Friday, February 22, 2008

How To Make Money With AdSense

"How to make money with AdSense" is one of the most popular topics in Internet marketing forums and the subject of many books and special reports. Its popularity isn't surprising given the extensive coverage of AdSense in mainstream newspapers and magazines as well as the program's importance in driving Google's every-growing advertising revenues. Website and blog owners can't help but perceive Google AdSense to be an easy way to make money online.

While it's true that adding AdSense a web page is trivial — all you do is paste some JavaScript code that Google generates for you — learning how to make money with AdSense — especially how to really make money — is decidedly non-trivial. Like anything, it takes time and effort. There are no overnight successes with AdSense.

The key is to know what to work on. Four factors come into play:

  1. Traffic. By far the most important factor is how much traffic you can drive to your pages. After all, you only make money when visitors click (or in some cases view) the ads shown on your pages. If no one's visiting your site, you won't make any money. If you want to make more money with AdSense, you need more traffic. (That traffic should be targeted, too, otherwise smart pricing will kick in and reduce your earnings.)
  2. Niche. The niche you're targeting also has a huge effect on your AdSense earnings. You need to target niches where advertisers are actively seeking customers: if there are no advertisers, you won't make any money. The simplest test you can do is to search Google for related keywords and see how many ads appear in the "Sponsored Links" section on the right-hand side of the results page. If there are few or no ads, that's a sign that the market's not a big one and probably isn't a great choice for monetization via AdSense. (But you may be able to monetize it in other ways.)
  3. Content. AdSense is all about content. It's not about search results. It's not about random collections of scraped data. There's a reason why AdSense users are called publishers: it's because they publish content. You need great content on your pages, written for humans and not search engines. Content is what's going to keep visitors on your site, looking for the information they need. The longer they stay, the more chance they'll click an ad.
  4. Optimization. Many AdSense publishers spend too much time trying to optimize their pages when they should be spending their time on getting more traffic and writing more content. Luckily, many AdSense optimization techniques do double duty as search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. Concentrate on the basics, like:
    • Blending ads by removing borders and matching colors.
    • Positioning the ads in the "hot spots" of a page.
    • Choosing the right ad formats.
    • Tracking performance with channels.
    These and a few other techniques can make a dramatic difference in your earnings — but only if you have enough traffic.

Note that even a poorly-optimized AdSense site can make its publisher a lot of money if draws a lot of traffic with quality content in a competitive niche. Don't place too much emphasis on AdSense optimization.

There are no secrets to earning money with AdSense. You just need to learn the right things. Take the time and effort to learn how to:

  • Drive traffic to your pages.
  • Find and exploit profitable niches.
  • Create valuable content.
  • Optimize pages for AdSense and SEO.

Master these skills and you'll know exactly how to make money with AdSense!

Sunday, February 17, 2008

Adsense Arbitrage

In the world of contextual advertising and paid search, adsense arbitrage has been a popular technique among internet marketers in generating the biggest possible income.

This technique is quite simple, although one must devote a significant amount of time at first. Basically, you aim to make as many cheap ads as you can that will direct traffic into your website. In your website, visitors will click other ads which have higher payouts compared to your costs. The money that you make will be far greater than the money you spend to build traffic for your site. With the concept 'spend less, earn more,' many are greatly encouraged to adopt the adsense arbitrage method.

Whatever method you use to build ads for keywords, you will definitely need the Keyword Tool of Google to get specific words or phrases that people mostly search, but advertisers usually ignore. Generic keywords are commonly more expensive because of their high searchability, while specific keywords are cheaper because few advertisers compete for them. Also, make sure that your chosen keyword very much describes the content of your website because these keywords are considered by Google to be of high quality.

What basically happens is that you invite people to your website by having them click your advertisement in the search result of Google. While browsing what you offer in your site, people will also see ads of other advertisers with generic keywords, and maybe will get to click them, too. In adsense arbitrage, you are actually benefiting from the gaps between the generic advertisements of other advertisers and the specific advertisements that you have made.

Friday, February 15, 2008

Analogies in Blog Titles are Like Dirty Underwear

As I cruise thru my SEO folder in my feedreader every day I’m filled with a sense of dismay and utter dissapointment with most of what I see. More often than not I see titles like:

How My Step Dad Taught Me The Ethics of Burnt Sienna Hat SEO

93 Ways Your Shopping Cart Software is Like Progresso Chunky Chicken Soup

How Personal Branding On Your Blog Is Like Paris Hilton’s Mink Coat

Ok so maybe I changed the titles a little to protect the uncreative, but I think you get my point. Using the same formulaic approach over and over, or doing the same thing everyone else is, is just like wearing the same underwear everyday, eventually you really start to stink.

Do you want to hang out with the guy who hasn’t changed his underwear in a week? Do you want to read the same kind of blog posts someone has been writting all week, all month or all year? Use anologies when they make sense, use them when they help you tell a story, use them when they help you make a point, but my god man for the love all all that is good an holy in the universe don’t use them everyday, it just makes you boring. Of course someone will chime in “I don’t blog for you I blog to show clients we understand the blogging medium” well good for you sparky I hope your clients don’t want more than one style of writing from you because if they do you’re in trouble.

Why is it important you get this? Because no matter what vertical you are in, blogging is a from of entertainment. Sure sometimes it’s also news and information but the more entertaining and interesting you make it the more people are going to want to read it. The more you differentiate yourself and make your posts filled with a uniqueness and style that only you can deliver the more people will subscribe and keep coming back.

So please change your underwear and stop with the analogies.

PS: yes this post title itself is an analogy, but in this case it’s really irony and satire cause that’s just how I roll…

Adsense Keyword List

If you can think of a product, chances are, you can advertise it.

So then, it makes sense that if you can advertise the item, you can publish about it on Google Adsense. Now, with more and more people catching on to the idea and trying it out, it is a good idea to have an Adsense keyword list on hand, just as a reference. Of course, there is a thousand and one sites on the Internet that have an Adsense keyword list, so they're not hard to find.

So, you might be wondering, "What the #&$% do I need an adsense keyword list for?" Well, the simple answer to that is it is a list to pick keywords from. You see, the typical list is also likely to enumerate either the ones that generate the most revenue or the most popular ones. Note that those two are often one and the same. The good ones will divide them up by category or niche market they appeal to. The really good ones, also the rarest ones, will divide them up by category and list them, by niche, in the order of just how much each click generates in dollar amounts. Very useful stuff if you have the notion of making money out of Adsense.

The typical Adsense keyword list is pretty easy to find. Just a quick search on Google or Yahoo! will net you a lot of results. It takes a little digging to find an Adsense keyword list that is comprehensive enough for more advanced people but if you've only got one website and you're not planning on living off of the clicks, the typical list should be all you need.

Friday, February 1, 2008

Adsense For Beginners

There are countless of articles over the internet that discuss the principle of adsense for beginners. For a tech dummy, the term adsense may seem to be tech jargon. This is the main reason that many are still intimidated to get an adsense account even though they are aware that it is the most effective way in which people who upload information online can earn big bucks.

A regular internet user need not to be afraid with adsense. The process by which one acquires an account is intentionally made simple for beginners. The first step you must do is to sign up over the Google Adsense website. Upon getting an adsense account, you would be prompted to choose the kind of advertisement, whether purely text or those with pictures, you want to be displayed on your site. The fun part about this is that you are free to customize your account. All you must to do is tick the fields for every simple question.

Then, you would be provided with a code which you will paste in your website where you like your Adsense ad to be displayed. For every visitor in your site who would click the advertisement, Google will reward you with a certain amount. But you would have to collect a certain number of clicks before you get paid, so it's up to you on what strategy to use to attract visitors into clicking your advertisement. You can view the status of your advertisement through your adsense account. You get to check how frequent your advertisement was shown, how many clicks you got, and how much you earned.