Adsense - to fill your Wallet

How To Make Money With Adsense

2008-05-05T13:17:00.001+05:30

Adsense is one of the most effective ways of monetizing your traffic and the deeper you delve into it the more it will reward you. Understanding Adsense.com has been set up to help you do just that.

It covers everything from building your first website to building a virtual real estate empire. Things like how to target your keywords, how to find and target niches, how to optimize your ads...

The profitability of an Adsense niche is primarily based on the amount that Adwords advertisers are spending to compete in that niche.

Remember that an Adsense ad is only an Adwords ad that is appearing on your site and not Google. The amount that an ad generates per click is therefore directly related to the amount that Adwords advertisers are paying per click. Bottom line - if they are paying more we earn more.

We are researching and building Adsense monetized sites constantly and many of our methods and ideas find their way into these pages.

Keywords

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Adsense Keywords: Optimization

Different keywords pay different amounts. Other things being equal a website based around debt consolidation will generate more revenue per Adsense click than a website based around football cards. This is why an industry built around selling high paying keyword lists to Adsense publishers has become so profitable.

But it’s more complicated than this as different keywords in different niche markets also pay different amounts. If your website is not targeting the “right” (as in profitable) keywords you will probably be earning less money per Adsense click than you should be.

For example – if you increase your average CPC (cost per click) from $0.20 to $0.30 you will increase your revenue by 33%. There are two ways of doing this on your already existing website and the best tool for doing the research is Keyword Country.

1. Better target your existing webpages:

Which words are you using in your Title Tag, Meta Tags, H1 - H3 Header Tags and inside the body of your content? Google's content matching technology generates ads related to the meaning of the words on your page. If the high paying keywords for that page topic aren't in those 4 hotspots I just listed the quality (relevancy) and CPC of your ads will be lower than if they were. Google wants to match their advertiser ads to the pages which are going to offer the greatest return otherwise their whole system collapses.

This means that you want to make sure the high paying keywords are included in your hot spots. If I use UnderstandingAdsense.com as an example I logged into Keyword Country with the intention of finding the highest paying keywords for the Adsense market. I typed in Adsense and was presented with a list. "Making Money With Adsense" has the highest average CPC of $0.73 so when I've finished building the site I will optimize the home page and several other pages for that keyword so as to generate the most relevant and high paying ads possible. I will do this by including that keyword phrase (and related ones like "make money with Adsense") into the four places listed above.

2. Add additional content to your website which targets related high paying keywords:

The most important word here is related. Don’t add content pages about Viagra to your website which is themed around motorcycles just because the average CPC for Viagra is very high. Instead do one of these two things:

1. Type your primary keyword, in this example, "motorcycle" into Keyword Country, wait for the results to appear and then click on CPC. This will arrange all the related keywords by their CPC value bringing the most profitable to the top. I did this and found that -

“Motorcycle Insurance In Michigan” has an average CPC of $10.25
“Motorcycle Insurance” has an average CPC of $4.28
“Motorcycle Loan” has an average CPC of $3.34

These are very high average CPCs for which you could develop new content. These content pages would generate higher cost per click Adsense ads from your visitors.

2. Your second option is to type in keywords which are related to your principal topic. Continuing with the motorcycle theme you could type in Harley-Davidson a popular manufacturer of motorcycles. The results show that “Harley Davidson Boots” has an average CPC of $0.84. You could build a page today pre-selling Harley Davidson Boots and generate a nice Adsense stream from that page. Another extension would be the keyword “chopper”, a popular type of motorcycle enhanced by the big shows of the last few years. On Keyword Country a search for chopper brings up related keywords like West Coast Choppers, a famous chopper builder which has an average CPC of $0.95 – again a page or several pages around this topic would be a nice addition to a motorcycle based website.

Whatever your topic, virtually every website can incorporate new high paying content. So before you try and build a website in a new niche check that the website(s) that you’ve already put the groundwork into (link building and seo) can’t be better optimized for higher paying keywords and / or have additional high adsense paying content added to it. There will be at least five new pages of content that you could add to your existing website today that would create higher paying average clicks than what you are already generating.

The large majority of Adsense Publishers are still not taking advantage of these tools and are still working in the dark so to speak - unsystematically adding content, optimizing their pages and building new niche websites with no fore-knowledge of the value of a particular topic nor its potential profitability. I guarantee that if you test Keyword County for just a day you won’t want to unsubscribe - it makes our job of making money with Adsense that much easier.

They also have a free “sneak peak” tool whereby you enter your target keywords and it will give you the most high paying keywords related to that phrase.

Adsense Ad Relevancy

2008-05-05T13:14:00.001+05:30

Adsense Ad Relevancy: Optimization

There must be an ad pool for your market and on the assumption that there is, there are certain things that you can do to stress that your page is about X and not about Y: Stressing it in this way will improve the relevancy of the ads generated on your webpages and improved relevancy will result in an improved click through rate.

1. Include your target keywords in:

- Page title

- Meta tags

- Description tag

- H1 heading tags (plus include related keywords in H2)

- Body of the text several times (top and bottom)

- Bold and / or Italic tags a couple of times

- A link to the home page with the keyword anchor text

2. Use Google's Section Targeting facility.

Adlinks

2008-05-05T13:11:00.000+05:30

The common prejudices against using an Adlink instead of or as well as the traditional Ad unit are faltering as Publishers are finding more and more ways to turn these little units into high converting Ads.

The basic assumption goes something like this: as the Adlink unit requires a visitor to click first on one of the four or five topics and then on one of the ads they will be clicked on less as it requires them to do two things. In a sense this is true but the best way to see Adlinks is not to compare them to the traditional ad unit because basically they are not the same.

Whereas the regular ad is best utilized as additional content for your website, the Adlink is best utilized as additional navigation. Most navigation links are solely the number of words which prescribe the meaning of that navigation and this is what Adlinks replicate.

They come in two main formats - horizontal and square (each of which has several variations). Therefore, they can be used effectively in a variety of places:

1. The favored hot spot for Adlinks is the top left of your navigation where on this site it says "Make Money With Adsense". If you include them there and match the link, border and background color to the colors you are already using you will generate a high ctr.

2. A 728 x 15 in the traditional leaderboard position can work very well (just underneath your banner and above your actual webpage). This golf store has done it well.

3. A 468 x 15 above or just below your actual page title can also work well. On this page it would go either above or below "Adsense Adlinks - Best Practices". Bear in mind that the 468 sometimes isn't long enough to cater for the amount of words that it generates and will result in it being squashed together. You'll have to test it for your content.

4. You can also use one of the square units at the bottom of your articles. WiseGeek uses this method and have done so for as long as I remember their site being online suggesting that the conversion is pretty good.

The perfect Adsense page

2008-05-05T13:08:00.000+05:30

Even if you have taken advantage of the nature of Adsense ads and have optimized your website accordingly - namely: view Adsense ads as supplemental content and not ads, integrate them into the actual content of the webpage and not solely into the header or navigation, use a larger rectangle shape ad near the very top of your content, and potentially another one at the bottom, your Adsense performance will probably still only be a fraction of what it could be.

The reason for this is that modifications to the actual ad and it's positioning are only half the story of succeeding with Adsense. There is such a thing as a perfect Adsense page and what this is is the type of page that will generate the greatest number of clicks. The perfect page will meet the criteria listed below and the click through rate will be extremely high.

1. The Page Is about One Self-Contained Topic

The purpose of content websites is to reveal information to their visitors. The perfect Adsense page is focused on one particular topic and serves to reveal information about that topic. This has several benefits. Firstly, it makes it easier to get good search engine listings which will bring you relevant traffic. Secondly, the traffic will have come to that page for the sole reason of looking for the information which the page will actually reveal - they will therefore be more responsive to ads related to that content. Finally, your page will generate more targeted ads as your content focusing will have made it easier for Google's technology to analyze and match ads. The more related the ad the more clicks it will receive.

2. The Content on the page is not too comprehensive

Now while you want to be revealing information about one topic, you do not want to be the definitive resource for that topic. You do not want your reader to be "full" by the time they have finished your article. If you have completely satisfied their curiosity on that topic they are going to be less likely to look for further information in your cleverly placed Adsense ads. Content should be interesting and insightful and the reader should feel like he's learnt something but not everything. The perfect article makes more curious - encourages the readers search for information.

3. The Page Breaks The Back Habit

As search engines dominate the way that the internet is explored an important task of every website is to break the habit of people clicking on the back button. If someone comes to your website from a search engine listing and doesn't immediately relate to your page they will go back to the search engine and try another website. If they've gone backwards, they can't go forwards through your Adsense ads. People move through the internet very quickly and so your website should seek to connect with the person instantly. There are several aspects to achieving this:

Keep your page kb size small (below 50kb) so it loads quickly - no one likes to wait.
Have a good page title which relates perfectly to what the search engine visitor will be expecting to find.
Your first paragraph is to the point and pulls someone in to your website
The clever use of images - in terms of immediate responsiveness people often relate better to images than to words - they trust them more. The appropriate use of images in your banner or at the top of your page can pull people into your website.

4. The Way The Page Is Laid Out and Reads Should Flow Forward

This is a continuation of breaking the back habit. Once you've got your visitor involved then your page should flow forward and if done correctly the Adsense ads will be used as a continuation of that flow.

5. The Page Pre-Sells what the ads are offering

If you were promoting a particular product through a sales letter your aim would be to pre-sell it. Talk enthusiastically and knowledgeably (your visitor must believe that you know more than him) about your topic - your visitor should want more on the subject and your Adsense Ads should provide them with this more.

5. Limit The Number of Navigation Links on Your Page

A visitor has three choices - they can go back to where they came from, they can click the x button or they can click on another link on your webpage. If you've suceeded in breaking the back habit and you've not completely resolved the question he came to your site to find an answer to, then he will look for another link. This is what you want your visitors to do and if you want them to click on your Adsense ads you want to limit the amount of choices that they can make.

6. Give Your Visitors Nowhere else to go

An Adsense ad at the end of your content often converts well. If the visitor has read your article through then they will by this time be well away from your navigation links. If you want maximum performance from your ads don't include links to other pages on your website at the bottom of your page or place links to other resources which they may find useful, or make a suggestion that they go and do something. This works especially well on pages that are built around one self-contained topic. The ads are then used as a further resource as the visitor has nowhere to go but forward.

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Now, unless you create a website exactly around this model, your own website will inevitably diverge from it in several ways.

For example, the flaws in UnderstandingAdsense.com when placed against this idea of a perfect page are:

Although each page is generally about one self contained topic they are not great for the search engines. Pages built around keywords like Adsense Tips, Adsense Secret, Adsense Website and Optimizing Adsense would result in more direct search engine traffic.
On each page I try to be as comprehensive as possible and often highlight further resources and use examples for which I receive no commission.
Although I am talking enthusiastically about Adsense I am not pre-selling the Ads as each article will bring you further into the site rather than encouraging you to look elsewhere.
I have not limited the number of navigation links on each page.

But these negatives are offset in this case by the aim of creating a workable and integrated resource. If I'd built this site with the aim of it being a strict search engine traffic, Adsense optimized website then it's pages would be built much closer to the perfect page model. You have to decide where your own project lies and build accordingly.

Number of Adsense Units

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Number Of Adsense Units: Optimization

The Adsense rules stipulate that you are allowed to include 3 regular ad units and 1 link unit per page. The number you should use per page will completely depend on the structure and design of your website.

What you don't want is a webpage that appears like a collection of Adsense Ads. Such a site is valueless and will struggle to get any traffic unless you enter the world of spamming or decide to pay for traffic - both offer only diminishing returns. For a visitor to click on your ad means that they must want to go forward from your website to another website. If your page repulses them straight away they will hit the back button (read about Breaking the Back Habit in The Perfect Page) and return to the search engine that they came from to find another site that will answer their query more effectively.

Entice your visitors into your site and then cleverly place ads at points where they will be focusing as discussed in Ad Placements.

So how many is not too many? This website can easily absorb two ad units and an adlink as it does. It could also include another ad unit at the bottom of the articles which I may introduce over time.

As a general rule I'd start with more ad units than less, set up channels so you can monitor how each performs and then make changes accordingly. If you're building your website from scratch try and build it with enough flexibility to allow you to test different variations.

One Unit - A large rectangle (or at least the 250 x 250 square) inside the body of the page with the article text wrapped around it.

Two Units - Either

1. A more aggressive tactic is to include two large rectangles together either side by side or on top of each other. If you're getting a fair amount of traffic this will really improve your ctr and is worth tyring. Just keep an eye on your web stats to check it doesn't undermine your visitors experience which will be highlighted to you through a decreasing traffic rate.

2. The large rectangle inside the content and a skyscraper (preferrably the 160 x 600) in your left navigation. The right navigation converts much lower.

3. A large rectangle towards the top of your content and another at the bottom. This gives your traffic two ways out from inside the same page.

Three Units - If you can fit three in you can now mix and match, for example:

1. Two rectangles inside the content and one skyscraper in the navigation.

2. One rectangle inside the content and if you have a right and left navigation, one skyscraper in each of these (I know of websites this has worked well on)

3. One rectangle inside the content, one skyscraper in your navigation and one leaderboard at the header of your page.

4. Three rectangles inside the content - this can work very well if you have a lot going on inside the page and it is long enough to absorb the three ads allowing them to be placed far enough away from each other.

Including an Adlink Unit

Your one prescripted Adlink can virtually always be included as they can slot in to the smallest of places. Many publishers still neglect Adlinks as they have wrongly convinced themselves that the requirment to click on a keyword phrase before they can click on an ad is requiring too much from a visitor. To learn more about how best to use Adlinks go here.

Adsense Ad Placement

2008-05-05T13:00:00.000+05:30

Adsense Ad Placement: Optimization

Placement is the fundamental factor that will effect an Ads performance - its click through rate. The first reason for this is simple - a visitor cannot click on an ad that they cannot see.

The second reason (which I talked about in Adsense Psychology) is that your traffic will interact with webpage and consequently your ads in the way that you want them to interact with them. This is obviously a generalization as not everyone will interpret your layout in the same way but the principle is sound.

For example, I generally don't like ads at the head of the page above your content and navigation nor at the very bottom below both of these. These postions are too reminiscent of the traditional banner advertisement and for me don't come close to taking advantage of what Adsense ads actually offer.

The bottom line is that Adsense works best when the ads are integrated into your website as additional content. Adsense generates ads that are related to the actual words in the content of your page. To perform at it's best they have to be placed next to these words.

If you think it through this is just common sense.

This leads us to two places where content is contained on each and every website.

1. The actual body of that particular page - If you've built your website correctly then each page will be about a distinct topic. As each page differs in what it provides the Adsense ads will vary to match these differences. For example, a motorcycle insurance page will generate different ads to a motorcycle parts page. This means that the hottest spot for Adsense on every page is roughly where I've included the large rectangle on this page. Inside the page topic and above the fold.

2. The website navigation - Your navigation includes further pages which may be of interest to your visitor. Relevant Adsense Ads will also be of further interest to your visitor and therefore, a good supplement to a large rectangle ad inside the content of your webpage is a 160 x 600 skyscraper in your navigation (this often works best in the left navigation although I have several sites where the conversion is good on the right). Adlinks work well here too.

Google has produced a heat map to assist Adsense Ad positioning which pictorially confirms what I have been saying here. You can see it and read Google's own answer to the question of Ad placement here.

Adsense Ad Format

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Adsense Ad Format: Optimization

The trick with choosing the Ad Format that you are going to use is to actually choose it and not let your current website structure which you built before you decided to monetize your website with Adsense choose it for you.

This is what the average Adsense Publisher says to him or herself - "This is how my site is built - I can make that space available there and so I'll have to place Adsense there which means I'll have to use that ad format". This is not a choice and needless to say it will generally not convert aswell as rejigging your page layout so as to accommodate the ads that will perform best into it. What this also means is that placement is more important than format.

The basic Ad Format rule is that wider is better and Google gives a neat explanation of why this is so here. Note, wider doesn't mean width of the whole ad (otherwise we'd all be using leaderboards) but the width of an individual advertisement inside the ad block.

This means that the large rectangle - 336 x 280, the medium rectangle - 300 x 250 and the wide skyscraper 160 x 600, other things being equal all perform better.

In content sites I always try to use at least one large rectangle but remember that a webpage can often accommodate more than one ad unit.

How to make real money with Adsense

2008-05-05T12:56:00.000+05:30

Forget About Adsense

If you want to significantly increase your current Adsense earnings the first thing you need to do is forget about Adsense. Sounds strange doesn’t it, but if there is such a thing as a secret to making money with Adsense, it is that it has nothing to do with Adsense.

All Adsense is is a way of monetizing your website traffic. Therefore to make more money from Adsense you need a website and you need more traffic. No traffic, no Adsense clicks. Lots of traffic, lots of Adsense clicks. That’s the bottom line. You can get more traffic in two ways:

1. By bringing more to your existing website(s), or
2. By building a new website and bringing traffic to that.

Almost every forum post, blog entry and article that discusses Adsense and how to make money with it wrongly focuses on optimizing your website for your Adsense ads. Where should I place them, what colours should I use, how many units should I include on a page, should I use Adlinks, what format produces the highest click through rate – all of these questions belong to trying to increase responsiveness from your traffic to your Adsense ads. The prerequisite is traffic - if you’ve only got a few visitors coming to your website a day, even a 100% click through rate will only generate a dollar.

Now at this point I’d like to defend myself - the point of this lesson is not to devalue the importance of optimization. I’ve taken sites in the past from $5 to $50 a day without increasing their traffic, through things like re-structuring and correct format and color choices, but the trick with optimization is to know its place and to focus on it at the right time. Don’t get caught optimizing a website that has not been fully developed. The forums are full of these people puzzling over how they can reach $100 a day with Adsense when they’ve not broken down what is actually necessary to generate that amount of money.

From my experiences with Adsense, you’ll make good money with it by integrating it into “successful websites”. My example above was already receiving close to 1,000 visitors every day. A couple of weeks spent optimizing and monitoring resulted in a 10 fold increase in income but that site was already “successful” so to speak. It had good placements in the search engines, a strong supporting link structure and a growing repeat user rate – it was the right time to optimize.

But a successful website isn’t necessarily one that gets thousands of visitors a day, it’s one that fulfils the purpose it was originally established for. For example, if you’ve built a website about choosing a baby stroller you want people who are coming online to find out about baby strollers to find it and use it, if you’ve built one about making money with Adsense you’re looking for those people who want to make more money with Adsense ;)

A site is successful when it’s connecting with a significant proportion of its’ intended market or users. Once you’ve made this connection, monetizing your traffic with Adsense is very easy and improving your visitors interactivity with your ads (which is the same as saying your click through rate) becomes a legitimate focus. There are hundreds of different things you can do to increase your CTR and I’ll cover many of them in future lessons. Just make sure you’ve done the groundwork and have got targeted traffic coming to your website first.

It Always Comes Back To Content

Now you can only connect with “a significant proportion” of your intended market if your website actually provides what those people are looking for. This is why whichever direction you walk off in – optimization or increasing traffic, you always end up coming back to content.

No content means nothing for people to see, nothing for people to see means no traffic, no traffic means no Adsense clicks. The whole process of making money with Adsense is made much easier if you actually build something for your end user. Spam sites can make a couple of bucks a day for a couple of months but they’ve got no longevity and their purposelessnees makes them depressing to build. It’s worth spending the extra couple of days building something which fits nicely into its market and that can justify its position there. This isn’t difficult to do, it just requires you to go that little further.

My philosophy - whether I’m adding content to an existing website or building a new website is to do what is necessary to compete in that niche – this includes everything from site design and content quality to the external optimization and marketing I carry out, including search engine optimization, link building and distributing articles among other things. Less competitive markets require less work, more competitive markets require more. There’s no point doing more than is necessary just as there is no point doing just a little when more is required to make the site successful. Work out what is necessary, do it and develop a strategy for doing it quickly. The more you get involved with your projects, the more you’ll learn, the more you’ll know the internet and the easier it will be to build successful websites that serve their purpose and attract their intended market.

Optimizing Adsense - A Guide

2008-05-05T12:52:00.000+05:30

The aim with Optimizing your Adsense ads is to find your websites magic forumula.

This "magic formula" will do two things:

1. It will generate the greatest responsiveness from your traffic - meaning your highest click through rate.

2. You will earn the maximum amount of revenue possible per click.

To increase your click through rate you will need to focus on your choice of ad format, color, and placement. You will also need to make sure that your ads are as relevant as they can be, as related ads inevitably generate more clicks than unrelated ads. The number of units per page and your use of adlinks will also effect your click through rate.

Ensuring that you are receiving the most that you possibly can per click is a little tricker and involves targeting higher paying adsense keywords through onpage search engine optimization tactics and the creation of supplemental content.

When you've achieved this optimum real revenue from Adsense comes from turning away from optimization and focusing on bringing more and more targeted traffic to your website to what will then be your optimized machine for converting visitors into Adsense money. The article - how to make real money with Adsense explores this in more depth.

Monitoring Adsense

2008-05-05T12:47:00.002+05:30

Monitoring Adsense: Optimization

Monitoring is an important part of increasing your Adsense revenue. It's the only way that you can tell whether a change in format, placement or color has had an effect on your click through rate.

The best way to monitor your ads performance is to set up several channels inside your Adsense account. By setting up a channel for a particular set or type of ad you can monitor their performance and compare them to other ads.

For example, on this website I have four channels operating:

1. One channel for the whole website - UnderstandingAdsense.com,

2. One channel for the 336 x 280 rectangle inside the page content,

3. One channel for the 160 x 600 skyscraper in the right navigation,

4. One channel for the Adlinks in the left navigation.

When I make changes to these ads I'll be able to see what effect this has on my click through rate and it is through these methods that we work out many of our best practices.

The standard channels I always set up on any Adsense monetized website include:

1. One for the whole website,

2. One for each type of ad used,

3. I may also set up channels on different groups of pages or even individual pages to compare performance across different topics.

Using Adsense Channels

2008-05-05T12:40:00.002+05:30

So that we can understand which of our websites are generating what amount of revenue or even the amount of revenue particular pages or sections within one website are generating, inside your account you can set up channels which will enable you to see where your Adsense clicks are coming from.

There are two principal types of channel:

1. URL Channels
Unlike custom channels, with url channels you don't need to include a channel id in the actual Adsense code. Instead, simply set up a new url channel inside your account for a particular domain, subdomain, directory or page and Google's technology will automatically report the Adsense performance of the pages inside that channel.

The examples Google gives are:

example.com track all pages across all subdomains
sports.example.com track only pages across the 'sports' subdomain
sports.example.com/widgets track all pages below a specific directory
sports.example.com/index.html track a specific page

2. Custom Channels to track the performance of a particular ad that you have generated
With these channels the id for the particular channel you create is included in the actual Adsense ad code that you generate. Every ad that you include this code in will report its performance under that particular channel even if they are different format sizes or appear on different pages or different websites.

The amount of channels you are allowed to create is currently 200. Related reading includes the best practices for channels and how to analyze your Adsense reports.

Adsense Ad Colors: Optimization

2008-05-05T12:38:00.000+05:30

In line with my basic philosophy that integration is the key to Adsense success, I've always found that blending the ads by using the same colors that exist on your website works best.

This is often referred to as the three way match whereby:

1. The background color and the border of the ad matches the background color of the webpage.

2. The color of the link matches the color of the links on your webpage.

3. The color of the ad description (the ad text) and advertiser url matches your text color.

I generally only make three exceptions to this:

1. I make the actual ad link darker than the other links on the page but keep it in a similar color palette. For example, on this page I may use this color or this color. When a visitor is finished with the page they are on and are looking for someone else to go they tend to see darker colors before lighter ones. I believe Google makes the links bold for the same reason - intensity draws the eye.

2. I use the standard internet blue link. Although this isn't as widespread as it once was, internet users still often associate this color with being a link. On certain sites I've more than trebled my ctr by changing it from the link color of my actual site to the standard 0000CC.

3. I make the advertiser url a very pale shade of grey. It's still visible as it must be to conform to Google's policies but the link and the text draw the visitors attention and the ads appear more like internal links than Adsense ads. The success of this modification will often depend on the market your site is targetting. For example, webmasters know what Adsense ads are and so this change will have little impact. If your site targets people who are less familiar with the internet making the ads appear more like an internal link (ie simply a link and a description of what you'll find when you click on it) can increase your ctr.

The reason blending works better than colors that draw attention to the ads is that it's not a color that is going to make someone click on an ad - even if it's their favorite color!

Humans respond to words or better put still the meaning of words - and it will be the word or combination or words which your visitor connects to in the ad. This is why they will click on one rather than another.

Attention grabbing colors will only serve to put a barrier between your visitor and the words in the ad. More people may see them but less will click on them and Adsense is pay per click, not pay per view!

Different Adsense Ad Colors

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Google's aim is to allow Adsense publishers to have as much control over the appearance of the ads as possible which is why they are highly customizable.

Along with the different format choices you also have control over the color of the different parts of the ad. Consequently you can adapt them to the color of your website making them appear less like ads and more like actual content.

The five parts of the ad which you can change the color on are:

1. The border color of the ad

2. The background color of the ad

3. The link color of the ad

4. The url color of the ad

5. The text color of the ad

To improve your click through rate read about Adsense Ad Color Optimization.

Different Adsense Ad Formats

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The variety of Adsense Ad formats means that you can integrate Adsense into almost any spot on your website. There are currently 10 standard Ad formats and 6 Adlink formats.

The Standard Adsense Ad Formats

Horizontal Ad Formats
1. 728 x 90: Leaderboard
2. 468 x 60: Banner
3. 234 x 60: Half Banner

Vertical Ad Formats
4. 120 x 600: Skyscraper
5. 120 x 140: Vertical Banner

Square Ad Formats
6. 125 x 125: Button
7. 300 x 250: Medium Rectangle
8. 250 x 250: Square
9. 336 x 280: Large Rectangle
10. 180 x 150: Small Rectangle

The Adsense Adlinks Formats

Horizontal Adlink Formats
1. 728 x 15
2. 468 x 15

Square Adlink Formats
3. 200 x 90
4. 180 x 90
5. 160 x 90
6. 120 x 90

Different Adsense Products

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There are three different Adsense "products" that you can promote in exchange for revenue. These include Adsense For Content, Adsense For Search and Referrals.

Adsense For Content

This is the most common used and exists in the form of different shaped ads which you will have no doubt seen scattered over the web. These ads are relevant to the content of your website and you earn revenue every time one of your users clicks on them. For more read different ad formats.

Adsense For Search

This product allows you to place a Google search box on your website, allowing your visitors to search either your website (if your pages are indexed) or Google's search engine database. Each search by your users will generate ads related to that search term and you earn revenue for every ad click by your users.

Referrals

The Referrals product is a little different as you are not earning revnue through contextually matching ads on a per click basis but are recommending useful products and / or services to your users. When one of you visitors subscribes to the product or service you receive a commission. Referrals are much more like affiliate programs and they currently include Google Adsense Subscription, Google Adwords Subscription, Firefox Download and the Picasa Software Application.

What can you "Earn with Adsense"

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Adsense Publisher earnings range from less than $1 a day on one website to over $10,000 a day across a network of websites. The reality is that making money with Adsense has very little to do with Adsense and has everything to do with building websites that target and attract a market. Once you've got people, Adsense is made for monetizing them.

Hence, succeeding with Adsense is largely tied to being successful online and requires that you learn and develop your website building, keyword research, niche market finding, copywriting, search engine optimization and link building skills.

How do you join Adsense

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To join Adsense you will need an already operative website. If you've got that check out the programme policies to make sure that your site is in compliance with the terms.

Once you're happy with your site follow this link, click on the "Click Here to Apply" button, fill in your details and wait for your approval email. You will normally receive this between 24 and 72 hours after your application.

What If My Application Is Rejected?

Sites do get rejected by Google but this is not necessarily the end of your experiment with Adsense.

If you've read the policies and are sure that your site doesn't breach any of the terms send Google an email asking them why you have not been accepted into the program. They will normally respond.

If you think that your site fails one of the pre-requisites then once you've made the necessary modifications either resubmit your application or respond to your rejection email with details of the modifications you've made.

Alternativelly, if you have more than one website submit a new application using one of your other websites in the application form.

What Is Adsense

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Adsense is a contextual advertising program by Google which allows website publishers to generate revenue from their sites by placing ads from the Google Adwords network on them. Each time these ads are clicked on by one of your visitors you earn a share of the revenue that Google makes from charging that particular advertiser.

Below is a summary of how the program works and the steps you will need to take to implement it.

1. You join Adsense and on acceptance into the program become an Adsense Publisher.

You will now have your own Adsense account in which you will be able to create the ad code to place on your website and monitor the results of your campaigns.

2. Create your custom Adsense javascript code:

You can do this by logging into your account inside which you will be able to choose the particular ad format and ad color that you want to place on your website. The code your selections will generate will appear like this:

3. You can then place this code inside your website template:

Make sure you've chosen an ad format which will fit into the space available in your template. Once you have uploaded your page to your server the Adsense ads will automatically be generated.

4. Google's content matching technology will deliver ads that are relevant to the page content you have placed the code on:

It may take anywhere from a few minutes to an hour but Google will start delivering ads that match your content. This is the real perk of Adsense - ads that match the content of your page so that they are relevant to what your visitors are reading and thinking about at the time and so more likely to be clicked on.

In Google's own words:

"Google AdSense™ automatically delivers text and image ads that are precisely targeted to your site and your site content—ads so well-matched, in fact, that your readers will actually find them useful"

For more information on where the ads actually come from and how which ads appear is determined take the Adsense Tour.

Build an Adsense VRE Empire

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An Adsense empire is for the webmaster who wants to focus on utilizing Adsense to create a significant monthly income - say $30,000.

The majority of people who use Adsense already have a website or would like to build one around a topic they know about.

Adsense for these people is simply a way to monetize it. To make an extra $1,000 or so a month.

These are the monetizers. The other type of Adsense Publisher is the empire builder. If you want to build an Adsense Empire you must approach your task from a different perspective.

The fundamental difference is that you have now become a middleman - a middleman between internet traffic and Adsense Ads.

Your aim will be to connect people with the ads that they will click on and every website that you build serves as a platform to facilitate this connection. The more people you connect to ads the more money you make - that's the game.

For example, a $30,000 a month empire would probably be composed of anything between 20 and 80 websites depending on the models used, the niches targeted and the degree of optimization undertaken on each website.

Creating 80+ websites is a lot of work, especially if you don't know what you're doing and so there are certain "rules" that are worth paying note to that will help you stay on track.

The Rules of Adsense Empire Building

Don't become attached to your websites - the aim is not to perfect each website but to do what is necessary to create a successful website for the particular niche that that website relates to. This is still very easy to do as the quality of most websites are still very poor. The most common trap is to get caught trying to beautify one webiste when the only person judging it is yourself.

Build horizontally not vertically - it's easier to make a large number of websites that do ok than it is to make 5 that dominate their particular market. Competition at the top is always fierce and places additional demands on you including constant updating and constant link building. Don't aim high, aim wide and you can have a pretty much automated empire rather than a few sites which constantly require your attention.

Target niches - the internet is made up of lots of markets and each of these markets is a keyword pyramid. The key to a successful empire is choosing your markets and then targetting their keywords.

Come up with a definite model that can be applied to various niches - uniformity is the name of the game when you are operating in several markets. Develop a model that works and then apply it to other markets, tweaking where necessary.

Build a web template for that model and use it for numerous websites - if you're targetting different niches the chances of crossing over traffic is very slim and even if it does slight adaptations to a particular niche including colors and images will make the template appear fresh and original. You can either build a template using an application like XSitePro, buy a template which you have reuser rights for or modify a free template. I used to modify free templates as their actual structure is often sound and it allowed me the freedom to make changes but as XSitePro makes it so easy to build a new site my method has somewhat changed. Whatever works best for you, just make sure you use it more times than once - building fresh templates takes too much time.

Focus on getting traffic from the seach engines - There's no source of traffic like search engine traffic. The only thing that comes close is Adwords or Overtures PPC Services - but they cost money. Getting search engine traffic revolves around Search Engine Optimization. This involves extensive link building which will also serve as a source of traffic, killing two birds with one stone.

Develop a sound link building strategy - people always go wrong with link building in exactly the same way - they don't think. It's very easy to waste a lot of time and energy haphazardly searching and requesting links. If you're building an empire you want to limit this time to a minimum. I always start with directories and move forward from there. I'm in the process of building two websites that will help you with this. I'll include a link here once they're up and running.

Make sure all of your pages are content rich - the only way to get good search engine traffic is to have content rich pages. There are two ways of making content rich pages - with information or with products.

Steer Clear of Advertising - using Adwords or other ppc search engines to convert on Adsense has become a popular idea in recent times. It is possible to make a profit but it's limitations as a model far outweigh its potential unless you're supplementing the pages with products from an affiliate network like Clickbank. If I'm not doing that I only use Adwords to test my Adsense integration on a particular site.

Monetizing A Website

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How To Monetize A Website With Adsense

So you have a website and you have some people coming to your website and what you would like is for these people to somehow give you some money. For you, Adsense is going to be a dream come true - if you add it to some of your pages today you will be making money by tommorrow - guaranteed!

The key to getting the most out of Adsense on a website that is already up and running revolves around three things:

1. Integrating it properly into the structure of your pages,

2. Optimizing the ads for your current traffic through testing and monitoring,

3. Bringing more traffic to your now optimized webpages.

How you integrate Adsense into your website is the single largest determiner of it's eventual performance. With that in mind, monetizers often fall into one of two traps.

1. They chase clicks and forget about the purpose their website actually serves. Pushing ads at every visitor might force a higher click through rate for a time but if you undermine your websites value it will eventually fall from grace.

2. If they've built a website around a topic that they are genuinely interested in, then as I was with my first site, they will be rather proud of it and therefore quite possessive over it - and consequently Ads are viewed as a bit of an intrusion. Plus as they relate to the people using their site they are often reluctant to "push" (as it feels) ads in front of them. These people therefore under utilize Adsense and are only earning a fraction of what they should be from their traffic.

Therefore, your biggest barrier to having Adsense perform at its optimum on your website will be that you either follow Adsense to closely, concentrating on clicks rather than your website which will eventually hail it's demise or your attachment to your site prevents you from fully integrating Adsense and limits your earnings.

Going back a couple of years, the first website I integrated Adsense into was a custom motorcycle resource center. It was making no money but was receiving between 700 and 1000 people every day from a combination of search engine queries, reciprocal links and repeat visitors. I have not touched that website for over 9 months but everyday it does an average of $70 to $80 with Adsense.

The process I went through on that website is the exact same one that everyone who seeks to monetize their website traffic with Adsense goes through.

Building Your First Site

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How To Build Your First Adsense Website

The best way to learn something is to start doing it. This is a guide to get your up and standing on your own feet and making money with Adsense in a relatively short space of time. There's a lot to take in here but don't be put off by the foreign sounding nature of it all. If you persist everything will come together.

The fundamental fact is that Adsense is the easiest way to start making money online. With a very basic website and just a few people coming to it you will start to earn money. As you develop the site and bring more traffic to it an average Adsense monetized website will make between $500 and $1,000 each and every month with little work needed.

Desipte this, most webmasters struggle and the reason is that they are trying to make a massive amount of money very fast and are consequently not breaking each aspect of the process down to its basics. The reality is that from a standing start it is not possible to make $XX,XXX from Adsense in a very short space of time..

People who make a lot of money with Adsense have done one of two things:

1. They have Integrated Adsense into a website that already has high traffic (About.com is the extreme example of this), or

2. They have built a large network of niche websites each of which generates $500 - $1,000 a month. If you build 50 (which over the space of a year or two is completely feasible if you take my above example), you can earn up to about $50,000 a month which equals out to $600,000 a year - pretty good for a network of what are fundamentally very basic websites. This is Adsense Empire Building territory.

Creating one very high traffic website or a large number of small niche websites requires a whole host of skills which you will not yet have. You only get these skills by learning, implementing what you've learnt and reflecting on what your implementation has told you.

As a beginner you have to start at the beginning - that's the rule of any game. As you learn and do more, building effective websites that make more and more money will get easier and easier. Don't be one of the many that are making marketeers rich by buying into their rhetoric of making big money quickly and without any effort. These people end up stopping before they even started.