GREAT ADSENSE TIPS

Adsense is probably the most popular PPC (Pay-Per-Click) advertising available to blogs. More blogs use Adsense than proper punctuation!

I read a lot of other blogs, forums, and articles about bloggers that simply hate Adsense. Why? BECAUSE THEY DON’T KNOW HOW TO USE IT EFFECTIVELY! They trash Adsense because of their lack of success (lack of research would be a better phrase)… even though it generates TENS OF THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS monthly to those that know how to use it correctly.

Adsense 101 is out the door. Let’s really learn how to make some money with Adsense!

1. Learn to blend your ads.

• Learn to use colors effectively. The idea is to make the ads appear to be a natural part of your site. Don’t be the guy/girl that uses the lime green text on an orange background because he thinks that it “catches the eye”. It Does! It catches the eye long enough to feel nausea coming on.
• Never use the “border” option! If you use a border, are you really blending your ads? It’s kind of like building a prison for your ads using a 2px line as bars. Using a banner just screams “Here are my ads. Don’t look at them!”
• Don’t ever segregate ads. Don’t put them in their own section of the page. Don’t have 9 affiliate buttons followed by an Adsense banner. How effective is it for advertising if you throw all of your ads in one section of your sidebar? Why have them at all? This advertising strategy (or lack thereof) causes what’s referred to as “link-blindness”. If people can easily spot your ads as soon as they find your site, they learn to avoid them. And never… ever… put them all by themselves at the bottom of the page. FACT: Most readers never make it to the bottom of your page!

2. Put your ads in high profile areas.

• Use the Google “heatmap” (pictured below) to help you determine where the best spots are to place Adsense code. The best area is right above content. The orange areas are hot zones, the yellow is mild, and the white is ice cold. This will vary blog-by-blog but it’s a good general indication of what works.

• I see a lot, and I mean A LOT of sites thinking they can hide their ads in the bottom left corner of the page and still make good money from Adsense. When it comes to ads, either do it… or don’t. Don’t go hiding ads in the bottom corner and then complaining that Adsense sucks and you aren’t making any money.

3. Track your ads performance.

• A lot of people either forget about this one, or don’t realize it exists. You can track your ads performance by creating a channel for it. If you need a tutorial on how to create an Adsense channel, check out this video at Tubetorial.Com for more info.
• I have channels for every different location, style, and color type ad that I have experimented with. For example, I can check right now and see what is more effective, a 160×600 sidebar banner, or a 125×125 button. You need to know this stuff!

4. Use the competitive ad filter.

• Did you know that some Adsense clicks are worth as little as $0.01? Use the competitive ad filter to stop this!
• The competitive ad filter was created to target spam advertisers and MFA (made for adsense) sites. You have all seen this, I guarantee it. They are the sites that you visit on accident when looking for another site. They might look like a search engine with some ads all around about a specific subject such as baseball, blogging, vacationing, jobs, etc. These are all MFA sites. They bid low and get clicks to their site for as little as a penny!
• By using the filter, you can block these sites from advertising on your blog. In your Adsense control pannel simply click on the “Competitive Ad Filter” tab and enter the URL you wish to block. It’s that easy. Most of the time you’ll be able to tell it’s a MFA site by the content in the ad. If it seems like a list of some sort, more often than not, it’s an MFA site.

5. Use section targeting.

• This is one that I didn’t even know existed until a few days ago. Adsense targets keywords in your text and matches them with an ad. For example, you may notice if you blog about golf, you’ll have golf related ads. The key to getting targeted ads on Adsense is writing keyword rich content. This means that you need to think of a word or phrase you would use if you were searching for this article on Google. Try to use that keyword or phrase as much as possible, without becoming too repetitive and Google will pick that up and match it to relevant ads.
• You can also use this bit of code on posts in which you only want to target a certain part of. For example, you are talking about golf… but there is a quick story about your car having a flat on the way to the golf course. Without using this code, Google might target your site with golf related ads, or it might decide that you need ads about getting new tires. You can stop this by using these section targeting ads.

Talk about your flat tire here…

Put your keyword rich content here.

• Using at the beginning of the section you want to target and at the end of the targeted section will ensure that Google delivers relevant ads to your site. If you are using Wordpress software, simply type out your entry - click on the “code” tab - and add these tags to the section you want to target. Easy!

Above all else I recommend experimenting. What works for other site might not necessarily work for yours. Try different ad sizes, shapes, and colors. Put them in your post, above your post, in the sidebar. Just try new things until you find what works for you. But remember… track your experiments so that you’ll know what works!