Adsense help – tips for maximizing Adsense earnings

If you are new to blogging and adsense then you are probably wondering about all the people who claim to be making a lot of money from Google’s adsense ad program

Adsense does work

But you have to know how to use adsense properly, the first thing you need to realise is that adsense serve ads based on your content. So if you write about many different things on your blog you are going to get many different adverts displayed on your blog, and you might think that’s ok because with a variety of ads it is more likely that some of your visitors will see an ad they are interested in and click on it. This is wrong

For adsense to work you need to focus your content. If you write about parenting for example and all your posts are focused around parenting, you are going to get ads relevent to parenting

So that is a start, but you also need to consider the position of your ads, ideally you should put your ads near the top where they can be seen above the fold – in other words when your site loads and only the top part of your site is visible, that is called above the fold – put your ads there

Next you want to make your ads look less like ads, don’t make them stand out, you can edit how you want your ads to look from your adsense account or if you use blogger, in the adsense widget. Remove the border from your ad block by making it the same colour as your background. Make the title the same colour as all the other links on your blog and do the same with the text

Ok, so now they look less like ads, thats good, people tend to avoid obvious ads, the more obvious your ad is, the less it will get clicked.

How adsense works

Firstly, your regular readers are not the one’s who click your ads, so as much as you appreciate regular readers, forget about them for adsense, they are so used to the ads they don’t notice them anymore

So who are the people who click your ads?, they are mostly your organic search traffic, they are the people looking for something who are willing to click an ad to find it, here is an example -

I am looking online for book reviews of a fishing book I want to buy, I find a blog that reviews books on fishing, it sounds like a good book and over the review are four ads.

one for a bookstore with 10% off fishing and hobby books,

another for fishing tackle,

another for fishing holidays and one for fishing bait.

Doesn’t matter that the ads are not all books, they have got my interest, likely I will click the bookstore, but say the review didn’t make me think the book was any good and I am going to leave your blog anyway, I may well click one of the other ads because I like fishing

So I click and leave, that blog owner made money when I left, why? Because they focused their content, so adsense served ads that would interest anyone interested in that content

But What if the blog wasn’t focused? what if that book review was stuck in the middle of a blog about cats? I might have been shown ads about cat food (salmon cat food maybe – but thats not what im after) or an ad on how to train your cat not to eat your goldfish

So the main way to increase your income from adsense is to offer focused content to get the right ads

But you also need to get traffic that is looking for that content, you need organic traffic from search engines, otherwise the people who will likely click your ads wont be able to find your site

For that you need to look into SEO – search engine optimization, getting ranked higher in the search engines

That will be my next post