Make Money With Google Adsense

Google Adsense is a popular method to display contextual advertising from companies on your website where you get paid for everyone who clicks on the adverts.

It's a very easy system to set up and manage but there are numerous tactics and methods to improve your earnings and this article addresses some of those and more.

Improving Your Current Earnings

If you already have a website showing Adsense adverts here are some tips to improve your click through rate (CTR) and your earnings per thousand impressions (EPM).

However you develop your site you must use ad channels within your adsense account to see what ad is being clicked upon. For example if you put an ad at the top of the page and one at the bottom then open up two channels so you can see which is being clicked on the most and what EPM you are earning.

Google now allows you to link your adsense to your analytics account which provides much more in-depth analysis of the actual page and what search terms were used to track it. Before you provide all of your website to Google be sure you are absolutely sure you wish to undertake this task.

Blending or Contrasting Ads

Blending adsense advertising into your website is an almost sure fire method of increasing your CTR if the link colour of the ad is the same as the rest of your site. One big tip we can give you is to use the same colour as well for the headings on a page. An example is shown below.

blending adsense advertising into your website

You can of course contrast your ads so that they are completely different colours to the rest of your website and makes the link ads stand out. This may work for your market but generally the blending options performs better.

Links or Images

Google always offers you the option of having adverts as text links or images and most people choose the former and place them on their site. There are many advertisers who develop image ads in the small and large square format that could be placed on your site and this is an avenue worth exploring.

We have seen on some sites that the Google Adsense adverts are exclusively images and they are reporting excellent click through rates. The image below is an option of how to place these ads on a blog.

where images could be placed for adsense image adverts

The dark blue blocks indicate where such images could be located on a blog or informational website. You may think that people won't click on them but they do. Whether they are images or links simply experiment over a week or so and see where they get clicked on.

The Google Heat Map

The Google heat map has been around for some years now and Google have never updated it but it's worth having a look and moving your ad positions around the page a bit and see if this change improve earnings.

It's worth noting that people automatically look to the top left of a page. This is thought to be because the site logo is situation in this position as well as main navigation so this may be a place that could improve your click through rate.

Certainly you should test all ad sizes and positions. We have found that the large square and rectangles are often see as spammy as they are placed on made for adsense sites (MFA) and people also become ad blind and know that you are getting paid if they click on an ad even if your visitor wants to.

Developing Your Site With Keyword Research

Many people believe they will get rich overnight by dumping a few adsense adverts on their site but this is rarely true. This is how many blogs start out with the owner writing a few articles and then receiving a few $0.01 clicks and they quickly give up. Many brand new sites will receive low click values until there is trust in the account so be patient and continue to build your site up over time.

If you are simply writing about your life then the terms you are using as the page header and linking to the pages are very unlikely to be what people are searching for and so you won't be getting many visitors and those terms will not be paying much when people click on your ads so you'll need to undertake some keyword research.

As a popular blogger you can more or less write about anything in your field and the same types of ads will appear. For example in the internet marketing field adverts about SEO and making money will appear and these are well paying ads (although this is a competitive area).

One method is to use the adwords keyword tools that show you how many searches for a term are undertaken each month. You can see the competition by typing the phrases into Google with quotes around it. Using the Adwords tools also shows you the estimated click cost and Google will pay you between 70%-80% of that click into your account (so long as you are established and are not smart priced - see below).

You can also research your competitors to see which keywords are the most popular in the search engines to get to their sites. A free tool is Alexa - choose the keyword tab to get an idea of the phrases used to get to your competition. This provides a rough idea but there are other tools around such as SEMRush and SEOBook has the complete tool build into Aarons monthly subscription programme.

The better you are at finding higher paid keywords the better your payouts will be.

Advanced Development

Really the people making millions using Adsense are those with niche sites with thousands if not tens of thousands of carefully selected and written articles on their site. The "how to" sites and "answer" sites are the best because they are user generated so you don't have to actually make the content yourself and the users write in the manner they would search on the internet so are good for the search engines as well.

This tip together with keyword research and tested positioning with your adverts are the keys to making more with adsense.

Selling Adspace To Yourself

You want your site to be sticky so that people not only come back time and again but browse around your site looking for information. But getting visitors to visit more than one page will increase the likelihood of them clicking on an advert. One method is to put your main and sub navigations on the top left hand side of your site (see the heatmap above) which reduces your bounce rate and improve the pages per visitor viewed. They may like more than one advert so your earnings will increase this way also.

Repeat Visitors

The art of any site is to get people back time and again and blogging software makes this easy with the "sign up" element. If you can get people to sign up to your blog or static website then every time you post a new article they will receive an email enticing them to come back to your site.

This is done automatically so increases your visitors every time you add new content.

Smart Pricing

Smart pricing was introduced to knock down the earnings on sites that didn't produce conversions for Google's advertisers. If you have a site that gets a good CTR but those visitors don't convert then your account may be smart priced. You'll know when this happens because your EPM reduces by about 90% and there's not much you can do about it because the quality of your visitors is poor.

New accounts on new websites will also produce a poor return until Google sees that your visitors are converting. So if you have a new adsense account that produces a poor EPM give it a couple of months for Google's system to get working and you should start to see your earnings increase.

What You Can't Do

There are many rules with Adsense and really the main one is not to do anything that confuses the visitor to your site and entices them to click on your ads. That means not doing any of the following:

In summary Google Adsense can pay out but not as much as it used to because people online know what the ads look like and become blind to them rather like what happened with banner ads some years back. To get the most out of your account you'll need great keyword research, thousands if not tens of thousands of useful articles and tested placement of your ads for improved click through rates.

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