Mar

Choose your adsense site topic carefully

Posted by stuart as , , ,

OK, we all want to make as much income as possible from our Adsense site.

I have a passion, so I just write a lot of content about it and place adsense ads on each page, right?

Well, yes; if you want a hobby site. To make your adsense site any more than that, you need to have a bit of a think about the psychology of the people you need so desperately to click on your adsense ads, and the psychology of the people who are paying google to place adwords ads on your site.
Firstly, the motivation of the people paying google to place ads on your site. They are there to make money, no two ways about it. It would take a person of fairly limited intelligence to want to pay to have ads on your site if they didn’t think that they were going to get something out of it. So, generally, the Adwords advertiser is trying to sell something, and he wants to use your website (via google) to get people to come to his website.

This is where you come in. Yes, you could write a website about your Miniature Schnauzer, and I’m sure you have many fun and interesting anecdotes and stories, but how many advertisers are out there trying to sell products online related to your canine friend?

So how does this information help us?

Well, if you hope to make any money out of your adsense site, you’re going to want to be talking about a topic which advertisers are are trying to sell to the public.

Secondly, you want to be talking about a subject that casual surfers won’t be looking up. You are after razor tageted traffic, people who are specifically looking for something, searching for information, prices, or reviews of a product or group of products. These people are much more likely to click on your adsense ads in their search for the product or information that they are looking for.

So remember, traffic is good. Traffic consisting of people looking to buy something, or looking for specific information is even better.

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Mar

Google adsense blindness - the paradox

Posted by stuart as , , ,

There’s been a fair bit of talk recently about google adsense blindness, especially since the release of the adsense heat map.

The interesting paradox here is that, apparently, we’re supposed to combat adsense text box blindness by blending our ads into our content.

Huh?

So let me see if I’ve got this straight: I make people notice my ads by making them stand out less?

I can understand the idea of making the background and border colour of your adsense ad blocks the same as your site, but we need people to see the ads, right?

I guess it’s a case of finding the right blend. We all know our visitors ignore flashy image ads, we just need to find the right mix between getting our visitors to notice our adsense ads, without overwhelming them, or turning them off.
The trick is to be able to draw your visitors eye to your adsense ads, whilst still making them look like part of your site. By following the heat map linked above, and making sure that you have focussed content to bring in the adsense ads that are relevant to your visitors, you should be able to maintain a reasonable click through rate.

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Mar

Money for nothing using Google Adense?

Posted by stuart as , , , ,

“Can I make money with no outlay from google adsense?” I hear you ask.

Well, yes and no.

Whilst in theory it’s possible to make a few buck with google adsense using free web building services. (There is even one company offering free google adsense site hosting - googlepublisher.com), in reality, you’re probably going to want to get your own domain name and hosting if you’re serious about generating any kind of money from adsense.

The problem with free hosts is that they tend to come and go, and if you’re relying on the income from adsense, you don’t really want to be relying on someone else’s goodwill.

Also, you’re going to want to create a large site, with lots of traffic. The only adsense websites out there that are making any kind of money are huge - lots of content means lots of traffic, which means lots of clicks. Generally, free host are quite restrictive on how much disk space and bandwidth you are allowed to use.

You’re also going to need access to site logs, which most free hosts don’t provide. If you’re even vaguely serious about making money from google’s adsense, you need to know from where your traffic is comeing, what your visitors are doing once they’re at your website, and what pages they are leaving from.

In closing, yes, you can make a little coin from free adsense websites, but if you’re serious, it’s worth the couple of dollars a month that a paid hosting provider will charge you.

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Mar

Increase adsense revenue by reducing links

Posted by stuart as , , ,

We all want to increase our adsense revenue, squeezing every last cent out of our traffic. We tweak our ad placement, ad colours and pore over our adsense statistics.

We work like maniacs to get back-links, promoting our sites, tweaking our code to give the search engines what they want.

We slave over content, punching out page after page of keyword rich content, testing our keyword combinations, trying every little trick we can to bring in as much revenue as possible into our adsense account.

We pore over site stats, seeing where traffic comes from, which pages visitors leave our site from, how many page views we get per visitor, and try to work out ways to increase our eCPM.

But are we missing something? Site visitors come, and go, without clicking an adsense ad. We can see where they go, but why?

Could it be that you are providing them with too many options to leave your page? Logic would suggest that if you are in a room with 10 doors, each door has a 10% chance of being the door you leave by.

By following this logic, we should reduce the number of ways a visitor can leave our site. If we only have one or two outbound links, plus a couple of adsense ad units, we are greatly reducing the number of options the visitor has to leave the site, thus making the odds that they click an adsense ad greatly improved.

And we all know what higher click-through rates mean - more adsense income from the same amount of traffic!

3 Comments »

Mar