Make Money With Adsense
February 28, 2009 by admin
When you’re looking into the “how to make money online” niche, there’s this one topic that seems to be more popular than the other ones, and it is “how to make money with Adsense”. Countless books and e-books have been written about it, a good portion of them claiming to reveal, within their pages, the “secret” to being successful with Adsense. The reason why Adsense attracts such attention is simple. It connects advertisers, web site owners, and web surfers in a way that no advertising program had before, generating a win-win-win situation that is, to this day, unmatched.
What a lot of people fail to realize is that Adsense is one side of Google’s advertising “coin”, if I may say so. As a website owner, when you put Google’s code on your website, it starts showing ads from advertisers that sell products and/or services that are related to your site’s topic. The other side of the equation is Adwords. This is where the advertisers put in their bids on the keywords for which they want their ads to appear. They can choose to restrict their ads to search results, or allow them to also be shown on the content network (and that’s how the ads end up on content sites).
You need to understand that these two programs are intimately tied to each other if you want to make money with Adsense. Adsense can be best compared to chess: it takes only a few minutes to learn, but a lifetime to master. You can quickly make a few bucks a day with Adsense, but for the big bucks, it’s going to take time and effort, just like any other business venture. There are no overnight successes with Adsense, contrary to what you may have read.
Making money with Adsense comes down to four main factors.
- Traffic. Without traffic, you’ll make no money, it’s that simple. But there’s more to it: your traffic has to be targeted. Ideally, it should come from the search engines, because this is where people go when they have a need. Since they have a need, they’re likely to be interested in the ads on your sites that provide a solution to their need. So to make money with Adsense, you need decent, targeted traffic. If you have traffic that’s untargeted and clicks on your ads, you will trigger smart pricing on your account and will make very little money.
- Niche. The second important factor when it comes to how much money you’ll be able to make with Adsense has to do with the specific niche you’re targeting. As you can imagine, the niche that you target has to have advertisers, otherwise no ads will show on your website and you won’t make any money. Also, in some niches, every new customer is so valuable that advertisers are willing to pay big bucks to get their hands on them. Obviously, those niches also have much higher competition for your website to rank high in the search results.
- Content. Adsense ads are triggered by the content that’s on your website. You need relevant content on your website, that is attractive to human readers, but also tells the search engines exactly what your site is about, so that the Adsense bot can decide what ads to show on your pages.
- Optimization. This is what ties everything together. You’ll be happy to learn that most of the techniques that improve your website’s rankings in the search engines will also optimize your pages for Adsense earnings, provided that you chose a good niche. Basically, the two most important things you will have to work on are writing good, relevant content and getting links to your website. Those two things will help you move up the search engine page results for your niche.
Adsense-specific optimization boils down to the following:
- Blending the ads into the layout of your website by removing the borders and making the colors match those of your site. Beware of “over-optimizing”, though. Visitors must be able to tell the difference between the ads and the rest of the content of your site. Several webmasters have had their accounts suspended for blending their ads too well into their content
- Positioning the ads in the “hot spots” of a page. There are several theories as to exactly where an ad will perform best. It really depends on the niche, and on the particular site’s layout.
- Choosing the right ad formats. There seems to be a consensus that the 336 X 280 ad block is the best performing one.
- Tracking performance with channels. Google provides you with 200 channels to track your pages’ performance. This is where you can really test your pages’ hot spots and which ad formats work best on your site, so you can maximize your earnings.
Now I hope you realize that while all this is great, it doesn’t mean a thing if you don’t have a decent volume of targeted traffic getting to your site. Even if your site is poorly optimized, it can still pull in a lot of money if it’s ranking high and has quality content in a high-paying niche. The keys to making money with Adsense are simple:
- Find not-too competitive but high paying niches
- Create relevant, keyword-rich content
- Drive traffic to your website by getting links pointing to it
- SEO your site and optimize it for Adsense
This is, in a nutshell, the formula for making money with Adsense. It is simple, and it can be done.
