Today via, MindValleyLabs, I learned about Quantcast.com.

Quantcast is a new media measurement service that enables advertisers to view audience reports for millions of sites and services to build their brands with confidence. The free service empowers publishers to demonstrate the unique value of their audiences by tagging their websites, videos, widgets and games for direct measurement.

I plugged in the URL of my flagship site and was amazed at all the information about my audience that I could immediately glean from Quantcast’s reports.

I was actually shocked at how young my visitors are, and now that I know, I feel I can target ads and products toward them much more effectively.

I also saw that I have a high percentage of ‘drive by’ traffic compared to loyal visitors. Adding a blog or forum will, hopefully, alter that ratio.

Give it a try and see how your perceptions of your audience differs from Quantcast’s profile of your site. You might be surprised too.

Today is a holiday. To be specific, it’s the very first Family Day Ontario has ever had. Back in Alberta, we had family day holidays for years, but this is a first for Ontario.

Anyway, being a stay-at-home, homeschooling family, we get enough family time. If we tried to add any more, we’d get sick of eachother.

So I’m spending part of Family Day working on my site.

While I haven’t worked out all the complexities in my theme design, I did easily set up everything else. Using plugins for contact forms, a forum, and a way to take charge of my menus was a breeze.  I’m using pages for the actual site and posts for the back-end blog, and the whole thing seems to be coming together sooo much more smoothly than I thought it would.

I had initially decided to use XSitePro for my new site but after beginning to read “How to Build An Affiliate Website with Wordpress” I’m reconsidering that decision. After all, there are a lot of advantages to using WordPress for any site - - from RSS to built in commenting abilities, to the myriad of plug-ins that could make life and expansion much easier. Templating WordPress, though, is harder for me than making a template for XSitePro, and it’s harder for me to wrap my head around the changes that’ll need to be made to a default Wordpress theme to make it work for what I’ve got planned.

Decisions, decisions….

So, I’m going to take tonight to study the WP Affiliate book, along with the free “Wordpress SEO for Beginners” from Blog Oh Blog and Teli Adlam’s free “Beginner’s Guide to Using and Building Traffic with Feedburner” report.

If I feel confident and enthusiastic enough to proceed with WordPress tomorrow, I’ll set up a blog and see where it leads. Otherwise, I’ll go back to my XSitePro plan and save WordPress for a future project.

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Add Ebay to YOUR blog

Two blogs, created on the same day, on two brand new domain names with no history or prior traffic.

No incoming links other than Technorati thus far.

One has Adsense on it, the other doesnt

15 posts on each three days later, and I checked Google.

The blog without Adsense was completely spidered and in the results. Every single post was there. The blog with Adsense had only the index page in the results.

Granted, it’s too small a sample to be significant, and it might just be a fluke, but I find it interesting nonetheless.

It wouldn’t surprise me if Google would penalize sites that, when they are spidered for the very first time, show Adsense. That would be a great way to catch made for Adsense (MFA) sites, since they have Adsense from the get-go, while “real” sites will focus on content first and monetization later.

I got an email a week ago from Google Adsense asking me to place more 300X250 size ads, text and image enabled, on one of my sites.

Apparently, this is the size most preferred by large advertisers, and they’ll pay a higher price for above-the-fold ads in this size format on quality sites.

So, I’m changing large rectangles that are text only to medium text and image ad units to see how things work out.

The email also recommended using the “ad placements feature” to define the new slots, so I made new channels for each, even though I’ve got no idea how this is supposed to work.

Has anyone else tried this? Am I shooting myself in the foot by changing ad unit sizes from one that has been a cash cow till this point?
Below is an excerpt from the email I received…

After a recent review of your site, we would like to include xxxxxxx.com in our custom placement packs program.  Custom placement packs are selections of individually-reviewed sites designed for our largest brand advertisers.   

 We would like to feature your site more frequently in these advertiser packages, but to do so, we need you to place more image and text-enabled medium rectangle ad units (300×250) on your site. Visit https://www.google.com/adsense/adformats to see a sample of the medium rectangle unit.

 The medium rectangle is the most demanded size among our brand advertisers that utilize these packages for both text and image ads. These advertisers want to ensure they reach visitors on high quality sites like yours, and are willing to bid more for ads prominently displayed on these sites.  They require that the units be placed “above the fold” on a page so that the ads are immediately visible to your site’s visitors without scrolling down.

 If you decide to add medium rectangle units to your site, please notify us by replying to this email so that we can begin featuring your site in more of our advertiser packages.