Grow your multi-screen audience with Google Play Newsstand

If you have a news, sports, lifestyle, entertainment or other article-based site, target a growing mobile audience with Google Play Newsstand. Google Play Newsstand gives users the opportunity to discover more of the content they love in one place, and enables you to reach users through your own customizable Newsstand edition.

A message from an AdSense publisher: How to balance conflicting interests

Editor’s Note: Today we’d like to share some tips from AdSense publisher Dave Taylor, owner and author ofaskdavetaylor.com. Dave Taylor has been online for over thirty years and has been producing helpful tech content for just about all of that time. You can find him online at http://www.davetayloronline.com/.

It's a tricky balancing act being an AdSense publisher because once you start seeing your earnings increase, there's a natural desire to shift your attention to your revenue. The problem with focusing on your revenue is that you're taking attention away from producing the most useful content for your readers. And without readers, you have no audience to run ads for in the first place.

I know, because it's a challenge I face as an AdSense publisher too. I run a popular tech support site called Ask Dave Taylor and my focus since 2003 has been on answering tech questions in a simple, free, and easily obtainable manner. I had over 18 million visitors to the site last year -- but it's also a business, not a hobby, so maximizing my per-visitor revenue is important.

Introducing the Google+ Share button

When your visitors come across something interesting on your site, sometimes you want to encourage a simple endorsement (like +1). Other times, however, you want to help visitors share with their friends, right away. Today’s new Google+ Share button lets you do just that.

In line with the design of the new +1 button, here’s how it looks:

Before visitors share:

When clicked, visitors can add a comment and choose who to share with:

Increase your earnings with Google Affiliate Network exclusive promotions

If you aren’t already a Google Affiliate Network publisher, now is a good time to join and earn additional revenue from your website. Over 40 promotions will be available exclusively to Google Affiliate Network publishers from Friday, March 23 through Monday, March 26. As a publisher, you’ll earn a performance fee from orders that originate from your links. You can view all exclusive promotions on this blog post.

How do I post these promotions on my site?
To access any of these exclusive promotions, you need to be an approved publisher in Google Affiliate Network. 

1. Apply for Google Affiliate Network with your AdSense Publisher ID (or sign in if you're already a Google Affiliate Network publisher).
2. Once approved, review the promotions available and click the "Apply Now" link for each one that you wish to promote.
3. Tracking links will be available in your Google Affiliate Network account by viewing the Home tab on March 19th. You can also search for “March Exclusive” links in the Links tab on March 23rd.

Learn about other Google products with our new Help Desk Hangouts on Air series

You’re looking to grow your business, and we offer a ton of tools to help you do just that. But sometimes, you might need a little help learning all the options and getting started. That’s why this week on the Google+ Your Business page, we’ve launched a new series of Help Desk Hangouts On Air to put you in touch with teams who can help you get the most out of our products and features.

To kick things off, we asked +Justin Cutroni of the Google Analytics team (and author of the blog Analytics Talk) to show us how business owners like you can use Analytics to track your website performance and see how users are getting to your site (email, social media, referrals). If you missed it, you can watch the full hour-long Hangout on the Google Business YouTube channel:

Is your site ready for your mobile users?

Last December, we posted about the massive shift to mobile we’ve seen in your users over the past two years.  Still, 4 out of 5 online publishers don’t have a mobile-optimized website, and they risk losing their fastest-growing audience.  Today, we’re launching a new suite of tools at howtogomo.com to help publishers build mobile-friendly websites.

To help demonstrate the potential of creating a mobile-friendly site, we’d like to share the story of AdSense publisher Baby Gaga.  Two weeks after launching their mobile-friendly website they saw a 64% increase in mobile visits. This leading destination for educational materials and social support for pregnant women also saw an 82% increase in mobile page views and a 50% increase in revenue from mobile (full case study). 

More options for Google+ badges

UPDATE (2/2/12): The new Google+ badge is now out of preview and available to all users on all sites. 

When we launched Google+ pages in November, we also released Google+ badges to promote your Google+ presence right on your site. Starting today in developer preview (and soon available to all your users), we're adding more options for integrating the Google+ badge into your website. You can configure a badge with a width that fits your site design and choose a version that works better on darker sites. You'll also see that Google+ badges now include the unified +1 and circle count that we added to Pages last month.