Adsense Secrets

Pst! Wanna know some Adsense secrets? The only secret is that there are no secrets per se!

Do a search for Adsense secrets and you will be bombarded by a myriad of ads by trying to sell you the answers to making lots of money with Adsense.

Before you buy anything, my advise to you would be to do some research on a search engine and a bit of common sense. There are literally hundreds of forums where you can pick up valuable information, as well as hundreds of articles that have been written on the subject of Adsense.

Most of the answers are out there for you to find it you will put in a little bit of work. If you buy any of the ebooks available out there, you might find one little nugget of information that you may not have seen anywhere else, but I promise you: most of the time everything is out here on the Internet - all you have to do is search for it. Here are some of the search terms that I personally have used with great results:

increase adsense income
increase your adsense income
adsense experiments
adsense adsense tricks
adsense tips

What I can tell you from my own experience is this:

1. Ads at the top of the page and on the left of the page perfom better than any other ads. (Take a look at the “heatmap” from the Google link below)

2. Ads without background colour and borders perfom better than ads within borders with background colour.

3. Ads within content pages perform better than any other ads.

4. A search box on every page gives you another chance for earning Adsense income.

5. A blue link at the top of the ad, the ad in black, and the url also in black so that it blends in with the ad copy - also tends to perform well. A black url makes the link stand out and gives you a better chance of someone clicking on it.

Google has brought out some great Adsense optimization tips. You can read it here: Google Adsense optimization tips

Experiment with your settings and see which brings you the best results. Google’s reporting has become a lot better in the last month or so, so you should instantly be able to see which ads result in better CTR.

To increase your site traffic, which obviously will increase your Adsense income, the best way to get traffic is to have fresh content at your site. Write your own articles and submit it to article directories like Go Articles etc. To find more article directories, just do a search for “free article directory submissions” on a search engine like Google.

Another way would be to publish articles by other authors that are relevant to your site content. You can find free articles all over the web by once again doing a search for e.g. “free site content”.

Do this on a regular basis and watch your traffic (and your income)

The AdSense Formula for Making Money

I often get asked what the secret is to making money with Google’s AdSense program. This often comes from people who are dreaming of setting up websites chock full of high-paying keywords for particular niche subjects and then sitting back and watching the money roll in. “What’s the magic formula?” they ask me. If they’re non-technical, I point them straight to my first AdSense book, Make Easy Money with Google, and assure them that they’ll learn everything they need from it. They may think it’s hard, but it’s not.

But what about the technical people? By this I mean the people who’ve already set up a blog or website, who have registered domain names, who are comfortable with basic Internet terminology and concepts. What is the “AdSense formula”?

The only AdSense formula that you need to know is this:

earnings = number of clicks * average price per click

This is what I call the Fundamental AdSense Formula because you can derive almost every AdSense “secret” directly or indirectly from this formula. Do you want to earn more with AdSense? You have two ways of doing it:

• Increase the number of clicks, and/or
• Increase the average price per click

Your earnings will only go up if you do one or the other, and ideally both. It’s an obvious formula, yes, but it’s amazing how many people lose sight of it in their quest for increased AdSense earnings.

Increasing the Number of AdSense Clicks

Increasing the number of times the ads on your site or blog are clicked is the most obvious strategy. There are two general strategies you can follow:

• Increase the traffic to the site, and/or
• Adjust the ads to make them more “clickable”

Getting traffic is hard and takes time, so don’t look at it as a quick fix. The best way to get traffic is to provide useful, unique content and to rank highly in search engine rankings for keywords related to that content. In other words, use standard search engine optimization techniques. DO NOT “buy” traffic or use “link farms” or other dubious techniques. Other tips for getting traffic:

1. Publish articles, even free ones, with links back to your site.
2. Include a link to your site in the signature at the bottom of your emails or in any forum postings you make (if the forum allows it).
3. Participate in forums/groups related to the content of your site or blog. The key is to participate, not lurk, and don’t just post messages promoting your site.
4. Add comments (relevant ones only, please) to other blogs, you can usually link back to yours. (This won’t help your search engine rankings, but it may allow others who are reading those comments to find your own site.)
5. Syndicate your content (trivial if you have a blog) and make sure that the content is registered with syndication aggregators.
6. List your site in relevant directories.

Adjusting the ads is something you can do almost immediately:

1. Position the ads on the page in order to make them more noticeable. Google even publishes a helpful heat map for AdSense publishers.
2. Choose the best AdSense ad format that works for your site.
3. Change the ad colors either to make the ads blend in with your site or to make them stand out. Again, it varies depending on the site.

Whatever you do, DO NOT ENTICE VISITORS TO CLICK THE ADS. Google is very strict about this, see the AdSense program policies for the details.

Increasing the Average AdSense Price Per Click

Increasing the average price per click you receive from AdSense is the other strategy for increasing your overall AdSense earnings. You can do this by:

• Carefully targeting your content, and/or
• Filtering out and avoiding low-paying ads

Content targeting isn’t just about creating relevant, unique content. It’s also making sure that that content is written to target the higher-paying keywords associated with a given topic. This means:

• Figuring out which keyword variations for that topic pay more. Often the more specialized variations and phrases pay more than the “generic” terms.
• Ensuring that the keyword density of the content favors the higher-paying keyword variations.

And to reduce the occurrence of lower-paying ads, consider these two strategies:

1. Use AdSense’s competitive filter mechanism to screen out the ads that you don’t want.
2. Show fewer ads on a page. The fewer ads you show, the more the higher-paying ads get displayed and clicked.

Many publishers also report that their earnings increase if they remove ads completely from pages with few or no clicks. Again, the “less is more” strategy favors the higher-paying ads.

There’s No Magic

As you can see, there’s no magic involved to increasing your AdSense earnings. The Fundamental AdSense Formula is easy to understand, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy to apply the formula. It takes time and effort to do it, just like most things.

Copyright 2005 by Eric Giguere. Permission is granted to reproduce the article in electronic newsletters or on websites provided that the complete article text is included, unchanged, and that neither the copyright declaration nor this license are removed.

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