Five things you should know to make money with AdSense

Google AdSense can be a very effective way to make money online, but if it's your intention to make money with AdSense, it helps to get educated on how to do it successfully and sustain the earnings over a long period of time.

Place Ads Where People Will See Them

We've all heard this about real estate. Location. Location. Location. With Adsense the same is true. Place ads in locations where people will see them. Usually the best spots to place ads are at the top of the page and in the content. The ads should be formatted to complement the content of your site. However, getting the placement and formatting of AdSense ads optimized doesn't guarantee success. You'll have to do more. Keep reading.


Select Topics with Many Advertisers

AdSense matches ads to the content of your pages. So, the simplest thing to do is to create content where AdSense has existing advertisers to place on your pages. In general, the more advertisers there are to match to your content, the more money you will make and the better liquidity you will see so that your earnings fluctuate less. AdSense typically places the most valuable ads in the order the page loads. Generally, this means that the ads at the top of the page will pay more when clicked than the ads at the bottom of the page, but it stands to reason for sites that place three AdSense ads on a page, that if there are more advertisers, the fill rate of each spot will be higher and the amount earned with each ad spot will drop less if there is substantial competition among advertisers.

Understand Who Clicks on Ads and Where They Come From

If you are hoping to make money from AdSense, you'll have to attract people that click on ads. Did you know that people that begin their search on AOL and ASK are among the most likely to click on ads and on HubPages, they generate some of the highest CPMs. They are 210% more likely to click on ads than the average visitor to the site and generate CPMs 312% more than the average source of traffic. The trick is to understand the demographics of their site so you can create content that they will search for - Quantcast shows it has women with kids, higher income and less college education.


AdSense Home Page

http://www.google.com/adsense
http://www.google.com/adsense

Create Content that Lasts

I've written before about evergreen content. It's very important to an AdSense centric monetization strategy for two reasons. First, related to what I just covered, search engine traffic generates the most people that click on ads, and second, each piece of content is like putting a little money in the bank that will generate the equivalent of interest on a bank account. Each month you get a dividend because the content is relevant for a long period of time. When the article is nolonger relevant, this is like emptying your bank account and seeing the dividends stop. You want to create content that will endure and pay dividends for years to come.

Lessons Learned with AdSense

We've seen thousands of publishers try and earn money with AdSense and the many mistakes they make.

The top three mistakes

  1. They create spam content to trick search engines. While this can be lucrative in the short run, it doesn't last. This includes very short articles where the ad is the only thing to click on, to writing articles about something that is solely designed to get traffic from search engines (stuffing keywords in to the page, hiding links, linking to a page with misleading anchor text - just a few tricks we see)
  2. Some of the most well intentioned and helpful people struggle to understand how to write content for search engines and therefore never get traffic or make money.
  3. They focus on getting traffic that doesn't convert well with AdSense. I mentioned that AOL is some of the best performing, but StumbleUpon and Digg is among the worst. There is value in getting traffic from these sites that will indirectly help your AdSense earnings, but focusing for the quick burst of traffic won't translate to AdSense revenue quickly.
  4. I'll add a fourth mistake. People need to study their analytics. Did you know that Google Analytics is integrated with AdSense? You can study your users, what they search for to land on your site and how much each visitor is worth. Doing this will help you learn more quickly on what's working for you.