A lot of people have this opinion that PhotoBlogs or Photo Galleries would not go well with Adsense since there aren’t enough readable text (by GoogleBot) for contextual advertisements. While I may partly agree to that opinion, I believe it is still possible to get significant earnings from AdSense thru PhotoBlogs and Photo Galleries.
In the recent months that I have integrated AdSense with my Photo Gallery, I noticed several trends and user behaviors that significantly affects click-through rates. Here are some fo my observations:
- Your gallery or photoblog should have text descriptions and tags. These are the ones that are crawled by search engine bots and important for contextual ads.
- Custom URLs (using mod_rewrite) helps a lot.
- File naming of images and pictures for better searchability.
- Pictures of people aren’t really hot, except if these people are popular. (e.g. PBB housemates, celebs, Tweety Bird, etc.)
- Stock photos are hot - common pictures of places, sceneries, objects and food are frequently searched. (on top of my keyword list are California Maki, Apple Pie, Starbucks, Baby pics, La Paz Batchoy, Yellow Cab Pizza, Hong Kong Disneyland, Strawberry, etc.)
- Linking from related blog posts to the gallery for better SERPs.
- Optimized AdSense placement in the gallery for higher CTR.
Have been chatting with some people earning significantly thru their photo galleries (in the thousands of pictures). Mine’s just over 500 pictures and it’s already hitting significant amount of traffic and AdSense revenues.
That’s another reason why you should ditch Flickr and set up your own photoblog or photo gallery.
P.S. Looking for a nice WordPress Photoblog theme, check out Click!
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I didn’t particularly wanted to add ads on myManila.net but after adding more details (location, keywords, etc.) last year I thought it was time to try some ads.
Weird enough, the most popular picture in my 500 or so entries are ones with Rizal in the title. Here’s a tip to Photo Bloggers who still want to keep it focused on the pictures, you can hide the keywords in the meta tags.
I have always wondered about Photoblogs and using advertisements on them. When I take a look at many photoblogs, I never really see any ads, and I assume it is because of what you said, not enough text. You gave some great tips though that seem like it would certainly help
And thanks for pointing me to that WordPress PhotoBlog theme, that is perfect!
Great post
any insights on exif data?
I think Cost per Impressions (CPM) image ads will perform better than Pay per Click (PPC) ads or combinations of both. Google will decide which one will give you more revenue just modify your settings.
@ Brian
You’re welcome mate.
@ Peter
How has it been so far?
@ gabriel
I don’t think so yet. Google Image Search hasn’t even gone beyond the file names and the alt texts.
i have a photo gallery (but it isnt a blog) and i had to put a little content so i could show relevant ads at my site after someone from google took a peek at my site and told me what to do. they say they dont makes use of keywords in the meta tags but in the alt tags they do.
@vbignacio
Yes, ALT tags are being read so they’re really important.
Hi guys!
I actually wrote an article on this issue, called “Ads & Photographs”. It is at http://hulubei.net/tudor/articles/Ads-And-Photographs.html
Hope this helps,
Tudor
Great blog! I am just wondering how you were able to surive with adsense for that long. You break their TOS by placing “More Ad Links” in the top right corner…
Then you have small images right above another ad.
Piculiarities of life… Lots of honest people were banned for nothing.