Admob is still a revaltively new advertising network. That didn’t keep Google from purchasing them in 2009. Admob is completely taken care of financially, which means everybody wins at the end of the day. Focusing on mobile traffic primarily, Admob is continually providing publishers like you and me with tools to increase our margins. The most important number you should pay attention to is your eCPM (i.e, the amount you earn per 1,000 impressions).

One of the best ways to manipulate and hopefully INCREASE your revenue is through the use of Admobs ad filters Once you have an accepted mobile website in the Admob publisher program, you will see Reports, Setup, and Tools links on your Admob dashboard homepage. Click ‘Tools‘. On this page you will be able to manipulate a series of filters that ultimately determine which advertisements are displayed on your mobile website. Many people disagree with “Age-Orientated Ads”, which is why it is turned off by default. But that didn’t keep them from having the Gambling or their own Affiliate Ads from showing up by default. Personally, I like to remove any categories that would not seem relevant to my website to any degree. I recommend that everybody turns image ads on.

Be careful not to go crazy filtering your Admob ads, however. Though it might makes sense to remove categories that have nothing to do with your website, you would be surprised the kind of products there are in the free market that might interest one of your visitors.

At the end of the day, the advertisers through Admob determine the value of your mobile traffic. By filtering categories, you are telling certain advertisers that you don’t want anything to do with them. Your ultimate goal is to deliver the most relevant advertisements to your mobile visitors and increase clicks and your revenue. And since you own the website, you typically know what your visitors want.

Do you have an Admob tips or tricks on how to increase revenue?  Feel free to comment.  I may start a list if I get some quality contributions.  I’m not trying to promote Admob; just dish out ideas on how to make more money

Dropbox is a relatively new online file backup service tool.  It allows you to create shared folders so you can universally share files across any internet device.  Say for instance you wanted to outsource a programming job to a programmer in India.  You and your employee can both have dropbox installed, and share a folder on your computer that contains all the database and web files needed for the job.  Dropbox gives you the ability to give shared file access to you and groups.

Dropbox is handy for webmasters for two reasons: 1. it gives you the ability to easily share large files (of any type) with others. 2. it gives you peace of mind knowing that your valuable files are backed up on an independent, third-party server.

Yes it’s free.

Yes it works really well.

Join.

Here’s a somewhat extensive list of very useful, lite-weight, portable FTP clients.   Say you’re going to school or at a public library where you’re restricted from installing any applications on the computer.   With a portable FTP program installed on, let’s say your flash drive, you can run the program on whatever computer you’re plugged in to.  Again, you can use any device that uses flash memory (flash drive, iPod, memory stick, etc).  Download any of the programs below (I prefer Filezilla), run the file, and use your flash memory as the install location.  Cheers.

Portable FileZilla

Download

Portable Smart FTP

Download

i.FTP

Download

Keyword Research

I use Google’s Adword’s keyword volume tool to look to see if a keyword is even worth targeting in the search engines.

[ https://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal ]

Backlink Analyzer

I use this tool every so often when I want to see how many backlinks my site is getting.  Occasionally I’ll use it to spy on a few of my competitors – but don’t tell any one that .

[ http://sitening.com/seo-tools/backlink-analyzer/ ]

Page Rank Checker

Okay, page rank has NOTHING to do with how well your website performs in the search engines.  Are you sure Kyle?  Yes, I’m sure.  I’ve experienced a complete page rank stripping (from PR4 to PR0) overnight, and my website’s search engine result pages (SERPs) continued to go UP!  Page rank is simply Google’s attempt at giving a website a “rating”.  I do use it occasionally because advertisers consider page rank when buying links from you.

[ http://sitening.com/seo-tools/page-rank/ ]

Google Analytics

Are you not running Google Analytics or some other kind of website statistic harvester?  The information I get from my Analytics reports dictates to me about 75% of the work I do.  It’s free and awesome.

[ http://analytics.google.com ]

SEO Analyzer

This tool tells you the top 5 keywords you’re getting traffic from, as well as a wide array of other useful information about your web presence.

[ http://sitening.com/seo-tools/seo-report/ ]

Again, these aren’t just any SEO tools.  These come from my own, personal collection of bookmarks that I visit frequently.  Consider them very resourceful for you and website(s).  Hope this helps!

I’m all about major upgrades.  Did you know that WordPress has received almost 2 Million downloads since 2.3 was released?  WordPress is free, easy to use, but most important, stable.  Since WordPress has become such a widely used Content Management System (CMS), the coders on the dark side are always trying to breach its security to take advantage of people’s websites.  So, here is 2.5 to keep up with the security issues, as well as a few more features the WordPress team added.

If you’re upgrading: ALWAYS backup your MySQL database and your WordPress directory files.

WordPress 2.5, the culmination of six months of work by the WordPress community, people just like you. The improvements in 2.5 are numerous, and almost entirely a result of your feedback: multi-file uploading, one-click plugin upgrades, built-in galleries, customizable dashboard, salted passwords and cookie encryption, media library, a WYSIWYG that doesn’t mess with your code, concurrent post editing protection, full-screen writing, and search that covers posts and pages.

TLA’s Text Link Price Calculator requires you to enter your website address, website category, # of text links to be sold, and to choose between site-wide or single-page links. To the right of this form is a “map” of a standard website layout. You choose where you plan on placing the text links and the price is weighted accordingly.

The results aren’t that accurate – as in, the tool doesn’t consider many other factors that might affect the price you might charge your advertisers. There is definitely room for improvement. Right now it seems their algorithm for finding an estimated price is based on link popularity, link position on page, single or site-wide, quantity of links being sold, and possibly some other calculations made behind the scenes.  For noobs or semi-experienced people, this tool might give a good example of the “going rates” for text link these days.

You might also be interested in Patrick Gavin’s Link Building Blog.

This is not an advertisement.

I stumbled upon WebsiteGrader.com just a few moments ago. All you do is put in your URL, a few keywords you’re ranking in, your competitor’s website (optional), and your e-mail. It will very nicely list a variety of information about your website, and maybe even more importantly, your competitors.

I just found out that one of my websites is starting to overrun my competitor in the search engines.  Hooray!

It was one of PC Magazine’s Top 100 Undiscovered Websites, and I can see why.  A very nifty tool if you ask me.