If you have a blog or website, you probably know that Google AdSense is a great way to monetize your content and earn a few bucks. Some people make a fortune with AdSense, while other site owners only make a few pennies a day.
Have you ever wondered exactly what it takes to rake in tons of money with AdSense? Well there are a few basic tenets of AdSense success:
- You need lots of visitors to your site
- You need to have good content
- You need to place ads strategically
Those three points are common knowledge - if you do any reading about how to “do” AdSense, that’s what you’ll hear. All common sense stuff, too.
So let me share something with you that’s not as commonly known: there is a way to more precisely target your ads toward your visitors. The reason this is important should be obvious - if the ads are relevant to the subject matter, your readers are more likely to be interested in the ads and of course they’ll be more likely to click on them. So how do you target the ads? I’ll tell you a few ways. Let’s call them AdSense hacks.
Have a strategic naming structure. When at all possible, make sure the directory and filenames of your pages contain the best possible keywords. If a page is about “Spider-Man comic books” make sure either the path or the filename contains those words. Keep in mind that dashes are seen as keyword separators by Google (as opposed to underscores, which are ignored). By doing this, it increases the likelihood that Google will know which ads are most appropriate to display.
Filter your ads. In your AdSense account, go to AdSense Setup and click on the Competitive Ad Filter. In the box, type the domain names of the low-paying ads or ads you don’t wish to be displayed.
Use the Section Targeting feature. Google has a little-talked-about feature called Section Targeting that allows you to specify to Google where your content begins and ends. In effect it allows you to tell them, “Here - this is the part that matters. This is the part that I want you to base your ads on.” Read more about how to use this feature here.
Targeting your ads can make all the difference in the world. So if you have decent traffic to your site but don’t have the click-throughs or if you simply aren’t making much per click, try implementing these “hacks” and see if you make more money.
Stumble it!
great tips, i already implement most of them.
you can also search for a list of the most profitable adds, i think no.1 is “yahoo domain”
hey, you never stop learning! thank you very much for these tips.. haven’t known about that at all
Great tips. I have been looking for ways to optimize my adsense earnings
I picked this up directly from Google’s corporate PR feed in Reader, as you probably did as well. I’ve just now noticed you’re linking to it as well via Techmeme, congrats on posting early but you ARE NOT MY SOURCE FOR THIS POST, hence no link. If you were the source I’d be happy to link, and if you go through my many posts at http://www.xxxxxxxxxxx.com you’ll see me linking left, right and center to others. Attribution is given to the source and discovery point, as much as you’re writing some good stuff but you were neither for me in this instance.
What is the meaning of your comment? I don’t even understand what you’re saying. I wrote this article.
No link for you either. That’s for being a lunkhead.
In other words, you need a real site!
what do you think is more effective if you have a pr4 site… adsense or independently selling links on the sidebar?
You have more opportunity to sell links if you have some PR. But as far as AdSense - PR has no effect.
Yes i agree shawn pr has no affect the most effective thing is traffic
So easy, but so difficult to get in the right proportion. Get the right placement of ads and you got it.
Another tip:
I have a blog of a potpouri of topics and I had a hard time getting adsense to show up anything but the lowest paying/public service ads on the main page. The post pages were ok, but the main page sucked.
I went ahead and put in two paragraphs targeted to the blog topic into the sidebar. Voila! Google started to serve better ads, there still not the best, but a little bit is better than nada.
Well even though your blog is about various topics, AdSense SHOULD serve ads based on each page (each blog post). So if post #1 is about lingerie, there should be lingerie ads. If post #2 is about lawn care, that pages ads should be targeted to lawncare.
If they aren’t showing up like that, you probably need more content on each page, more targeted keywords on each page, and you also would want to put tags on each page. I use two plugins on my blogs for that purpose - UTW and Tags in the Head. UTW lets me put tags on each post targeted to that topic, and Tags in the Head takes those tags and creates a META tag using those, only for that particular page.
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