We know that publishers are quickly adding video to their sites and looking for ways to earn additional revenue. If this sounds like you, look no further than AdSense for video, our solution for qualifying publishers. You may remember that we announced AdSense for video as a pilot last May.

Since then, we’ve tested a variety of ad formats with the interest of users, publishers and advertisers in mind. As a result, we’ve decided that AdSense for video will use the InVideo ads adopted on our own property, YouTube, which enable advertisers to make a single buy at scale. Also competing in the auction - and unique to AdSense for video and AdSense video units - are text overlay ads which are contextually targeted to signals in your videos and on the page where the video lives. The InVideo ads are paid on a CPM basis, while the text overlay ads are paid on a CPC basis. You can see ad demos here. While we’ll continue to test a variety of ad formats, we believe that overlays are the best way to balance user experience with the needs of our publishers.

AdSense for video is now available to publishers who, at a minimum, serve one million video streams each month and are based in the U.S. with English language sites. In the near future, we do plan to expand the program to more publishers of various sizes and locations.

You may be wondering how this offering differs from the other video advertising solutions that AdSense (and YouTube) have rolled out in the last year. To give you an overview, we’ve launched a site at www.google.com/videoadsolutions.

To apply for AdSense for video beta, please visit the AdSense for video page on the Google Video Advertising Solutions site. You can also learn about the various ways to earn revenue from video content by watching this video.

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When we talk about optimization in AdSense, we usually focus on testing different formats, colors, and locations for your ad units. But it’s just as important, if not more so, to optimize your site’s content to make it as user-friendly as possible. Which homepage design do your users respond most to? Which headline or graphic will entice your users to spend more time reading your articles? Knowing the answers can help you implement the most user-friendly elements, increasing user loyalty and engagement. And as we’ve noted, more engaged, more frequent users means more eyes on your AdSense ads.

You can determine the answers to the questions above (and more) by using Google Website Optimizer, a free tool available through Google AdWords. It lets you try out different layouts and content for your site and conduct either an A/B test or a multivariate test to track how different content affects your users. To learn more about Website Optimizer, just visit their informational site to find out everything you need to know before getting started. If you don’t yet have an AdWords account, sign up here to access Website Optimizer.

Finally, we encourage you to attend a free online seminar about Website Optimizer. Your host will be Tom Leung, Product Manager for Website Optimizer, and the guest presenter will be Bryan Eisenberg from FutureNow, Inc. Tom and Bryan will introduce Website Optimizer, share best practices for testing, and discuss some of the top elements to test on any webpage. Here are all the details:

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Bloggers using Google Blogger have been clamoring for Google Blogger to introduce Categories (a very useful feature) which had been available in other blogging platforms but not the old classic Blogger. That is, until they introduced Blogger Beta (now referred to as New Blogger or just plain Blogger). The only difference is they like to be different and they call it Labels which is the same as the more widely recognised Categories. It enable you to tag (label or categorise) you posts with the same label (category or tag) and make them easy to find.

How to use Labels (Categories or Tags)

The very first thing you have to do is whenever you make posts (or edit old posts), type the relevant labels (categories or tags) in the field provided at the bottom of the post editor (see screenshot below, the part highlighted with a red circle):

You can put as many labels as you like, but they should be separated by commas. Someone asked for help, but I am not exactly what she wants. I think she want her visitor to click a link to all her posts about her favorite books. If that is what she want, all she need to do is to type the label “My favorite books” (minus the quotation marks) into the field for labels (highlighted with a red circle in the screenshot above). She can still add more labels which is relevant to that particlar post if she want by adding a comma, then typing in the other label or labels.

Label List in the sidebar (or elsewhere)

Just adding label or labels to a post will help but will not be very useful because a visitor will see the label or labels only at the bottom of a particular post. It would be much more useful if you add a Label List to the sidebar (or anywhere you like) so that the list of labels you use will appear in every page, including the main (home or index) page, the individual post pages (permalinks) and the archive pages. To do this, if you are in the post editor page, click the TEMPLATE tab and you then should see the LAYOUT. The proceedure may be slightly different depending on which page of Blogger you are in. It could be you will need to click on PAGE ELEMENTS instead. Click on the ADD A PAGE ELEMENT in the LAYOUT page, and you will get a “pop-up”. Select LABELS (see screenshot at the beginning of this section). If you do, you will the see CONFIGURE LABELS where you can chose to display the labels either alphabetically or by frequency, plus you will see Labels already added to the title of that Page Element. My habit is to add (Categories or Tags) to that because categories and tags are better known. After you have made a choice, click SAVE CHANGES and you will see the new Page Element added to the top of section. If you are happy with that, your job is done. If you want it elsewhere, hover your mouse over the new Page Element and the cursor will change to a cross: . You can now drag it to wherever you want it.

Like in the example above, you want someone to see all your posts you made about your favorite books, just add the label “My Favorite Books” (minus the quotation marks) and any other labels you want and you will see the link “My Favorte Books” in the Label List in the sidebar. Anyone clicking on that link will see all your posts you made on your favorite books.

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The video below shows how you get set up a custom domain which will be your own domain (property) and not a sub-domain (and property of Blogger) of blogspot.com

I initially registered some domains from Godaddy but that took me so long to start because I want to make sure all related URL’s, that is both the URL’s that have www and minus www will go to the same custom domain page. Found out later that is going to be a torturous process and kept putting off the Herculean task until I discovered the method described in the video below:

Hopefully, when I get the time, I will do a transcript and maybe even a few screen shot so you don’t need to refer to the vidwo each time you forget a step.

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You may have seen today’s announcement that Google has completed its acquisition of DoubleClick.

The combined company will offer more tools for publishers, enhance productivity and provide additional revenue opportunities so you can focus on creating more relevant content and improve the user experience on your websites. We will also work with our existing publishers to better monetize their inventory by combining DoubleClick’s and Google’s strength in inventory management, ad serving, and optimization.

If you have a DoubleClick account, rest assured that everything will continue to operate as usual, and that you’ll receive the same support you’re used to. For more information, please read our press release.

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