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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?