If you hear about people achieving high payments per click with AdSense, remember that's only part of the story. for high total earnings, you also need lots of page views and a high click-through rate.
Here are some ideas on how to achieve those three things:
If you're starting afresh designing a site specifically for AdSense revenue, you'll want a simple design that makes it easy to paste Google's code into a horizontal or vertical space on the site. For experienced webmasters, that's easy.
To increase your click-throughs, design a simple, uncluttered page with the AdSense ads displayed prominently.
Use white space, so that the AdSense panel catches the eye.
Where possible, use ads high on the page. They catch visitors' attention.
Experiment with borderless ads high on the page. (You can create borderless ads by setting the border color to the same as the background color. Look in your AdSense control panel under "Ad settings".)
Try placing AdSense high in the left-hand column. That works well for super affiliate James Martell.
On very simple, one-column pages, making your article wrap around AdSense ads near the top-right of the page works remarkably well for me on a non-Internet marketing site.
Stick to only one topic per page - that makes it easier for Google to serve up highly relevant ads on your pages.
Plain, bland pages with few competing links result in higher click-through rates on the AdSense ads.
If you want to target certain high-priced keywords, use them in the file name, in the heading on the page, and in the first paragraph - in other words, use search engine optimization techniques.
If you change those keywords, Google will change the ads that appear on your page.
If you have trouble getting AdSense to serve relevant pages, check your anchor text - the words used in links on your page. Try changing some of those words.
Watch out for cases where Google has guessed wrong, and is displaying ads that won't interest your visitors. Figure out which words are involved, and rewrite those words. Help Google by sticking closely to the topic.
Don't worry about losing traffic via those clicks. If you can earn maybe 30 or 50 cents or more per click, you WANT to lose visitors!
You'll also want keyword-rich pages, optimized to rank highly in search engines, so you can serve lots of pages.
Try using ads at the top of the page and again at the bottom. At first, this wasn't allowed but AdSense changed the rules and it's now OK.
One of the beautiful things about AdSense is that you can generate revenue from informational sites even if there are no obvious related affiliate programs. With more than 100,000 advertisers, there's a good chance that Google will find ads that match your pages, better than the big ad networks can.
Don't be tempted into trying to create thousands of spammy computer-generated articles. Human beings review sites for AdSense. Build useful, interesting sites. Google likes them.
One way to create articles quickly is use Gary Antosh's approach. He pays people to write articles for him - by the truckload. So far he has bought hundreds of them and paid only $5 per article. See How to buy articles for $5 - the details
Another way is to use works that are copyright-free. Here's a book that describes how to find such articles: The Public Domain: How to Find and Use Copyright-Free Writings, Music, Art & More
However, that technique isn't likely to be useful for long. At the very least, it would be wise to add your own introduction and conclusions to make your pages different from everyone else's.
Several websites now sell packages of articles on a wide variety of topics. I belong to several of these membership sites. It's an excellent way of saving time. It's so much easier to rewrite an article you've bought than do all the research and writing yourself.
These articles are often referred to as PLR articles or private label rights articles because you own the right to alter them in any way you wish. Here are some good sources of PLR articles.
You can use PLR articles to quickly add lots of keyword-rich articles to your site for the search engines to find.
For long-term success, write your own original articles on a topic you're passionate about. That way, you're writing for humans AND search engines.
