How to boost your AdSense revenue
How much can you earn?
Let's say you have a goal of earning $100,000 a year from AdSense. Is that possible?
Let's see ... $100,000 divided by 365 = $274 a day. So your goal is to produce either:
274 pages which earn $1 a day
OR
548 pages which earn 50 cents a day
OR
1096 pages which earn 25 cents a day
The following are hypothetical cases. To earn $1 a day per page, you need, per page...
400 visitors, 5% click-through rate (CTR) and average 5c payout.
Or 200 visitors, 10% CTR and an average 5c payout.
Or 100 visitors, 10% CTR, and an average 10c payout.
Or 100 visitors, 5% CTR, and an average 20c payout.
Or 50 visitors, 10% CTR and 20c average payout.
Or 25 visitors, 20% CTR and 20c average payout.
Or 20 visitors, 10% CTR and 50c average payout.
Or 10 visitors, 20% CTR and 50c average payout.
Or 5 visitors, 20% CTR and $1 average payout.
Let's assume you choose a goal somewhere around the middle, say aiming for 50 visitors per page and want 274 pages earning $1 a day. You'd need 274 x 50 = 13,700 pageviews a day.
Does that sound too tough? If so, you'd better look for more profitable keywords and ways to improve your click-through rates.
Let's try a different scenario. You choose more profitable keywords and make your $1 on average per page from, say, 10 visitors. 274 x 10 = 2740 pageviews a day.
That's looking easier to achieve. If your average visitor sees 3 pages, you now need 913 unique visitors a day.
Is that too tough to achieve in your niche? If so, create two sites, each attracting half that number, 456 unique visitors, a day.
Can't achieve those click-through rates and payouts? Then you'll either need more pages on your sites on more niche sites.
Some affiliates have a goal of writing one article a day and building one site a month.
Need a little more help reaching that $100,000 goal? Add affiliate commissions into the equation. Add a newsletter for repeat sales.
Choose the goal which best matches your site or sites.
Then start building keyword-rich pages containing well researched, profitable keywords, and get lots of high quality links to your site.
Please note, because of the AdSense rules, these are all hypothetical cases. I'm not allowed to give real cases. Real CTR rates and payouts vary hugely.
It's fast
Google usually approves web sites in less than a day.
After your site is approved, within a few hours a special Google spider will spider your site. Then it's time to paste the code into your site and the text ads will appear.
You can choose between either horizontal or skyscraper AdSense ads.
Google Adsense Secrets, Tips and Tricks
Placing ads high on a page is good
Position the ads with the highest CTR, as high as possible in the page, in the source’s order (in the image below, notice that the ad appears just below the body tag). The first ads that appear in the pages (in the source’s order) get the most income per click.
Use images. Images and Adsense work together
Use images left or right of the ads. It makes them seen as part of the pages content, and your CTR increases. It doesn’t matter what images you use. Use any plain generic images. If you can, try to corelate those with the niche/domain of your website/blog. Be carefull not to write text, point arrows or similar on the images, as that might be seen as click incentives
Earnings are variable, based on CTR
With the Smart pricing ideea, your income varies a lot, according to each of your channel’s CTR rate.
Now this is very important: It’s account-wide, not channel-wide. So if you have a very good CTR (5%-50%) for one website, and you include it in the same account with a 0.04# CTR website, you will loose money.
Remove all the websites (from your account) that don’t have at least a 5% CTR (or depeding on your overall CTR, remove the ones that are really lower than your average), or you’ll affect the income of all the other good converting websites.
Use non-standard types of ads
We all know that web-savvy (eg. webmasters or people that use the Internet for so many years, and know all the standards, convetions and so on) users are ad-blind.
Banners like 468×80 have been on the Internet since it’s creation. Even people who use the Internet vaguely or once a month, are kind of blind to these standard banners.
Instead, use vertical skyscrapers, or boxed ads. They have a much higher click rate. The Adsense team even published a list of their highest performing ad sizes:
•336×280 large rectangle
•300×250 inline rectangle
•160×600 wide skyscraper
How to Top Google by Writing Articles
Search engines determine their rankings based on two things:
Is your site relevant? (Optimized for certain keywords)
Is your site important? (Many links back to your site from other sites)
Only when you address both of these considerations are you guaranteed of
making an impact. Your degree of success depends on how hard you try and
how many other people you're competing against (and how hard they're trying).
Optimizing your site for keywords is the easy part. (See Writing SEO Copy for
more information on SEO copy.) Generating links back to your site is much more
challenging – and time consuming (especially considering Google's dampening
link filter - see Beat Google’s Dampening Link Filter with SEO Articles). But it can
be done; and you don’t need a huge budget.
The key to topping Google on a budget is writing articles.
Here’s how it works :
STEP 1) You’re an expert in your field so you possess knowledge that other people want.
STEP 2) You write a helpful article – sharing your hard-earned knowledge and expertise.
STEP 3) You submit your article to recognized “Article Submit” sites on the Internet.
STEP 4) Publishers of online newsletters, ezines, etc. gather content from these sites for free.
STEP 5) Helpful, well written articles are snapped up by thousands of publishers from all around the world.
STEP 6) The only condition is that they must publish the article with a functioning link to your site.
STEP 7) 300 people publish your article – you get 300 links back to your site.Below are some FAQs about article writing that will help you write your articles and manage your campaign.
What should I write about?
Write about what you know. Make sure it’s related to your business (so you can use the keywords you want to rank with) and helpful (so it gets published). For example, if you’re a manufacturer of industrial plastics, you might write an article - or series of articles - on how best to handle teflon tubing prior to installation. Once you get thinking about it, you'll probably find there are hundreds of articles you could write that are helpful. You may even have some of them partly written already in your instruction manuals or installation guides, etc. Another good idea is to think of all the questions you get asked by customers and potential customers. These questions show you what people are interested in. If you write an article answering every one of these questions, you'll get published, and you'll also show yourself to be a credible expert. (You
may even cut down phone support time!)
How long should my article be?
The best articles are only as long as they need to be. Keep it short and sweet – there’s nothing wrong with a 400 word article. By the same token, if you need 1500 words to say all you need to say, that’s fine as well.
What kind of writing should I use?
Simply write in a style that your audience will be comfortable with. If they’re from the old school, don’t write like I am. Don’t use contractions, don’t end sentences with prepositions, and don’t start sentences with “and” or “but”. But if they’re not old school, just use conversational English. In fact, the more of yourself you include in the article, the more engaging it will be. The key is to make it readable.
Should I focus on keywords?
Yes! Yes! Yes! Any SEO website copywriter will tell you that just as you need to optimize your website for specific keywords, so too should you optimize your articles. If possible, turn keywords into links back to your site. And always try to include keywords in the headline and byline of your article. And don’t worry about being seen as Spam; if your article provides good quality information and guidance, it won't be seen as spam by the search engines even when it’s very keyword rich.
Where should I submit my article?
There are hundreds, if not thousands, of submit sites on the Internet. Too many to include here. Do a search for “article submit” and just find the ones that are most applicable to your industry and offer the most subscribers. Alternatively, you can purchase a list.
Who will publish my article?
Generally people publish pre-written articles because they want “eyes on paper”. In other words, they want to generate traffic to their site. Helpful articles are one way of doing that. It also sets them up as credible authorities on a particular subject. And it develops customer loyalty. There are hundreds of thousands of companies (maybe even millions) publishing online newsletters, ezines, and article pages. No matter what your industry, you’re bound to find
quite a few who are interested in what you have to say. In fact, once a few publishers recognise you as a good source of content, they keep coming back looking for more (and even email you asking if you can send them directly)
How will I know when my article has been published?
As one of the conditions of publications, you can request that the publisher notifies you when they use your article. Of course, most don’t bother to do this, so it's a good idea to set up a Google Alert which notifies you when your URL has been published on a web page. Google doesn't pick them all up, but it picks up a lot. Whenever you receive an alert, you make sure the article in unchanged and the link back to your site is functioning.
Will the publisher change my article?
No, generally not. Changing articles is just extra work. In fact, that’s why publishers like good articles and consistent content providers – because that means they don’t have to do any extra work. I’ve had many articles published, and don’t recall a single instance of an article being changed without my permission. If you’re worried about it, you can include an instruction not to
change the article in your conditions of publication.
Can I get an SEO copywriter to write and submit my articles?
Yes. Any SEO copywriter should be able to write keyword rich articles and submit them to a number of high traffic article submit sites.
What kind of information would I need to supply an SEO copywriter to write my article?
You’d need to tell your SEO copywriter something like, "We want to write an article which helps people install teflon tubing. The kinds of people who'd be doing it are... They'd be doing it because... The benefits of our tubing are... The difficulties they'd face are... Here are the key steps to successful installation..." Using this information, your SEO copywriter should be able to put together a very readable article which would be bound to get published.
Will my reputation suffer if my article appears on a dodgy site?
It shouldn’t. Most dodgy sites will be either unrelated or have very low traffic. If the site is unrelated, the publisher won’t go to the effort of publishing your article. If it’s related but has very low traffic, very few people will see your article there anyway. And besides, even if your article appears on a dodgy site, it probably won’t be changed because – dodgy or not – publishers don’t create extra work for themselves. So your original presentation, content, and intent will be unaffected. Write a good article, and it always reflects well on you, no matter
where it's published.
How long will it take for my ranking to increase?
There are no guarantees in SEO. It all takes time. For a start, the search engines can take up to 2 months to update their index of pages. And a single inbound link generally won’t have much impact. Depending on how much competition you’re facing for keywords, and where the links are coming from, 100 inbound links may not make much of a difference. (Links from high PageRank sites are more beneficial to your ranking – see http://www.divinewrite.com/seotradesecrets.htm for more information on PR.) So don’t expect anything to happen too quickly. But if you’re dedicated, and you’re prepared to write quite a few articles, you’ll definitely see results within a few months.
An Easy Way Not to Get Banned by Google
Strategic search engine optimization involves far more than keyword research, META tags and content. If you want to mange an SEO program, you need to be aware of any issue that can affect your success. Domain name management is one of the big factors. Effective domain name management is critical because you could end up getting banned from Google and other search engines if you take the wrong approach.
Why would Google ban you?
In the spirit of fair play and providing depth in its results, Google frowns on duplicate content. Some web site owners purchase multiple domains and copy their content for both domains. They figure they may land the #1 and #2 positions that way. That may be the company’s goal, but it’s not very valuable for the Internet searcher.
Even if you don’t maintain your identical content with two or more domains, you can still run into problems. It’s possible to update just one set of web pages, but have them look like duplicates because of how the domain names are administered. You may be risking everything if someone enters
www.yoursite2005.com/about.html and www.oursite2005.com/about.html and they see the same content – even if the pages reside in only one location. Many web site owners redirect one domain to the next rather than configure the server to associate the core content with a second domain name. In many cases, a 301 redirect is your best bet. It’s a server-side redirect most
administrators can handle in a few minutes. In effect, it’s a proper way of telling search engines to ignore one domain and favor another.
You may have many good reasons for owning multiple domains, including brand protection. Some companies get extra domains on the off-chance that someone may simply try a domain name and see what comes up. A classic example is 1-800-FLOWERS 1-800-FLOWERS.COM. One of their domains is www.1800flowers.com, but you can get there with www.flowers.com as well.
The Bottom Line :
If you secure more than one domain, redirect the extras to your main web site (on the server) or use the extra domains for unique content (showcasing a line of products of services). Michael Murray is vice president of Fathom SEO, a Cleveland, Ohio-based search engine marketing (SEM) firm. A member of Search Engine Marketing Professional Organization (SEMPO), he also authored the white paper, "Search Engine Marketing: Get in the Game."
Relevant Ads Increase Adsense Profits
If you’ve started using Adsense as a way to increase advertising income, but the
numbers just aren’t adding up to what you expected, the problem might be with the ads
themselves. If the ads being generated by Google’s Adsense aren’t relevant to your
website, visitors won’t click on them. And, no click-y, no money. It’s that simple. And it’s
a simple situation to fix.
One way to know if the ads are working is to monitor the click-through-rate (CTR) on a
page. If it’s low, it’s usually an indication that once a visitor arrived at your page using a
certain keyword, that visitor did not find any ads relevant to that keyword. And
unfortunately for you, the visitor found no reason to click on the ads.
How do I know this? It happened on my website. On one of my sites, I had a page
dedicated to PHP programming (a programming language). The page had a low CTR.
Upon further examination of the page, I noticed that not one of the ads was related to
programming or even to technology.
What I did notice was that the ads were related to guitars. Guitars? I thought to myself,
“What relevance do guitars have to PHP programming?” And I imagined visitors to my
site wondered this as well.
After studying the ads, I noticed that one word seemed to keep jumping out at me. The
word was “strings” as in guitar strings. Well strings are used in programming too, but
Google was not able to make this distinction which is why it was generating guitar ads!
The solution to this problem was simple. I removed from my webpage the words “string”
and “strings” (or I just used another word in place of string or strings). After Google
found this page again and updated its view of it, the guitar ads were replaced with
relevant ads. And best of all? CTR on this page immediately increased and so did my
advertising income!
If you have a page with a low CTR, you may need to tweak your text so Adsense
generates ads that are more relevant to the page. When making these types of changes
to your webpages, use the same ideas you use for search engine optimization. Why?
Because Google uses the same logic to determine the appropriate Adsense ads to display
on your page as it does to determine if your article should rank high for “blue widgets.”
Some areas on your page that might need a bit of text tweaking include:
- The title of the page
- The H1-tags used in the page
- The number of occurrences of the keywords in the text of the article
- Changing the filename (this can be very effective, but only do this for new pages that
are not yet in the search engines or you risk losing traffic)
One word of advice: Don’t forget that your keywords determine your search engine
rankings so take small steps when changing keywords.
And remember, the only ads that will bring you the extra Adsense income you’re looking
for are relevant ads
The Truth About Google’s Adsense Affiliate Program
The truth about Google’s Adsense program is that it is amazing. It’s the greatest
affiliate program ever invented. There is no affiliate program that even comes
close. If you are not using Google’s Adsense, you’re truly missing out on a great
opportunity. I’ve tried several other affiliate programs, and the only one that is
creating revenue even close to Google’s, is the Amazon.com affiliate program.
Amazon.com’s affiliate program pays 5% commission and up for shipped
products. It’s not really clear how Google pays you, but let me tell you it seems
very fair. They do not pay per clicks, leads, or click throughs; they have a secret
formula that no one will tell. But trust me it works. I was making pennies off of
clicks monthly, until I joined Google. Then the pennies became dollars.
Here are some basic tips for signing up with Google’s Adsense program.
Tip # 1 If you search multiple websites in different categories you’ll find one
thing in common. Almost all of them have Google ads and nothing else. This is
because most other programs are a waste of time. Don’t take my word for it.
Try other programs, but don’t skip Google’s Adsense.
Tip # 2 Google’s search spiders are so specific, that the ads that appear on each
page correspond exactly to some element of that page. Therefore, having ads
from other companies is not a good idea.
TIP # 3 You can place text, image, banner ads and even a search box that will
earn your company revenue. Do not place a search box from another company
on the same page as Google’s search box. They may stop working with you.
In summary, the Adsense program is a great way to make revenue, has
incredibly targeted ads and don’t use other search boxes on the same page as a
Google search box. If you have any questions about Google’s Adsense program,
you can email me at awais_ajaz@yahoo.com
My top 5 tips for increasing adsense earnings (without increasing traffic)
I have spent a long time trying to improve the advertising earnings on my websites and I have managed to go from a couple of dollars a month to 3 figures in a relatively short time, without increasing the amount of visitors to my site.
The tips I am about to tell you are what worked for me, but I encourage you to try different things as each site is unique.
1. Colour and Position
This is probably the optimization which is mentioned most regularly, but it's for good reason. You really should experiment with different ad positions and different colour combinations. Each time you make a change leave the ads for a week and see how your earnings alter. Make a note of what works and then try something new. I was always sceptical when I read these comments before but since I have started playing with positioning my adsense revenue has multiplied by 4 times (crazy but true). Personally I've found that blending ads into the site works very well but it's not the only way and you should try all the combinations you can think of.
2. Different date, different adverts
This is one of my favourites and I intend to write a post on how to do this next week, for now I will stick to the what and why.
In simple terms, the older the page the more ads you show.
Despite the fact that I have advertising, I don't actually like it. I have 0 to very few adverts on new posts, and increase the ads on older ones. This isn't so obvious here on Binary Moon, but on Binary Joy I have gone a little crazy - but there is a method to my madness. The theory is that older posts will be more appealing to search engines, and visitors who come from search engines are more likely to click on ads. Another side effect is that I "reward" regular visitors by not annoying them with adverts, so I feel this is a good compromise. As I said above I'll go into this one in more detail next week (with code).
3. Content Targeting
This one is a very simple change and is ridiculously straight forward to implement. Google have a simple comment tag that you can place around your primary content, and this is what your ads will be targeted to.
Key page content here
The idea is that you place these comments around your core page content. That is, the content which is mostly text, and which best reflects the content of your site. On a blog this will generally be the main post content. The reason you do this is so that the adverts don't target irrelevant content such as the links in your sidebar.
You can also add regions you want Google to ignore. I haven't used these myself but they are something I intend to try in the not too distant future. You can read more on the section targeting page of the Google Adsense help.
4. Referrals
Google Referrals don't make me a huge amount of money, but I like to include them on all my sites. Currently I only use one referral package and it only displays in Internet Explorer on the PC. It's for the Firefox browser, and earns me roughly a dollar for every new install I generate. Some sneaky css removes the ad for Firefox users so that they don't get pestered with unnecessary adverts.
To do the show/ hide css on your refferal code all I do is have a div with my referral button in it, which I hide. I then use conditional css comments to load some css to display the advert in IE.
I've put together a simple example of what I mean below. Just copy and paste the code below into a new htm document and then view it in IE and Firefox. In IE you will see the ad block at the top of the page, in Firefox is "magically" disappears.
4.SEO and Content
I get about 75% of my traffic from search engines and, in my opinion, search engine visitors are the ones most likely to click on adverts, far more so than the regular visitors (which ties into the date based adverts above). Search engine visitors are on a journey to find some information, if they can't find what they want on my site then they might as well find it on one of my advertisers sites, and that's the good thing about contextual advertising - the ads are relevant to my readers.