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How many sets of Google AdSense ads do you have on your pages?  Most people have just the one and little do they know but this is costing them money!

Did you know that you can have up to three AdSense units on a page, two AdSense search boxes and one unit of ad links on every page (however, beware, because any more than this and you’re breaking the AdSense terms and conditions)?  If you’re allowed to have that many, you’re loosing money by not making sure that you offer as many chances as you are allowed.  The more variety of ads you have, the greater the chance that one will catch the eye of your visitors and that they will click!

Also, by running more than one ad block, you can spread your ads around and place them in a number of likely hotspots (places where they attract the most attention), again increasing your chances of scoring a click.

Make the fullest use possible of the Google ads you are allowed!

There’s no doubt that images attract the eye, so why not use them to your advantage!

I’ve seen a number of websites that have placed a small image close to their AdSense ads to draw the visitor’s eye to the ad and  hopefully, encourage them to click on the ad.  There are a number of ways that you can do this, and which technique you choose really depends on the style of your site (in a future post we’ll look in details at this trick and show you how different ads respond to different images). 

The idea is that you place an ad close to the ad that you want to draw attention to, but not make the image part of the ad (because that would totally go against the Google AdSense terms and conditions.  This works if you get the right image (again, relevant to your site and the subject) and you position it well.  To get the right combination, there’s no doubt that you’ll need to test one style against another here and figure out which works best for your site.  Also, once you’ve found one image that works, you’ll need to find others too, because your loyal readers will, over time, stop responding to the image as well (and who knows, you might find an image that works a lot better too!).

However, this trick does demand that you know what you are doing when it comes to building web pages - a good knowledge of how to leverage HTML and CSS is vital (if you don’t know what HTML and CSS is, then you need to do some research!).

If you have a relatively large blog or website (say, one with 100 or more pages of content) then chances are good that a some of your visitors will carry out a search while on your website for other content that’s of interest to them.  Why not leverage this to make some additional dollars?  Google AdSense allows you to place a Google Search box onto your site. 

How does this earn you money?  Simple.  The search box allows visitors to carry out searches across your website.  However, at the top of the results page is a selection of Google AdSense links.  If the visitor clicks on one of these links rather than a link to content on your website, then that counts as a click on an ad and you get paid.

What’s the best way to maximize profits from using a Google Search box.  Here are a few tips:

• Offer the Google Search box as the only mechanism for searching your site
• Generate more great content - this is what’s going to make people search in the first place (there’s no getting around the fact that you need lots of good content!)
• Generate lots of good content to encourage users to want to search
• Place the search box is a highly visible location (where this is depends on the look and layout of your site)
• Use the new feature that Google AdSense offers to allow search results to appear within your own site (this way users aren’t freaked out by being taken to another site)

Don’t expect a massive boost in your earnings from just adding a search box - normally you can expect an increase in revenue of between 1% and 5% (although it’s possible to get more, depending on your site, the content and the readership).  However, if you earn $100 bucks a month from AdSense for content, that’s up to an additional $5.  Grow that AdSense for content earnings to $1000 and you’re making up to an extra $50 a month.  Not much, but it all adds up over a year!

Google AdSense offers you, as the publisher of their ads, about a gazillion ways to customize the color and styling of your ad (if you’re not familiar with all these customization settings, I encourage you to log in to your AdSense account and check them out).  On top of that, you have an almost infinite number of ways that you can tweak the website or blog that you have wrapped around your ads (I know that’s an odd way to put it, but I think that it’s important to think that way, especially when you are looking for ways to improve your ad earnings).  Combine these two and you end up with a situation where you have an infinite number of possibilities.

But how do you choose the “right” combination of ad style and presentation to your site?

Well, there are a number of sensible steps that you can take, such as placing your ad in a conspicuous spot and making sure that it blends in, but beyond that, much of what you do depends on your site and the look and the look and feel that it has.

So what do you do?

Simple.  Test everything!  If you think (or someone tells you) that your ad would be better on the left instead of the right, see for yourself.  Make the change and watch the stats for a week or so and see if there’s an improvement.  If not, roll back the changes.  Same with color tweaks and changing ad sizes and layouts.  Test everything.  If it works, good.  if it doesn’t revert. 

Test!  Test!  Test! 

Don’t just limit testing to new things, but try old settings with new parameters (for example, if you found that one ad size outperforms another with one color scheme, this might not be the case when you use different colors).

Keep detailed notes of the changes you do to your site, along with the date you made the change.  This way you’ll be able to identify what caused the change in your earnings.  Also, if at all possible, keep a copy of any code you change so that you can roll back your changes if they don’t work.

Whatever you do, don’t go with your gut - I did this once and it cost me thousands!

You’re starting to get clicks on your Google AdSense ads and the cents are starting to mount up to dollars - it’s now time to start tracking your statistics (from this point on, called stats).

OK, what do we mean by tracking stats?  What starts should you be keeping an eye on and what do they mean?  There are a number of different stats that Google AdSense provide you with that are worth keeping an eye on:

• Page impressions
  The number of pages with ads on that have been displayed to visitors
• Clicks
  The part of the equation that earns you the cash!
• Page CTR (Click Through Rate)
  The number of clicks an ad receives divided by the number of times the ad unit is shown
• Earnings
  How much cash you make

You probably know that, ideally, you want to see each one of these figures increase over time (although with, say, page CTR, there is a ceiling that you will eventually hit, after which, these figures will plateau).  You definitely want to see your clicks and earnings go up over time (although small dips are to be expected, along with dips associated with times when fewer people are online, such as over the Holidays), because this shows that your website or blog is growing over time.

OK, but what do you do if your earnings start to take a nose dive?  Not look at your stats?  Hide under your bed?  Hope that things will change and get better? 

No!  You take a look at your stats!  Why?  Because you’re looking for what’s caused the dive in earnings.  Your stats can tell your a lot about what’s going wrong:

• Are you earning lower because you are getting fewer visitors?  This will translate into fewer impressions and fewer clicks.  If so, you need to take a look at your web site logs and try to figure out why.  A good place to start is by looking at your referrer log (where your traffic is coming from).  What changes can you see there?  Are you getting fewer hits for your top topics because someone else is beating you in the search engines?  If so, you need to find out why?
• Has your page CTR taken a nose dive?  In this case, your page impressions will still be high but your clicks will be lower.  If so, maybe something you changed about your site is putting users off?  Maybe your ads are no longer relevant and they aren’t of interest to your readership.  If this is the case, there are things that you can do to try to fix this (that we’ll cover in a future post).
• Is it just your earnings that have taken a dive (your page impressions and clicks are still high)?  This could be because you’re getting lower quality ads which are earning you less.  You now need to start attracting better quality ads (another topic for a future post!).

When things are going good, you need to keep an eye on your stats, when things are going bad, you need to put both eyes on the stats!

If your earnings have taken a nose dive, we’ll be giving you loads of advice on things that you can do to bring them on track in later posts.  For now, the message we want you to take away is that stats are your friend.  Keep an eye on them!

Most people have heard the phrase “content is king”.  What this means is that no matter what else you do to try to improve your website or blog (for example, spend time tweaking your design, working on search engine optimization techniques, or installing new features), it’s ultimately the content that you post on your site that is the major magnet that attracts visitors to your site.

It makes sense, doesn’t it?  No one is going to bother coming to your site to see your great design (OK, they might come once).  No one is going to come because you’ve got a great ads.  People come for the content.  Don’t believe me?  Take a look at your surfing habits.  How much of your surfing is content-driven?  My guess would be that most of it is.

But I think that the phrase “content is king” is far too simplistic.  More specifically, I think that the phrase should be “great content is king”.  People will come your your site and revisit more often because of your great content.  The longer they hang about, the more chance there is that they will see and click on your ads.  Think about it.  Where do people who visit your website or blog come from?  Chances are, they come from a search result page after doing a web search (most probably, using Google).  What makes them come to your site?  Content!  However, not only does your content have to be compelling enough to draw users to your site, it has to be good enough to jump up in the listings and get into the first page or so of those search results in order to be seen and clicked on.  Great, well written, original content can do this.

But what about reusing content?  Many “AdSense gurus” suggest that you find sites that allow you to use their content on your website and advocate this as a way to populate your website or blog with good content. 

Garbage!  This is a total load!  These sites that offer content for redistribution are doing so because this is their business model.  They want their content on your site because you have to link back to them and they hope that your visitors will go from your site to their site and see and click on their ads.  It works for them, but it won’t work for you.  If you have a blog or website and you are planning to make money from reusing content, forget about it.  Save the money that you’d spend on hosting and go go something else.  It’s a total waste of time.  Remember, you’re playing against millions of existing blogs, with thousands being created daily.  Do you really think that you’re going to win against these odds with duplicated content? 

There are always going to be a few people who will tell you that this is a good idea, but this is because their business model revolves around fooling people into thinking that it’s possible to make mega bucks with no effort. 

Making money is all about adding value.  You do something which adds value and you’re rewarded.  It’s simple.  Posting content that someone else has written doesn’t add any value to your site.  Think about it.  What is compelling about duplicated content?  What about this is going to draw visitors to your site?  Why don’t they go to the site where the article appeared originally?  How is it going to improve the ranking of your site?  It just doesn’t make sense!  It’s nothing more than a scam - either someone is trying to scam you into linking to them, or they are trying to scam you that it’s easy to make money online.  Pure garbage! 

If you want to make money on the Internet, you MUST find a mechanism that adds value.  Reproducing content that you can find elsewhere on the net isn’t adding value.  You must, if your venture is to succeed, either write great, compelling, original content yourself, or pay someone else to do it.  Period.  There are no shortcuts.  You MUST add value. 

This doesn’t mean that you can’t link to other content or quote something, but for each and every post that you make, you need to ask yourself “what’s the value that I’ve added here?”.  Sometimes that might be just that you’ve highlighted an article or post that otherwise might not get much attention.  It might be bringing together a number of reviews for a particular product.  Again, this adds value.  Look for the value you are adding - the money you make will be directly proportional to the amount of value you add.  As a web entrepreneur, this is an area that you should spending a lot of your time concentrating on.  There are no shortcuts.  If anyone tells you otherwise, it’s bull.

People go through phases of trying to be “different” in order to stand out.  You’ve probably seen it before - people who write their resumes with a pink pen, people who get an extravagant hair cut, people who wear flamboyant clothes.

Yesterday, we wrote that you want to place your Google AdSense ads on your blog or website in such as position where people visiting the site or blog will see them.  What we didn’t say was don’t go over the top trying out wacky color schemes and styles to get attention.  THIS DOESN’T WORK!”  In fact, it will dramatically harm your earnings.

Why is this so? 

It’s because people become good at noticing patterns.  If your ads stand out too much from the rest of the content, your visitors will, quite unconsciously, ignore them.  This process isn’t even a conscious one.  Your extravagant color scheme gets associated in their heads with ads and their brain filters filters them out.  This is exactly the opposite to what people expect.

The best ad colors, styles and layouts are ones that blend in with your design.  Try to make the ads look like and blend in with the content of your site or blog (without being deceptive, or course).  What you are aiming for is for the reader to give the ad “eye time” like the rest of your content in the hope that they’ll go “hmmm, that’s interesting” and click.  Choose ad colors and styling that fit in with the rest of the site.  Match link colors and font colors to those that you use. 

Don’t try to be radical and use contrasting background colors and styles - test after test after test has shown that it simply doesn’t work.

A lot of people put a lot of effort into designing a good site, writing and posting good content and generate increasing levels of traffic, but they are still only making depressing earnings. 

How is this possible?  Doesn’t traffic always convert into clicks?

I’ll let you into a secret.  The number 1 reason why people who have a good site, good content and good levels of traffic are still not seeing the returns they deserve is that they don’t position ads like they mean it.  Let’s take a look at what this means and why people fall into this trap.

Remember the simple equations we looked at yesterday:

Clicks = Cash

More clicks = More cash!

In this equation, the clicks that earn you money aren’t just random clicks anywhere on the page, but clicks on the ads.  If you make use of an ad program such as AdSense, this means that visitors to your site actually need to actually “see” your ads in order for them to be able to click on them so that you earn cash.  The problem arises when people design a good looking site or blog, but don’t plan on where they are going to place ads effectively (we’ll look at this subject in much greater detail in later posts).  This can be because they didn’t plan on having ads in the first place, or thought that they could add them later on, when traffic was at a workable level.  No matter what the reason, there comes a point where they want to incorporate ads into their design.  At this point, they take the ads and place them at the bottom on the page as an after-thought (usually because this is the easiest spot to place them because it doesn’t require any major redesign).  This is one of the worst places to place an ad and it is usually a waste of time.  You’re better off not bothering placing any ads.  Design your site with the ads in might right from the start.  Even if you know nothing about ad placement, take a look at some sites that you visit and see where they place their ads.  That gives you a starting point.

There’s a second reason why people hide the ads at the bottom of the page.  This is because they are uncomfortable about the fact that they host ads on their site and want to hide them.  Placing them at the bottom of a page says “I want to have ads, but I don’t want them to get in your way”.  These are what I call “shy ads”, shy because they have been placed almost as though the site owner is shy about having ads on their site. 

Don’t be shy about having an ad-supported website or blog!  In fact, be extravagant!  Never fall into the trap of placing ads as an after-thought or placing them where they don’t get in the way of the reader.  Remember, if you are generating quality content that there is a need for, people want access to that content.  You’ve generated all that content for free and are providing it to the reader free of charge.  You have no reason to be shy about having ads - after all, there’s no such thing as a free lunch.  The only way you make money from it is from people clicking on the ads on your website or blog.  This means that you want to be placing your ads where people see them and will click on them.  You either need to get over the “ad shyness” or get out of the game.

Place ads like you mean for them to be there!  There’s absolutely no need for you to be shy about the fact that your site has ads on it.  TV has ads.  Magazines and newspapers are filled with ads.  Movies have trailers.  Ads are a fact of life.  You are providing free content and in return asking that people put up with your ads and consider clicking on them.  Fair exchange.  That’s all.

Position your ads like you mean it!

Technorati Tags: AdSense

There are literally millions of people trying to make money from the Google AdSense program.  Nowadays it seems that almost everyone has a blog or website where they try to leverage their content into clicks, and by subscribing to AdSense, those clicks earns them a few cents each.

It seems simple.  If you’re on this path, there’s a good chance that you seen simple equations like these:

Clicks = Cash

More clicks = More cash!

Problem is, for most people the real equation is something that more resembles:

Few clicks = Very little cash

After a few months of poor performance and earning no more than a few cents, they pull the plug on the project and give up.  This is quite sad, because everyone earning money using a program like AdSense, even those earning huge bucks, started out making very little money.  It takes time and effort to build up good content, to tweak your design and attract the visitors who will click on the ads you host, which, in turn earns you money.  Your idea might be a fantastic idea, an idea that could easily earn you a nice income, but if you don’t give it time to grow and mature, you’ll pull the plug on it before it’s ready and miss out on the rewards.

As a general rule (there are no hard and fast rules in this game, and don’t believe anyone that tries to tell you that there are), you should give any web-based income strategy that you come up with at least 12 months to start showing profitability before you even consider pulling the plug on it.  12 months might even be conservative, and perhaps 18 - 24 is more realistic.  Earning money through websites or blogging is not, despite what many will tell you, a “get rich quick” scheme.  It will take you at least 12 months to develop a style, create content, get into the relevant search engines (in particular, Google!) and start getting levels of traffic that are capable of earning you a good income.  During these months, don’t focus on how much (or little) money your site is earning, focus on increasing traffic.  This you can do primarily by generating and posting good, original content.

Unless there’s an extremely good reason for you to abandon your idea (for example, the niche that you chose has collapsed), stick with it!  Start up small and with few expenses (for example, got for cheap hosting and don’t spend tons of money on expensive software).  This way, you’ll hit a profit much quicker (nothing is worse for a small business than being stuck in a hole where your profits go to paying the debts that the business has incurred).

Start small, and plan on being sticking with it for the long haul!

Technorati Tags: Google AdSense, AdSense