Make Money with Adsense!

Adsense Tips To Increase Your Profits

Now that we've completed the basic steps to creating a blog, I'm hoping everyone is comfortable with posting and layouts and fonts and all of the tools blogger gives you to work with so now we can fine tune adsense to increase money making potential.

Adding adsense to your site is the first way to start bringing in income, assuming you have traffic coming to your site and assuming they will click on your adsense ads. Before I get into any 'tips' or 'tricks' with adsense ads, I'm going to present some different ideas on how you want your website to appear to your visitors. Some of you are going to want to design sites simply for the purpose of making money from adsense. I hope you will remember that quality content is important no matter what your intention is for your site.

Let's say, for example, that you are going to design hundreds of websites for the purpose of making money through adsense advertising and possibly the addition of a few other money making strategies. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this strategy. So many online marketers do nothing but this, yet, many don't want to admit it. Why? Because for some, ethics becomes an issue. There are millions of useless, poor quality content websites, that serve as nothing more then a host to advertisers. Some will go as far as to put up sites to lure in traffic only to have that visitor arrive and realize the site has nothing whatsoever to do with their original search. Other marketers will design very plain and often times downright ugly sites in hopes the traffic will not get stuck on their site forever and so they click the first ad they see that might get them to the desired destination or at least one more interesting and appealing to the eye. Marketers will put up thousands of these and rake in the money from advertising. For me, I think it's just as easy to write a good quality content site as a poor one. But some marketers don't care to focus as much on their writing as I do. I also don't see anything wrong with having sites simply to promote products. I draw the line at intentional misrepresentation or doing anything that would cause harm to another human being. I say to each his own! In regards to ethics, I think it's important to know where you draw the line. I'm not here to judge so let's move on.

Other marketers focus mainly on the content they offer on their sites - high quality content, an abundance of content and information that visitors are looking for. Then, hopefully, while the visitors are absorbing this great content they will notice other items on the same site, links that will give them even more information and will not only be of benefit to the seeker of information as well as to the provider (publisher) by clicking on one of their links.

So maybe you're wondering at this point, why all the discussion about adsense ads? All you have to do is sign up for an adsense account, make a few choices about size and placement, copy the code into your blog and you're done, right? Well, almost. Here's another thing you don't hear marketers mentioning. The size, color and placement of your ads can make a huge difference to your bank account.

Let's take a look at my site, the one you're reading right now. It's plain on purpose. Okay, it's ugly. The colors, black and white, are as basic as you can get. In case you're wondering why, think about the books you read, or the newspapers (when we used to buy them at the newsstand or have delivered to our doorsteps) - black print on white backgrounds. These colors weren't chosen because they're particularly beautiful. They were chosen because they're easier to read! If I had to read orange letters on a green background, I'd probably give up sooner, either because it's making me go blind or I start to feel nauseous. Black and white is easy to read and it's what people expect. Blue and white are also used but not as often as black and white. Are there other colors that will work? I suppose there are for some sites but if you're offering a lot of content and want your visitors to stick around for a while, then I would suggest starting with the basics. What does this have to do with your ads? It has everything to do with your ads. You want your ads to be easy to read too!

Most times, when I visit a site, I avoid ads. They're always sitting off to the right side, looking so obvious and I just know that if I click one of those little ads somebody's going to try to sell me something. For those of you planning on creating 'value-less' content sites, this might be a good plan. Lure the traffic to your site and when they find out it isn't exactly what they were looking for, they'll quickly click an ad to get the heck out of there! In my opinion, you'd better plan to have thousands of blogs if this is going to be your main method for making any kind of money. It's good in places, let's leave it at that. Take a look at lockergnome.com and spend a little time observing the colors, sizes and placement of the ads. Can you even tell which ones are ads? Sometimes I can, sometimes I'm not so sure. This website is perfect for adsense ads. While I haven't seen the stats for this person's site I do know that on advice of a fellow blogging expert, after changing the color scheme alone on this page, his income and click through rate on his ads improved dramatically. Ad size and placement are equally important. I'm not going to suggest one specific way of doing this other than the tips I've already mentioned.

Many of you, by now, have heard the phrase 'cracking the code'. When it comes to adsense, cracking the code simply means finding the right combination for your ads on your blog that works the best. It means you may have to track one method for a while and then make adjustments. Often times, I see reports of someone making these changes and they notice an increase immediately in revenues. Now that's what I like!

One other point regarding ad design....make the ad look like it belongs on your page. Adsense will match up the ads with your content assuming you've followed the basics with keywords, titles, posts, etc. but you can do the rest. Don't be afraid to experiment. The old style ads with the box drawn around them? Which one is best, the square, slightly rounded or rounded corners? None of them. Get rid of the borders! Don't have a background color behind your ads that is different from the page of your site. It looks pasted on and it's unattractive! Match the text in your ads with the text in your blog. Go on, crack the code! Find what works for you!

Thanks for sitting in with me again and I'd like to remind everyone that comments are always appreciated. If you have tips to offer about improving your site to improve your money making possibilities through the use of adsense ads I'd love to hear from you!