My Secret Formula for Creating Super-engaging Blog Content

This guest post is by Kiesha of WeBlogBetter.

Many of my readers have asked how in the world I come up with such creative ideas for my blog content.

If you’ve read:

“The Walmart Guide to Increasing Time spent on your Site,”“Can your blog Pass the Salad Test?”“Attract Readers to your blog like Mosquitos“What the Sims Taught me About Social Media”“How to Solve the Blogging Puzzle” (a post that compares blogging to a jigsaw puzzle)

…then you’ve probably figured out by now that there are no limits to the subjects I’ll squeeze a blog post out of.

I often challenge myself to find the most unlikely subject and see what blogging lessons I can squeeze out of it. While some things are a complete stretch and really won’t work, there are some surprising lessons you can pull from just about anything, if you’re creative enough.

I’m going to be honest: I’m using the phrase “creative enough,” but really what I mean is this. If you have a brain that has the capacity to think deeply enough to write a coherent paragraph or two, then you’ve got “enough creativity” to pull this off.

I’ll tell you how, but first let me tell you about a book that I read that really informs how I write today. It’s called The Medici Effect. This book talks about how it’s not completely new ideas, but the intersection of two seemingly unrelated ideas, that make a real difference in innovation.

I’m really simplifying the complexity, so you’re going to have to check this one out yourself to really get this and fully grasp the secret to creating meaningful and engaging content.

Here’s my secret formula for creating those zany analogies and surprising comparisons that I write about.

Every good writer is so because they pay attention to the details of life around them. They use those details and describe them with words that evoke the five senses: sight, smell, taste, sound, and touch.

Being able to describe an experience is key to hooking readers and keeping them engaged.

This is a direct extension of step one—if you’re paying attention your environment, you’ll discover that life’s lessons are everywhere. Blogging, like Kung Fu, is in everything!

You can pull lessons from any subject and then think about the ways they are similar to your blog topic.

This is easier if you make a list. For example, think of all the ways your experience in college is similar to your blogging experience. If I were to list mine I’d say:

Both were baffling at first.Both required time studying alone.Both required commitment and dedication to a schedule.Both required one to stretch his or her thinking beyond the ordinary.

This list could go on and on. I might start with a really long list, but then I would narrow it down to the most important points, since only so much can go into a blog post if it’s to remain engaging.

This step is extremely important. If you’re sitting there worrying about how crazy people will think you are or how much someone might think your analogy sucks, you’re not going to be able to do much writing. When you kick your inner critic to the curb and decide to just have fun with writing, it will come through in your writing. Confidence or lack thereof can be sensed and can weaken your credibility and authority.

If you’ve selected an interesting topic, then half of the work is done for you. At this point you just need to think of ways you can capitalize on those phrases that people love and that are also search engine friendly.

This works best if I’ve allowed the post to sit for a couple of days. This gives me fresh eyes and since the mental load of revision is far less than writing, it also allows me to think of ways to inject humor, think of details I’ve left out, choose better words and also consider ways to extend the post if possible.

Randomly pick two items and think of ways they are similar and can complement each. Then boldly consider ways you could use the combination to your advantage. You may need to try this exercise a few times before you arrive at something you believe to be true genius that you can passionately use to separate yourself from your competitors.

It was the combining of seemingly random, unrelated ideas that sparked the idea to change up the blog contest game and do something different. I suddenly got the idea that I should host a reality blog contest where bloggers will team up and work together while simulaneously competing for a Grand Prize. I got that idea while reading The Medici Effect, specifically a passage that talked about what makes a good contest. It discussed the evolution of the game show over the years until it eventually turned into reality contests and shows—that immediately sparked a eureka moment for me!

That’s what combining unusual ideas should do for you and your readers. It will help you create super-engaging content that your readers won’t be able to resist.

Kiesha blogs at WeBlogBetter, offering writing, social media and blogging tips. She’s currently holding an exciting new type of contest on her blog—the first ever reality blogging contest called “Surviving the Blog”. Visit her blog for details.

View the original article here

13 Ways for Bloggers to Make Money with Advertising

Recently, I posted my “How bloggers make money MindMap” on Google+. I’ve had a few people ask for clarification around the Advertising section, and what all the options there mean. Here’s a summary:

These are services like AdSense and Chitika but also smaller or more local ones like NuffNang (which operates out of Australia and Asia). They can probably fit in some of the other categories as well, as they use different models to deliver their ads.

This is where you sell space for an ad and get paid based upon how many times it loads. Usually you get paid per 1000 impressions of the ad. The rate varies a lot, depending upon topic. There are lots of very low, “remnant” ad networks out there that pay you a pittance per impression, but if you have a higher value niche you can get better money. I’ve been paid up to $40 per 1000 impressions.

These ads pay out only when someone takes some kind of action after clicking the ad. The action might be a sale but could also be them signing up for a service, leaving an email address, etc.

This is what AdSense used to be: every time someone clicked your ad, you’d get a certain amount. Now AdSense do a combination of CPC and CPM ads—they mix them in.

This is what I do on ProBlogger. I sell ad spots on a month-by-month basis to sponsors for a fixed amount per month.

When you sell a text link on your site, the person buying the link is usually doing it for search engine ranking purposes. As a result, Google frowns on these and you could be risking your own search rankings by doing it. I don’t do this, as I see it as a little too risky, but some bloggers still do. Proceed with caution.

Also known as sponsored posts (advertorials), this is where you’re paid to review a product or to promote it in a post. Bloggers have varied ethical stances on this. Generally these days you are required to disclose that you’re being paid for the post.

If you operate in a niche where people are buying and selling products or there are jobs that people want to advertise this can be a nice source of income. You need to be able to attract both advertisers and those they want to see the ads to make it work, though—so you need traffic and profile.

This is a growing area for me. Some advertisers love to have their brand included in emails that you send to readers. We find bundling some onsite sponsorship banner ads with inclusions in our newsletter is a good way to sell space to advertisers.

Some ad networks (like AdSense) have ways of doing this but you can also sell sponsorships in your RSS feed directly. We use a WordPress plugin called RSS Footer to add an advertisement in the RSS feed of ProBlogger.

Here are a few more ideas that I should add to the mindmap…

Ad networks like Kontera offer these, and I think Chitika and a few others do, too. They are ads that appear in your posts, turning certain keywords into little ads (they usually change the color of the word and/or underline it to make it look like a link). When someone hovers over the word a little ad pops up with a description of a product that they can buy. Some bloggers find these ads convert well, but others find them intrusive.

If you publish videos, you might be interested in Youtube’s integration with AdSense, which allows you to earn money from ads that appear in your videos.

Yesterday +Scott Fitzgerald alerted me to ImageSpace Media, who have a system that adds advertisements into your images. These are similar to the ads you might see in Youtube videos that pop up and that can be minimized.

There are of course other typs of ads and ads that fit into multiple categories above. What types do you use, if any?

View the original article here

Boost Your Blog #12: Create a “Best Seller” List

Continuing our discussion of things you should be doing right now to improve your blog, today’s tip is:

If you promote products on the Amazon Affiliate program, why not dig into the reports, look at what your readers are buying, and create a “Best Seller” list?

I created one of these on my photography blog, and I update it every six months or so (see it at Popular Digital Cameras and Gear).

I link to it from the front page of my site, and it drives significant income each month in commissions. Read more about Best Seller lists here.

Do you have a Best Seller list on your blog?

View the original article here

3 Reasons I’m Proud to Be an Amateur Blogger

This guest post is by Dan Meyers of Your Life, Their Life.

You  push the Submit button to introduce your next great thought to the world.  Finally, this might be the one that pulls in some real traffic.  Up until this point, the majority of your visits have come from you and your parents.

Amateur golfer (image is author's own)

Your bubble bursts when you check your web traffic and realize this wasn’t the one.  If you could only get your Facebook friends to like your blog page, then you’d have some legit numbers!  However, you’ve asked time and time again and most of them don’t come through.  Your subscriber count remains the same.

Life as an amateur blogger isn’t fun, but it reminds me of my experience as an amateur golfer.  I say aloud that my sub-par abilities (pun intended) aren’t worthy of my anger. But that doesn’t prevent me from getting ticked off with every ball that bounces belligerently into the brush.  Check out the picture: I’m that bad!

I’ve only blogged on my current site for a few months.  Of course I shouldn’t expect great traffic or a large subscriber base.  However, that doesn’t numb the pain of a harsh reality!

Are you embarrassed to admit that you’re an amateur at something?  Admitting so can make you feel worthless.  Our culture teaches us it’s better to lie than admit you’re not good at something.

My name is Dan, and I’m an amateur blogger.

I started blogging in 2007, but it was one of those one month blogs.  You know the kind: you get all fired up, pay for a website or sign up for a blog account, write three blog posts, and quickly become discouraged when you don’t get any visits. That’s what mine was, but I appreciate my parents, brother, and friend Ryan for clicking on it!

I’m back at it again and now I’m not afraid to admit I’m an amateur blogger.  It’s easy to start a blog, but it’s not easy to make a blog successful.

I’m now convincing myself that life as an amateur blogger should be relished.  Here are the reasons why.

Life as an amateur gives me room to grow, and the humility to accept that my first ideas probably won’t be my best .  It will allow me to kill some of my ideas without feeling like I’m killing part of myself.

This is relevant for more than blogging.   Charlie Munger said, “If Berkshire Hathaway had made a modest progress, a good deal of it is because Warren [Buffett] and I are very good at destroying our own best-loved ideas.  Any year that you don’t destroy one of your best-loved ideas is probably a wasted year.”

I’m an amateur. Of course I’m going to have some bad ideas!  Ben Graham made an investing observation that is analogous to real life when he said, “Good ideas cause more investment mischief than bad ideas.”  Are your good blogging ideas causing you more pain than your bad ideas?

Acknowledgement of my life as an amateur allows me to not hold myself to the high standards of a professional.  However, I am forced to know I must strive relentlessly to get to that point.

Professionals got to where they are because of many years of hard work.  As I mentioned in my previous problogger.net guest post, Malcolm Gladwell puts that amount of practice at 10,000 hours in his book Outliers.  If you attempt to instantly match the professionals, you will become frustrated quickly, which might lead to an overwhelming feeling of inadequacy.

However, you must realize that it is possible to get to that point just as they did.  If you are unwilling to put a lot of time into it, you’ll probably join the death of my first blog.   As they say, problogger.net wasn’t built in a day.

This is my favorite part of life as an amateur.  I’m passionate about helping others get out of debt and take control of their life.  I do it even though I’m not a professional; I don’t currently make money doing it and it’s a lot of hard work.

In his book, The Call, Os Guinness explains it as the following, “To our shame we moderns have taken the word amateur, opposed it to professionalism and excellence, and turned it into a matter of tepid motives and shoddy results.

“But amateur, as G.K. Chesterson never tired of saying, means “love.”  Man must love a thing very much if he not only practices it without any hope of fame or money, but even practices it without any hope of doing it well.”

This doesn’t give you a free pass to do sub-par work and shouldn’t cap your ambition to strive towards excellence.  However, it should prevent you from not doing something just because you’re not a professional.  Your message is important because you can help others, and because it’s worth doing.   G.K. Chesterson also said, “If a thing is worth doing, it’s worth doing badly!”

I can guarantee you one thing:  if you doing something badly long enough, but you try to improve and are passionate about it, soon it won’t be bad anymore!

These are three reasons that I’m proud of my amateur title, but it doesn’t mean I want to continue with it any longer than I must!  I’m so passionate about my subject that I know I can become a professional; it just takes time.  If I continue to work hard and not get discouraged, then I can make it and help many people.

Are you willing to live life as an amateur in hopes of one day becoming a professional?  You have a voice, don’t be afraid to use it!

Dan Meyers started Your Life, Their Life to help you take control of your life.  Read how he paid off $50,000 of debt in two years and how his strategies can help you.

View the original article here

The Mottos that Landed Me a Post on Problogger.net

This guest post is by Magz Parmenter of Tangerine Turtle.

Close your eyes for a minute and think about the biggest goal you have right now. Is it becoming a full-time blogger? Would you like to speak at a conference? Maybe you want to sell advertising on your blog. Whatever it is that you’re trying to achieve, you need to take the advice in this post. It’s how I succeeded with one of my biggest goals this year: to write for problogger.net…

I was going about my business, writing a post for my blog when I got a little pop-up message in the corner of my screen. It was Darren Rowse, you know, the Darren Rowse, from Problogger. Here’s how the conversation went:

Darren: “Hi Magz, I read your blog and liked what I saw. How about doing a guest post on problogger.net?”
Magz: “Wow! I’m flattered, Darren! Of course, I’d love to!”
Darren: “Okay, that’s great. Send me something and I’ll make sure to send it through to Georgina (the Content Manager at problogger.net).”

Okay, I’ll confess. None of the above actually happened. But wouldn’t it be awesome if it did?

The truth is, if you want to guest post for anyone, particularly an A-list blogger, you have to submit your ideas to them. Let’s be honest, they get thousands of emails asking them to please, please, please consider their amazing post. Particularly if you’re a new blogger, or even if you’re not (I’ve been blogging since 2005), getting to grips with pitching the big guns with your ideas can be daunting.

I’ll be the first to admit, it took me a good six months of reading and researching, interacting with Darren on Twitter and learning as much as I possibly could from heavy-hitters like Brian Clark, Jon Morrow, Pat Flynn, and the Blog Tyrant before I got the courage to pitch my ideas to the guys at problogger.net.

I. Was. Terrified.

To make matters worse, I sent my pitch on a Friday, and because of various factors like the time difference from the UK to Australia and Georgina’s work schedule, I didn’t get an answer until 1.30am on Sunday (Monday). I was sweating it that weekend!

In my former life, I used to be a counsellor. I’ve always been interested in psychology and what makes people do the things they do. I’m now a Personal Coach and I love helping people find ways to be more productive and successful in their lives, whether that means organizing their homes and offices, or organizing their thoughts.

I’m also addicted to Google. (They should give me shares, really. No … really.) Finally, I love inspirational and catchy quotes. Put these things together, and it should come as no surprise that I used the marketing slogans of four major companies to help me reach my big goal of guest posting here.

If you’re struggling, this motto might seem as believable as a pink elephant flying. But here are a few thoughts that will help you:

Your thoughts are influenced by words.The words you tell yourself become your reality.“Impossible” is a word.So is “possible.”

If you tell yourself (or someone else) something over and over, eventually they will believe it. That is why parents are warned about the things they say to their children. If you tell a child continually that they are no good or can’t do something, they will start to believe it whether it’s a fact or not.

This is just as true for adults. In January of this year I did a productivity course and it changed my life. To see what I accomplished in just six weeks after the course, click here. One thing the speaker said really stuck with me:

There is nothing you can’t do that someone has already done before you.

Read it again, and then read it again a few times. When I saw the Adidas slogan “Impossible is Nothing” it immediately reminded me of that same thought. I realized these two statements were both extremely powerful tools to help me achieve my goals and be successful. I started repeating both of them to myself whenever I could. Every time I started feeling fearful or doubtful of my abilities, I would say one or both of them over and over until the feeling passed.

Do you know what? Over time, I found that I was doing it less and less. In other words, it had become my reality. It was no longer a strange sentence that I was just repeating, I actually believed it.

Impossible really is nothing: it’s just a word. It has no hold over you.

It’s no secret that one of the main thing that holds us back from achieving our goals and dreams is fear. It may or may not come as a surprise to you to learn that many of the biggest experts out there also struggle with fear. We’re all human. We all hate the thought of failure or rejection.

The difference between successful people and the rest of the world is that successful people don’t let the fear win. They go for it anyway.

When you’re gripped by fear, ask yourself, “what’s the worst that can happen?” The Dr Pepper people took that thought and made a joke out of it, showing outrageous scenarios of things going wrong in their ads. If it helps you to remember those ads, do it. Sometimes it’s good to visualize the “worst” and then make a joke of it in your mind. (That won’t be appropriate for every situation, of course!)

When I was preparing my pitch to Problogger, as I said before, I was terrified.

But to conquer it, I asked myself, “what’s the worst that can happen?” The worst that could happen was that they would say “no.” Okay, the worst that could happen was that they would say no and then tell me how I had no talent whatsoever and that I should find a different job and never write again. But I was banking on them being more professional than that, and from what I knew about Darren, I thought it would be unlikely that he or any of his staff would be so soul-destroying.

As it happened, I got a “yes.” But if I had let the fear win and not even tried, I would not have achieved one of my big goals for this year, and you would not be reading this right now.

So, the next time you’re afraid to make a move that will push you towards success with your blog, or in your life, ask yourself, “what’s the worst that can happen?” The chances are, it’s not as bad as you think and even if it is, do it anyway—that’s what the big guns do!

After fear, the second biggest reason that people don’t achieve their goals and dreams is lack of self-confidence and self-worth.

They don’t believe they can do it, and more importantly they don’t believe they deserve it!

When I was younger and the L’Oreal ads would come on TV touting “because I’m worth it,” I used to smirk just a little bit. It was a catchy little slogan; I could see how women justified lots of purchases using this mantra. But really … how many of them really believed it?

Sadly, not many I would say. Research has shown over and over how low women’s opinions of themselves are. The issue isn’t confined to just women either; many men suffer from the same lack of self-belief.

As I’ve said before, what we tell ourselves becomes our reality, and unfortunately, too many of us tell ourselves that other people are better and more talented, smarter, more beautiful, and frankly, more deserving than us. To make matters worse, we tell ourselves this over and over and over, until eventually, it’s all we believe.

The fact is, none of us is more deserving than another. (I’m talking about hard-working people here; I’m not saying you can just do nothing and expect to get everything just because “you’re worth it.”) I am no less deserving of success in my life than Darren Rowse or Brian Clark or any other expert out there. I remind myself of this every day.

So the next time you think you deserve less than someone else in your niche, or in the blogosphere, tell yourself “I’m worth it.” Tell yourself over and over until you actually believe it.

The last motto is one that really speaks for itself.

Just do it.

This is the last piece of the puzzle that will get you where you want to go.

After all the thinking and talking and preparing, you have to just go for it. You have to take the leap and take a chance. Doing nothing will get you exactly that: nothing.

When I was preparing my pitch, and indeed, this post, I went through all of the things I’ve talked about above. The hardest thing was just clicking the Send button. But that’s what you have to do.

When you’ve done everything else you can, all you have to do is:

Just Do It.

So, there you have it. Take the advice in this post and you’ll be guaranteed to achieve just about any goal you set for yourself and your blog. When you do, stop by and leave me a message, I love hearing about people’s successes!

Magz Parmenter is a Freelance Writer, Blogger, Personal Coach, Organizing Addict, and Author-in-Training. She specializes in writing about personal development, organizing for success, home and family management. She’d love to hear from you on her blog Tangerine Turtle, on Twitter: @magzparmenter or Facebook.

View the original article here

The Full Adsense Formula - No Tricks

Adsense is the best income generating program ever spawned! Why?

There is no product or service to promote. Only your domain. Webspace, an Adsense account, and highly targeted traffic is needed. Your success with adsense, you will soon learn, is as easy as driving s car or cooking a four course meal. The reality is Adsense Success and everything else has to be learned. When you learned how to drive a car it became simple and after a couple of months of driving everyday or so. It became second nature. Once you learn the Adsense formula and it's variables. The sky's the limit with Google Adsense

Learn The Adsense Craft.

You can't cheat your way to success or for some a healthy adsense income. Just like anything other skill in life, it has to be learned. Everything that everyone knows was learned from a teacher(I.E. Anyone), a book, an article(I.E. Newspapers, Magazines, and the Internet), or by word of mouth. You have to learn the adsense formula and all the adsense variables. I have a A.A.S in Computer Programming and Engineering. So believe me I know how to give low-level instructions. No one can tell YOU how to make YOUR site a success, only guide you in the right direction.

The Adsense Variables

TT(High CTR) + Content = Adsense Earnings

Content - try to have a 1000 words of keyphrase-rich content.
High CTR - highly optimized placement of the adsense code.
TT - Highly Targeted Traffic

Yes that's it. The "Adsense Formula" is just a basic math problem and as we all know any on can learn math. We're not near finished. These variables the make up the Adsense Formula is the key to your success. Why refer to them as variables, because these Adsense elements constantly change and YOU are in full control of them. Imagine a indoor plant and its variables. Sunlight, Soil PH, CO2, Fertilizer, and Water. You control every variable and if each one is highly optimized then you will have a healthy fast-growing plant. If you highly optimize each adsense variable then you will in turn receive a healthy fast growing adsense income. Now that we have an understanding let's evaluate this "Adsense Formula."

Adsense Content

Keywords are a bad idea! High paying or not. In fact don't choose high paying keywords, not because of the saturation of SEO experts, but because keywords are to broad. Adwords is ying and Adsense is yang. Broad keywords have low payouts and ctr. You want to target keyphrases, so your site only displays high paying adsense ads, not .15 adsense ads from some beginner with one of your terms in their adwords campaign. There is a lot of free content online, but it is best to use unique content for search engine purposes. To accomplish this hire a writer or choose niche subjects that you are familiar with, so that you can write your own articles and e-books. Don't base your site on money rather than your passion. Example. My passion is computers and networking.

Adsense CTR

Optimal adsense ad placement is the heart of high adsense ctr. There are four locations on a webpage the receives the most clicks.

1. Just above the fold. The fold is the end of the section of the page you can view without scrolling.

2. All along side the left column.

3. In your content, if very interesting and informative.

4. At the end of your content after a reader finishes.

Adsense ad format effects ctr greatly whether or not they are placed in the right spots. Squares receive the most clicks, beginning with the largest and so on. The ads should blend with your page. Only the link title should be a different color than the text and url. No borders unless red or yellow. They attract viewer's eyes.

The link color should match your site's links, but blue and red work the best. Incredibly Increase your adsense ctr up to 400% by placing related images above or to the left of adsense ads.

Highly Targeted Traffic

Yes, there is a difference between targeted traffic and highly targeted traffic. Someone looking for an online business would be targeted traffic to this article, but someone looking for an adsense business would be a highly targeted visitor. Why high quality traffic? Your Ctr will be amazing and unbelievable because all of your traffic will be looking for YOUR site. Don't be surprised if you have certain days where 97% of your visitors clicked an adsense ad. How? Blogs, Articles, E-books, Rss Feeds, and most SERP(search engine results page) traffic. Never use traffic exchanges or links from other sites unless their content is similar to yours.

In my experience TrafficSwarm is the only echange that will get you clicks without getting your adsense account terminated.

I have given you the full adsense formula in detail, but for more info please visit Adsense Secret Tips. Please, if this article has benefitted you in any way leave a comment on my blog at Adsense Secret Tips [http://adsense-secret-tips.blogspot.com/2006/04/full-adsense-formula-no-tricks.html].


Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/172113

4 Keys to Increasing Your AdSense Income Online

Nothing is as frustrating as watching your Google AdSense revenue trickling in cents; $.10 here $.30 cents there and $.0 cents over there. So much for all the hype about guys making thousands a month with AdSense. Me thinks, thiz Adzenz thing be weird!!

Read this article, Try the 4 facts, and up the wall you will drive AdSense!

Lets face it, if my website traffic is anywhere in the hundreds a day, there is no way under these blue skies I'm gonna make myself enough money over the internet. I read a review of some website with mammoth traffic and they make over $15,000 a month. Heck, Digital Point makes anywhere around $10,000 a month on a 50% revenue share with their contributor members. That is $10,000 being 50% of what is left after forum members have been paid off. "Google pays Digital Point about $10,000 a month, depending on how many people view or click on those ads", said Shawn D. Hogan, the owner and chief technology officer of Digital Point.

Here is the kicker. I don't in my wildest dreams think I'll ever have a website the size of digital point, ever! But I can make 100 small ones. See, I'm just an average Joe trying to make head, tail, or both, whichever comes first; of this internet money thingii. And right now I'm not sure I'm holding onto the tail or neck.

I have been doing some research on Google AdSense and I want to share with you some interesting things. Things that I didn't know about and things I believe if I had known earlier, I would still be having some hair left on my head. (Pulled much of it off trying to double my AdSense to $ 0.40 a day). Anyway, I have concentrated my research on how to optimize my AdSense revenue even before I work on increasing traffic to my 2 blogs.

In my quest, I have learned that the secret to increasing your AdSense revenue lies in mastering four main factors namely:

Creating Relevant Ads

From my Google AdSense account reports, I have noticed I earn much more from AdSense for content ad groups as opposed to the AdSense referral ads and AdSense for search bar. If you have an AdSense account, you know that there are three types of AdSense ads that you can choose to be served by Google on your site. These are AdSense for content ads that are related to your website's general content. The content based ads are the best performers in generating you AdSense revenue and they are definitely your best bet. Make sure to concentrate your efforts to having as many relevant content ads as possible if you want to make the money.

Then there are AdSense referral ads that you can choose for your website. These ads are not related to your website content and will advertise anything from bio fuels to air tickets. These Google ads do not do as well as the content based ads. The main reason being that visitors to your site are more interested in relevant content to what they were looking for in the first place. AdSense referral ads are however second to the content based ads in generating revenue. And that's a distant second from content ads.

The last type of ads that Google offers you for your website is the Google search bar. The search bar ad group is such that a visitor to your website can type the name of what they are looking for in the bar. The bar connects directly to Google search and will bring the visitor to a Google page with several ads related to what they searched for. I have really not experimented on the effectiveness of this ad groups from Google and would not therefore conclusively say they work or don't. It's however worth putting up a search bar at a corner of your page or at the bottom.

From the above three discussed Google adgroups, you will notice that content based ads perform better than the other two. Its not rocket science to figure out why. The main reason however is that people searching the web are looking for particular information of their interest. They are therefore more likely to click on ads that seem relevant to their search. AdSense adcopies are written such that they offer answers to very specific needs and a visitor will most likely click on an ad that seems to answer their quest. And that's all you need them to do to earn your money. Click.

For example, people looking for Movie Downloads will be confronted with ads that offer them all sorts of diverse benefits and types of downloading movies online. Likewise, People looking for Water-for- gas cost saver kits and manuals on their cars will be bombarded with ads that offer increasing mileage per gallon of gas etc. Once again, concentrate on requesting from Google only those ads relevant to your website's content.

Serving Only High Paying Ads

In the real sense, choosing high paying ads from Google AdSense will in effect determine the content you put on your website. In other words, if you want to concentrate on high paying ads, and considering that you need relevant content to earn good AdSense income, then by default you will have to make a website or blog on topics that pay prime dollar for clicks on them. In a nutshell, not all ads pay the same with Google. Since competition for some products is excruciatingly high, the advertisers are willing to pay top dollar for their ads to appear first on Google content based advertising network.

Google adwords (this is where advertisers bid and create their ads on Google) offer the advertisers an option to allow Google to distribute their ads to other websites within their network besides Google that have relevant content to the ads. This is how you end up with AdSense being served by Google on your website in the first place. Now here is the spoiler, not all ads that you choose will pay as high. Ads for new technology, gadgets and gizmos pay much more higher since the manufacturers are willing to pay as much to enter the market and make their product known. Google ads for such products pay you equally higher dollars per click as opposed to ads for say nail vanish.

I have seen some adwords bids that start from $5 per click. Other companies and individuals bid as high as $50 per click to maintain the pole position in Google results pages. The revenue principle applying to AdSense when Google serves the ads onto your website is practically the same. On the converse, the highest bid by advertisers is a paltry $0.05 for some products. Which ads would you rather get served with by Google?-go figure.

For you to be able to run high paying AdSense ads, you will need to make a thorough research on minimum bids made by advertisers in adwords. This is not rocket science really. One way of telling a certain area has higher bids is to Google a product you suspect might have high competition among advertisers. Just counting the number of adwords ads appearing for that particular keyword will tell you much.

A Google SERP (Search Engine Results Page) with a lot of ads appearing on it might indicate that the advertisers on that keyword are bidding serious figures per click on their website.

The higher a particular ad appears on a highly competitive keyword usually indicates higher bids and you may want to consider creating websites in such an area and get it served with AdSense. But also bear in mind that high ad counts also means that it's a highly competitive field and getting traffic for your website might be like pulling teeth...and with a pair of tweezers that is.

It pays to do an intensive research into areas to create websites for AdSense revenue. Since AdSense is served automatically by Google to your website, your only maneuver is to look for very specialized, less competitive, high paying niche areas and keywords to create your website content on. As a rule of thumb, new products are naturally good niche areas to start with; assuming that you catch on the fad soon enough before every man and his dog start selling the same product. Please note that we are placing emphasis on guys that want to use AdSense as their main source of online revenue here.

In most cases and usually why we (me included) make measly AdSense income is that, we create websites in areas of our own interest and then serve AdSense ads to them. Problem is, our preferred areas of interest are not necessarily areas that can make us worthwhile money with AdSense. Research an AdSense area that pays, then create unique content on that, serve the ads and laugh all the way to the bank. Kind of doing things in reverse... banana eating monkey sort of thing.

Positioning And Designing Your Ads

This is an area that I want to approach with a lot of caution. One thing is painfully true, and that is your AdSense ads are not worth the space if they are not optimally designed and positioned. One of the biggest advantages with serving AdSense ads is that Google lets you design and position your ads on your own website. But, which design and positions work best? Just like the offline world, positioning an outdoor advertisement makes all the difference between the ad being seen and it passing as a waste of resources.

Why does placing a TV ad at prime time, for example, cost more than double that of placing it dead in the night or early in the morning? Better still a billboard on an unused highway will not receive as much audience as one in a freeway that has huge amounts of vehicular traffic.

The same principle works with serving ads from Google AdSense. Placement of your ads is everything in getting noticed by visitors to your website and eventually getting them clicked on. Some areas of your website are actually prime real (or is that virtual) estate while others are... well, badlands, abandoned dumb and quarry sites.

Positioning Your AdSense Ads

As mentioned above, you need to know which areas of your website or blog work for AdSense. Research (and don't ask me by who) has shown that an online browser's eye is trained more emphatically on certain areas of a webpage while other areas receive just a gloss-over glance. It is also true that a webpage visitor's eye lands automatically and for the first instance on a particular area of a page and then follows a certain trail of vision on that webpage. Disconcerting, is it?...No, it's actually a nightmare for an advertiser if you don't have those facts.

You might have noticed that, in a Google SERP (i.e. the results page you get when you search a word in Google) ads always appear on the mid top and right side of the page. Fact is that, advertisers on these two areas pay completely different rates. The ads on the top of the page are called sponsored ads, while those on the right edge of the page are called adwords.

The middle top area (sponsored ads) is also much more expensive to advertise on while the right-top side ads (1st to 5th positions) are priced higher than the mid-right and bottom right adwords areas. Although, this is done through a bidding process, the idea is clear that, if your ad is the first on the top right side of the page, you get hit more than those below you. This is not only exclusive to Google but to most if not all search engines online that run ads on their SERPs.

Ok, let's bring it home. Considering your webpage will be providing other relevant and mainframe content in the middle of the page, you will need to follow Google ad positioning example. For starters, you can try to place AdSense ads at the mid-top of the webpage. The best ad design that works for the top page section is the leaderboard format which stretches the ads across from left to right of the page. Usually about three to four AdSense ads will be served with the leader board format.

The leaderboard ads are available in the ads set up button within the horizontal ads drop down. All this is possible once you get Google to approve your account, you will be able to create your ads there and get a HTML code provided for you to paste to your webpage. Google promotes family friendly websites and blogs and will need to review your website before approval. They discourage websites with adult content; your website should also have well arranged and meaningful content.

Your next prime real estate on the webpage is the far right hand side. This is a crucial area and you might want to place the ads right from the top running downwards as a column. Again, I have experimented on this area with the broad banner ads from AdSense and they fit in like a glove hence bracketing the main middle text. The broad banner format is available from your Google ad set up button in your account under the vertical ads section.

Personally, I select the text-only ads from the create-new-ad button. You have a choice of ad types including texts and images, text only and images only formats. I prefer the text only since it's now accepted that text ads attract more interest than banner and image ads. I think it's something to do with an ad getting to the point as fast and as effectively as possible.

Now, the other available position has been subject to a lot of debate; but there are still some marketers who swear by it. This is the mid-text AdSense ads. These are ads that are placed in between your main text and separated into two, three or four parts depending on the size of the main text. Basically it interrupts the flow of the text after some delivery of information. By text I mean your main page content located at the middle of the page. I cannot deny that locating the ads mid-text really gets them seen by people interested in reading your full content. But there are also visitors that might consider it an interruption to their reading and just pass along. I think this position's effectiveness surely depends on an individual reader and I might want to leave the choice up to you here.

The last AdSense positioning real estate is the end-text position. This is placed at the very bottom of your webpage text. This position is equally important for webpage visitors that have read your content and might see something that catches their eye at the end. It is proven that a visitor prefers a sense of continuity while doing their web searches as opposed to opening one page, closing it and opening another altogether. If your end-text AdSense ads are relevant enough to the content on display, the visitor will most likely sign off from your page by clicking on that last ad. Which I believe is good enough for that AdSense revenue click.

As I end the positioning AdSense discussion here, I might want to mention that caution is necessary to avoid overdoing it by serving too many ads. Your webpage should have just enough AdSense ads to create a wrap around effect to your main text. The webpage should avoid looking like an overcrowded flea market. Usually Google allows you to serve about 15 ads per page but you need not go the whole nine yards with it. Place just enough on each page to make it optimized for AdSense revenue.

Designing your AdSense ads

You will also be able to design the format of your ads within your AdSense account. Google allows you to play around the text of the ads within certain parameters like size, type, nature, text color, borders color, background colors, url color and the shape of their edges. Google also lets you choose how you want your AdSense ads to contrast against your main text by being able to choose the templates among them blend, mother earth etc. Personally I have found blending my ads to the text works where I don't want them to conspicuously stand out.

While designing your ads for primarily the purposes of AdSense income, you may want to consider making them stand out. Take care however not to overdo the colors, otherwise your site will look like its reading the riots act to visitors to click on them or else... The idea here is to softly make the ads stand out but not so much as to distract the reader of the main text. This means you will be doing a balancing act with the AdSense font color, the background and the general shape around the edges of the ad boxes.

My research has shown that choosing a soft AdSense ad background like light grey combined with emphasized text color on that ad's background has a good effect on the click through rates. But grey if your own site's background is white. Grey works best with websites with a white background. Other lighter colors work best with different backgrounds on websites. I guess I'm trying to say that your AdSense background color should just be enough to provide a slight shade to differentiate it from your original website's background. Don't make it scream here.

This might hold true when you visit other websites like hubpages.com which shares its AdSense revenues with article contributors. What they do here is that they serve AdSense ads around your article and if it's a nice piece, you will get decent clicks if not an outright click-riot. I observed that, since their website background is white, they serve their AdSense ads with an ad-background of light grey while blending the top-text ad's background white. Your best bet here is not to take my word for it but to keep on tweaking, testing and turning the ads until you see what works for your website.

High Traffic Levels

This is the devil in AdSense income. The above three aspects of increasing your AdSense income will only work to a certain extent and as far as your traffic goes. As I said this is where AdSense becomes everybody's biggest headache. However if we are to look at this critically, there are a hundred ways to drive traffic to the websites.

Let's assume we have already worked on the other three areas to our satisfactions. We are now more than sure that for whatever traffic we bring to our websites, we will be able to milk the most revenue out of them. I think that is important. No one wants visitors to be making a pass by their website without ever contributing a cent to their revenues online. So optimized they are and out you go for traffic.

I don't want to go deep into this area of bringing traffic to your website but let's just say the methods are many besides writing unique content, writing articles with links to your websites, adwords, contributing in forums among many others. The most important and that which will save you a lot of agony and time is to choose a niche area that has comparatively less competition. Since we started off making websites for AdSense, we might as well ensure that we make websites with content that attracts the search engines, hence traffic.

Choose your niche area well and the search engines will pick you out. Visitors will be on your website like ants to a Popsicle- with the right content. To help you with selecting a niche area, you can use the Google trends keyword tool to measure the competition of a particular keyword. As a rule of thumb, avoid keywords that are crowded. The competition won't do you any good.

There are people out there who have mastered the art of making multiple websites for AdSense revenue. Most of them use the automated softwares that help them develop unique websites in certain niches. An example of good AdSense automated website developer software that is popular in the market is the HYPERVRE [http://increasingAdSenseincome.wordpress.com]. (see below)This software is designed to prompt you generate the most unique sets of keywords and go on to develop unique content. As mentioned earlier, making websites in unique niche areas is the key to getting massive traffic sent your way by the search engines. Well designed and unique website content also saves you the agony of leveraging your website traffic by writing articles, buying advertising space, email lists and all other related headaches to generating traffic.

Concentrate on making websites that attract traffic by themselves, then keep on churning out as many websites as you can using the automated softwares. Within 2 months you will notice your AdSense revenue expanding to unimagined levels. So much for your earlier belief that-nobody can earn more than adcents monthly.

Good Luck

Robert is a successful online marketer. He has written extensive reviews of new products including providing his well researched areas on "how to make online income'. He recommends the HYPERVRE for automated adsense websites development. Follow links to read more Click Here! [http://increasingAdSenseincome.wordpress.com]

Source: http://EzineArticles.com/1046117