How to Make more Money with Adsense
December 28th, 2009 | 41 comments
As we’re coming up on a new year (at the time of writing) many of us start thinking about goals for the new year. I’ve never been one to sit down and write out all of my goals, although I probably should, but I do try to set them and keep them in mind throughout the year.
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
Related Posts
- Is your Blog Lowering your Adsense Income?
- “MFA” Made for Adsense does NOT Equal “Black Hat”
- Adsense Isnt Always the Best Money Maker
- Increase your Adsense Income through Section Targeting
- Should you Monetize your Site with Adsense or Affiliate Programs?
- How to Raise Adsense CTR
- Increase your Adsense CTR to 30% Easily
- Why No One Clicks your Adsense Ads
- Should Newbies Concentrate on Earning Adsense Income?
- New and Old Adsense Policies to Consider
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28th December, 2009 at 4:58 pm
Interesting post!
Again I see having lots of valuable posts using various keywords could help both human readers and search engines.
Thank you Josh. I learned quite a lot from it.
28th December, 2009 at 5:01 pm
Nice tips Josh especially the keyword research. I have bought KE and MNF but I just returned them. I’m not really into Adsense sites. If I ever do build them I have to outsource the work and automate all that stuff. Btw… love your $5 a day report. Keep it up.
28th December, 2009 at 5:11 pm
Hi Josh,
I enjoyed your article, as I always do. I am new. I finally have a website up and running and I am beginning to add content to it.
About this adsense thing: I need to know where I can get easy, step by step info as to what it is, how to do it, etc. I need info that does not presume that I know anything.
If you have any thoughts along these lines let me know if you can.
I have been a member of yours for a while now and always enjoy what you say. You always have that “ring of truth” about you and I like that.
Thanks,
Carlton
28th December, 2009 at 5:12 pm
Wow…you mean I actually have to do WORK? I hate constant testing and analyzing traffic, optins, optouts, keywords, etc…. But I still do it. Why? Because it works.
Paul
28th December, 2009 at 5:13 pm
hey josh
thanks for the helpful content that u have on your blog, i often stop by and take a peek and see what u have been up to.
im also working with adsense and things are going well and building nicely.
there are a few highly recommended adsens etemplates flying around the net and wondered if you have tried any of them apart from your own and what type of results u have had.
im using a template that has been specifically designed for wordpress from a friend of mine and it converts like magic.
keep up the great work
paul
28th December, 2009 at 5:14 pm
Hi Josh,
AdSense is a great monetization model. My experience was, that it took a loooong time and testing before it started to work. Okay the income per click was modest but on the other hand I had lots of long tail keywords in that niche.
But when I started a new site with high paying mortgage ads, I got again the same problems: unrelated ads and low ctr.
And more challencies: the niche does not have so many keywords, so it is harder to get the traffic with SEM.
So these are things, which I must check before the next niche site.
However, I believe strongly on AdSense.
Juhani
28th December, 2009 at 5:26 pm
Great post Josh. I’d add one more to the mix.
Google Analytics provides so much data, I’ve been running reports to determine which pages on my site deliver the most in terms of eCPM.
Then I drill down in the reports to determine which keywords are landing on that page. Those are the keywords I target to move up in the SERPs.
I’ve found pages on the site I’m working on that deliver 200% more in earnings per thousand visitors than some of the other pages I had been targeting. Analytics can make it very clear where you should be concentrating the bulk of your efforts.
Also, I have a free script that I’ve been using to split test different adsense variations. It’s amazing how much difference size, color, 3 inches to the left, or pic vs text can make in terms of earnings. Anyone interested can get the script at this link.
http://www.brentcrouch.com/2009/11/30/free-code-for-testing-adsense-color-size-and-placement/
28th December, 2009 at 5:29 pm
Thanks for the info on Section Targeting – I had heard of it before but never knew exactly how to do it. I have one website in particular that has ads that aren’t super relevant, so I’m going to try this out and see if I can get some better ads (and hopefully a better CTR).
28th December, 2009 at 5:32 pm
Great content as always. “Section targeting” was a new one for me, so glad to have learned about that today.
28th December, 2009 at 5:35 pm
Hi Josh,
I learn something almost everytime I visit your blog, this time it was how to overcome ad relevancy problems through the use of Section Targeting.
This is something I hadn’t considered doing before, but I will look at it now.
Keep up the good work,
Steve.
28th December, 2009 at 5:37 pm
Content creation has become so vital that “fresh content marketing” has been talked about quite enormously recently and search engines are publishing real-time search results, for example in Google, under the “Show Options > Updates”.
What I mean is that apart from Google AdSense income, content draws targeted traffic to your site as well – if it’s well-optimized with well-researched keywords.
28th December, 2009 at 6:00 pm
Mixing Adsense with Affiliate links and banners looks tempting but as you suggested it is counterproductive. Adsense like other links needs to be optimized and reader gets distracted if there are too many other links as well.
Dilution means low incom.
28th December, 2009 at 6:08 pm
I am still fairly new to this making money online stuff and always find your blog an inspiration.
I am still learning how to pick profitable keywords and know I have a long way to go if I want to achieve my goal of living off my online earnings.
I wish you good luck with your goals for 2010.
28th December, 2009 at 6:19 pm
Hi Josh,
Good post about Adsense sites. I have quite a few out there but certainly not making me enough to live off of.
I have been trying to find out what a good CTR is for Adsense sites. Any ideas?
That Section Targeting thing was new for me also. I will definitely be looking into that one.
Have a Happy New Year and thanks for all the great teaching you give us.
Brenda
28th December, 2009 at 6:34 pm
Hi Josh,
As usual thanks for sharing your insights with the rest of us. I agree with most everything you said except for this one statement….
“In most cases, Adsense earns you more on big content sites, so the more content you have the better!”
That may indeed have been the case in previous years and with old school Adsense monetization but these days my impression is that small, tightly focused web sites targetted very specific, long tail keywords with severall thousand in traffic per month is where Adsense riches are at.
In other words the most money that can be made, I mean realistically by most publishers, with Adsense may no longer lie in having just one or two large sites but rather in having 100/200 smaller one’s.
I partcipate in one very hot forum where lots of Adsense publishers hang out and almost none of them have these large Adsense sites.
That’s not to say they aren’t around. Maybe the large publishers are making so much they don’t need to hang out on make money with Adsense forums but making large sites is extremely time consuming.
It may take years of work. Whose got that kind of time these days?
Seems to me that it is better these days to focus on a whole string of much smaller sites.
Just my impression. I could be mistaken but the smaller site is what I personally am focused on using Adsense on.
Carlos
28th December, 2009 at 7:34 pm
@Carlos – Pick any niche you want and single out the high traffic keywords for that niche. I bet you will find those terms are dominated by big sites.
Realizing that big sites win the best keywords in the SERPs is something that I’ve just come to realize. I believe part of the reason is they have more real estate to take advantage of internal linking.
I do agree with you that small sites can do well. I have a few of them. But in a world where the bottom 80% of the keywords in a niche generate 20% of the traffic and the top 20% have the potential of generating 80% of the traffic for a given niche, I’m more interested in targeting those top keywords although it usually requires a big site and a lot of time as you pointed out.
28th December, 2009 at 7:41 pm
Josh,
Timely post on adsense monetization and GREAT tips.
Are you still using the Adsense Templates from Mason World. I am interested, since I purchased them a few months ago, but have had some issues with IE8 (which I finally fixed).
Any tips/ideas on how to use those templates would be helpful.
MikeR
28th December, 2009 at 7:56 pm
You bring up some excellent points Josh. I think I was too hasty in calling large site Adsense to be “old school”. Sorry about that.
The problem with a large site is that one can invest countless hours not only developing the content but getting it to rank highly only to find out that one should have emphasized something different on the site or should have even gone into a different niche entirely.
Of course from the standpoint of your being very experienced you have the advantage of experience in determining what is a good niche for Adsense or not. I mean not in a foolproof way but certainly better than me for example…who is just starting out.
But for a newcomer like me…I can’t afford the luxury of sinking countless days and hours into large site for Adsense that I might realize later, after getting more experience under my belt, I should not have gone into for one reason or another.
I can afford little mistakes. Little sites take only a couple of days to set up from start to finish including some article marketing.
Big sites? If I make a mistake on one of those overall with respect to the niche I go into…well…let’s just say that my Adsense attempts would seemingly go down the drain of fruitless effort real quick.
As a newcomer I like the encouragement that little sites can give me when I see them ranking well and otherwise making me some money, albeit much smaller amounts.
Little sites are much more flexible for me too in that I can sell them, change them quickly to suit what I discover with my increasing experience, or outright abandon them without losing too much. The risk is low as opposed to a much higher risk of losing out on a lot of effort with larger sites.
Of course the reward is also much lower with small sites when compared to big sites too
.
I guess in the final analysis after thinking about what you said…there really isn’t a one size fits all with Adsense. Large sites…small sites…they both obviously work in the context of what a publisher wants to gain from them
.
Interesting.
Carlos
28th December, 2009 at 8:04 pm
Great tips here, Josh!
I’ve never even attempted the “Section Targeting” aspect and only recently even heard of it.
Now to make some AdSense cash!
Thanks!
28th December, 2009 at 9:06 pm
@Carlos – Josh didn’t write that comment, I did. He may disagree with me completely. He has much more experience in this area than I do, so maybe he will chime in and give you his opinion.
I agree with you that starting to build a big site could be a waste of time. For me, I threw up about 20 small 15 pages sites about a year ago. I just recently picked one of those 20 that appeared to have the most potential to make into a “big site”. At least this way, I have a much better idea of how profitable this niche is going to be before investing a lot of time and resources.
29th December, 2009 at 1:15 am
Nice tip about looking further than mere keywords. It means more work, but it makes sense to try and give folks what they are looking for.
29th December, 2009 at 3:21 am
Oops!
@Brent…sorry about me mixing you up with Josh (my apologies to you too Josh)!
You bring up another great benefit of mini-sites. Some stick and some don’t for no discernable reason. I mean in niches that are pretty much very similar. Google can get downright confusing sometimes.
But we can shift attention and further work to those that do stick as an efficient way to use our limited time.
Personally I put up one page sites after registering domains targetted at keyword phrases I like. All my one page sites use the same SEO. No backlinks, very limited on-page SEO.
If one makes it to the top 100 all on it’s own, and a surprising number of mine do, I then invest more time and energy in ranking it better.
Otherwise…well…I put the site on the backburner to perhaps never do anything else with it again (unless I want to play around with SEO on it for the enjoyment and learning of it without risking the ranking of my other sites).
Carlos
29th December, 2009 at 3:45 am
@Carlos – That’s an interesting method Carlos. I might give that a try. I could lots of 1 page sites for the purpose of testing. For the most part, most of my test sites have been 10 – 15 pages and I have spent time getting a handful of links. By the time I pay for a writer and spend my time, I can be out $200 and a lot of hours for one site.
Thanks for sharing how you are doing the same thing successfully with one page sites and no concentration on links. I’m going to give that a try.
29th December, 2009 at 4:39 am
@brent…I am flattered that you would consider my “method” something to try but it’s worked well for me.
As an example in the last couple of weeks among the sites I created 1 made it to pos 5 with one for the keyword phrase I was targetting (turned out to be a dud as far as traffic is concerned though…weird since Google’s keyword tool returned enough to warrant a targetting). Another one pager ranked at position 26 and still another one at position 53.
A couple of things to bear in mind though Brent.
What I do on these pages is important. I carefully research and write excellent if not outstanding one pagers (about 700 to 1000 words). I use LSI naturally to then write about what I have become a mini-expert on.
Since I am creating Adsense sites I don’t use headings or otherwise make them…well…too easy to read or so good that visitors have no reason to click on through ads elsewhere. In other words they are presented with a bunch of text broken into paragraphs of course but just text. Great text. Great content but just text.
No fancy graphics, JavaScript, Flash or other such baloney.
Secondly, as part of my research, I look for and use outgoing one way links to very high authority sites. WebMed, Wikipedia, FDA, etc..
And I include a fair number of such outgoing links at the bottom of my one pagers, never inside the body text as I don’t want to make it too easy for visitors to click out through these links. But I don’t just include the usual anchor text one might expect. I carefully review the page at the authority sites I am linking to and extract out a few words to use as anchor text that line up very closely with the topic I am writing about. I figure it’s my site so I can make the anchor text anything I want though I do make sure it is also indicative of something at the page I am linking to.
Lastly I make sure I register a domain with the exact keywords I am targetting in the domain.
http://www.keywordphrase.com
http://www.keywordphrase.org
http://www.keywordphrase.net
http://www.keywordphraseinfo.com, .org, and finally .net.
99 times out of a 100, one of the above domain names is available for the taking and I use it.
These three things have worked very well for me.
While waiting for Google to pick them up and initially rank them I go on to do more keyword research and or site building. Once a site is ranked and reaches into the top 100 I then focus on it more with articles, digg submission, and otherwise. Adding more pages that also have good keyword phrase numbers but thematically related to the main phrase I am targetting with the site.
I learned the hard way that it can be a big time drain and waste of my time to focus building up a site before Google gives it it’s tentative approval this way. The first Adsense site I built was a five pager that I labored over and submitted five ezine articles for. It’s still down around 400 somewhere LOL though I rewrote the home page (which was written by someone else) to line up with what I have said above and am hopeful.
Carlos
29th December, 2009 at 4:44 am
Carlos thanks for sharing.
I’ve also found having keywords in the domain is a big advantage. For some reason, most of the SEOs I consider to be experts claim it has very little impact on rankings, but my experience in that respect has been very similar to yours.
29th December, 2009 at 4:57 am
@Brent…there is a lot of “expertise” going around in the SEO world that is just…well…so much speculation more than anything else.
I prefer to stick to what seems to work based on common sense and my own research and testing though of course I too read the “experts” for additional insight.
I think there is some truth to the keywords in the domain not being that important by the way. I recently read that only something like 6-10% of top ranked domains for a given phrase have the keywords exactly in the base domain. Real world search results I have looked at bear that out.
But…here’s the clincher. In lower competition niches having all keywords in the domain can be a big help against others in the low competition niche.
Why?
Because in low competition niches things which might not have much weight at all in high competition niches among those who know a lot about SEO seem to count for a lot more than would otherwise be the case.
Probably because anyone coming along and using some decent SEO techniques in a low competition niche to begin with stands out against their competition a lot more than they would if they were involved in a super high competition niche where everyone is already SEO techniqued to the full.
I have found a distinct and clear advantage to using keywords in the domain among the low competition niches I hang out in.
Carlos
29th December, 2009 at 10:23 am
Hi Josh,
Why did you decide to “slow down with Adsense” and why now you decide to “up’ Adsense again?
And now that I notice: why isn’t there Adsense on this blog?
Cheers and prosperous 2010
29th December, 2009 at 3:43 pm
This is a great post followed by some good information from the conributors. I’ve learned a lot reading the post and comments. It’s always being a problem for me deciding how much content to include on a website. reading Carlos’ posts about his mini sites I think I’ll give mini sites a try. I’ll have to learn more about them.
Thanks for the post as always it’s full of good content.
paul
29th December, 2009 at 7:14 pm
Despite achieving some limited success (so far) using my methods (glad they were interesting and hopefully useful to some of you) my whole SEO world view (LOL) is in a state of disarray now that I have found out that my clever attempts to start getting link juice from digg.com and twitter.com is of no use with their nofollow links and that personalized searching is now upon us through Google and other search engines .
Alas…I am doomed
.
…..
Now that I have had a chance to calm down LOL I supposed the basics of SEO still count. Great content focused on being relevant to searchers based on excellent keyword phrase targeting. Making even one page web sites useful for those that might find them and useful to me in determining which sites to flesh out and focus more attention on.
Hmm…maybe my world has not been turned upside down after all. I feel better now…:).
Carlos
30th December, 2009 at 11:19 am
Hi Josh
I agree with your idea about just sticking adsense on your site, and not offering a lot of other affiliate offers. I took off an affiliate offer that was on the home page of one of my sites (it was getting clicks but not converting) and just left the one large block of adsense on there. Since then my adsense income has nearly doubled for that site, because the readers don’t have any other offer to click other than the adsense. It is definitely worth testing
30th December, 2009 at 11:26 am
@Carlton: Check out http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/03/19/100-google-adsense-tools-tips-and-resources/,
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/07/08/perform-better-with-google-adsense-the-ultimate-round-up/.
They are the best free adsense resources I’ve come across online.
31st December, 2009 at 1:42 pm
Josh you might recall I had a relevancy problem recently on one of my niche blogs and you helped me with the section targeting code and it worked beautifully, thank you!
Now I have to admit I’ve been lazy with channels, always opting only for a url channel. I really hadn’t thought enough about the unproductive ad blocks and how I could earn more if they weren’t there at all! Looks like I have some custom channels to set up.
Thanks for another great list of tips.
2nd January, 2010 at 12:23 pm
There is really no doubting that there are amazing incomes currently being made on Google Adsense and the really interesting thing is that even relatively small sites and blogs are finding new ways to make money from their Adsense sites every day.
15th January, 2010 at 1:03 am
I have struggled for a long time on mixing Adsense with affiliate marketing.
One side of me says…”big no no” and then another side of me say’s…”you’re leaving money on the table”. But in the end, I think it’s best NOT to give the visitor too many options. Else they won’t know where or what to click on.
Currently on one of my blogs, I concentrate on Adsense, and abit of eBay on the side. But the eBay I just added to test out. So far it’s not doing too bad, as its quite relevant to my niche and i’ve placed it in a good spot. Well, at least I think so. lol.
Adsense is a tricky beast for sure!
27th January, 2010 at 7:25 pm
Hmm…that’s odd Saiyed (if you are a real person and not an automated robot). That’s the exact same thing I said earlier in this very thread.
Not that I mind somebody copying what I said word for word mind you. No big deal with respect to blog commenting but..well…just odd that someone would copy my very comment and make it their own under the same blog post.
Kinda funny actually.
Carlos
27th January, 2010 at 7:42 pm
@Carlos: There really isn’t anything funny about what that guy did. You OWN every right to your comment unless otherwise stated by the blog owner. His action was simply THEFT.
Should you eventually start running a blog, keep an eye out for them. Cheers mate
28th January, 2010 at 12:56 am
Yeah…you have a rather unusual name too but assuming you are sincere in your comment…
Trust me I am familiar with online thievery. It’s happened to me before.
I guess what I should have said rather than funny is that it’s sad that someone would so obviously and blatantly steal a comment and make it there own. I mean how low can you get.
It’s like they don’t value their own ability to make a valuable comment enough to think of something to say themselves so…they take someone else’s comment and use it instead.
Just weird. I mean if you are going to steal something, which I don’t recommend but if you are going to steal anyway, at least have the self-respect to be a competent thief where you don’t appear to be a thief at all. Not like some amateur who doesn’t even know how to steal. That’s the laughable part to me. That someone would so childishly try to provide a useful comment by stealing someone else’s on the same thread and not apparently realize or think about how obvious their thievery is.
Josh…feel free to erase this comment too if you don’t think there is any value to keeping it in line with the overall topic of your post here. No biggie.
I appreciate your blogging and sharing things with us Josh and look forward to your next post.
Carlos
12th February, 2010 at 11:25 am
Thanks for some doable tips, Josh! You always give sensible advice regarding Adsense and other website topics.
27th February, 2010 at 5:34 pm
Great post! As time goes on and I continue to build my own personal niche websites, I’m looking further into how to improve my ad performance. However, I did not know that Google has “section targeting,” so that is something that I definitely need to look into — especially when some of the relevancy of ads displayed on my websites appear to be out of whack.
29th March, 2010 at 7:09 pm
Thanks for the tips. I’ve found that keyword research tools give a good base as well but it takes some knowledge of the niche to really create good content with keywords and phrases that will get you traffic.
4th August, 2011 at 12:55 pm
Tell you what, I was very naive with all these internet marketing stuff when I was just a newbie. And then I made an account on Blogspot and sign up for Adsense. They decline my application and told me that my website is under construction. Heck, that was so stupid of me. Haven’t finished my website yet. I really was in a hurry way back then.