In the last few weeks, I've noticed a substantial response decline, some reporting issues and a drastic decrease in earnings. Not big issues yet, but something to be concerned about. Let's see how much earnings recover and if response times improve.

People are still asking if bloggers are really making money with AdSense.

• Matthew Hurst
• Darren Rowse

Well I do. I've been making a reasonable living as a part-time blogger for the last year and more. That's a second income as I've maintained a job as a well paid programmer. In November, I was laid-off and decided to see what I could make blogging full-time. I'm still not a 6-figure blogger, but I'm getting there. My daily hits have doubled these last two months. Income should follow.

Now, I know a lot of bloggers who write one post per week, put the AdSense at the bottom of their right sidebar and ask why they are making only $1 per month. In fact, that's the vast majority of bloggers. I didn't see substantial revenues until my 3rd year of blogging several times per day. This ain't no get rich quick scheme. You are gonna have to expend some time before the money comes in.

Thanks to Scott Kingery for the link [play tag with me].

Toivo Lainevool is reporting that the Performancing-PayPerPost deal has been cancelled.

Last week, I reported that I was gonna try AdsBlacklist. Today was the day. Unfortunately, the website seems to be completely broken. I had to load the Register page several times before I could fill out the form. Then the submit button failed. Oh well! If anybody has different luck, then ping me and I'll retry.

http://www.adsblacklist.com/

Those PayPal payments are coming in. First from FeedBurner, then from ReviewMe. $125 of the $225 I got from ReviewMe is going to SickKids, as promised. My wife is gonna be happy!

But where's that cheque from Google? What is wrong with Google? Why am I receiving my money via snailmail? I don't get it? Yes, I know some people get direct deposits, but I don't. I tried signing up when I got an email saying that Canadians were now eligible, but got an error when entering the banking info. I reported the error to Google and they responded that I couldn't sign up for direct deposit (no reason given) and I haven't heard back.