Category: Monetizing Content

Content is the key to SEO, A category of articles with a focus on efficiently monetizing content, creating unique content is not an easy task creating content with a goal to monetize motivates the content creation further.

  • Solved AdSense AMP Auto-Ads WordPress Not Showing Up 2020

    AdSense can be displayed on AMP Pages and Posts on WordPress with many options from manually adding code snippets and using plugins.

    Enabling Auto-Ads Option – AdSense Account

    This is the first step if you want to display Auto Ads on AMP enabled Posts.

    The option is on your AdSense Account page, see the screenshot below click on the AMP is On

    Once you click on the AMP is On, a new Window Will Open
    Note: this option appears when you have valid AMP pages on your site.

    You have to turn on the toggle follow Step 1, Step 2 and click on Done.

    Adding AdSense Codes using Reusable Blocks

    If you need to add AdSense in your posts specifically at a place while you are writing a new post, you can save the html code in a block and add that to your post anywhere,

    On your Adsense Dashboard you need to copy the Ad unit Code

    adsense

    Go to Ads > By Ad Unit > Click on the ” < > ” Get Code Option, You will get an a Code Generetor Page

    Copy the Code Snippets in the AMP Tab next to HTML tab

    Go to your posts and add a html block

    Once the block is added select to use the block as a Reusable Block See the Screenshot below

    You have to click on the 3 Dots and in the options for the Block select Add to Reusable Blocks

    Give it a name that you can remember like AdSense ADS Slot 1, so whenever you want you can use the block anywhere in your content.

    Manually Adding AdSense Ads – All Posts After the_content

    You can add these codes to your functions.php, I recommend using a child theme to do that or use Code Snippets Pro plugin to add these as code snippets.

    This is a free plugin available at the the WordPress Repository
    add_filter ('the_content', 'insertAdSesnseSlot');
    function insertAdSesnseSlot ($content) {
       if(is_single()) {
    	  $content.= '<div style="content-align:center;">';
    	  $content.= '<p><b>Sponsored Links</b></p>';
          $content.= '<amp-ad width="100vw" height="320" type="adsense" data-ad-client="ca-pub-123456789101112" data-ad-slot="123456789" data-auto-format="rspv" data-full-width="">';
          $content.= '<div overflow="">';
          $content.= '</div>';
          $content.= '</amp-ad>';
    	  $content.= '</div>';
       }
       return $content;
    }

    Manually Adding AdSense Ads after second paragraph of each post

    //Insert ads after second paragraph of all the single post content.
    add_filter( 'the_content', 'prefix_insert_post_ads' );
    function prefix_insert_post_ads( $content ) {
     $ad_code = '<div style="content-align:center;"><p><b>Sponsored Links</b></p><amp-ad width="100vw" height="320" type="adsense" data-ad-client="ca-pub-123456789101123" data-ad-slot="123456789" data-auto-format="rspv" data-full-width="">
      <div overflow=""></div></div>
    </amp-ad>';
     if ( is_single() && ! is_admin() ) {
     return prefix_insert_after_paragraph( $ad_code, 2, $content );
     }
    return $content;
    }
    // Function to do this
    function prefix_insert_after_paragraph( $insertion, $paragraph_id, $content ) {
     $closing_p = '</p>';
     $paragraphs = explode( $closing_p, $content );
     foreach ($paragraphs as $index => $paragraph) {
     if ( trim( $paragraph ) ) {
     $paragraphs[$index] .= $closing_p;
     }
     if ( $paragraph_id == $index + 1 ) {
     $paragraphs[$index] .= $insertion;
     }
     }
     return implode( '', $paragraphs );
    }

    Manually Adding AdSense Auto-Ads Code in Header.php

    Open your Appearance > Theme Editor > Header.php
    After the <head> tag add :

    <script async custom-element="amp-auto-ads"
            src="https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0/amp-auto-ads-0.1.js">
    </script>

    After the Body Tag <body> add :

    <amp-auto-ads type="adsense"
            data-ad-client="ca-pub-12345678910111234">
    </amp-auto-ads>

    Adding AdSense using Insert Headers and Footers Plugin

    By WpBeginner available free at the WordPress Plugins Repository
    adsense

    Similar to adding manually you can also add the same if you use Insert Headers and Footers a plugin by Wp-Beginner

    Adding AdSense using the Google Site Kit Plugin

    By Google official team free at the WordPress Plugins Repository

    Go to Site Kit > Settings > Adsense > Turn On The Toggle

    adsense site kit

    Let Site Kit Place Adsense code on your site turned On will automatically get the ads showing up on your site.

    Using AMP Auto Ads Plugin By Weston Ruter

    Here is the link of the plugin, that you can download and upload to your plugins directory
    https://gist.github.com/westonruter/a41573b932e24810b09949136b9a8445

    After Adding the plugin go to WordPress Dashboard > Settings > Reading

    On this reading options page, you just have to add your publisher id with complete like
    ca-pub-123456789101123

    Here is a screenshot

    adsense by weston ruter

    Cons and Pros of Using AdSense Auto-Ads on AMP on WordPress

    Cons  

    • Known bugs Auto Ads Not Showing Up in AMP https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/issues/28254 and many more open bugs for problems with amp auto-ads.
    • Fewer Options for Ads: All Ad Options are not available for AMP like for the Non-Amp Sites, mainly In-Article, in-feed, Link ads.
    • Auto Ads Can show up anywhere on the site, that means anywhere between your content that can ruin the design of the site.

    • More AdSense Ad Impressions with AMP so better monetization of your content overall.
    • AdSense Auto-Ads doesn’t require a fallback for browsers like duckduckgo that do not support Ads and tracking.

    Conclusions and Checklist

    1. AdSense for AMP on WP can also be displayed by other WordPress plugins available, pro versions etc, the options above are most lightweight to use with almost no effect on the performance of the site.
    2. Never Cache the Adsense JavaScript or Ad Codes with any caching plugins that won’t show ads as AdSense uses cookies and analytics to show related ads.
    3. Never use your own extra CSS or your own codes inside AdSense codes.
    4. AdSense not showing up can be a reason with the bugs that are open and contributors already working on the same you can track them at the AMP HTML Project at Github.
    5. Another way to find out if your ads don’t display is using your chrome console by Inspect Element, various other reasons can affect the non-display of the Auto-Ads or Normal Amp Ads like Cookies if they are blocked or are not secured on your server and CORS Policy of your Server or Hosting.
    6. Proper placement of ads.txt file is also a must to check if the Ads are not displaying.
    7. Amp pages should be valid to get AMP Ads, you can either use AMP Original Plugin to get validations or check your pages manually with an AMP Validator Tool.
    8. If you use Cloudflare Rocket Loader you need to ignore the AdSense script from loading to the loader here How can I have Rocket Loader ignore specific JavaScripts? when using Cloudflare on your website.

  • 20 Definitive Reasons for No Traffic On My Blog in 2020

    Here is a list of 20 Reasons for No Traffic on a Blog in 2020, I have written 20 Reasons you can please add more in the comments.

    Primary Reason: No New Visitors No New Traffic to the Blog

    This post is finding out reasons why blogs quit for no visitors

    If your blog doesn’t get organic traffic new visits even after many good efforts of creating content,
    that can frustrate a lot,

    you just keep on looking at the analytics, who visited your blog from which country what was the time spent on a particular post and so on.

    Well, Does that Make Sense?

    While as they say it all starts with a domain, an idea or a niche, it would never make sense to quit your blog,
    rather finding out reasons for no visitors is what your target should be if you follow your niche correctly just stick to what is required you won’t ever quit writing your blog.

    Finding reasons for No Traffic

    No traffic could be many valid reasons, here are some that I find relevant, you may add more in the comments below.

    Poor Design Worst User Experience Leading to No Traffic

    A poorly designed blog would never engage the visitors to read more, follow a blog or revisit it.

    Blogs that have lots of design elements, poor accessibility scores, for designs usually make the user quit the page and never return,

    It’s just same as visiting a new restaurant that has an ambience and food you are comfortable with and would repeat the visits.

    Always remember that first impression is the last!

    No Traffic for Not having a responsive layout

    This is one of the major reasons for lesser or no organic traffic, mobile-friendly pages that are responsive in all screen resolutions, cross-browser compatible, use technology like AMP for blogs are likely to get more impressions and rank higher.

    If you ignore how your website looks on a mobile screen most likely you will lose the traffic from search results.

    No Traffic as of Slow Pageload Speeds

    A visitor is most likely to leave your page. If the content loads slow, never loads or has errors, reasons can be many like not optimised images, poor hosting, weird server configuration, no use of CDN’s or in short no focus on the core web vitals.

    This performance now includes First Contentful Paint, Time to Interactive, Speed Index, Total Blocking Time, Largest Contentful Paint, Cumulative Layout Shift,  Critical Request Chains, Critical path latency, request counts and much more added frequently.

    Here is a list of many tools to check the performance of your website.

    Every page speed tool has its own term to determine the performance like Yslow considers DNS lookups as a performance score, while many other tools don’t consider this as a performance score.

    No Traffic as I am Giving away a damn to SEO

    SEO is not just getting the green lights on your WordPress Seo Plugin, It’s definitely beyond that or much more beyond that, The search engines are smarter than you can imagine, they change with the time improve with the technology stacks, your SEO plugin goes by the wish of the Developer how he wants it to be,

    I can see many plugins most popular one like Yoast has lots of open bugs, pending enhancements from years, ignoring then on its own with the one who suffers is the new blog who would require to match everything to outshine.

    Your blog won’t get organic traffic if you don’t follow how a search engine expects your content to be crawled, Things like Schema, Structured data play a vital role in the correct SEO strategy and plan.

    Posts that are in the Rich Snippets get the most clicks, more impressions. As soon as your posts hit the rich snippets for certain keywords, you would see a jump in your organic traffic.

    Greed to Monetize More More Ads Less Content So No Traffic

    With the greed to make money from a blog initially, placing more and more advertisements after each paragraph, on the fixed widgets on the footer, headers everywhere, adding affiliate links to almost all your lines you write, to monetise the blog whether or not its useful to the readers or visitors is another reason for no organic traffic.

    If you include more advertisements that eventually load more scripts, have more DNS lookups and more cookies making your page slow.

    Wasting time looking Income Reports of an old Successful Blog

    Most of the times new blogs get lured with the income charts, fake or real income disclosures, screenshots of an old blog site,

    Never understanding the real way they made success it wasn’t overnight, decades of work sticking to a single category, working contributing, building a community, helping in forums how pleasant the approach could be,

    only following the income of a blogger would not make you earn the same income even if if you follow them whatever they have done.

    I have seen some old blogs, and it has just become rather I would call it a weird trend to show off the income reports,

    but why only because they want to lure you with success stories, want you to follow them what they did to make money online, and then click on the affiliate links and make them more famous or richer?

    Content creation should be unique in your own way, not followed by how someone made a commission with affiliate programs or sponsored ads. So, Grow Up! Go to Work Create the Content.

    Please keep patience your time will don’t quit, keep on creating more and more good content.

    For the bloggers flaunting the income reports can let success make the noise please,

    Publishing Irrelevant Baseless Stuff for No Traffic

    I follow many blogs, even subscribe to the newsletters but why would I follow or subscribe?
    Only for some very good reasons like,

    Blogs that have helped me solve a problem, or have given me a reason to explore what’s new with them, as a visitor I would never return to a blog that has irrelevant and baseless stuff,

    With irrelevant I mean no relevance to the title and the post, like in this post I am writing about “Why the Blogs Quit”, So I should not write the tips what can be done along with each reason in detail.

    Yes, maybe a separate post would make sense.

    No Niche Topic, Blogging about Everything

    I have seen some Tech blogs discussing hosting. Also, writing about yoga, organic farming and writing about how to get admission to that Great University, to me as a visitor that looks like a piece of scrapped content nothing more than that, and I quit reading that blog.

    If you need to blog, you have to stick to your niche. Remember it’s your blog and not a country’s national newspaper.

    Backlinks From Everywhere

    When a new blog is built, you just thrive to get a backlink, irrespective of where the referral traffic comes from how authoritative the domain is, whats the class of the IP address it has?

    The link from a social media posting, again and again, spamming in social media groups, in comments to every other blog you visit just to make a backlink can also get you banned and your social media account can be suspended for spamming with posting links everywhere.

    The backlinks from social media sites, spam posts emails and forcing people to click with backlinks gradually makes a blog rank lower and with no organic traffic at all.

    No Traffic With Shared Hosting

    Hosting with a good host plays a vital role in getting organic traffic making your domain more authoritative, secure and available, get more and relevant pings and crawls from the search engines.

    A Class C Static IP address could also result in a better SEO,

    In short, when you get a Shared cheap hosting plan and start your blog, it’s mapped with many domains on the same IP address that could make your domain a culprit of another domain’s bad behaviour on the web.

    Longer Domain Names

    Usually, people don’t type or remember longer domain names. This can be a major reason for no traffic at all. Indexing is ok, but what if someone visited your blog and wants to reconcile with your post again to open it directly when he needs to refer the post again a shorter easy to remember name should preferably have good traffic.

    Selecting a wrong TLD

    When it comes to domain selection, and you see a list of available options if you select a wrong TLD for an example a most common TLD with .com is likely to get more traffic from all over the world than a TLD from a specific geo-location like .in for India .ca for Canada and so on.

    Geo-targeted TLD’s are often stuck to certain areas of the defined country that can be a major reason to get less traffic.

    Policy Violations No Indexing

    You might not even know, but you could have violated a policy of the search engine and they might have stopped indexing your site, could be another good reason for no traffic, regular check on guidelines best practices should be followed to avoid violations,

    You keep on creating the content but if your blog is not properly indexed would result in no organic traffic.

    No Security of the Visitor

    Search indexing will be better for a secure site on a secure hosting than a non-secured blog, I am not talking about getting the free SSL, security is beyond that the rating of your SSL the authority that has signed it, HSTS preloaded domain, How are cookies managed on your domain, If you allow users to signup how safe they are with signups. How you treat the privacy of the visitor?

    Everything for safety counts if you need traffic for your blog.

    Very Long Articles

    A blog with very very long articles, more than 2000 Words, are most likely to adversely affect the user engagement with the content, posts that do not stick to the title and the topic if you write irrelevant to what is not required for the topic or suddenly shift from the topic and start writing in between for another topic just to make the post contents long.

    The long blog post should be presented up in points, or with a table of contents at the top for users to jump to the relevant topics.

    Also its recommended to make short paragraphs that have a good readability.

    Lesser Posts Not Updating Content Frequently

    If you don’t post frequently have been or posting very fewer posts, that could be a reason that affects the visitors you receive.

    Visitors seek for blogs with new content every day if your blog is not updated; you are not likely to get organic traffic.

    If you created a HOW-TO a year ago and it has now changed completely, you should also update the same with updated steps, else that would become irrelevant for the visitor.
    Updating your posts and content is required regularly to maintain the user experience and get organic traffic.

    Switching over Hosting Zones and IP Addresses

    If you continuously shift over with hosting accounts, shift your sites entirely with where its available and hosted one zone to another zone and do not have a static availability can impact your traffic with my personal experience I shifted to Cloudflare for a day and suffered a loss of organic traffic for at least 14 days till everything became normal.

    The mistake I made was opting for a free plan to test something a few months ago. At the same time, I was saved by taking a quick decision to get back everything to normal AWS hosting, with using a static IP on my domain that has just my domain hosted and is not shared with any other domain name.

    Changing permalinks not monitoring your 404 Hits

    Mostly new blogs when start publishing keeps on changing permalinks and do not monitor the 404 hits, or maintain a 404 page, this could lead with slow indexing as when a visitor browses through the indexed URL, and he is directed to a blank 404 page it makes the worst user experience.

    Many of the blogs to improve change the permalinks make them shorter or change the entire structure of the URL. This can affect organic traffic, adversely resulting in less or no traffic.

    No Interaction with your blog users on comments

    When someone comments on your blog, and you do not reply to them at all, it sounds insulting, Quite similar to inviting someone to talk and not responding to them.



    Most likely the user won’t turn back again to your blog if you don’t respond, for the appreciation of your posts you should thank and reply like ” Glad my post was helpful”,

    For Answers, the author of the posts must be active to respond on the published content if the comment is not a relevant question you can direct them to something more relevant, you know.

    No promotion of your Blog

    If you have worked hard writing and making content, you should take out time to regularly promote your content the same with relevant posts to other authoritative blogs, like Quora, Medium and many more not doing so you will not get new traffic.

    You can also make a Facebook group of users to your blog, building a community to help will achieve regular readers for your blog.