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Inner Circle Roundtable of 21st Century Marketers |
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Chapter Thirty-Four Make Easy Money with Google AdSense
By Ben Hart
Google AdSense is the flipside off Google’s mammoth search advertising business.
With Google AdWords, you pay for ads. With Google AdSense you get paid for ads you let Google run on your site. This is why you see Google AdWords not just on Google searches, but on sites all over the Web. These sites serve as “syndicators” or “publishers” of Google’s ads.
If you have a website, this is an easy and quick way to make significant money with almost no work.
Here’s how it works.
If you are already enrolled in the Google Adwords program, you’ll be able to follow this very easily.
What Google does is take the ads of its Google AdWords customers and puts them on sites that match the content of the ads, as defined by the keywords connected with the ads.
How much will I earn with Adsense?
Google pays you either by way of cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-1,000-impressions (CPM) ads. This means that advertisers pay either when users click on ads, or when the advertiser's ad is shown on your site. You'll receive a commission on the amount paid for either activity on your website. Google does not tell us the exact method of how your revenue share is calculated (and that’s annoying), but the money does roll in.
The best way to find out how much you'll earn is to sign up and start showing ads on your web pages. Once enrolled in Google AdSense, you can view your earnings at any time by logging in to your AdSense account and clicking the Reports tab.
You'll be able to see the total number of page and ad unit impressions, ad clicks, click-through rate, effective CPM, and your total earnings so you can get an idea of how well the program is performing for you and how much you can expect to earn from the program.
Controlling what Google ads appear on your site
Google allows you to set filters so that you can prevent the ads of your competitors from appearing on your site. And you can set many other restrictions on the content of ads that appear on your site. You’ll be surprised at how much control Google gives you over the ads that appear.
If you don't already have AdSense ads on your site, you should think about getting started. It’s the easiest and quickest way to “monetize” (make money) from traffic coming into your blog or ezine.
Keys to maximizing your income with Google AdSense
Key #1 - More traffic equals more money
The more traffic you have on your site, the more money you will make with Google AdSense. What Google is doing, in essence, is paying for traffic. Creating traffic on your site (the right targeted traffic) is a big part of how you make money on the Internet. Google knows this. So it’s paying you for your targeted traffic.
The high-traffic sites tend to be news and information sites. So if you have a popular blog or ezine, this is ideal for making money from AdSense.
Key #2 - Make the ads blend in with other content on your site.
But there are some other keys that will help you maximize income from visitors to your site with Google AdSense. Content is king on the internet, so you don’t want ads to look like ads. Visitors are much more likely to click on links that look like part of the content they're reading.
Google allows you to do this with preformatted colors it offers so that you can adjust the colors of the background and links on the ads to match the rest of the content on your site. If you know HTML, you can make more precise adjustments to the look of the Google ads.
You can change the color of the background and the color of the links to match those on your web pages. There are two ways to do this. The easiest method is just to choose one of Google’s formats. You have a variety of Google formats and colors to choose from. If you know HTML, Google also lets you tinker with the look of the ads.
Key #3 - Location, Location, Location
This is critical when deciding where to put your store or invest in real estate. It’s also important when designing your web pages. The rule is simple: put the money-making links on your web pages where people can easily find them, in plain view and “above the fold” in newspaper lingo.
Key #4 - Don’t put AdSense ads on your sales letters or order pages
When someone is reading your sales letter or going to your order page, the last thing you want is for your reader to be diverted by clicking an Ad Sense link. You will make a lot more when people order something from you then the little commission you receive for a click on an AdSense link. Keep the AdSense ads on your content and news pages and add them to your newsletter archive pages. But never put them on your sales and order form pages.
Key #5 - Find the expensive keywords.
This is opposite strategy from your Google AdWords campaign where you want to find less expensive, more highly targeted keywords for your own ads. In this case, you are selling space on your site and you want to receive the most money you can for each click on the AdSense ads you are running. So make sure the keywords and content on your site includes the pricey keywords advertisers are bidding on. This will also create more traffic for your site.
To find the keywords and phrases you should emphasize on your site for Google AdSense, do a Google search using the keywords you are thinking of using and see what comes up. Pay attention to the wording of the ads that show up in the right margin. The ads at the top of the list have the higher-paying keywords in them. You can piggyback on the ad revenue for those words by using them in your site's content.
You can also find the pricey keywords by tapping into keyword databases. Here are three good ones:
www.bestfreekeywords.com
Key #6 - But do not twist the content of your site to fit pricey keywords.
Remember, that for most of us, the main purpose of our websites is to sell our own products and services. Google AdSense is a way for you to earn additional residual income from visitors to your site. Unless, you are building a site soley dedicated to making money with Google AdSense, your AdSense effort should take a back seat to your own products and services. The AdSense program works best for news and information sites -- and especially if the news and information is on a focused subject. People go to the site primarily for the news and information you are providing (perhaps daily). They then see the AdSense ads during the course of reading your content.
Key #7 - Have only one subject for each AdSense page on your site
Relevance of the page where AdSense ads are appearing is the key for Google. Your AdSense campaign will work best if the pages on which you are running AdSense are exactly in line with the ads -- that is, the keywords and phrases connected with the ads.
Key #8 - AdSense pages should be text-heavy, not image-heavy.
Google is interested in content. It determines content relevance by searching text and does not recognize images. For this reason, navigation buttons are also negative as far as Google is concerned. Replace navigation buttons on your page with text links.
More money-making options with AdSense
1) Websites created just for AdSense
Oficially, Google says it does not permit this. But some internet entrepreneurs have set up websites for the sole purpose of earning money from Google AdSense. These sites attract traffic with a combination of Search Engine Optimization (CEO) and pay-per-click advertising (i.e. with Google Adwords or Yahoo Search Marketing). If you choose this route, it won’t work to just throw up a page with nothing but AdSense ads. Nor will minimal content that is rarely updated help you with Google. What Google wants is relevant, valuable content to go with its ads.
2) Extend your reach with AdLinks. When you enroll in AdSense, you also have the option of displaying AdLinks. These are text links that take your visitor to a page of AdSense ads when clicked. Just like the ads, the text links (which are like little headlines) are also related to the content of our site -- but because they are just the headlines you can have more of them. Consider AdLinks if you don’t want to give Google so much space on your website. But keep in mind that, for the AdLinks program, two clicks are required for you to get paid -- the first on the AdLink and then a click on one of the Google ads on the subsequent page that pops up.
3) Put a Google Web Search box on your site. Yup, Google pays its AdSense customers for this too. Every time someone uses the Google search engine box on your website, Google places ads directly related to their search topics on the results page. When your visitor clicks one of these ads, you get paid. The added benefit to you is that your site becomes more useful to visitors and people don’t have to leave your site to do a Google search.
Another big benefit of AdSense for the little guy
The size of your wallet is not what Google cares about when deciding where to place the ads of its content search advertising customers. All Google wants to know is which sites have the content that is most relevant to the ad.
What counts with Google is matching the ad to the right content so that content searchers will encounter ads related exactly to their area of interest.
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