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Monday, July 27, 2009

9 Google Adsense Placement Recipes

ABOVE THE FOLD, BELOW THE TITLE

Ingredients:
1 Medium Rectangle (300 x 250) Text Ads or 1 Square (250 x 250) Text Ads or 1 Large Rectangle (336 x 280) Text Ads or Banner (468 x 60) Text Ads
How:
Place one of the above Google Adsense Ads at the beginning of your article, just right below the title.

AT THE END OF AN ARTICLE
Ingredients:
1 Medium Rectangle (300 x 250) Text Ads or 1 Square (250 x 250) Text Ads or 1 Large Rectangle (336 x 280) Text Ads or Banner (468 x 60) Text Ads
How:
Place one of the above Google Adsense Ads at the end of your article.

NEXT TO AN IMAGE
Ingredients:
1 Medium Rectangle (300 x 250) Text Ads or 1 Square (250 x 250) Text Ads or 1 Large Rectangle (336 x 280) Text Ads,
1 image (width 190 px, height 280 px) or 4 images (width 60 px, height 60 px)
How:
First Approach

Create a table (width = 550), and divide it into two columns.
Place Google Adsense Text Ads into the left column.
Place your 190 x 280 image into the right column.

Second Approach

Create a table (width = 550), and divide it into two columns.
Divide the left column into four rows, and place each of your 60 x 60 images into each row.
Place Google Adsense Text Ads into the right column.

Caution!
You must place a border or a line between your images and your Ads, so it doesn't violate Google Adsense TOS (Terms of Service).

BLENDED IN ARTICLE
Ingredients:
1 Medium Rectangle (300 x 250) Text Ads or 1 Square (250 x 250) Text Ads or 1 Large Rectangle (336 x 280) Text Ads
How:
Place one of the above Google Adsense Ads into your article body, so it perfectly blends in. You can use this code for that purpose:

You may choose to make it left or right justified. According to Google Adsense Heat Map, left justified tends to bring the best CTR. But some webmasters said right justified is also working very well.

RIGHT JUSTIFIED
Ingredients:
1 Skyscraper (120 x 600) Text Ads or 1 Wide Skyscraper (160 x 600) Text Ads or 1 Vertical Banner (120 x 240) Text Ads
How:
Divide your webpage into two or three columns (left, middle and right).
Place one of the above Google Adsense Ads into the left or the right section.

RIGHT BELOW IMAGES
Ingredients:
4 images (width 165 px, height 60 px),
1 Leaderboard (728 x 90) Text Ads
How:
Create a table (width = 728) with 2 rows.
Divide the first row into 4 columns and place each of the images in each column.
Place the leaderboard text ads in the second row.
Place this table below your header.

Caution!
You must place a border or a line between your images and your Ads, so it doesn't violate Google Adsense TOS (Terms of Service).

BELOW THE HEADER
Ingredients:
1 Link Units (468 x 15) or 1 Link Units (728 x 15)
How:
Place one of the above Google Adsense Link Units right below your header and match its color with your website theme.

BLENDED IN NAVIGATIONAL LINKS
Ingredients:
1 Link Units (468 x 15) or 1 Link Units (728 x 15)
How:
Place one of the above Google Adsense Link Units right below your header.
Place your navigational links below or above that Link Units and set their fonts to "Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" 11 px.

CAMOUFLAGED AS NAVIGATIONAL LINKS
Ingredients:
1 Link Units (468 x 15) or
1 Link Units (728 x 15)
How:
Place one of the above Google Adsense Link Units right below your header and make it looks like your navigational links.

How to Increase Your Google Adsense CTR

This is the first part of two series of articles about How to Increase Your Google Adsense CTR. Many people think that they just have to copy and paste Google Adsense code into their website and start earning a huge amount of money from it. What a huge mistake! I also thought the same way two years ago. Later I realized that without optimization, that's impossible. Here I will share all of the tricks to increase my Google Adsense CTR that I found within the last two years.

Here are some tips to increase your Google Adsense CTR:

Make sure the ads that are appearing on your site are closely related with your content. This is the first thing you have to do because if your ads are not relevant, there's small possibility that people will click on them. Then, what should you do to tackle this problem? Here are the tips:
Create a keyword rich content. I suggest you creating one topic a page.
Check your keyword rich content and then mark some of your keywords as bold or italic. But don't do it too much, just do it 1 – 2 times per page. Otherwise, Google assumes you are doing spamming.
Use your keyword in your page title.
Use HTML Tag H1 as your content title, and put your keyword in it. Don't forget to place this tag at the beginning of your content.
If all those tips still do not work, there is just one possibility: there are no ads that matched with your keyword! You can check this out by using this marvelous tool from the Digital Point Website. It is called the Google Adsense Sandbox, and located in http://www.digitalpoint.com/tools/Adsense-sandbox/
You'll be asked to enter your selected keyword and it will display every Adsense ads that's connected with that keyword. What if your suspicion is correct? Change your keyword! Do not worry; sometimes you just have to change one or two words.

Use wide ads (336x280, 300x250 or 250x250). Because these are the best performing ads.

Blend your ads with your website themes. For example, if your background color is white, change your ads border and background color to white as well. If your background color is dark (black), use bright color such as yellow as link color. This will decrease user ad-blindness.

Place your Google Adsense in these positions:
Above the fold
Above the fold is the top position of your page that's visible without your visitor having to scroll down. This is the best location that works for me. I place 336x280 ad unit in this location and it works very well. Why? Okay, back to our example. Your article is about "how to bake delicious bread". Someone finds it from search engine; when he opens it, he first sees ads about "baking school", "baking book" or "bread recipes". Who won't be interested?
In the middle of an article.
This works well if your article is long (more than 500 words). People tend to stop for a while and look for something different while they read. I suggest using rectangular ads (125x125, 180x150, 300x250, 336x280, 250x250 ad unit) for this purpose and make it left justified.
At the end of an article.
Many people reported that placing Google Adsense ads at the end of their article tends to work very well. This is because when people finish reading an interesting article, they usually think "okay, what's next?" That's your chance! By placing Google Adsense ads at the end of this article, people will spend a minute to read it and then (maybe) click it. For example, you write an article about "how to bake delicious bread". And at the end of it, there are some ads about "bread recipes". Who won't be interested?

Regarding the fourth tip, I don't recommend you placing three ad units in a single page. From my experience, the number of ad unit you place in a single page doesn't affect your CTR. In fact, I even found that placing three text ads in a single page make my ads "unblended". For example, I put 160x600, 468x60 and 336x280 ads on a single page. You know what? My 468x60 ads only showed 3 ads in it, whereas my 336x280 ads only showed 2 ads in it! My suggestion is: use 1 – 2 ad unit and a single link unit on your page (Google allows 3 ad unit and 1 link unit to be placed on a single page).

Always use Link Unit! Many people never realize that Link Unit is the most profitable format if put in the right place. Try to place it near your navigation menu. People will misidentify it as a navigation menu and automatically read it. If your ads are closely relevant to your content, there's big possibility they will click it. I move the top navigation in one of my websites to the bottom section and replace it with 728x15 Link Unit Ads. You know what? My Google Adsense CTR increased by 200%!

Monday, July 20, 2009

9 Tips to Improve Your Earnings With Adsense!

Make The Most Of Google Love
One of the common reasons bloggers don’t make a lot of money from Google Adsense is because they don’t write about topics that people are searching for answers on i.e. using Google. Just writing interesting articles isn’t going to get you a lot of clicks on ads as your readers won’t be searching for answers or certain products.

If you take a look at my top posts in the sidebar you will see that most of the posts are giving tips, or useful links for services, or are product reviews i.e. posts that get lots of Google love which sends lots of click happy people through to my site. If you post more articles of this ilk your adsense earnings will increase. These articles are also timeless and will continue to get Google traffic long after my regular readers have moved onto newer material.

To maximise your Google traffic don’t forget the basics like making sure your post titles are clear and that your first paragraph clearly explains what the post is about, so that even if you are not the top result you have increased your chances of being clicked on. Take a look at my top posts – every one of the post titles makes it clear what the post is about, which is why they do well on Google.

Smart Pricing
Less Is Better I’m stunned by how many blogs haven’t factored in Google Adsense Smart pricing into their site design. If you haven’t come across Adsense Smart Pricing before, then in one sentence this is where Google looks at your site’s overall CTR and if it’s low then it will display lower value ads and if it’s high it will display higher value ads.

So, for many sites a quick way to improve earnings is to actually display fewer ads i.e. to remove poorly performing ad units like sidebar ads, or ads that are below the fold etc. This will increase your site’s average CTR, which will make Google display higher value ads in your better performing spaces which will raise your overall earnings.

Smart Pricing works across your Adsense account, not just on a site by site basis. So, if you are displaying a significant number of Adsense ads on other sites that have a poor CTR then you should remove them as your main sites will benefit.

If You’re Going To Place Ads Put In Best Spots – Don’t Kop Out
In my view, if you are going to run ads on your site then it doesn’t make sense to do it half-heartedly i.e not put your ads in the best slots. If you do you’ll never get to see the full benefits – if you’re going to do something in my view, then do it right!


Blend Your Adsense Units
Following on from the previous tip, again if you are going to add Adsense ads to your site then again I think you should make sure that they are fully optimised. The best way of doing this is to blend the ads into your site by making sure that the text and link colours match.

To maximise CTR you should also wrap text around your ads. Many sites have tried placing ads above text or even before articles, but in my opinion this is a bad move, as all it does is encourage readers to ‘jump’ past your ads straight to the content.

Get A Good Stats Package
One of the difficulties with Google Adsense as it’s virtually impossible to see for certain which posts have a high CTR. But, if you have a good stats package then at least you can see which of your posts are popular so that you can try and write more of the same to further grow your traffic.


Rewrite Best Articles
So That Better Ads Appear In tandem with working out what your best articles are, you should manually see what kind of ads are displaying on your bigger posts. Take for instance my number one post. The ads that were originally being displayed were awful and the post itself was only about one line long.

However, once I spotted the crazy Google traffic I went back and rewrote the post so that it included links to other related posts and improved the keyword density so that better Adsense ads are now displayed.

Reduce Noise Around Ad Units One of the best ways to improve your Adsense CTR is to reduce the amount of noise around your ads. If you are serious about increasing your CTR then you want to limit the amount of other links and noise around your units.

No author name, categories, ratings, tags etc in sight.

Don’t Use Competitive Ad Filter
Trust Google This one may be a bit controversial, but I fully believe that to increase Adsense Earnings you shouldn’t use the competitive filter and that you should trust Google, as Google will always display the ad it thinks will work best on your site and which has the highest CPC. If this turns out to be one of the ads that you’ve blocked, then all you are actually doing is reducing your potential earnings. I believe that you should only use the competitive filter to eliminate competitor ads, not in an attempt to increase Adsense earnings.

Get An Adsense Optimised Theme
I couldn’t finish this list without plugging my Adsense Optimised theme. I have lost count of the number of people who have thanked me after they have changed their theme to Typo XP Reloaded. Having a theme that’s designed for adsense can make a huge, huge difference.

If you are attached to your current theme then try and make tweaks that will help your CTR e.g. do you need that huge bright header that is pushing your ads below the fold and is only creating more ‘noise’? Should you use nice blue links that everyone knows means ‘click here’ rather than that funky link colour you like because it matches your wallpaper?

A-Z Tips to Increase Google AdSense Earnings

a. Strictly follow the rules mentioned in Adsense policies. You will always earn more revenue from Adsense by playing it clean.

b. Never modify the Google Adsense HTML code. If have trouble embedding AdSense code in your WordPress or Blogger template, take help of the AdSense support forums or send an email to your AdSense account manager.

c. Never ask your friends or visitors to click on your Google ads. Google takes click fraud very seriously. Do not include incentives of any kind on your site for users to click on your ads. Don't label Google ads with text other than "sponsored links" or "advertisements.".

d. Don't click on your own ads - Google is much smarter than you think and can discover invalid clicks through IP addresses, site navigation patterns, etc. If you working on a new design for your site, avoid reloading your pages (with AdSense) excessively. You can turn off AdSense temporarily and avoid invalid CPM impressions. Or you can use the unofficial Google Adsense Sandbox Tool that is accessible from Firefox, IE and other browsers to see what kind of Google ads will be served based on content (website address URL) or keywords.

e. Don't place ads in pop-up windows, error pages or even empty pages. Update: With the new AdSense policy change, you can probably place ads on 404 pages. Check with the AdSense support team.

f. Don't start a "adsense asbestos" or "home equity loan rates" website merely to make money from accidental clicks. You will never make money out these Made for Adsense websites. Instead, write on topics what you are passionate about. Don't waste your money on high-paying adsense keywords lists. Stay away from AdSense Adwords arbitrage.

g. For short articles, CTR is best when ads are placed just above the content.

h. For long articles, CTR will improve if you place ads somewhere in middle of the content or just where the article ends - when visitors are done reading the article, they may be looking for related resources.

i. Use Text Ads instead of Image Ads as users get more options and the payout is often higher. If you still want to display image ads (for CPM), consider ad formats like the 300x250 medium rectangle or the 160x600 wide skyscraper as they support also support rich multimedia and the new gadget ads.

j. Google Ads with no background color and no borders will always perform better. Make the border color and background color same as your page background color.

k. Always put ads above the main fold. Make sure that the ad unit with the highest clickthrough rate is the first instance of the ad code that appears in your HTML source. Since the first ad unit is always filled before the rest, you want to make sure that ad unit is located in the best placement on your page.

l. Try setting the ad link URL color to a lighter shade. If your text is black, you may make the adlink as light gray or something like #666.

m. Go Wide - The large rectangle (336x280) is the best paying Adsense format especially for text ads. Try using the 336x280 large rectangle, 300x250 medium rectangle, or 160x600 wide skyscraper.

n. Don't places images next to Google ads as that will invite a permanent ban to your AdSense account.

o. Blend AdLinks with other navigation links or place horizontal adlinks at the top of your webpage. AdSense publishers are permitted to click on link unit topics on their web pages, provided that they do not click on any Google ads on the resulting page.

p. You should try adding a unit near the comments senction of your blog. See more AdSense tweaks.

q. You can put upto 3 adsense units on a page. Try putting a large skyscraper on the right navigation sidebar of your website. That area is close to the browser scrollbar. You can also add 2 AdSense for search boxes and 3 adlink units.

r. The first few lines of your content are an important factor for determining what Ads are served on your webpage. That's the right place to put keywords in bold (strong tags) or header tags (h1, h2, etc).

s. Always select the setting to open Google Adsense search box results in a new browser window, so you won't lose your visitors. Click the Open search results in a new browser window checkbox and this add target="google_window" to your form tag.

t. Maximum people think the search box is on the top right corner. So you know where to put it.

u. Always syndicate full text RSS feeds and then monetize your feeds with a 468x60 ad in RSS feeds.

v. Monitor the AdSense performance of individual web pages with Google Analytics

w. For low CTR pages, try changing titles or adding more relevant content to get better focused ads. Alse see: Get relevant Google Ads

x. Block low paying advertisers with Filters. Why to loose a visitor for an ad that will only pay you a cent. Use Overture or Google Adwords Keywords tool to discover keywords that are less popular with advertisers.

y. Learn how to implement AdSense Revenue sharing if you run a site with multiple authors and need to pay your writers based on advertising revenue generated from their articles.

z. Experiment with color schemes and layouts using split testing. You are the best judge when it comes to choosing ad formats for your own website.

Saturday, July 18, 2009

How to Make the Big League in Adsense Revenue

So what differentiates the big Adsense earners who earn in excess of $100,000 a month from those publishers who struggle to make the $100 threshold to generate a payment.

Well there are a number of factors which include the following common practices for maximizing your Adsense earnings;
•Ad Placement
•Ad Blending - Fonts, Colors, Background, Border etc
•Ad Sizes
•Website Traffic
•Website Niche or Topic
As an Adsense publisher it's crucial that you optimize the ads on your site or blog to ensure that your Adsense revenue is as high as it can be, however, notwithstanding the above, one of the biggest factors that is directly proportional to your Adsense earnings is time.

In other words the older your website or blog, or the longer you have been publishing Adsense ads on it, the more chance it has have increasing its daily Adsense revenue.

Ok, this could be related to traffic, because as time goes by, the more the website gets tweaked, the more links it gets and the better it ranks in the SERPS (Search Engine Results Pages) and so on.

So what this means is that unless you have instant traffic to a your high paying niche website, you will probably have to be patient to realize that $100 a day Adsense revenue.

Adsense Publisher - How to Maximize Your Adsense Revenue

Wouldn't it be nice to be generating more than a $100 a month in Adsense revenue from the magic Google programthat would be more than $3000 a month which would provide a pretty decent income for some people.

The reality however, is that many Adsense publishers see Adsense as a way to making some easy money online but after a month or two they soon realize that it's not going to be an easy way to get rich online.

However if you are one of these struggling publishers then take heart in the knowledge that many are generating more than $10,000 a month after starting out & struggling just like you.

Thursday, July 16, 2009

Google AdSense Marketing For Serious Bloggers

Earning on the net does not only pertain to selling tangible products and information products but there are also other means. I'm sure this is not new to you when I talk about making money through blogs. Many bloggers have actually been making lots of dough from their blog sites. Some may have started as a hobby and later became a business that generates good income. With the information that you post on your blog, you can have Google AdSense and eventually make passive income out of it. However, this is not as easy as it may seem. It won't make you an instant millionaire contrary to what some "experts" may be saying.

Yes, there is really a high earning potential in this advertising scheme but you need to employ the right Google AdSense marketing techniques in order to maximize the potential. It must be considered like any other business wherein you must also put in efforts in making it work for you. Thus, any serious blogger needs Google AdSense marketing if they want to monetize his or her blog site. Without an appropriate plan, I don't think you can easily generate income. Making money with AdSense is absolutely not impossible. You can even have it as your main source of income, if you only explore all its facets and creatively make money out of it.

Google AdSense marketing must be geared towards the delivery of quality contents in your site. You have to be mindful of what you write about since the ads that will appear on your web pages are dependent on the keywords that you will have on your posts. If you have a keyword-rich content, it will attract appropriate ads that will most likely be aligned to the interests of your visitors. For those who are contemplating on establishing their own online presence and create a blog, it is always better that you get your own domain name and have your own web host.

This is much better than settling for free blog sites. You can do Google AdSense marketing with much ease and freedom if you have everything on your own. It will be easier for you to edit your blog and design it the way you want it to appear. Unlike in free blog sites, there may be limitations on how you should design your site. If you have full liberty over our blog site, you can freely design it in accordance to your Google AdSense marketing plan. It is not only the content that is the main key to increase website traffic but the design also plays a vital role in this case.

The better the design, the more internet users will be attracted to visiting your site. So, no matter how good your contents are, if you have a lousy webpage design or layout, I don't think people would love to visit your page again. It must all come in one complete package, don't you think? I've known a lot of good writers maintaining their own blogs. Only that, they don't employ good Google AdSense marketing that's why they are not really able to monetize their sites. If you think you are on the same boat with these people, you have to right away review how you are managing your website.

Remember, you must post quality contents on a daily basis and create a well-designed site. Having all these main factors will surely lead you to become a successful and rich blogger.