Some Tips That Increased My Adsense Earnings
I signed up with adsense quite some time ago and never really made any money. I must confess that I placed their code on some weak sites and I didn’t optimize them very well. I also didn’t read up on using adsense.
What made me learn more about adsense?
A few months ago I had part of my network completely deindexed from Googles search results, about 40 sites went from PR1-PR4 to the death notice of a complete grey bar. After the shock and panic I analyzed the sites, which were actually pretty good and each catered to a specific micro niche. The best reason for the death penalty from Goog that I could come up with after my own investigation is that I cross linked the sites. I cross linked them even if they were not relevant to eachother. My own fault for getting the domains deindexed, I should have known better by now. I removed the links and submitted them with a re-inclusion request, its been about 2 months and no change so far. The sites were averaging a nice chunk of change from affiliate programs, at the same time the major affiliate program I was using for the sites dropped their relationship with me, the result was zero income. The sites still were getting a pretty fair amount of traffic from Yahoo and Msn. Since each site was very specific to a small niche I had some trouble finding a sponsor to replace what I had lost. I figured why not try adsense.
What and How I learned about Using Adsense?
I read alot of ebook ads about adsense. I read all the information on the adsense website. I read all the guidelines for using adsense. On the ebook and guru type sites I browsed I made note of all the example sites they had links to. Most of the sites were pretty bad and mostly MFA type sites. I took notes about any similarities between the sites I viewed , I was looking for a pattern. I was looking for something alot of different users were doing that was the same. Why? I figured that any success that adsense users were having would eventual show up in some type of pattern. Most affiliate marketeers eventually copy eachothers successful tactics.
My Results:
- Most webmasters placed adsense in the middle of the top fold of their websites
- Most of the sites used black as the color of their links and their websites were light colors
- Alot of the sites made their links match the color schemes for their own site
- the adsense code was placed with content above and below
- most sites used rectangle blocks as the style of their adsense links
I placed adsense on the deindexed sites after fixing any issues I thought the sites were having staying index and made sure they were following googs guidelines. The sites started to generate about $35-$40 per day in total, I won’t get rich but its better than no income from these sites, they are still deindexed, the traffic is all organic and coming from the other search engines. These sites receive about 3000 page views per day, high week averaged about 4000 page views a day and the low was about 1000 views.
I tried adding popshops, which builds affiliate links from many affiliate networks. Using popshops you can build a shopping cart type site with products from many online retailors. I used the php links for the sites. My results have been weak. The traffic on the sites i used popshops upon also went down about 30 percent so I took the code off the sites and put the sites back the way they were and the traffic came back after a few days. When using popshops my adsense earnings also dropped very significally, about half. My adsense earnings have now increased again since dropping popshops.
Why the loss of traffic and Revenue Using PopShops?
The following is my opionion of why these sites lost traffic resulting in loss of adsense revenue.
- I used the php type link codefrom popshops. This added to the source code of my sites pages and the keyword densities changed.
- I used the default descriptions from popshops which was probably considered duplicate content by the search engines
- I will try again using the javascript version of the links I build using popshops in the future, I believe it will only be a little code added so the pages won’t change very much and my seo should not suffer on these sites since the search engines ignore javascript anyway
I hope readers of my blog can read my through my ramblings on this subject. I hope maybe some of my own experience with this issue you will find useful when monetizing your own sites . Deindexed sites can still produce revenue, they are not all useless. As long as you optimize and test different strategies on your own sites you should always move forward with making money online.
My conclusion:
When bad things happen don’t dwell on the problem, learn from your failures and come up with a plan and don’t be afraid to test and try something new. Most of what I consider valuable knowledge about working online I have been forced to learn after making mistakes. Always track your websites progress and keep notes about anything you change. Keep a log or journal about what you do to the websites you build with dates. Patterns make it easier to track success and failures.
Related Articles:
Adsense Alternatives:
I must post that I also tried Bidvertiser Network. This company is similar to adsense. I didn’t like them as much as the adsense program. I made a few cents at first and it looked promising but after a few days the ads that were showing on my sites were not what I would consider relvant to my site and the ad revenue dropped to zero. I think if a webmaster utilized their program better than I did it is a viable affiliate program to work with. I will be using them on a few sites and plan on reporting my results in the future.
My affiliate link: Monetize your Website or Blog with BidVertiser
Almost one full day since I made my changes to the sites I mentioned, today my adsense revenue should reach twice the amount for the previous day, very nice.
But how about getting clicks on your ad? Even If your get ranks in the first page for relevant keywords, is one sure that the site will be getting the ad clicks. Please help me out and detail which ads to place, where to place and ofcourse how much can one earn from this?
Great questions Brooks.
Ad placement is something we should all play around with. Where on a site that the ads of any type are placed seems to make a difference in the amount of ad clicks. Adsense is contextual so you have no ability to choose your ads beyond how you target keywords and SEO your pages.
Targeting relevant keywords when optimizing your pages is what every webmaster worth a dime is already doing. The real question should be are the keywords worth anything? do the keywords have anyone searching for them? Target higher volume keywords.
I have found placing 2 250×250 ad blocks next to eachother and using black as the link color and placing them smack in the middle of the top fold of my sites seems to have the best results.
How much revenue you can make really depends on the target audience of the site, the niche, the keywords you are targeting. We have no control on revenue sharing and cost per click of the ads shown by adsense. I just read another post on a site and the webmaster called adsense welfare for webmasters. I thought it was funny. Two questions I have asked often over the years is “How much is alot of money? How much is alot of money to you?”
I am going to write a more detailed post on this subject while its fresh in my head and will call it Welfare for Webmasters.
Hey Brooks, thanks for giving me another idea for a post #$@!!!!!!
I have not even got to the other 20 pages of post ideas I have yet lol.
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