This is a basic Adsense tutorial for beginners. I have added it as a video on Youtube. The full text from the video is below.

So you’re only making a few cents a day from Adsense and you don’t know why?

What are the biggest mistakes?

1. Not having a defined niche

Adsense clicks pay out based on keywords relating to your content – if it isn’t clear what keywords relate – you won’t make money.

2. The wrong traffic

Visitors from social sites don’t click ads. Visitors from search engines do.

3. Not researching your keywords

You must research keywords if you don’t want to leave your search engine traffic up to luck.

4. Not having unique content on your sites.
5. Poor ad positioning

Get your Adsense ads in front of your readers’ eyes if you want to make money.

What can you do to get more search traffic?

1. Pick higher traffic, lower competition keywords in higher paying niches.

Yes…yes, it’s easier said than done…but research!

2. Get anchored backlinks to your content .i.e links that have your keywords in the hyperlink.
3. Write content optimized for those keywords .i.e. have your keyword in the title.

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

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.

Are you one of those Adsense users who gets 4-5 clicks a day and only makes 21 cents?

Courtney Tuttle writes about Adsense smart pricing.  If you are displaying Adsense on a site that doesn’t have a higher click through rate (CTR) than 3%, you are at risk of having Smart Pricing applied to your Adsense commission. Smart Pricing is a system that Google use to ensure good value for their advertisers. It is estimated that your Adsense commission can be reduced by up to 90% if you are in the smart pricing category, so if a click paid out 40c to a normal user, it will pay out 4c to a user who has been smart priced.

I had been using Google Adsense on Pingable for a few months with very little success. I had read about how hard it was to get clicks on ads in blogs that are about blogging, but I had no idea how much I was actually sabotaging my Adsense account. And yes, it affects all sites in your Adsense account not just those that have a low CTR. Apparently it’s easy enough to get removed from the Smart Pricing category, you just need to either improve your CTR, by optimising your ad placement, or remove Adsense from those sites all together.

So what can we take from Courtney’s article:

• If you have a blog about blogging, social media, SEO, don’t use Adsense, the CTR will most likely be very poor. People who read these sorts of blogs, don’t click ads.
• If you are displaying Adsense on a site that has a lower CTR than 3%, remove Adsense from those sites.
• If a large portion of your traffic comes from social media sites like Digg and StumbleUpon, displaying Adsense is a bad idea, not only will these users not click your ads, so many of them won’t, and it will lower your CTR to the stage that if you do get a click it won’t pay well. You could also control who gets ads with different plugins to only show your ads to search engine visitors.
• Place Adsense on sites that typically get a lot of search engine traffic, this traffic is most likely to click ads.

Optimising Adsense Placement

If you decide to use Adsense on your site, it is worth considering optimising your ad format options. Many publishers like the big rectangle, mainly because it works! It gets very good CTR. The 250X250 square, has almost the exact same look as the big rectangle, but it shows three ads instead of four. This means that you give your visitors fewer options to choose from (but not too few) and they may decide to click more easily. You also eliminate the 4th ad which would be, on average, the lowest paying of the four.

If that doesn’t work out for you, you can try using two 234X60 ads stacked on top of each other. If you use background colours that blend together, it will give a similar appearance of a 250X250 box, however, it will only display two ads in the spot. You want to be mainly displaying the higher paying ads, so if your users do click them you get a decent payout, yet you still want to give readers enough options, if you have too few ads, there are no options, and they will be less likely to get clicked. If you have too many options you are more likely to be displaying ads that pay out less.

Once you are sure that your site has not been smart priced you can optimise performance by lowering the amount of ads (using the above technique) that are being displayed if you find that some of your clicks are still paying poorly.