Adsense Performance by Country

You can now see the performance of your Adsense ads per country. From your Performance Report Tab, click 'Country' on the left-hand side navigation panel. Adsense will then show the earnings you get per country.

Historical data is not available though. You can only start showing earnings starting March 22, 2011.


[Source] [note: the screenshot above is not mine, but from the Adsense blog post.]

Google's Ad Market Share to Reach 43.5% in '11

According to the eMarketer blog, Google's online ad market share will reach 43.5% in 2011, rising from 38.9% in 2010. It is projected to increase to 47.6% in 2012.


Yahoo! will get 11.9% of the ad market pie, Facebook 7.7% and Microsoft 5.4%. 


[source]

New Adsense Interface

For several weeks now Adsense has been putting a new web interface in beta. I think the new one is more friendly and easier to decode. On the main landing page you can see, at first glance, how much you are earning for the day, month and the previous month. It also displays the finalized earnings, and how much you got recently paid.

Reports are accessible in the Performance Reports tab, where you can drill down and analyse more. You can check data such as number of clicks, click through rate, cost per click and estimated earnings for the day.

You can manage and create new ad units in the My Ads tab, and allow and/or block ads from your network through the Allow & Block Ads tab.

Content is King

Content is king, even in blogging. Visitors of your blog will keep coming back if you keep your content fresh and engaging. I recommend posting new entries at least once a week, more whenever you can. Nothing will turn off blog readers than finding stale blog posts in your site, and that would guarantee them not coming back again. Encourage your readers to post comments and discuss your posts. That way you will be able to keep them engaged to check on your posts and visit your blog often.

Starting a Blog, continued...

Starting a blog is easy enough. There are several sites on the Internet that offer free tools and hosting for blogs. I use Blogger.com as my host, but a budding blogger can also use other sites such as TypePad and LiveJournal. Social networking sites, such as Multiply, Friendster and MySpace, alsohas blogging features that their members can use. If you are going to do a photoblog, you may use Flickr, PhotoBucket or Picasa to host your images for free. A site called Twitter (twitter.com) is great if you want to do microblogging, in which your posts are limited to about 160 characters or less.

One of the most critical things you should remember about blogging is that you should blog about things or topics that you know about. For example, I blog about astronomy because amateur astronomy has been a passion of mine since college days, and it's something that I feel confident writing about. Discussing topics that you know and feel comfortable with can make keeping your blog easy, and your audience will appreciate it too if you can show some credibility about the topic of your blog. You don't have to have expert level knowledge about what you're blogging about but you should be able to post intelligent things about them.