One of those goals is to bring my Adsense income back up to where it was a couple years ago. At one point I was earning a few thousand dollars a month via Adsense. Since then I have shifted my business model to focus more on my Info-Product Success Formula, which in turn more than quadrupled my online income!

I’ll continue to work on new info-products and to increase that income as well, but just setting an hour or so aside each day can make a big difference in my adsense income, so I figure, why not? That’s more money in my pocket and that’s what it’s all about.

So let’s get into making more money with Adsense.

The first thing that you need to realize is that Adsense isn’t a business model. Adsense is a monetization model! A business model is a complete system for making money, like my Info-Product Success Formula (shameless plug, but excellent example.) A monetization model alone will make you no money.

With that being said, I obviously can’t go into each and every business model and tell you how to make each of them more profitable in this blog post. But I can give you a few Adsense tips that seem to be interchangeable. These may or may not apply to the Adsense business model you’ve adopted, but chances are they do.

1. Keyword research, keyword research, keyword research, keyword research! They say 90% of all searches are unique. Meaning the keywords people are getting from expensive keyword research tools only account for about 10% of the total keywords used by real people. What does that mean to you? Use tools so you know what is being searched for by those 10%, but also get to know your niche and use COMMON SENSE in figuring out what people in that niche are looking for! THEN, and only then, create a compelling title and write your articles and pages.

2. The more content the better! Never rely on only a few pieces of content to catch on. Some do, some don’t and even those that do aren’t always big money makers. You should alot a certain amount of time every single working day for content creation. In most cases, Adsense earns you more on big content sites, so the more content you have the better!

3. Check your ads relevancy often. The ads that Google decides to show aren’t always 100% relevant. The more relevant the ads, the more money in your pocket, so the less relevant the ads are, the LESS money in your pocket! Fortunately Google has something called “Section Targeting” that allows you to tell Google where you want the Adsense bot to really look at and also where you don’t want it to look.

4. Test with channels. Your site should have the same overall design and template for each page. And in most cases your ads should be showing in the same spots on each page of your site. Each of those ad spots should have a channel and you should be recording stats. If one spot earns next to nothing, get rid of it. You should only keep units that perform. Also record the earnings for each spot for a month. Then change the design of the ads around a little.

Test different backgrounds, borders and text colors. For each modification give it 30 days. Obviously after you’ve tried 3 or so variations stick with the one that performs the best. Generally you want the background of the ad to match the background of the page and the text to match the text of the page etc. but that isn’t always the case. Testing is the only way of knowing for sure!

5. Don’t mix Adsense with loads of Affiliate banners! In most cases adsense performs the best when it is the only monetization on the page. If you think affiliate offers will earn you more money you should test it. Run affiliate offers for a month, then Adsense for a month. If you think Adsense and Affiliate offers combined will earn you more, test that for a month. Whichever performs the best wins. But don’t do what 99% of all Adsense publishers do and just stick everything that you think looks good on the page just because. Ads should be placed because they earn you money, PERIOD!

If there is one thing that you took from this article it should be this: TEST! I know people hate hearing that because it requires work, but the fact is that I can’t sit here and tell you exactly what will work best on your site and no one else can either unless they test it.

So take the tips I provided above, combine them with testing and I guarantee your chances for more Adsense income will greatly increase.

photo credit: Peter Forret

For NON-Coaching with Josh clients the first problem almost always seems to be that they started off targeting the wrong niche in the first place. In other words, they didn’t target a high-paying niche! So instead of earning $10 or more for every 10 adsense clicks, they are lucky to earn $3.

However, that’s not the purpose of today’s short post.

The purpose is to clear up the second and third, and most common reasons why people don’t earn enough money from their adsense monetized sites.

1. The display of your ad
2. The positioning of your ad

All it takes is a little testing and tracking of your ads with channels to figure out very quickly what colors and what positions convert the best.

The absolute, ultimate spot and colors of your ad will depend on your exact site, but 95% of the time, the following is true.

The BEST converting adsense ad is placed directly below each pages title (headline.) The ad is a large rectangle. The background is the same exact color as the background of your page. The title of the ads are the exact same color as the color of the links on your page. The color of the ad text should be the same color as the text on your page. The color of the border of the ad is the same as the color of the background. The color of the advertiser’s URL should be the same color as the text.

95% of the time, that will bring in the BEST possible CTR!

I couldn’t begin to count the number of people who have asked me why they aren’t making any money with adsense, only to go to their site and see their adsense ads are large, vertical skyscrapers, displaying in their sidebar, that might as well be screaming “I’M AN ADVERTISEMENT” due to the extreme colors that are used.

Take a look at this example:

There are 5 things wrong with this ad, that combined are killing the CTR.

1. It’s in the sidebar and although you can’t tell by the image, it is below the fold, meaning you can’t even see it unless you scroll down.
2. It’s a vertical skyscraper, which will convert more poorly than a well placed large rectangle.
3. The color of the ad titles are blue, while the color of the links on the rest of the page are gray.
4. The color of the ad text is black, while the color of the text on the page is gray.
5. The color of the advertiser’s URL is green, while the color of the ad text is black.

Should an ad stand out? Yes, absolutely, BUT think of this: A bum on the street stands out for an entirely different reason a well-groomed, clean-cut businessman stands out.

The ad that is stuck in the sidebar, using odd colors that don’t match the site’s theme is the bum. The ad that is right there below the title, using colors that match the theme is the clean-cut businessman!

(Sometimes you just don’t want a big ad gleaming in your visitors face. And for more serious sites you may want to gain the trust of your readers and develop a following, which is never a bad thing. In this situation I like to stick a small, horizontal ad directly after the post.)

img credit: Dave Bullock

I’ve actually been playing around with PPC for several years. The problem for the longest time was that I couldn’t get my ads to compete with the top competitors without paying a crap load of money to get them up there.

I was reading alot of PPC blogs and forums and I was looking for all the answers… I never found them and figured PPC was just too hard to figure out, but I’ve always seen the ENORMOUS profit potential in it!

Recently I decided to start playing with it once again, but this time I decided to just forget all of the advice I’d been given and just use common sense and what I realized was PPC is much like SEO.

* The PPC networks (Adwords, YPN, Live etc.) want to serve the most relevant, helpful ad to their visitors. So, my ad needs to be relevant to the phrase that it’s served for and it needs to be helpful.

Relevance – So, if I’m bidding on “Red Nike Shoes” I’m going to start an ad group using “Red Nike Shoes” as the title of the ad, insert “red Nike shoes” within the ad as well and bid on ONLY “red Nike shoes” and a few more extremely relevant keywords with that ad! So my keywords would be something like

“red nike shoes”
“red nike shoe”
“hot red nike shoes”
“hot red nike shoe”

Then I start a new ad group in the same campaign, but this time I’ll change the ad to target a different, yet similar term like “red nike shoe store” or whatever I come up with during my keyword research. I do that over and over, so I’ll have a different ad group for basically every ad variation I find with a decent amount of search volume.

Helpfulness – Being online for several years now I probably have somewhat of an advantage because I have several sites in various niches that are established. Do you think an ad network is going to give preference to an ad for a site that has been around for a little while or a site that is brand new?

I also include links on my landing pages to pages that any credible site would have, like contact, about, privacy/legal etc.

By using common sense and doing the things I mentioned above my adverts have been served above 90% of the competition, 100% of the time… out of 10 campaigns I’ve been running for the last few days and I’m paying far less than I expected… the CPC is actually going down on many of my campaigns because the ads are performing well.

This is obviously not ground-breaking advice on PPC, but for those like me who have never really gotten into PPC, it’s useful information.

I’ll be working alot more with PPC in 2009, so you’ll most likely be seeing a few more blog posts on the subject in the coming months.

photo credit: Danard Vincente

I still own the website and you can take a look if you like (still as ugly as ever and goes against some of the most important SEO advice I provide) http://www.TheGermanTruth.com/ After developing that site I moved on and created a new site, which is basically the exact same type of site, but I integrated what I had learned into the new site. You can see it at http://www.EverythingAboutGermany.com/. Why am I telling you all of this and how does it relate to Adsense? You’ll see in a minute.

Most people, including myself, started off online with one monetization model: Adsense… generate clicks in any way possible (hopefully ethically and within their TOS though.)

So, we either learn how to put up a site with FrontPage or Dreamweaver or we start making free blogs etc. that allow you to run adsense ads or we do both. I personally learned the basics of Dreamweaver, with the help of a friend, and did it on my own.

We then start writing content for the site and put up some realllllllly ugly graphics that we made, which at the time we think are awesome. Every chance we get we capitalize words and center the content, because that will get the readers attention, right? lol

Somewhere along the way we hear about affiliate marketing too, but adsense seems so much easier… they click, you make money, so easy. So we just do both. We put adsense up and LOADS of affiliate banners allllll over the place, because the more ads there are, the more likely the visitors are to buy, right? uhhu ok

Then we learn a little bit about promotion. We learn that we need to build links and that we can exchange links with other Webmasters, but the best way is to write compelling content. However, we don’t believe these people… we think we have to manually do it all, because so far, noone has linked to your “compelling content” right?

If that sounds just about like your story when you started, or where you’re currently at, you can rest assured I, as well as just about everyone else in this business, went through the SAME THING!

Fortunately we learn as we go and we learn that we don’t need to capitalize everything or make everything bold to get people’s attention… we learn that things we’re not good at (graphic design in my case) should be outsourced or we’ll scare people away… we learn that the more banners you have DOESN’T necessarily mean the more sales you make (often times it’s opposite of that) etc. etc.

If you visit just about any Internet Marketing forum or read many blogs, you’ll notice that many of the newer Internet Marketers will frequently talk about Adsense, while the more experienced Internet Marketer will only speak about Adsense on occasion. Obviously there are several different business models out there and some advanced marketers do talk about Adsense quite a bit, but overall they don’t. Why? because they started diversifying their income years ago!

I don’t know how many times I’ve written about creating multiple sources of income, but it’s a bunch and I’m saying it again!

If you’re new to the business create some sites and put some effort toward adsense revenue, but DON’T spend all of your time on it or you’ll end up like I did and wait 2 years before you’re earning enough money to make a full-time income when you could have done it in under a year!

The website I spoke of at the beginning of this post (EverythingAboutGermany.com) now earns me a steady $200/month and while that’s an incredibly small portion of my income, it’s there and I do NO WORK AT ALL to keep it up. As a matter of fact, I haven’t added content to that site for over a year and it’s been even longer since I’ve manually built links! The only thing I’ve done to it is replaced the template with a better looking one (click here if you’d like the same template.) And oh by the way, it holds top 10 rankings in Google for many germany related phrases like “Germany Tourism” and “German Mountains” (without quotes) etc.

So, to answer the question, YES, “newbies” should be concentrating on Adsense starting out, but they DEFINITELY should NOT be concentrating solely on Adsense, as it’s not a quick money maker by any means!

One can see some very quick money through Adsense using a technique like my $5 Formula, (I no longer own that product) but a raw newbie wouldn’t have a chance with it because it takes some experience and know-how to do proper keyword research etc.

Build an email list through the same sites you’re promoting for Adsense income. Learn the basics of Pay Per Click and test out an offer every now and then. Create a product as soon as you have a good amount of knowledge in any particular field…. but NEVER concentrate solely on Adsense income!

I still have a few mods to make myself, which I’ll be making very soon, but I wanted to get this out there to those of you who may not know.

There is a rumor going around that the Adsense team will be suspending the accounts next month (April) of those publishers who have not yet implemented existing guidelines. Obviously they suspend accounts all of the time, but they may possibly be getting very strict in the near future. This may or may not be true, but it’s enough to get me off my butt and make some changes.

A Few Important Tweaks that may Save your Account

Privacy Policy – This is a big one. Each and every page that contains a Google advert, must have a privacy policy, as some advertisers collect personal information:

You must have and abide by an appropriate privacy policy that clearly discloses that third parties may be placing and reading cookies on your users’ browser, or using web beacons to collect information, in the course of ads being served on your website. Your privacy policy should also include information about user options for cookie management.

This is best done by an attorney, but that may or may not be realistic for all. There have been a few different adsense privacy policy generators and WordPress plugins pop up that would probably be better than nothing, but you should always seek legit legal advice for this!

Images and Video – Most of us chalk it up as common sense that we can’t serve adsense adverts on pages with objectionable content, ie. porn, hate, racism etc. But some of us use images for nearly all of our new blog posts etc. It’s something I honestly never thought of before, but are every single one of those images in compliance? Some images/videos may be inserted out of pure fun and humor, but they may very well be objectionable to some users!

Ads Directly Underneath Titles – *edit* I was a little premature with this one. After RT and Ryan’s comments I looked into it a bit more. My new understanding is that we can place adverts directly underneath titles and headlines, but not all. It depends on the wording. For instance, if the title were “how to boil an egg” that would be fine because it doesn’t imply that the ads are a list of your own links showing how to boil an egg.

If your headline where, for instance, “Best Health Care Resources” it would be against the Adsense TOS because the ads could be mistaken for these resources!

Clarification on the new “Next” and “Previous” Buttons

One of the recent tweaks that many publishers don’t seem to like is the new “Next” and “Previous” arrows beneath our adverts. I read a blog post a few days back (forget where) where the publisher complained about not getting paid for clicks on ads theat are delivered when clicking these new “Next” and “Previous” buttons. I read the same thing in a forum today.

This was derived from a blog post at the Adsense blog that stated:

You won’t generate earnings for clicks on the ‘next’ and ‘previous’ buttons, but these buttons will help improve both advertiser value and your potential revenue.

However, what they’re saying is that you won’t get paid for visitors actually clicking on the “Next” and “Previous” BUTTONS. You WILL get paid for valid clicks on the adverts that are delivered as a result of clicking on those buttons. This is cleared up in the comments field of that post.

To clarify, you won’t receive revenue for clicks on the actual ‘next’ or ‘previous’ arrow buttons, but you will receive revenue for valid clicks on the ads which appear after a user clicks those arrow buttons. Sorry for any confusion!

Anyway, this is just a reminder to those of you who’s income comes (hopefully only partly) from Google Adsense. There are new terms to be aware of and old terms that may be enforced more strictly in the future!

disclaimer – The information provided in this blog post was derived from my own understanding of the Google Adsense Terms of Service. It is not official. For official advice you’ll need to contact a Google Adsense representative and/or read the Google Adsense Terms and Conditions.

When it comes down to it you obviously need the traffic and that only comes through your own marketing efforts. But some publishers have the traffic and still don’t see the kind of money they expect with the Adsense advertising program.

I’ve been running Google adverts for nearly 3 years now. A person tends to learn a thing or two about increasing conversions when running the same advertising program for that amount of time, so I’m going to share a few tips with you:

1. Use section targeting to increase the relevancy of your adverts! This is something I don’t see talked about nearly enough because it really does work out for alot of sites. Its effectiveness really is determined on the site in particular, but no matter what it’s worth a shot!

2. Target competitive niches! I don’t care what anyone says about MFA sites, they work! I’m not talking about spam sites, I’m talking about high-quality, informative sites that are in a high paying market! Some of these niche sites can bring in $5-$10/day after only a couple days. When you’re making over a $1 per click you don’t need much traffic to make money.

3. If a site has a CTR of 1% or less, remove it from your site. Although there is some contraversy as to whether or not CTR causes “smart pricing” to kick in, it’s just not worth risking. At least remove Adsense for a few weeks and see if your overall adsense income rises. If so, you were probably hit with Google’s Smart Pricing. If that site in particular was causing smart-pricing to kick in, consider a different monetization model.

4. Use large rectangles wherever possible. Obviously this will be determined by your own perception of ads, as some people think it’s somewhat “spammy” to have a big ad at in their face, but large rectangles appearing at the top center of a page does work! I use this format on my niche sites above the content and I get very nice CTR’s on most of these sites.

5. Remove the “on-site Advertiser” link from your ads. This is something I noticed a few years back and noticed an immediate increase in earnings. That may have been a coincidence, but it makes sense. It’s just one less thing that makes it look like an ad.

6. Most pages convert better without a border and by using the same link and background color as your page. This is of course dependent on each page in particular, so testing is always important, but more times than not blending in converts!

7. In many instances one individual advert will show over and over again. If you see an ad that continues to appear on your page(s) but isn’t laser targeted to your content remove it with the competitive ads filter inside your account.

8. Do not go by Google’s heat map. It’s a good visual aid for some layouts, but there are just too many variables. The effectiveness of any layout will be determined by color, style, niche etc. so testing is always your best bet!

9. Don’t get too crazy with ads. I’ve seen loads of sites that have there maximum allowance of Google ads stuffed into their pages, a few (or alot) affiliate banners etc. etc. Placing too many adverts on any page does NOT mean you’re going to earn more!! That’s a classic “newbie” mistake that most of us made in the beginning. More times than not, just have a couple well optimized ads on each page will convert MUCH better than 5 or more.

10. Play by the rules. Don’t ever click your own ads and don’t ever have others commit click fraud. You can’t crack their code and trying will only get your account banned for life! If you do click your own ad on accident don’t worry, one or two accidental clicks probably won’t get you banned, but several from the same IP and/or geographical location will definitely get your account banned. It’s not worth it, don’t do it!

photo credits: Mint Software

I asked several people and posted the question on several forums etc. Noone knew why this would happen.

Then, a few weeks ago a sold a few sites that had extremely low CTR’s. I’m talking extremely bad, below 2%! Now for the past week or so my adsense has risen and I’ve noticed higher paying clicks and CTR’s throughout my entire Adsense account…why?

I just read an article by Courtney Tuttle, which I believe explains exactly why. It’s titled “How to Get Worthless Adsense Clicks.”

In a nutshell he explains how low performing sites can cause your entire Adsense account to drag due to Smart Pricing.

He explains that Internet Marketing related blogs normally perform poorly with Adsense, as most of us already know, but my thinking was, “I won’t leave money on the table, as little as it may be.” Well, now that I’m pondering this concept I’ve went ahead and removed Adsense from this blog, as it was bringing in very little income anyway and could have very well been costing me money.

I run Adsense on about 12 sites and with the removal of this blog I only have one article directory that performs under 4% that I need to deal with.

It’s somewhat exciting to manage my account, removing poor performing sites just to see what kind of a difference it makes.

I’ve already increased my Adsense income by simply removing a few low-performing sites and I’ve definitely seen the effects. But maybe I can increase it even more after removing this blog and working to increase the CTR of the one remaining site that has a low CTR, possibly with Section Targeting.

Food for thought, what do you think?

It’s incredibly easy to implement and even the newest newbie can do it. You simply add a simple tag (below) before and after the actual content that you want your ads to be based on.

Here are the tags:

< !**-- google_ad_section_start --**>

< !**-- google_ad_section_end --**>

(Remove the Stars)

So why use these tags? Lets say you have a page about article marketing but your sidebar, footer, header etc. has links or content about Blogging. The bot is going to see all of that and deliver ads that may or may not be relevant to what the page is actually about! So in the case above, you may have ads about blogging on your page that is about article marketing.

How can this increase your adsense income? Duh If your pages are serving up more relevant ads, your viewers are more opt to click on them!

You can add these tags in more than one instance on the same page and you can also ad the following tags to restrict the bot from crawling content:

< !**-- google_ad_section_start(weight=ignore) --**>

< !**-- google_ad_section_end --**>

(Remove the Stars)

This is something new to me that I’ll be using on all of my pages from now on. I hope you appreciate the value of this and do the same!

Over the past few months I’ve been making several hundred dollars from one referral program alone, Google Referrals.

This is something that is not new to many of you. But, do you really understand the money making opportunity that Google referrals provides?

A few months ago I created a couple pages on how to create a Google Adwords account and how to create a Google Adsense account on the main site ez-onlinemoney.com

I was actually just bored when I created them and the idea came to mind. I didn’t promote the internal pages or anything.

Now I earn $100-$400 a month just from the referrals that these pages generate.

If someone where to create a Website dedicated to providing small businesses etc. information on how to promote their businesses via PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising, and this site promoted Googles advertising programs, I would imagine that person could make a lot of money.

This is something that I have had in the back of my head for quite some time but I just don’t have the time.

Hopefully an eager viewer takes this idea and runs with it!