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