Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Don't. You'll just annoy users.
Commonly repeated wisdom. But the truth is that some users get annoyed by external links which don't open in a new window.
Recently my Yahoo Mail account changed its link settings and for the next week (before I figured how to fix it) I would click on a link in an email, look at the site which opened, finish reading, look around for the email which I came from... it wasn't there! Instead of being in a separate window it was in the browser history (occasionally way back in the browser history). Out of habit I kept forgetting when I clicked and it was starting to drive me nuts.
It's not any particular external link behaviour which annoys users. It's behaviour they're not accustomed to which annoys them. The key (and I think both IE and Moz have sorted this out now) is to have browser preferences override hard-coded link behaviours.
If I exchange links with other websites, how do I:
1. have the outbound link open in a new window, and
2. ensure the link is crawable by spiders, and
3. validates for Strict DTDs
PowerUp: I have sent you a stickymail.
Moving on...
A friend of mine who is just starting his own site asked me today about revenue streams and I asked him if he had reached 100 visitors a day yet. He hadn't. I advised him not to think about revenue until he got to that level at least.
When he said he didn't understand why not, I suggested to him that while it might not be necessary to reach critical mass before you start monetising your traffic, it is necessary to spend time and work on ensuring that traffic (even if still small) is solid and will continue to grow. Otherwise what guarantee is there that your site isn't flash in the pan and won't disappear next month leaving you high and dry, regardless of how much time and work you have spent on developing income streams for your site?
If you are working on your own with a minimal budget on a new site, you need to prioritise what you need to work on and what is less important. At the beginning traffic is important. Monetisation of that traffic is far less important.
I tend to agree with europeforvisitors on this. Until the bots find my site, anybody who goes on my site are friends and friends of friends a couple layers deep. Obviously, nobody wants them to start clicking on ads. My thought is to get people excited and happy about being there--and then start introducing advertisement.
I, for one, prefer external links to open in new windows.
Getting googlebot to visit a page is hard, but when you put adsense on the page mediabot visits the page when a person looks at the page and mediabot pulls double duty for googlebot. It helps get the site indexed faster.
This is a good point, and often overlooked. In my experience, new pages on a new site are indexed sooner when adsense is present.
If this still holds true, one could always place an ad on a new page, visit it, then remove the ads soon thereafter... :D
It's in our interest that Adsense starts requiring minimum traffic before participation in the program.
In this way people will not go after one or two illegal clicks, but when they start with minimum required traffic, hopefully they will already have 60-80 clicks per day.
In this scenario those publishers will be more inclinced not-to-ask a friend to click on their ads, but rather building content.
It's in our interest that Adsense starts requiring minimum traffic before participation in the program.
Impossible, consider parked domains, for one. Another example - a Webmaster may not WANT to reveal all traffic, and just channelize a certain part of the site.
There is no "right time". Just do it I hope this doesn't get deleted as a trademark :)
If you were looking for a specific service, and 2 comparable companies offered what you were looking for, but one site was also running ads, I would call the non-ad company first, and probably never call the ad-using company.
I'm all for ad supported sites and some offer extremely useful content, but for the most part, ads = spammy sites on the majority nowadays.
Chip-
With an ecomm site one might wonder why they ever run something like AdSense, who cares if the ads are there from the start or just show up after some time, (unless it's an affiliate site).
With an information or hobby site I'd put at least some ads on from day one. Of course, that doesn't mean the ads should overpower the content.
You should know the ad payout range and CTR for your niche. Divide both bottom/base rate (better safe than sorry) and CTR into the monthly minimum and you know the traffic level required to get monthly AdSense cheques. Prior implementation simply subsidises Google.
example 1:
$100.00 (payout threshold) / $0.10 (base click value) / 2.5% (CTR) = 40,000 visitors per month.
example 2:
$100.00 (payout threshold) / $1.00 (base click value) / 5.0% (CTR) = 2,000 visitors per month.
Note: you also need to be blocking or at least accounting for bad bots because they skew the visitor-CTR numbers.
didn't add adsense till I got 10,000 uniques a day I recommend waiting till you get at least this to make it worth while to add adsense.
For some of us traffic like that translates into nearly $150,000 per year. Most likely worth the effort.
Since the income is low on this site, the main reason I'm planning to take ads down when I have some extra time is because they annoy me more than the $50 or so per month they bring in. Don't want to give up screen real estate and allow third parties to essentially put content on my site for pennies.
At current earnings per visitor and 10K uniques per day, I would pay my mortagage. At that price, it would be less difficult to give up that screen real estate!
