About:Maximising Ad Revenue

Introduction

Travellerspoint users can earn money through their blog, featured photos and their contributions to the wiki travel guide. All you need is an AdSense account.

For detailed instructions on how to sign up for the program, go to this article: Ad Revenue Sharing.

Here, we will provide tips on ways to maximise your AdSense earnings.

The Golden Rule

To maximise your Google AdSense earnings, you need to increase the number of people seeing your ads.

The more people visit your articles, blog or pages with your photos on them, the more likely it is that they will click on one of the ads. The tips below are designed to help you get more eyeballs to your content.

General tips

Great content

One of the most important steps to making this happen is to make your content really good. If you're contributing an article to the travel guide, make sure it's a great resource for other travellers.

If you're writing a blog, make sure your posts are interesting and engaging to complete strangers. Check out these tips for improving your blog:

• Writing quality introductions
• 3 tips for keeping people interested
• Writing smart titles

Promote your content through social media

There are many sites on the internet where users can share links with each other. Some of these are excellent ways for you to promote your blog to a wider audience.

StumbleUpon:
StumbleUpon lets you "stumble" through the internet by downloading their toolbar. You can also give pages a "thumbs up", which is how you can share your blog, guide articles or featured photos.

To make the most of StumbleUpon, use it regularly and not just to promote your own content. The StumbleUpon crowd are especially big fans of beautiful photos, so if your photos have been featured, you may want to give them a thumbs up.

You can also make friends (you can befriend these TP folk if you'd like: Sam, Peter and Eric).

Del.icio.us:
Del.icio.us is one of the web's most popular social bookmarking sites. Like StumbleUpon, you sign up for an account and can then share cool links you find on the web.

Del.icio.us is a great place to bookmark guide articles you have written or contributed to. Really resourceful, helpful stuff is most likely to succeed.

Iloho:
Iloho is a travel site that allows you to share articles with the rest of the community. If you have written a helpful, entertaining or otherwise intriguing post in your blog or have contributed to a great article in the travel guide, folks at Iloho may love it. Sign up for an account and submit your articles.

Other social media sites to try:
We think the three sites above are probably the most useful ones to try, but here are a few other sites you could try to promote your content through:

• Digg - The biggest social network, Digg will only yield results if you have a big fanbase and a really interesting story, article or photo.
• Mixx - Mixx is like Digg, and it has a dedicated Travel section. To share your travel stories, feel free to join the Mixx group Travellers' Tales. Once again, way to be successful on Mixx is by submitting stuff that's really interesting or funny.
• Reddit - If you have a hilarious or incredible photo or story, Redditers may be interested.
• Facebook - Chances are you're already on Facebook. You may not know that you can display your Travellerspoint blog in your Facebook profile. This is a great way to get your Facebook friends to come along to your blog.

Travel guide-specific tips

Here are a bunch of ways for you to maximise the popularity of your guide articles (ie. get more people to see it).

Contribute to articles about popular places

If you help contribute to an article about a really popular place (say, Spain or London), you know that a lot of people will be visiting that article. So even if you have only contributed 20% of the article, the fact that the article will be visited a lot means that your ads stand a better chance of getting clicked.

Write articles about less common destinations

Conversely, if you write 100% of the article about a lesser-known destination, this means that every time an ad shows on that page, it will be yours. So the article may receive less visitors, but at least you'll get all the credit for the article.

Link to your articles

The more you link to articles you've contributed to, the more they will be visited. Besides providing a way for people to find the article, the links also help the article become more popular on Google.

At the very least, make sure your article is linked to from appropriate places in the travel guide (ie. link to the Madrid article from the Spain article... duh...). If you have a blog, be it on Travellerspoint or elsewhere, you can also link to articles from there.

Appearance

The appearance of an article can make a big difference. Pictures in an article can make the article look and feel a lot better. Take the time to look at other members photos and put them up. Also posting multiple photos across a longer article makes the article look nicer.

Writer shorter paragraphs can make a big difference. Reading from a computer screen is very different from reading from a book or piece of paper. Long paragraphs can make the eye feel tired and are easy to get lost in. Try to write shorter paragraphs then you would normally write for paper articles.

Useful Information

Having a good amount of useful information keeps people on an article. How much will someone read if all there was for Chicago was "A large city in the center of America." People will not keep reading an article and not show it to other people if there is too little information. If starting an article it is good to start with a decent amount of useful information so people will read the page and share it.

This does not mean you should wait to post an article until you have it completed. Just make sure that the major sections are covered to a decent degree such as the introduction, some sights, some hotels and basic getting there/away info. Other people can help fill in other information later on-just give it a good start.

Warning

Whatever you do, do not click on your own ads. Google can figure out if you've clicked on your own ads, and they don't take kindly to it. They may deactivate your account. If that happens, there's nothing Travellerspoint can do about it.