By Joanna Glasner | Also by this reporter
02:00 AM Feb, 14, 2006

Enter a Google search for Harold Davis, and some resulting links will inevitably lead you back to Google.

As the author of two books on Google, operator of a blog called Googleplex and longtime user of Google's keyword advertising program, Davis is among the more hard-core followers of the popular search site.

In his new book, Google Advertising Tools, Davis addresses the company's keyword advertising program, concentrating on how bloggers can manipulate it to their benefit.

In a recent interview with Wired News, Davis shared some tips for aspiring online publishers.

Wired News: Can a blogger realistically expect to make a living from blogging?

Harold Davis: There are people who make a living blogging, but if you're going to do it on your own, you darn well better have a ton of traffic. There are 10 million lonely bloggers and people probably only read a few thousand. If you're going to make serious money off this, it's a serious time commitment.

WN: What amount of time and money are we talking about?

Davis: Well, I spend an hour or two a day, but I have a lot of content already from the books I write.

As for money, people who are really in the business of making a living off content pages say they average about $10 a page per year. That would be a pretty good average. Usually, it's not enough to make a living on, but it's a good supplement.

WN: What do you need to start a profitable blog?

Davis: You should have at least 100 pages of high-quality content in the can. Blogs are good because they keep content fresh, but that's just a small part of it. Good reference material really draws traffic. On a photography site I run, for example, one piece I wrote on how to convert raw digital photos draws more traffic than 99 percent of my other photo pages.

WN: What are some of the more lucrative areas for blogging?

Davis: Hot technology areas are always good to blog about. People always want to know what new gadget they should get, and those sites tend to have very monetizable content.

Probably blogs on legal issues would do well if they focused on areas that have to do with litigation. (Drugs and diseases that have resulted in huge liability suits are among the most expensive keywords.)

Another area that seems under-blogged is financial reporting. There isn't too much well-informed financial stuff that isn't under subscription. In my book, I also write about sex blogs. People make some decent money from them.

WN: How does keyword advertising work for bloggers?

Davis: Advertisers pay to place certain keywords. So, if I am writing about a Nikon camera, for example, that's a valuable keyword. A lot of advertisers are bidding on Google's AdSense program for the right to have ads appear near it.

WN: Does it work for any blog?

Davis: There's a big difference between running your own server-side blog and using a free service like Blogger.

If you host your own blog and have an AdSense account, you get paid by Google when people click on those ads on your web pages. You can make more money from keyword advertising if you host your blog on an outside server.

If you have a blog hosted by one of the blogging services, like Google's Blogger, up until recently you didn't get any revenue from keyword ads. Now, it's pretty typical for hosting companies to give a portion of the AdSense revenue to anyone who hosts a blog.

WN: Are there drawbacks to using AdSense?

Davis: To the extent to which these are automated systems, they don't always work very well. Sometimes it's fun to watch the context ads that appear on one's blog. They aren't always a good fit.

On my Googleplex blog, for example, I wrote a couple of pieces blasting intelligent design and got a couple of ads for Christian fundamentalist sites.