What is phlebotomy certification

When I first stumbled upon the phlebotomy niche, I had no clue about what the word means. A quick search showed me that phlebotomy is the act of drawing blood from a patient either for testing or donation. We keep cribbing that the medical expenses in the USA is too high. Well that seems to be because even the smallest tasks like drawing blood is done by experts there. Yes phlebotomists are professionals who have passed the phlebotomy certification exam and specialize in this single task.

Phlebotomy Certification is not a regulatory requirement

Except for 2 states in the USA, phlebotomy certification is not really a requirement by any regulatory requirement. Still, the market place has evolved in a manner that the certification is a requirement to get a job as a phlebotomist. Only people like me who have seen even untrained people working as nurses can truly appreciate this fact.

What is involved in phlebotomy certification courses?

Unlike many certification courses that you may be aware of, passing a theory examination alone is not good enough to get a phlebotomy certification. It involves both a practical and a theory part and the student is expected to demonstrate his or her competency in both segments to be able to get the certification. I think that is the way to go for any other certification as well, since only theoretical knowledge is a certificate for the person’s ability to memorize things and not his professional competency.

Finally some benefits of phlebotomy certification

It will be wrong to close this article without discussing some benefits of this certification program. Phlebotomy certification is a great way to improve the chances of getting into the profession of phlebotomists. That is not all though. Phlebotomy as a profession requires a lot of respect and an ability to handle people who are worried and/ or irritated. After all most of them are there to get themselves tested for some disease and definitely it is not the best time to be introduced to new people. The training program exposes students to such real life situation, which helps them to decide if they really want to continue with the program or not.

I have had a lot more learning while working on this phlebotomy certification blog. I will keep sharing them with you from time to time.

Looks like my little site has developed some sort of stage fear and is refusing to move beyond the third page of google result My first thought was to abandon the site and start working on a new site. But then one of my close friends suggested that I can not earn the right to lecture others about research unless I am able to move this site to the first page.

That is why I have decided to use this post as an open challenge to myself to work on my stained glass website and get it to the top 10 for a search about stained glass supplies. I am giving myself time till the end of August to accomplish this result. Right now I intend to publish posts about other stained glass items and continue to try different methods to push it up.

I hope I will be upto the challenge. If I fail then may be I will jsut delete this post and continue to give gyaan to people about keyword research. Shameless Btw if you have got some suggestions about how I can improve the ranking, then please let me know.

Here are some issues that makes me increasingly uncomfortable about adsense

1. Bad dreams about getting banned from adsense keep me awake at night. I am kidding but Google is known to react in extreme manner to any violation of their guidelines. If I have to depend upon a single source for my online income, I shall like it to be more moderate and consultative.
2. I can make no planning based on adsense income: To make matters worse, adsense income is extremely volatile. With the same traffic, same CTR, the final income tends to vary in a wide range. I can safely leave my day job and work online fulltime, only if someone guaranteed that the income will atleast continue to be at this level.
3. Adsense performs extremely poor with regular visitors and social media traffic: I have got 2 sets of websites. The first set are websites that are created for long term value and to solve some problem. They have what you call quality content and get a lot of repeat visitors. While the second set are more of seo experiments/ projects and get their traffic from search engine but have crappy content. Guess what? I earn more money on my crappy websites from adsense. Unless I change my plan to create more crappy content, I better get a good alternative to adsense.
4. Everyone and their cat uses adsense: While google has made the acceptance process more stringent now, they were allowing everyone and their cats to use adsense. That has sort of created an impression in the minds of the users that any website using adsense must be unprofessional.
5. Adsense treats everyone as equal: I love democracy but only for forming governments. Unfortunately adsense uses the principles of democracy for websites as well. A car blog by the CEO of Toyota and my random ramblings about second hand cars will attract the same revenue per click.

What is your take? Do you need to move away from adsense as well?

Using Google trend to drive traffic is good strategy, but then if its not your niche , you will simply end up increasing your bounce rate. Is int it??

I was going to respond to him in the comments section. However I just realized that many established bloggers and webmasters seem to have accepted the theory that high bounce rate = bad quality as gospel truth. That is NOT necessarily TRUE.

I Love high bounce rate on certain pages

You read that right. I love high bounce rate. I actually brainstorm for quite sometime everyweek trying to increase the bounce rate. And trust me I have not gone mad. Not yet atleast

High Bounce rate means higher CTR for adsense

What are the normal advice you have heard/read for decreasing the bounce rate? Provide lot of interesting links to your other pages from the body of the post, at the end of your post, provide links to your most interesting posts from the sidebar etc. Now think about what those interesting links are doing to your adsense blocks. All those interesting links are competeing with the adsense blocks for the attention of the user. As you succeed in making the internal links more and more interesting, the adsense blocks continue to become less attractive. Is it any wonder that your CTR keeps going down.

Answer to some queries about high bounce rate raised in the comments

I think Nihar, Tarun and Harsh have raised some really valid points in the comments section. Instead of answering them in the comments, I will deal with them here.

1. If you are blogging solely for money, then a higher bounce rate is good: I think this statement is true for most bloggers who monetize their blogs through ppc. However if you are monetizing your blog through affiliate products or if you want to monetize your blog by selling some service/product then this does not hold good
2. If you want to convert a google reader into a regular reader then you need to give them some option: Again true. However you need to answer some questions to know if it is true for you
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         • What % of your feedreaders actually read your blog daily? It is less than 15% for most of my blogs
         • How much you would have earned by putting an adsense block at the end of your post
         • What is the worth of the feed subscriber to you
3. A High bounce rate will decrease your ranking: Fair and logical point. However I and several authority figures in SEO do not think that Google has started using bounce rate as one of the quality parameters. My experience with the post about core 2 duo vs dual core bears it out. I think this is because bounce rate as a ranking factor is quite noisy and susceptible to manipulation.

I was having a chat with Pavan about whether use of adsense on my sample resumes website will result in a smart pricing. That is when it just dawned on me that if that is true then I can use anyone else’s adsense publisher details on that website and get his account to be smart priced. I am not that evil but still that is a possibility. Worse still, I can setup a p*o*r*n website and put up your adsense block in it and get you banned.

You can protect your adsense account from such evil people

Google adsense has a feature that allows you to control the websites on which your adsense can be displayed. Make use of that feature right now to protect yourself against any misuse.

Simply go to “adsense setup” tab and then the “allowed websites” subtab. Under the “choose your site settings” there are 2 radio buttons. Select the 2nd radio button and list down the websites where you want to display your adsense advertisements. Take care not to include any http or www prefix before website name. So I shall enter binaryday.com and mywalkin.com into that box.

Screenshot of how to enable the feature

Not to Google It keeps on showing advertisements about the products. Noone is interested in them anyways. So noone clicks

What is the possible solution to this problem? Any ideas?

1. http://www.pinoymoneytalk.com/2007/03/06/how-to-reinstate-banned-adsense-account/?cp=all
2. http://www.devilsworkshop.org/how-i-got-my-google-adsense-account-back-in-14-days
3. http://www.legalandrew.com/2007/04/19/how-to-get-back-into-adsense-account-reinstated/
4. http://stason.org/articles/money/how_to_bring_google_adsense_down.html
5. http://www.seopedia.org/contextual-advertising/google-adsense-adwords/google-adsense-account-disabled-the-faq/
6. http://yfs1.com/2006/you-too-can-be-banned-from-adsense-with-no-money-down-enquire-within.html
7. http://www.yfs1.com/2006/you-too-can-be-banned-from-adsense-with-no-money-down-enquire-within-part-2.html

There are many gurus in the world who have talked about this topic. However I was not satisfied with only listening to what they had to say. I wanted to find out what are the formats that real bloggers use. What follows is not my view but my findings based on study of usage of adsense by real bloggers. The link to the excel file with the raw data is here.

The most popular adsense format is 468 x 60
Out of the 15000 blogs that I studied around 3000 used adsense. All these blogs had a total of 6272 adsense blocks. The 468 x 60 format was the most frequently used format followed by 160 x 600 format. Surprisingly link units seem to be used by far too less blogs.

Result of my study of most frequently used adsense format

How many adsense blocks should you place on the homepage
I was expecting atleast 2 adsense adblocks to be used on the homepage. Surprisingly 955 bloggers have only 1 adsense block on the home page. Another 722 bloggers 2 units of adsense. I am unable to think why so many people are using only 1 or 2 blocks of adsense on their homepage. Any ideas??

P.S: These studies take up way too much of my time. I was just wondering if anyone other than me finds them interesting or useful. Else I shall rather concentrate on technical posts.Will appreciate if you can let me know what you think of the above data in comments section.

P.S to P.S: Let me know if you want me to analyze something else.

The first adunit shows the ads with the highest revenue per click ads. Make sure that it is the ad unit with the highest Clcik-Through-Rate as well. Use of CSS can make it difficult to know what is the first ad unit. Visit the page from your browser and do a view source. Scroll down the html code. The first block of adsense that you see is your first ad unit. Use custom channels to check that it is the one with the highest CTR.

Size matters. Google’s data says wider ad units outperform the narrow ones. What do you use?

Do you still use wordpress built in search box on your blog. Stop throwing away serious money and start usings an adsense for search box.

Site targetted ads increase the competition for your advertisement place and there by increase your earnings. Modify the default message to convert more advertisers into site-targetted advertisers for your site.

The corner of the ad uniit makes a difference. Increase your earnings by using rounded corners for your ad units.

Go Borderless
Place your adsense unit below the header of your posts and directly below the border. Removing the border between content and adsense unit can result in an increase in CTR of as much as 300%. Binaryday uses this trick to the letter

Match your ads to the content
In May 2005 google published the secret to dogbreedinfo doubling its income to more than $650 a day. The simple tip that doubled the earning was use unobtrusive advertisements. It is not like for nothing that all adsense Guru suggest this as the first tip.

Way back in January 2006, Google published this simple but effective optimization tip for blogs. To get the best results from adsense, you should choose the right ad format for your blog and then place it at a place, where people will see it. Also make sure to use section targetting to get ads targetted to the specific post.