This post is part of the series “How to Monetize Your Blog”
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You can make lots of money monetizing your blog with Adsense if you have quality content, the right keywords, and the right adsense ad layout. Many people complain they can’t make money with adsense or that it cheapens their site. I will show it how it will not only increase the value of your site, but how it will start building you monthly income!
I monetize my web sites and blogs in many different ways. I see many web sites missing out when it comes to non-invasive ways to monetize your web site or blog, and they don’t have to be ways in which you anger your visitors. In fact – good monetization will always compliment your web site, not “cheapen” it. I have also read many articles that debate when to monetize, and there are still some hold-outs that say build up traffic on a site first and then monetize once it gets to a certain level. I’m sorry – that’s just BS in my book, and I have the experience to back it up. Monetize your web site from day 1 – PERIOD!.
Why? Every post and page is an opportunity to make money. Making money with a web site is like planting a garden. Why would you want to keep plowing the field for 6 months and and keep waiting to plant the seeds? Also monetization is marketing, and marketing takes time and skill. Yes – skill. The more you do it the better you become, so do it from day #1.
Making money online is like a sport or a professional trade.
Ingredients you WILL NEED to become SUCCESSFUL:
- Competent Trainers and Mentors
- Passion and Drive to Succeed
- Organization and Work Ethic
- Ability to make 10,000 mistakes and keep going
- Good Communications Skills
- Practice, Practice, Practice!
Today we’re going to talk about monetizing your web site with google adsense. If you’re already using google adsense – read this article anyway and learn how to make more money using adsense. Click the banner above to join adsense if you haven’t already. By signing up with adsense you can build code snippets and place ads on your web site.
Adsense Myths:
- To make any money you need thousands of visitors per day
- Ads will make a percentage of your visitors leave and not come back
- Adsense cheapens the look of your web site
You would be surprised how much more money you could be making with some very basic and simple changes to your web site. Think about how much you could be making per day. Just $1 per day is $30 per month, which should more than pay for most basic hosting plans (and then some). Only $5 per day and you’re making $150 per month, $10 per day is $300/mo. It adds up quicker than you think. Especially if you have more than one blog or web site to monetize.
Adsense Facts:
- You can make $1-$3 a day on as little as 20-30 visitors per day
- A percentage of your visitors quickly leave anyway (the bounce rate) – you can make money on that dead traffic
- Adsense is so targeted that it’s less of an intrusion and more of a service compared to other ads
The first thing you need to understand is where the ads come from. Adsense is fed by google’s other product Adwords. If you haven’t used adwords before – it’s where you can pay to drive traffic to your web site – you “pay per click”. In the Adwords marketplace – people “bid over keywords“. The more competition there is for a keyword, the more it costs and the highest bidder wins the top slot, the next bidder the next slot, and so on. For example it may cost 50 cents per click to get the keyword “designer handbag”, but I bet you can get “clay flowerpot” for under a nickel. It’s all about supply and demand. The most searched for terms are fought over pretty fiercely. Once keywords are purchased, the adsense algorithm places the actual ads on web sites – matching them up with keywords and content on web pages. The algorithm is pretty amazing, and in most case will be serving highly target ads to your web site within minutes. If the ads are way off target or inappropriate – you need to re-think your web site setup.
So once a keyword is purchased and an ad is written – it’s matched up with a highly targeted web page where it should perform well. It doesn’t matter how “busy” or popular that web site is, well performing and paying ads are placed on appropriate pages getting from a dozen to thousands of visitors per day. If you are using high paying keywords in your web site content, you will attract high paying ads. Did you understand that statement? Go back and read it two more times and think about it a minute.
That’s right – the key to making money in adsense is attracting well paying ads. If I have a web site that gets only 30 visitors per day, and 3 per day click an adsense ad paying 35-50 cents, I can easily make $1 per day from this very low-traffic web site. Of course everyone wants to get more than 30 visitor per day, but all sites have to start somewhere. I’m illustrating how easy it is to make money from day #1. I do this in nearly all the sites I setup. Many of you that have used adsense for a long time won’t believe it, because in my example my adsense clicks pay extremely high and the click-through-rate (CTR) is 10%. Most sites are lucky to get a 2-3% CTR on adsense ads, and the clicks usually pay a nickel or less on average. Be sure to subscribe to our RSS feed because in future articles I’ll give more details on how to structure a web site to attract those better paying ads like flypaper. It’s just some very basic SEO and keyword work while writing detailed and informative content.
I said earlier that if you received off target ads your blog or web site layout was possibly not “adsense optimized”. If you want to attract high paying ads and make the most adsense revenue possible from your existing traffic – I’ll give you some very simple rules to follow when writing articles, pages, and posts. If you follow these very basic rules you will not only get more revenue per click with adsense, but (in the long run) you will also get more visitors, and better search engine listings.
Top 10 Ways To Make More Money from Adsense Using Keywords
- Obtain a URL with very important keywords in your niche: I can’t say enough about this. The #1 reason I have so many domains is because when you build a niche site if the domain has your top 2 or 3 keywords in it – you immediantly start getting traffic from post #1. This is very important.
- Use permalinks, pretty URL’s, etc: This is second most important whether you are using WordPress, Drupal, Joomla, Mambo, or whatever. As soon as you setup your software turn on permalinks, pretty URL’s, or whatever it’s called so you posts have “site.com/this-is-my-post”. Having great keywords in the URL past the top level domain name is only second to keywords in the domain name itself.
- Find the Best Keywords and Phrases: DO YOUR RESEARCH! Read my post Secret Link Juice Keyword Techniques to find out how to do keyword research. If you don’t know what the best keywords for your niche are – there really isn’t much point reading any farther than this…
- Create a Great Title: When you write a post the title controls much more than you think. Everyday I read great articles with crappy titles. With every title you need to be thinking of using keywords that will be searched for while linkbaiting a title enticing people to click. This can be harder than it sounds, because the best titles are 6-8 words or less. I’ve gotten better at this over time, but it’s just practice, practice, practice to become a master at it!
- Have an H1 Title first: WordPress natively takes your html post title tag and puts it into an H1 tag as the textual title on the post’s web page. If you use another CMS like Drupal, Joomla, Mambo, or something else make sure your Content Management System does the same. Keywords in header tags (especially the first header of the page) carry much more weight than laster in the content areas.
- Start with a Synopsis Paragraph: Unless you are writing custom meta description tags for every single page the most important area of any post or page after the title is that first paragraph. This paragraph ultimately becomes your description under you title link in search engine results pages. You want to stick to 2 or 3 sentences when possible, or at least place your important keywords there. Remember – what you type will not only determine how well this page comes up in search results, but also how your page is described and why people click!
- Bold important keywords as you write: As you write your post or article bold keywords and phrases when you are making points. These keywords, combined with your title and synopsis help target ads (and traffic!).
- Link relevant sources: This is a given, but should be mentioned. Be sure to link only relevant items in your post – it helps target everything.
- Organize sections using h3 and h4 headings: Using h3 and h4 headers in longer pages and posts is a great way to “sub-title” the page with even more targeted keywords. It’s also easier to organize information (and for more people to follow and read).
- Use keyword laden categories and tags: Just before you publish that page or post, be sure to use great keywords to both categorize and tag it.
Now back to the adsense ads themselves. First – if you are brand new to adsense, be sure to visit the newly created adsense official newbie help at google and get all the free information that you can. Second you want to get the code for the adsense ads necessary for placement on your web site. I want you to view the google heat map. This picture illustrates where a visitor’s eyes go first, and where you would get the most clicks. Do you see how the reddest spot on the page is directly above the content? I want you to understand that if you could only place one adsense ad per page – it should be directly above you content. In addition, the highest paying and best performing adsense ad is 336×280 large rectangle.
So you’re ready to place that ad? Not so quick – you need to “blend” it into the look and feel of your page. When you create it in adsense setup make the background color the same as where it will be placed on your page. Make the font color and size the same, make the link colors the same too. I personally would never use video ads for any reason – only text. My reasoning on this is that in a 336×280 text ad you normally get 4 text ads, and that’s 4 chances to make money. If a video takes up the entire 336×280 block – it’s only 1 chance to make money, and it’s images and video that can be intrusive to many visitors. IMHO – you would need some type of pop-culture (music, movie, celebrity, joke, media based) web site to be successful with image or video ads. Place one 336×280 adsense ad directly before your content and one directly after. If you use google analytics to track your web site – you many already be aware of your “bounce rate”. When people come to your site, and quickly leave because they didn’t find what they wanted they “bounce”. To me a bounce rate of 20-30% is normal. Over 50% is incredibly high.
If you’ve placed the 336×280 blocks before and after the content your are placing highly targeted ads to soak up your bounce rate. In other words – if 20-30% of my customers are going to leave my site quickly anyway to find what they want – I’d prefer that they click on one of my adsense ads to find it. I help them find what they need, and I get a “referral fee” for the click. Also visitors that stay awhile on my site many click an ad because they’re in the same niche. It’s like being in the library and finding the book you need, but seeing others on the same shelf you might also like.
Beyond the two mandatory adsense blocks I use before and after the content – I often also add a 4 text link unit in a sidebar or a 160×600 skyscraper. How you feel about this is up to you and your layout. If you have other ads or sidebar content that could be earning money – it might be better placed there. But if all you have is the latest posts and some categories – these types of adsense ads can help you not “leave any money on the table“. That means – you might only make a few extra pennies or nickels per day – but if that money was just laying on the table would you just leave it there? Probably not. It adds up over time. Again – especially if you are monetizing multiple web sites.
I learned this term (money on the table) from Joel Comm, whose adsense eBook I read a few years back just after setting up my adsense account for the first time. For the first 6-7 months I used adsense I made no money at all. After I read Joel’s book I quadrupled my CTR and went from making pennies per day overnight to $3-$5. One month after reading that eBook I received my first ever google adsense check, and I’ve received one every month since. Joel has a free eBook report you can read about making money with adsense. I recommend you read it.
So – if your web site or blog consistently using my techniques above you should have no problem earning more money from adsense. A lot of times you read a great article like this and you wonder how successful it was for the author. Well, it worked for me – last year I made more than $10,000 from adsense on just a few web sites…
If you would like to talk about your Adsense Success and have it added to this page (or have a question), just comment below or contact me directly!
Great blog post, keep it up 🙂
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Yeah true, you have been writing in lot of details John which is good.
As a publisher, I have been using adsense since last 4 years. And I also seen those days where everyone was crazy behind words like “Mesotheliama” or something like that which used to pay $1-2 per click. Every I have got $6 for a click but then if it’s something you cannot write about for long, better avoid it.
Right now I focus on a technology niche that is uncommon and that gives me $0.40-0.50 per click so I can easily make it $4-5 from that blog everyday
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Nice blog. Keywords are as important as the blog content. The keywords really play prominent role in driving traffic and can create wonders to the blog. I think Adsense is the most effective way to monetize blogs and earn more revenues. Thanks for the details about Adsense.
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Hahaha! This is right up my alley. You cover a LOT of great stuff in one post.
First-yes to ads on sites early on. If you build a professional looking site (and with WP themes this really shouldn’t be much of an issue anymore), and write content the I say go ahead and have some ads! Why would you not? People expect to see it on “real” sites anyway.
Next “$1 per day is $30 per month” Again yes, I made about $2.89 last month and got DISGUSTED because I had a lot of traffic. I decided to take a month and put in 15 hours a day of research/testing/etc and go for AT LEAST a dollar day. So I’m a little behind right now, but close. And the plan is 30, then 50 then 100 and so on. So to recap; I’ve had 1/3 the people of last month, but nearly 10 times the income.
One Problem: Adsense has NOT been good to me on content matching. Some sort of problem I keep writing them about, but 25 percent of the time good ads, but 75 percent wrong has been killing me. And yeah, I’ve one most of the 10 on your list, but clearly something is still up, this issue happens for the same pages. On one day correct ads the next day incorrect.
But great point about “high paying keywords.”
And lastly, I’ve digested so much in the last 3 weeks its hard for me to pinpoint what I got from where (well Maki’s stuff sticks out) but I do know I watched about 8 Joel Comm YouTube videos.
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You have covered almost everything about adsense in this article. The whole post is superb especially the keywords part.
My earning is directly proportional to traffic from Google Search Engine and unfortunately I am not getting enough traffic from Google. May be they have penalized for some reason.
Weldon man.
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Yes – I use a lot of these ideas + Entrecard and am up to about $5/day – You have an excellent blog here. I’ll visit often.
Thanks for this post. I take from now on the money making blog as a reallity. Even though I do at present live in Spain, I will probably focus on english speaking readers and publish in english. Thanks again.
VladimÃÂr
You gave me an ah-ha moment with this post!! I never realized that the titles to my blog posts were important. There will be a change from now on. Thank you, thank you!! I am so loving your blog.
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@Pamela R – You’d be surprised how many people don’t realize how much weight the title’s carry. You have to constantly choose your words wisely – you never know how it may affect you in SERP’s.
I’ve had a website for almost two years, but I have never tried to monetize it. Your tips will be very useful as I move forward. Thanks!
I’ve been using Adsense for two months now and all I have earned is few dollars. Thanks for sharing this information!
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@Paul – a couple of things. I took a look at your blog and one reason you’re doing badly is your .biz domain. Google often sees and treats .info and .biz domains as spam. Get a dot com domain.
Secondly, on your post pages use a 336×280 adsense block between your header and content on every page, and make the background color match the background color of your pages. This alone will dramatically increase your adsense earnings. Don’t use rounded corners either. Blend the ad in with your content. Using smaller sidebar type blocks, or blocks with contrasting colors, or blocks with rounded borders, or blocks after content – all these things will kill your adsense earnings.
Great info!
I’m a blogger newbie n making little progress optimising my site for adsense, sigh.. ;’P
Hmm, what went wrong for me?
I’m still picking up more knowledge & tips each day. Thks for sharing! 🙂
=0 make my spirit flame on again to publish adsense , thank for the tips
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Excellent post about monetizing your blog. I am in the neverending process of learning and mastering blog in blogger and WordPress and getting some income from Adsense was something I considered before but unfortunally I got “0” income from adsense so I decided that was not worth pursuing and concentrate on CJ ads instead. Your post make me realize that perhaps I was not doing it right and I will give adsense another try.
John your posts are an excellent source of useful information and I am one of your fan-reader that consume everything that is in your head. Your collection of great ideas that you post them here for all of us to see, It is nice to see how a brilliant marketer think.
Regards
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Great post. I put the two mandatory blocks before and after content. Will test to see!
I agree that one should monetize off the bat. Some “gurus” out there are saying build content first…
I disagree and glad you do too!
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This is a really good post, I feel like I’ve hit a wall with my Adsense revenue, but this gave me some real insight as to how I can get things moving again….I think. 🙂
JT, this has totally made me want to re-evaluate my thinking about adsense. When I read the Bans forums, they always say NOT to have adsense ads. They make it sound as if you can’t make money and it cheapens your site by the look of it. I’m going to try it again.
Thanks…
Hi,
A lot of the people on the Bans sites say don’t use adsense. Do they understand how successful you are with it? Apparently not. I think I’ll give it another shot. I didn’t know how to use it when I had it on my site. I think I’ll give it another shot. Thanks…
I appreciate this detailed information on using adsense. It seems traffic and having a vast VRE established might be keys to increasing income using adsense. I will employ these recommendation on my niche site. I only use adsense in limited manner on my blog.
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Just yesterday I modified colours of my ads… The result was horrible! Thanks to one website (rather let’s not mention the URL) I lost a few bucks (well, maybe only $5-$10), but I also understood one important thing… Ads should be visible. That guy recommended making URLs black (or of the same colour like other unclickable text), making titles almost black (dark blue). So I lost a few bucks… who cares. Today I again modified the ads, made URLs green (light green), titles red, description black. It works much better. The background is grey (ads background is the same like background of page).
Just wanted to share my experience. Sometimes you can get hundreds of clicks more just due to colours.
Nice info JT, you are absolutely right about picking high paying keywords I just wish my highest traffic-ed site would average more than 13.5 cents a click – if I could hit that dollar a click average I could retire. =
If I could respond to Angela who commented a couple comments ago about putting ads on BANS sites – from my experience I earn way more from my ebay revenue than I do from ad clicks so that is perhaps why people recommend not putting ads on BANS sites. If you have a site tho that has high paying keywords I would go ahead and give it a try and see how it effects your earnings.
Excellent advice. I’m inspired by your W2 to keep on building new sites and improve the ones I have such as the one above.
Text ads do better for the most part, but sometimes an image ad will start appearing on my site that gets a lot of clicks. For example, if one appears for the iPhone, people just love to click on those things ads. People also seem to flip over anything to do with music.
Great advice, I get minimal revenue, 1 normally just a few cents from my clicks, but every now and then I get a click for $2-3. Now I’ve just got to make it happen more often.
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Congrats on your numbers JT that is pretty impressive. I’ve had a couple of my sites doing very well with adsense but only because they get a good amount of traffic (unfortunately the amount per click is low). What works seems to be different for every site so some experimentation is always crucial. I have two classic car sites with the same ad placement on both and one does significantly better than the other – still haven’t figured out why. I haven’t had much success at all with link units though on any site – has anyone had much success using those?
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Key ingredients for a profitable AdSense site with minimal traffic include a high-paying niche, good content and a split-testing layouts to maximize CTR-rate. once you have the niche and the layout done, focus on building a great site, move it up through the SERPS ideally to Top 10 in a profitable niche, and you’ll have a solid income coming in.
Remember also you can use AdSense income for your AdSense site, so once you have a bit coming in you can put it back into your business so to speak and keep on growing.
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Agh, not trying to bother you here, please try it yourself when I search your site using the search bar I get taken to a comments page saying something similar to “No comment posted…” I guess it still thinks I’m posting comments, even when I click “go” on the search box. Please don’t need to publish this comment, I’m just trying to reach you.
Hi John,
Great post. Linking out to relevant and authority sites seem to be a good way to get traffic to your pages. Nice tip. I need to do it more.
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nice to find such great information. i was struggling to get on with ad sense for my blog. your blog has helped ma a lot.
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I agree that you need to ‘blend’ Google ads into your site. There are so many sites with three ads right at the top of the page and you have to scroll down a way before you actually get to the content. I click away as soon as I see those sorts of sites.
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Hi JT, this is the most useful description of using adsense that I’ve read, and it’s changed my view about using adsense completely.
I always saw adsense as something ugly that reduces the quality of your blog for a few potential pennies a day. But I see now that if you can blend the adsense in a way that actually compliments your site and adds value for the visitor then why not do it! Also, it now seems obvious but of course the higher value keywords you have associated with your site the higher value you will get per click. I will bear this in mind with all my sites from now on.
Cheers!
I think I’m on the right track, I started adsense about a week ago and I get about 3k unique visits a month, and I’ve made $20.00 my first week, I want to do better though so I’m going to add an adsense text block somewhere, and I’ve also broken down how I get my traffic and have worked up a formula to double it in a month based on the trend of what my viewers read more of.
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I was looking for an Adsense plugin. I would like the adsense ads to show up in the right column along with the links and what not already in that column.
Is this a widget, some plugin or what. If any one could please help.
Thanks
you don’t need anything, just get the code from adsense and add it as a “text widget” in your sidebar.
Jt:
This is an excellent blog, I’m new to blogging and using wordpress, But I really like the way you have things set up here.
I have been trying to make money online for about a year and 1/2 now and failing miserably. I have found a ton of good tips and tricks here on how to monetize a blog.
Thank You very much
Bob
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Thank you for another great post and some excellent education. I can see now that I have my adsense ads on my two blogs in the wrong places. I need to change them…as soon as I can figure out how. I found out how to place them to begin with just from trial and error.
Your post was in great detail.
You know before getting into this line of work, I always thought adsense was an ugly pain in the neck thing that was just in my way. I never knew what they were or even wanted anything to do with them. I absolutely had adwords after losing a bunch of money off it.
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Hi John,
Thank you for this post! It helps people like me who are struggling to get traffic to my website. SEO is really one of my weakness that’s why I just hired people to do it for me. Anyway, Great article! Very nice!
I’ve been thinking about adding adsense but I wasn’t sure if it was worth it. It appears I was wrong and I need to give it a try
This is a lot of info about adsense. You mention that you want to use h3 and h4 headings for the body of your site, my question is why not use h1 headings instead? Just wondering.
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should this be done on all products?
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Adsense can be a great way to earn a little extra cash, or even more. Just do not get greedy and start doing black hat things.
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yes I have done all of this, but my current adsense earnings is not impressive at all considering that I have thousands of pages indexed in google. I currently earn an average of $5.00 per day and sometimes I earn just $1.00 a day. My ads are well placed according to Joel’s directions. Everyday many of my article pages are tweeted and retweeted on twitter. Many of my pages are also bookmarked by social networking sites, yet I get merely 500 daily page views. Also I have about 40 subdomains with adsense on them, all are indexed by Google.
I am using the same google ad snippet for all of these sites, am I supposed to use a seperate ad for each site? what am I doing wrong?
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you probably don’t have any original content at all, and your ads aren’t very well targeted (poor SEO).
just because that happens to be how my theme is laid out.
I’ve been thinking about adding adsense but I wasn’t sure if it was worth it. It appears I was wrong and I need to give it a try
There’s some great advice here about drawing the right adverts to your page by doing things like using tags, keyword laden h3 and h4 headers and bolding up key words in the text. I’ve never thought about this before, the more targeted the ads, the more likely they will contribute to the overall image and quality of your site. Thanks!
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