How to increase your AdSense earnings
If you hear talk about people achieving high payments per click with AdSense, remember that’s only part of the story. For high TOTAL revenue, 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 square, 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. Simplicity of design is REALLY IMPORTANT when you’re aiming for high click-through rates. Why? Because the ads are much more likely to catch the eye and catch the click.
Use white space, to help the AdSense ads pop into view.
Where possible, use ads high on the page. They catch visitors’ attention.
Larger AdSense ads usually attract more clicks. Google says:
“The sizes we’ve found to be the most effective are the 336×280 Large Rectangle, the 300×250 Medium Rectangle, and the 160×600 Wide Skyscraper. Keep in mind that while these ad sizes typically perform well, you should use the size that best complements your pages.”
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. This often works very well because people reading web pages start at the top left of the page.
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 – this 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 your 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, often 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 when visitors click on your ads. 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 bottom of pages, at the end articles, where the reader is looking for somewhere to go next. However, you may prefer to place affiliate links in that spot. Experiment to see which gives you more revenue.
Have another look at Google’s AdSense heat map and study their advice, which answers the question: Where should I place Google ads on my pages? They know better than anyone what works best, and they’re eager to help you succeed because more clicks mean more revenue for Google.
Note: Google strongly recommends you put your users first when deciding on ad location. This is excellent advice. If you put your visitors’ interests first, they’re much more likely stay longer on your site, seeing more ads, are more likely to revisit, and more likely to recommend your site to others. So in the long run, more people will see and click on your AdSense ads.
AdSense is perfect for theme-based informational sites
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 many thousands of AdWords advertisers, there’s a good chance that Google will find ads that match your pages, more effectively than the big ad networks.
Don’t be tempted into trying to create thousands of spammy computer-generated articles. Human beings review sites for AdSense. Build genuinely 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. In our newsletter, he described how 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 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.
If you’re not keen on writing your own articles, let our writing service write good, unique articles for you, for a very modest price. For details, see At Last! Our New Article Writing Service.
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