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.
|
Keyword |
Searches |
Google Pages |
MSN Pages |
CPC |
|
adsense |
110,459 |
48,800,000 |
3,260,000 |
$20.01 - $27.93 |
|
google adsense |
29,176 |
22,300,000 |
10,800,000 |
$18.27 - $24.18 |
|
adsense publisher |
10,980 |
224,000 |
137,000 |
$4.87 - $6.08 |
|
adsense ad |
4,863 |
171,000 |
140,000 |
$3.75 - $4.69 |
|
google adsense publisher |
705 |
171,000 |
66,900 |
$3.41 - $4.27 |
|
template adsense |
439 |
3,530 |
5,950 |
$5.85 - $7.30 |
|
adsense tool |
370 |
26,900 |
9,360 |
$5.85 - $7.31 |
|
adsense format |
259 |
18,500 |
33,700 |
$6.55 - $8.19 |
|
adsense alternative |
227 |
61,000 |
41,300 |
$1.56 - $1.95 |
|
adsense earnings |
191 |
385,000 |
176,000 |
$7.43 - $9.29 |
|
adsense tip |
189 |
23,700 |
14,600 |
$9.07 - $11.34 |
|
adsense ready |
156 |
219,000 |
224,000 |
$2.30 - $2.87 |
|
adsense program |
126 |
359,000 |
366,000 |
$9.68 - $12.10 |
|
google adsense alternative |
125 |
13,100 |
6,770 |
$3.41 - $4.27 |
|
adsense keyword |
123 |
65,300 |
28,900 |
$2.37 - $2.96 |
|
adsense web site |
108 |
45,100 |
10,500 |
$3.75 - $4.69 |
|
adsense site |
106 |
192,000 |
90,900 |
$1.72 - $2.15 |
|
adsense secret |
103 |
112,000 |
14,900 |
$0.95 - $1.18 |
|
google adsense program |
90 |
198,000 |
198,000 |
$12.62 - $15.78 |
|
msn adsense |
90 |
5,630 |
1,040 |
$3.07 - $3.84 |
|
adwords and adsense |
88 |
94,300 |
72,700 |
$8.02 - $10.02 |
|
how to make money with google adsense |
88 |
98,600 |
21,700 |
$3.24 - $4.05 |
|
how to make money with adsense |
86 |
81,700 |
18,100 |
$2.19 - $2.74 |
|
adsense income |
85 |
313,000 |
125,000 |
$2.81 - $3.51 |
|
adsense google |
84 |
711,000 |
1,110,000 |
$21.02 - $27.45 |
|
make money with adsense |
79 |
308,000 |
78,200 |
$1.71 - $2.14 |
|
adsense template |
77 |
35,700 |
9,510 |
$1.27 - $1.59 |
|
adsense tracker |
74 |
79,900 |
54,600 |
$1.00 - $1.26 |
|
google com adsense |
72 |
280,000 |
175,000 |
$18.74 - $23.43 |
|
adsense forum |
71 |
163,000 |
163,000 |
$6.65 - $8.31 |
|
adsense money |
71 |
241,000 |
81,900 |
$2.08 - $2.60 |
|
adsense revenue |
70 |
630,000 |
343,000 |
$6.52 - $8.15 |
|
adsense adwords google |
68 |
37,500 |
129,000 |
$15.13 - $18.91 |
|
making money with adsense |
67 |
205,000 |
53,700 |
$1.81 - $2.26 |
|
adsense ready site |
66 |
8,220 |
1,670 |
$0.95 - $1.19 |
|
adwords adsense |
64 |
171,000 |
225,000 |
$4.05 - $5.06 |
|
google adsense keyword |
60 |
39,400 |
9,040 |
$3.06 - $3.82 |
|
google adsense secret |
58 |
86,400 |
1,570 |
$4.21 - $5.27 |
|
adsense make money |
58 |
71,500 |
27,000 |
$1.59 - $1.98 |
|
yahoo adsense |
54 |
18,900 |
16,700 |
$2.97 - $3.71 |
|
adsense profit |
53 |
35,900 |
12,100 |
$2.65 - $3.32 |
|
adsense exchange |
53 |
3,010 |
456 |
$1.71 - $2.13 |
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.
14 Responses to “How To Improve Adsense Earnings On Your Blog”
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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?
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
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.
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?
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
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
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
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.
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.
My adsense account got higher clicks when i started using my current theme.
Anyway, nice post!
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
A very informative post, only hope this bring some great returns.
wow, nice post and very informative
thanks
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