What’s this site about?

Hi, and welcome. I just wanted to take a moment to explain what this site is all about. Firstly this site aims to be a one stop shop to guide you on how to make money with Google Adsense. Google Adsense is an advertising programme that allows publishers to make money from targeted “in content” advertisements. If you have landed here, you probably already knew that, but maybe you want to know more, like what are the secrets? How do people make very good money using Google Adsense? These are the questions which this site will answer. I will also use this site as a model on how a good Adsense site should be set up, and when this site starts to gain the sort of organic search traffic, which I know it is capable of, I will also position Adsense ads on this site. I have been an Adsense publisher for a few years now, and time and time again, I find that there are a few keys to success. What are they?

Social Traffic and Organic Search Traffic

This is the first common stumbling block. When people decide that they want to have a go at making money online, they often have a romanticized image of it in their head. Making easy money well they sleep, playing with the kids while the cash comes rolling in. This can be a bad thing when this vision stops them from making the right choices from the beginning. The normal story I see is an enthusiastic go getter, buys their own domain, commonly something like their own name, or a random cool sounding word that doesn’t seem to relate to anything. They “blog” about topics they see on sites like Digg.com or any other social site. The idea behind this strategy is that if they create content that is interesting people will want to read it. As they haven’t really thought about traffic, the first step they might take is to submit an article to Digg.com. Because if an article is popular on Digg, it will make your lots of money right? Well probably not. This is a huge mistake. Not all traffic is profitable. Social traffic in particular is very hard to make money from, and is a waste of time for Adsense sites.

I have found the only way to make profitable Adsense sites is to get organic search traffic. This is where all the money is. Either you are buying it with PPC, or you are ranking for high volume keywords yourself. Ranking highly for profitable keywords is what I do. Traffic that comes from search engines for ranking for terms is called organic search traffic. The reason this sort of traffic makes you money is because it is targeted. The person has opened Google, or any other search engine, and typed their intention: “How to Make Money from Google Adsense”. If you landed on this site from searching for this term, I know you are after the sort of information I am giving. In the same way someone searching for “Iphone review” is looking for a review of an iphone, and someone searching for “Bad credit loans”, has bad credit and is trying to get a loan. All of these terms signal the user intention, so if we capture this user, we can make money from them. Simple. Social traffic is the opposite. You know nothing about the user coming to your site.

Keyword / Niche Research

Once you come onboard with the line of thinking that organic search traffic is the best traffic to get, you then need to think about what keywords are going to bring you traffic. You also need to think about if that traffic is likely to be buying traffic, or information traffic, and then how you will convert the traffic into money. Buying traffic is easy to convert. Sell them the product they are looking for. Information traffic can also make money, using either PPC ads, like Adsense, or via selling an information product like an Ebook. However, since the focus of this site is Adsense, we will just focus on that.

You need to decide on a niche for your new site. What will you write about? Do you know a lot about this topic already? Will you pay someone else to write the content? Once you have selected a niche which you think will be profitable, you need to find keywords that will bring you the most profitable traffic. A good starting tool for this task is the free Google Adwords Keyword tool.

Tips for using:

• Do a quick search for a broad keyword in your niche
• Change match type to from broad to exact
• Turn on the average CPC column.
  … Now search again

How to read the results:

The higher the CPC, the more money the term is worth from an Adsense perspective. The value will be inflated as it is giving the average price someone will pay for a click, Google takes some of this, and this value is for ad placements directly on search engines, placements on your site are worth less. But the higher the CPC, the more the term is worth to you. Higher volume search terms will bring more traffic, so the more searches the better…however…

Keyword Competition

The more searches a term gets, the more competition for that term you are likely to find, and the harder it likely is to rank for. So the next step is to look at the competition, and decide which terms are worth you time. For most terms you can rank for eventually, however, the harder the term, the more effort, the less return on investment. So finding keyword terms that bring traffic, but have less competition are really the key focus here. The best way to judge competition is to open google and search for the term. Look at all the sites ranking on the first page. The most important factors for ranking are:

• Keyword use in title tag of site
• Keyword use in domain name
• Substantive, unique content on page
• Keyword focused anchor text in links
• Quantity/quality of links
• Diversity of link sources
• Page specific trust rank
• Relevance of link sources
• Keyword specific anchor text from internal links

Now obviously you can easily go overboard here and kill hours looking at these details for every site, however this probably isn’t the best strategy. Time is money and we want fast results. SEO Quake is a browser plug-in which will quickly show you most of the above factors in a few seconds. Be warned it will slow down your browsing speed so it’s a good idea to install it on an alternative browser.

It’s hard to suggest what level of competition is worth going after for every individual. This is something you will get with experience. The more sites you set up, the closer you will get to finding what you are comfortable with. At first it is probably worth focusing on something that doesn’t have a whole heap of authority sites on the first page. Some key sites I like to see on the first few pages of a term are Squidoo lenses, Ezine articles, Hub Pages, or Go articles. These sites are free authority sites where people can set up content and articles. These sites rank relatively easily with little effort because they are on real authority domains. However they probably don’t have a lot of backlinks, so they can be out ranked with a little effort.

Writing Quality Articles

Writing content for your Adsense sites is a key step. Some people mess around with PLR content, and other rubbish like that. The truth is PLR content, as it is, is a complete waste of time. So many other sites have the exact same articles of their sites, so the content is not seen as original by Google. Substantive, unique content on the pages you are trying to rank is important. So you are either going to have to write good original content yourself or pay someone else to do it. If you buy articles always thoroughly proof read them, and use Copyscape to check to see if the articles are 100% original. Using your keywords in your articles at least a few times is worth the effort. Some people suggest this now has little effect on ranking as it is too easily manipulated, however, having your keyword on page a few times is a good idea. Make sure you articles have your keywords in their titles. Your site name should also have your keyword in it.

Targeted Domains

Top search engine rankings can be achieved without keywords in the domain name, however, for smaller Adsense sites it makes sense to aim for exact domain names where possible. What I mean by this is if you are trying to rank for the keyword XYCABC, you go a buy the domain XYCAMC.com. You will notice that the domain name of this site is an exact match for my main keyword phrase. Exact match domains mean that we can rank much more easily with less backlinks. This is true particularly for dot com domains. A dot com domain will always rank much more easily that other domains on Google.com, and this is where most of your traffic will come from. A dot net domain for a good keyword also has some value. Geotargted domains have value if targeting local niches, however, for Adsense sites you probably want to stay global.

You probably realise that most of the great dot com domains are already gone, and to a certain degree this truth. However, there are always new trends popping up making new terms profitable, and old domains expiring. For example in 2005 an iphone was unheard of, so iphone related domains would have been unclaimed, now it is a huge consumer product and there are plenty of profitable terms that involve iphones. If you had got on board and scored a domain when it was first announced you could find your self a goldmine of domains.

SEO and Quality Backlinks

I have already listed the important factors for ranking above. These are the key focus of any SEO campaign. However, the most important factor, that is also the hardest, is link building. Every link aiming at your site is like an endorsement of your site. If that link is anchored with keywords, “How to Make Money with Google Adsense”, for example, it is like an endorsement for your site being a good page about that topic. So building lots of backlinks that have your keywords in them is the main key to your success. Quality, quantity, and link diversity are all important. More links, links from authority sites, and links from plenty of different sources.

How to get links

Getting links needs to become your bread and butter if you are to become successful at creating profitable Adsense sites, but where should I get these links you ask? Here is a proven list of link building methods. Some require more effort than others.

Writing Articles for links: There are a few real authoritive domains that allow you to write articles on their sites for free, and they allow you to get a backlink or two back to your own site. These include: Ezine articles, Go articles, Hubpages, and Squidoo + others.

Posting Comments on blogs: Blogging is very popular. There are millions of blogs out there. All these blogs have comment forms that allow you to get a link back to your site. Some have the no-follow tag applied to them, which make the links worth very little, however some have this disabled to encourage more comments. These blogs are called Do-follow blogs. They are well worth your effort for writing a relevant comment on someone article. On standard Do-follow blogs you have to leave your name as the link anchor and this isn’t ideal, however if you search for Keywordluv blogs, these sites allow you to get a targeted do-follow link back to your site. Similarly Commentluv blogs also give you a link back to your most recent article, and assuming you use your keywords in your article headings this is worth the effort to. So finding a good list of Do-follow, Keywordluv, and Commentluv blogs to post meaning comments on is a good way to build backlinks. Don’t bother writing small short generic comments like “Thanks for the post”. The authors of these blogs know you are just trying to get an easy backlink and they will delete your comment. Read the post and write a meaningful comment if you want a free backlink.

Submitting your site to directories: This is pretty old school now, 2009, and most site directories have very little value. There are a few good ones, but they mostly are very hard to get accepted into or cost. Still this is worth the effort, particularly if you can find niche targeted directories.

Social Bookmarking: There are plenty of sites out there which basically allow you to bookmark sites and articles you like. These then become public links on your profile. These links are of pretty low value but are worth the effort if you find ways to automate the process. Onlywire is a site which will help you with this, plus there is a huge range of software packages out there for this.

Forum signatures: There are forums all over the net. If there is a big one relating to the niche of your site, posting a few posts on the site and including your link in the footer will help you out. These links don’t have much value, but may bring you some direct traffic. As your signature will likely be displayed on your public profile page for the forum, you also get a link from that page. Some high profile marketers make a living out of selling forum lists that have public profiles for you to add your link to. I am not a huge believer in this method, as it takes a lot of time to manually add all the links, and so many other people are doing it the sites often block your efforts by making profiles private, or blocking new signups. However lots of people use this method to build their links.

Link exchanges: I don’t recommend participating in link exchanges until you actually have a well indexed site which has page rank, age, and a good amount of backlinks. If you do, the only sites you are likely attract are other new sites, and links from these sites have little value and come with a whole heap of draw backs I won’t go into. However, once you have all of the above, you should likely attract a few good link partners. Site wide links aren’t that great, but they are easy to add, and they do help as long as they are from a good site.

Guest posts / articles: This is a very good method at gaining high quality backlinks, but it does take a lot of effort. You need to find another site in your niche preferably a real authority site that is has good page rank and lots of backlinks. Send them an email and ask if they would like you to do a guest post. Write a quality article for them and include a backlink to your site, with your keyword. The article will need to be good and be original content, and not an article on have used anywhere else.

Ok, so that was a brief overview of the methods I use to make money with Google Adsense. I will be updating this site from time to time with more articles on the topic that will go into more depth in certain areas discussed above. Feel free to ask questions or leave a comment using the comment form. Cheers.

If you are reading this, I guessing your have heard of Adsense, Google’s contextual advertising network. Making very good money from Adsense is a very an achievable goal, however, it involves a fair amount of hard work. First you need to develop Adsense Sites, that are targeted to a profitable Niche, then you need to build a good amount of organic traffic. After this, you can optimise your site to increase your earnings even more. This article will look at optimisation techniques to improve your Adsense revenue.

Before you start Optimising

To make good money from Adsense you need to have a site that gets a lot of organic search engine traffic. Most other forms of website traffic convert very poorly, and will make you very little income. If you haven’t figured out how to get search engine traffic to your site, by targeted keywords, there is absolutely no point in playing around with optimisation techniques. You still won’t make money from it. If you have a website with a lot of untargeted traffic, Adsense isn’t not the best way of making money from it. Social blogs are an example of a site, where I wouldn’t recommend using Adsense on.

Adsense Optimisation Tips

Optimising your Adsense ad placement and style can be very profitable. It is certainly worth experimenting with different options to ensure that you are making the sort of money you should be from your site. Before we start it is important that you understand that to make money from Adsense sites you need to be prepared to place advertisements in front of your visitors. If you are obsessed with design, and don’t like pushing advertisements onto your visitors, and simply want to include some low profile ads, away from your main content, you will not make good money. You simply need to be prepared to put the advertisements in prominent locations in front of your visitors.

Formats

The most successful formats for Google Adsense ads are:

The large rectangle – This is the format that makes the most money for me. It needs to be in a prominent position. I normally place it at the beginning of an article above or below the title, and then maybe another one, lower down the page at the end of the article.

The wide horizontal leader board – The larger the ad space the more successful it will be. This format has a nice large viewable space. The only drawback is that this has been a traditional ad format size since the internet began, I feel in some sites these units suffer ad blindness.

Link Units – These are my favourite, they work very well when positioned in traditional navigation positions. All of the sizes work well when positioned in locations that work in with the design of the surrounding area.

Colour of units

There have been a lot of research done into what colour scheme works best with Adsense units. Some theory suggests that to combat ad blindness you should use a colour scheme dramatically different from the rest of your site to make it stand out. What I have found works best is to use a colour scheme that blends well with the rest of the site. I even go as far as to copy the hexadecimal code for the colour used on my sites, and use the exact same colour for my ads. If all the hyperlinks around my sites are pink, I will use the same pink for the links in my Adsense units. If all the text is black, I use black for the text in my Adsense units.

Fonts

It is now possible to change the font size and font family of your Adsense fonts. This is fantastic news for the optimisers out there. You only have a limited range of selections, but these will really help you optimise and improve your earnings. For your large rectangle ads, I suggest you use the largest font size, I have found that these units are performing very well with the larger font size. My sites using these have had a noticeable increase in CTR (Click rate). I suggest for your font family that you use the font that is the same as or closest to the font you use for the rest of your site.

Split testing

If you are serious about optimising your Adsense site, I suggest you look into split testing. There are tools out there that allow you to serve different html to a range of visitors which allow you to test different formats and positions with your visitors and see which formats works best. It is a good idea to test different formats and positioning for a measureable period of time, then try another format for the same period of time. After these type of experiments you can compare vital statistics. Optimisation of Adsense is all about improving CTR and overall income.

Further Evidence to Support My Points

If you have read through this article and think that I am full of it, and you want to look into it yourself, all you need to do is look at some of the Premium Adsense partners and you will see that what I am saying is correct. These are premium sites that have millions of monthly visitors. Sites like Hubpages, Ezine Articles. Google have worked individually with premium sites like these to optimise earnings. And what you will find on these sites, support what I am suggesting. Use large ad blocks, and blend you colours, and fonts. I hope this article has given you some valuable tips to help improve your Adense Revenue.

Adsense is a contextual advertising network created by Google. It allows publishes to generate revenue from their own content by placing Google ads within it. Creating a profitable empire of Adsense sites is not for the faint hearted. It is a lot of work, and there are no real shortcuts if you want to do it right. Cutting corners will only hurt your Adsense income in the long run.

What are the most important factors for success?

Niche Selection

Before you get stuck into creating content and articles for your Adsense Sites, it is important to think seriously about the niche you are targeting. Is there an audience out there for what you are writing about? Will they pay money for products relating to your topic? What defines the niche, is it mostly women or men? Young or Old? All this information will help you select an appropriate design for your target audience. It is also important that you ensure that there is good money to be made from your niche before you start. Because if clicks for your niche only pay a few cents, then you are not going to make good money out of it, and maybe you need to re-think if it is worth your effort. It is also important that you have a good knowledge of the niche. If you can’t write good quality content about it easily, then it is going to be hard work. I know for a fact that “Pay Day Loans” is a profitable niche, but I wouldn’t know the first thing about the topic, nor would I know where to start if I had to write an article about it. So I am not going to waste my time. If you are prepared to pay others to write content for you, then this isn’t such a big problem.

Keyword and Competition Research

Once you are happy with your niche, you need to research what terms you are going to target in the search engines. For the most part search engine traffic doesn’t just come rolling in with no effort. You need to know what terms will bring you a significant amount of traffic, and which terms will pay a good amount for each click. It is also important that you target terms that are at the right level for the authority of your site. So if you are just starting out I suggest you stay well away from writing about credit cards, or Insurance.

For keyword selection, the best free tool to use is the Google Adwords external keyword tool. It will give you a good range of keywords that relate to your Niche, plus it will tell you roughly how many visitors that term will bring in each month. It will also give you an idea of the value of clicks in your niche if you turn on the CPC column…this amount isn’t exact as it is giving an advertiser to cost of buying the click. You won’t get all of that amount. But it is fair to say that the higher a click costs the more you will make.

For competition you need to search for the term in Google and find out who currently ranks for it. If the sites on the front page are all established authority sites, with high PR, and lots of backlinks then it is not worth the effort. However, if the sites are nothing special, then this is a good term for you to target. SEO quake is a great plugin for Firefox that will help you with competition research. It gives you the vital details discussed above for each result in a SERP (Search Engine Result Page).

SEO – Building backlinks

To make good money from Adsense sites, you need to build the authority of your site. A site won’t rank well if it doesn’t have a good amount of incoming links. There are two main theories about how backlinks should be built for your site 1) That you should just create good content, and if it is good enough people will link to you. 2) You should build links yourself. The major advantage to the second method is that you can select anchor text for backlinks that you have built yourself. Having control of the anchor text of a link allows you to make that link target a keyword you are after. Still, it will make your life easier if you have good content that people want to link to.

A few sources for backlinks to your Adsense sites

• Writing Blog Comments
• Link Directories
• Article Directories
• Forum Signatures
• Link exchanges with other web masters

I hope this article on Adsense Income tips has given you some helpful tips to get you started on your way to success with creating Google Adsense.

Adsense is Google’s contextual advertising network. It allows publishers to place ads relevant to their content on sites without the need to deal with Advertisers. You simply put some javascript code supplied by Google into the html of your site, and it will display ads relevant to your content. Sounds like an easy way to make money right? Maybe not.

Common Mistakes

Commons mistakes people make when trying to make money with Google Adsense sites include:

Post and hope

The first thing that normally happens when people learn about Google Adsense is that they rush out, make a blog, often a free one on blogger.com. They then write a whole heap of content about whatever interests them, then they chuck up Adsense ads, and wait for the cash to start rolling in. It doesn’t come.

Trying to make money from social traffic

The next thing that happens is that they realise that they need traffic to make cash. After all, you need plenty of visitors to click on your ads to make cash right? Figuring out how to get traffic for a new website can be hard work. This normally leads the newbie to investigating methods of getting traffic from social sites like Digg.com or stumbleupon.com. They figure if I get onto the homepage of either of these sites I will get thousands of visitors, and I will make heaps of cash. True, they will get thousands of visitors, but none of them will click ads.

Not researching keywords

At this point, if our brave newbie hasn’t quit, they have figured out that to make money from Google Adsense, you need to get targeted traffic from search engines, often referred to as organic search traffic. Our newbie understands that to get search engine traffic they need to build lots of backlinks. They go about their way building backlinks. But in many cases they haven’t researched what keywords they want to target, so all their content isn’t optimised for valuable keywords. And their backlinks have generic anchor text like the name of their site, or their own name. Sure these types of links have some value, and do improve the authority of your domain, but search engines are still playing a guessing game trying to figure out which keywords to rank your content for, so likely, our newbie will continue to have little success.

Attempting to rank for keywords that are too difficult

Our hero now returns. They have got to the point in their Adsense career, where they understand that to make money from Google Adsense they have to target those keywords which have a good amount of traffic, and pay a good amount for clicks. This is a good start, but what keywords do they target? This is the most costly mistake. Our hero now goes about their work, creating more content, that is optimised for keywords, and building backlinks that have their selected keyword as the anchor text for their backlinks. They wait for the traffic and cash to start coming in, but, still it does not come. They have selected keywords that have too much competition, and fail to rank for the term, or rank too low to make any money from it.

If you click on the diagram above, you can see this term is very hard to rank for. The sites ranking for this term are either very old and have a lot of authority, or they have thousands of backlinks.

So how do I go about improving my Adsense Income?

It is all about living on the fine line between selecting keywords that have a good amount of visitors and have a good price for each click, but that don’t have too much competition for the level of your site. If you have a new site you are not going to rank for a high competition keyword any time soon.

Keyword Research

If you have got to this point in the article I am sure you have figured out that keyword research is important. We need to figure out what keywords we want to target. The important factors in keyword selection are:

• How many hits will it bring you each month if you rank highly for it?
• How much competition is there for the term (i.e. how hard will it be to rank higher than the current sites)
• Roughly how much do clicks pay for that term?

Competition – What factors to look at in sites you will be competing against:

• What is the site’s Page Rank?
• How many backlinks does that site have?
• Does the site use the keyword term in the title of the site?
• How old is the domain that the site is using?

Ok, I have selected a handful of perfect keywords for the level of my site…now what?

You need unique content…not content that can be found else where. Search engines can detect duplicate content. At least 5 articles of 750 words or greater to start with.

You then need backlinks. The best backlink strategy for a starting site is to target one way links which you can control the anchor text for. Don’t even think about link exchanges until you have built some page rank for your site. Good sources of one way links are:

• Comments on Blogs
• Write articles for article sites or blogs.
• Submit your site to directories

After a few months you should get some page rank, at this point your site will become a more valuable as a link partner for other sites, and you can try getting some blog roll links and exchanging links with other sites.

You now have a basic framework to create profitable Adsense sites. I hope you have found this article informative.