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In certain niches including the niche this blog falls within you can run into problems when using Adsense.

1) Your readers may be savvy and recognise Adsense blocks, and they don’t click on them.
2) None of the terms which relate to your topic/ niche are very competitive, and so even if readers click them, they only pay very little.
3) A large percentage of your traffic comes from social media sites which lowers your CTR (see smart pricing).
4) You don’t want to alienate your readers by placing large Adsense blocks at the top of your articles.

So what do you do? How can you make good money from Adsense on these types of blogs?

Basic concepts:

• Adsense performs very well when you use the large rectangle format, and place the ad blocks in your content, normally at the top, so it is in front of every person who views the page.
• Visitors who arrive at your pages from search engines (particularly Google) are those who are most likely to click on Adsense ads.
• Your regular readers probably don’t deserve to look at Adsense, and they probably don’t click Adsense ads anyway.

After considering this information it makes sense not to put Adsense on every page of your blog, but just on those articles that are getting a lot of visitors from search engines. For this you need to look at the stats for your blog. I use Google Analytics. Look at old posts and select those that are getting traffic from Google or other search engines. Place a large rectangle ad block at the top of the content on these pages, probably beneath the title.

Problems and Solutions:

The first problem you might have is that even with only having ads on old posts, none of the clicks are paying well, because your topics are in a niche where there is no competition for keywords.

The second problem you may have is that you don’t get a lot of search engine traffic.

Both of these issues can be addressed by doing a little keyword research before you write your article.

Since this article is about Adsense, I will use this as an example. For the information below I used a tool called Niche Inspector, but you can use : This Free Wordtracker page for basic keyword research. 

The “Searches” heading gives an estimate of the average amount of searches for that term each day. So the more searches, the more potential. However some terms will obviously have much more competition than others.

Google and MSN Pages gives you an estimate of pages out there that relate to the term, which shows how much competition there is for the term.

CPC (Cost Per Click) gives you an estimate of how much a click will pay out for that term.

In an ideal world you would rank in Google for all the main terms, and you would make bucket loads of cash. However this isn’t realistic. It makes sense to target keywords that still payout well, but have less competition i.e fewer pages that relate to that term. There is a point where the phrase doesn’t get enough people searching for it, so it isn’t worth targeting. But it is worth considering, if a term has 50 people a day searching for it, but no competition, it will be so much easier to rank for. If you find yourself ranking first you will get many of those visitors hitting your site each day, something like 90% of people click the first result in a Search Engine Result Page (SERP), and as low as 3% click the result at the bottom of the first page.

Once you have selected some appropriate keywords and phrases, make sure you use them as much as possible with out spoiling your reader experience. You should also use your main keyword in the title of your article, or if it sounds ugly, use a post slug to get it the URL. I also recommend Wordpress users using the plugin Headspace, and adding the keywords into your posts meta data.

I hope this article helps you improve your Adsense earnings. I have found that most people a not so happy to share how they earn using Adsense.

New content about Making Money Online is now on my new Blog Make Money Online.

32 Responses to “How To Improve Adsense Earnings On Your Blog”

1. matt on January 28th, 2008 9:32 am

   I blog about carbon offsetting, my issue is the majority of my readers use firefox as a browser. Adsense has great ads from carbon offset providers that are very pertinent to my readers. Since I have firefox readers, they are blocking the ads. Other ad companies don’t really have the “right” ads.

   What do I do?

2. Simon on January 28th, 2008 12:51 pm

   Good question Matt, I think it’s a hard problem to deal with, and it is only going to get worse as more ff users blanket block ads. Here is a solution that makes it more difficult to block your ads, and displays an image that only those who have blocked your ads will see. You can make that image what ever you want… very good read on a very good blog. Pro Blog Design

3. Kellie Pickler on February 4th, 2008 12:21 pm

   I think that Google will have to change its smart pricing policy as social media continues to grow. Google should not want to miss out on publishers serving their google ads in fear of being smart priced.

4. Jon Cardozo on February 11th, 2008 11:19 am

   Sorry if this question is too basic - adsense hasn’t really been my thing up until now. How can you estimate how much you will make per click?

5. Simon on February 11th, 2008 8:26 pm

   Hi Jon, You have to do research, and find tools to help you. As a general rule, competitive niches which relate to highly profitable products tend to pay more. Credit cards, Buy Viagra etc

6. Make money online with Adrian Kelly on February 12th, 2008 3:53 am

   Simon / Jon

   I have experimented with various blogs and find that the type of niche your blog is in dictates all of your potential adsense earnings.

   OK… Pretty obvious stuff so far…

   Here’s what happened when I ditched all adsense on my blogs -

   Adsense earnings jumped, within a couple of weeks, by up to 1000% on some sites! I kid you not.

   I might add that your ‘Smart Pricing’ post is invaluable to those caught in that particular trap.

   As a result of being hit with Smart Pricing, I now ONLY use blogs for the sole purpose of driving traffic to another offer, or website, and have removed adsense from all from my blogs completely.

   I find that using adsense works incredibly well and can achieve a 25-30% ctr on sites built around B2C type products/services.

   I want to assure you that it is possible to earn an average of .25 cents for everyone who merely visits your site when you can create a good ctr, in the ‘right’ niche, with the ‘right’ keywords (long-tail).

   A typical example of a ‘HOT niche’ (to coin a phrase) would be any type of insurance product (my favourite) because there is huge demand. AN example would be ‘car insurance’.

   By then homing in on a sub-niche you can create multiple sites targeting different countries and include many affiliate products to compliment your adsense earnings.

   Yes, I know that something like ‘car insurance’ is hugely popular with tons of competition but I have a technique that’s almost laughably simple.

   It can help you to find many keyword phrases to build your next adsense/affiliate site around… and you can beat those PR5 - PR7 sites to the punch and bag a PAGE 1 slot in all three of Google/Yahoo/MSN searches.

   This reply has gone on long enough… so apologies all round… but if you’re interested in seeing how I complete this simple task, I’ll post the ’system’ back here if you’d like to see it.

   Here’s to more profits!

   Adrian

7. Simon on February 12th, 2008 7:56 pm

   Adrian, thanks for the very informative comment. I would love to hear any further info you have on the topic….as long as it doesn’t involve signing up for any free ebooks, or buying anything. Cheers, Simon

8. Dwayne Charrington on February 16th, 2008 10:38 pm

   Thank you for the information. I’ve only just recently placed Google Ads onto my blog seeming as my blog has started rating #1 in Google search for terms like stmusic code amongst others.

   Very informative post, I’ve got your RSS feed bookmarked in FireFox.

9. Erin on February 19th, 2008 6:41 pm

   I’m not sure I’d even bother with Adsense personally at this point. Eventually the market will have to even back out and make promoting Adsense worthwhile.

10. Laarni on February 29th, 2008 3:03 am

    My adsense account got higher clicks when i started using my current theme.

    Anyway, nice post!

11. Internet Niche Marketing - Adrian Kelly on March 5th, 2008 2:55 am

    Simon

    Apologies for the delay in posting back.

    I’ve included a video because it’s easier to explain the niche marketing system and how it’s possible to rank page #1 in the search engines.

    It’s explained in detail if you’d like to take a look.

    I like your Youtube post and I can confirm your article contents form the bedrock to produce money online.

    Here’s to getting richer — quicker!

    Adrian

12. Katir on March 10th, 2008 4:35 am

    A very informative post, only hope this bring some great returns.

13. fedmich on March 16th, 2008 5:37 am

    wow, nice post and very informative thanks

14. sandie on March 26th, 2008 12:12 pm

    Thank you for providing a valuable article.I recently came accross your blog and have been reading along. I thought I would leave my first comment. I dont know what to say except that I have enjoyed reading. Nice blog.

15. ranjeet on June 19th, 2008 10:01 am

    how can i increase my blog’s page rank..also i hv joined bidvertiser …

16. Santa Barbara SEO on June 20th, 2008 3:33 am

    Thanks for the good tips. I have several blogs but must say that my main earnings dont come from Google. Would love to improve but just not getting the right visitors from social media websites. Only search engine visitors will actually get click rate up.

17. Free Wordpress Hosting on June 24th, 2008 8:38 am

    Great tips! You can customize the adsense ads so they blend into your site design. People will think they are links and click on them

18. adsense gempak on July 3rd, 2008 11:11 am

    gud info for newbie like me…thanks a lot for this gud info!!!

19. Business Solution-Ardi on July 9th, 2008 8:07 am

    Good post about adsense ads format and position. Thanks for the info about headspace plugin. The plugin should be tried to get higher rank. For keyword analysis, I usually use www.nichesearcher.com. The tool also account number of my keyword competitors.

20. Eugene Chuang Garg on July 19th, 2008 5:30 am

    I have tried almost everything to get my adsense earnings up. Not working for me. Thanks for the tips anyway.

21. Simon from Rugby Coaching on July 28th, 2008 3:16 am

    Adsense can be a real bitch. Thanks for going to the effort to show how it can be done right. Cheers.

22. Jak from doberman pinchers website on August 8th, 2008 6:18 pm

    man, I wish adsense wasn’t so confusing because it can make you some decent cash. I’m still struggling on how to trigger specific adsense keywords.

23. MJ from Make Extra Money on August 12th, 2008 12:22 pm

    This is a great guide. I had a lot of trouble with smart pricing because I owned a forum (really bad CTR) but now my CPC has gone through the roof!

24. bilginin adresi bilginin tek kaynağı on August 13th, 2008 6:37 am

    I think they are wrong, and that is why I no longer participate in their program. (It’s not like it cost me anything to quit.)

25. Donna from Bitching Blog on August 27th, 2008 6:28 pm

    I have tried the Who Sees Ads plugin to avoid the problem of smart pricing with social media traffic but it isn’t as nice as Shylock adsense plugin with the placement of ads. So I found a hack that combines both - show only to search engines but with also the ability to place the ads easily wherever you want.

    But I heard that the best ad server is openx. Do you have any opinion or tutorial on that?

26. jason from homes for sale on October 1st, 2008 1:24 am

    I am still trying to make some money with AdSense. I didn’t think it would be this hard. I am going to try your suggestions and hopefully it will increase my CTR.

27. Kevin from Web hosting Ireland on October 2nd, 2008 2:57 pm

    Smart pricing is a real problem on certain terms. Sometimes your better off trying a new keyword to try and get rid of the people who smart price your site.

28. Post from Forex iTrader on October 3rd, 2008 3:37 am

    I think the main problem with adsense is that you need thousands of visitors to make money but thousands of viitors will get you into smart pricing. Google is so smart right ?

29. Simon on October 3rd, 2008 2:15 pm

    @ Post: You do need lots of traffic to make money from Adsense…but lots of traffic won’t get you smart priced…lots of untargeted traffic will. The best traffic for converting adsense is traffic from Google search. If you improve your SEO, you can make heaps with adsense.

30. chris from Pimco high yield bond fund nav on October 13th, 2008 9:32 am

    I also get better adsense earnings sometimes with text links or search box. For some reason they do not seem to be smart priced as much and you can earn more somtimes.

    Great article on how to improve adsense earnings. Everyone should try your points they do help increase adsense earnings on most sites.

31. charles on November 7th, 2008 7:50 pm

    I usually earn more now by testing different ad position and sizes on my blog. Testing is best thing you should do.

32. tony from Domain registration pay pal. on November 24th, 2008 12:09 pm

    I think keyword research and niche make the most difference in adsense earnings. I also noticed that more adsense ads are not better use less and keep CTR rate high to earn more money.

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