Tutorial: How to increase your Adsense earnings

I’ve written many blogs now about making money online with little or no effort, recounting tales about how you could earn thousands while you while away your time gardening, watching TV, or cheating at the local pub quiz on your Internet phone (James).

Well now it’s time to go into a little detail, some ‘put up or shut up’ facts to turn your casual hobby into a full-time career. Forget the websites that offer to teach you how to make money with Adsense in exchange for paying them a consultancy fee, or buying their expensive eBooks. They’re idiots, and they’re trying to scam money from you. The real gold is right here… for free.

If you’ve read my previous blogs you’ll know about choosing a niche for your website, filling it with regularly updated unique content and monetising the socks off it – this time we go into detail about how to make that little extra money become a lot, with Google’s very own Adsense.

Step 1 – Ad Types

Choosing your Ad format is the first step to make, as remember Google’s Adsense is mostly an EPC (Earnings per Click) scheme whereby you get money each time someone clicks on the ads rather than when visitors simply view them, or actually buys something at the end of it. Therefore it’s in your best interest to have as many of your visitors as possible click on your adverts.

Obvious that is, easy that is not, hmm?

So what are the best performing ad sizes? According to Google the best performing ones are:

160×600 Skyscraper: Google say that advertisers like these size ads and tend to bid more for them, who are we to argue?

728×90 Leader board: Very popular for site headers, footers and forums

300×250 + 336×280 Rectangles: Another popular size and one Google personally recommends, also used quite extensively for video ads.

Link Units: These are recommended by Google for sites that have limited space, and recommended by me because they can be slipped into a horizontal navigation seamlessly

Step 2 – Position your Ads

Location, location, location!

Slapping your ads on a page and hoping for success will lead to failure just as sure as eating a curry after 14 pints ‘to settle the stomach’ will lead to vomiting. You need to know where the hotspots are on your website; the locations that users are most likely to click (what is a hotspot not?  …not a good spot! Actually in this instance it’s very good, so read on). Identifying these hotspots is simple, as user trends are fairly constant. Then you place an ad where the user is most likely to go first.

In fact, if you’re unsure about where users are most likely to click on your website, Google Analytics even shows you an overlay of your website marked out where your visitors click – if you have it installed; if you don’t, why not?

So where are visitors most likely to go? Why, the navigation links of course! They can usually be found vertically on the left of the page and horizontally at the top of the page. When visitors naturally head for these hot-spots they’ll be finding your ads instead of site navigation, earning you money.

If you’re thinking any of this might be a little underhand, or against Google’s TOS, don’t panic… Google actually offers advice on this itself in the Adsense FAQ, and even offers extra tips for ad placement within your forums and blogs.

Let’s look at a couple of examples of successful advert placement from some Adsense websites.

This website utilises the left hand navigation slot for the Adsense links, knowing that most users will automatically look there in an attempt to navigate the website – earning the website owner money from the clicks.

Notice the links at the top of the page? They’re not navigation links; they’re Google Adsense link units, masquerading as navigation.

For a much better example however I’ve used one of my own sites, anonymously of course, to show how to truly Adsense up your website.

Here you can see use of the Link Unit and the 160×600 skyscraper to maximum effect. Obviously with the normal navigation slots used for Adsense placement the usability of the site suffers, and the bounce-rate is extremely high… but the exit links are almost always to Adsense. That, of course, is the idea!

Step 3 – Style your Ads

This is the real trick, where the serious optimisation comes in. Your CTR will soar if your ads don’t look like ads, and instead look like the rest of your site.

Now hold on! We can’t go and style up our Adsense ads outside of the limited colour changes Google affords us can we, it goes against their TOS? True, you can’t… however, you can style up your own text and links to match the Google ads. This is perfectly OK with the big G. Make sure that your link text is the same colour, same font and same size as the Adsense ads and that it is underlined the same. Also make sure you have descriptions underneath your links to match the style and layout of the Google ads.

To be really sneaky (and again even Google recommends this) you can make your Adsense adverts’ background colour the same as your website’s, AND even lose the border on the Adsense ads. This makes them blend in seamlessly with your website.

With your navigation links and your Adsense links working in perfect harmony your website doesn’t look like an ad-fest when visitors first visit it.

Darren
Affiliate Marketing