AdSense Tips from an Expert
by Randall McCarley
June 15th, 2007
I recently stumbled into someone that is a wealth of knowledge regarding AdSense and how to make it pay. I asked this “mystery mentor” to guest write a post here but he declined preferring to stay anonymous. However, he did encourage me to share what I had learned. I think you’ll agree that when you see these tips they are absolute quality and speak for themselves.
Why Adsense?
AdSense outperformed every affiliate program he tried.
Ad Placement
The heat-map (where visitors look more carefully) is like an F and placing the ads there will lead to a higher CTR.
For the top ad, use the google_ad_format “300×250″ and put it to the right of the left column navigation. Put a small paragraph of text above it so that the whole ad is wrapped in content. And make sure that ad is above the fold.
For the footer, use a horizontal text link ad, placed in the middle of the page like the bottom navigation many sites use. Use the 4 or 5 link unit that best fits the size. These give a lower CTR, but if you have tons of traffic, it is worth it.
Never use more than two ad blocks. The more have ads you have, the more room there is for cheap ads to appear.
Skyscraper ads do not perform as well as 300×250 ads but are a good substitute on pages where the 300×250 ads can’t be used.
Ad Design
Colors of the link of the ad should match the color of the navigation links.
Dim the URL in the ad (under the text) as much as possible so the visitor has a hard time reading it and typing it into another browser window. The color will be overruled if it is too close to the background color.
The ad text should match the page text color.
The background and border of the ad should be set to the same as the background, so they blend with the page colors.
Use an alternate color so you don’t display public service ads. PSAs do not pay but do hurt your stats.
Preventing “Ad Blindness”
You can use alternate colors for the links if it’s a forum, or a site that people come back often to prevent ad blindness. The format to rotate 3 colors randomly for the links is:
google_color_link = [”0000CC”,”800000″,”005500″];
This will rotate the colors in the bracket randomly.
Targeting Ads
To exclude menus and other noise and target the right ads you can qualify specific areas of content for Google to use in its matching criteria:
<!– google_ad_section_start –>
Content content content…
<!– google_ad_section_end –>
Google will still show other ads if the amount of text is not enough.
Make good use of <title> and <h1> tags to get better targeted ads.
Don’t forget to think about a product when writing a page - and mention it - so Google has some idea of which ads to place there. Good things to mention are books, software or equipment that could be useful to the user. Mentioning items in relation to the content will only help everyone.
Targeting an Audience
Think of what “Mr. Nobody” looks for, and you’ll get more money. SEO sites are the worse for AdSense, because SEO people don’t click ads. Amusement and games give very low money for the clicks.
Long-term Strategy
If every page you make raises just $.04 per day from the time the page ranks and you put up 5 pages per day you’ll raise your income $.20 per day. With 365 days in a year you’ll make $73.00 more per day!
One site may not make much money but several “not much” sites can equal a lot.
Defense
An update will not destroy several “not much” websites, but it may wipe out one mega-earner.
Big keywords hurt much more when you lose them. 100 pages bringing 10 visitors are better than 1 page that brings 1000.
You must have more than one site to make income online.
Working with Partners
Greed will make people make the wrong decision. Just remember, you can only trust yourself.
Link Building
Note: I asked about having ads on the site right away or if you should build some links first to get things rolling. Mystery Mentor suggested to place ads at launch.
I don’t swap links, so all my sites are just one-way natural links. I can’t say if having ads are slowing natural links because I always put the ads right from the start. I do get loads of them even if my pages have ads on them.
Design versus Content
I’m no designer and basically use the same template for all my sites. If the content is right, you’ll get links eventually.
Attitude
Think good… don’t be influenced by complaining people. Just do the work and be free in a few years.
Make a good helpful site: don’t pull tricks and you’ll get there.
The rest is a patience thing.
Next Article: The Death of Brick-and-Mortar - 2 Sides Previous Article: Fresh free links!
June 15th, 2007 at 3:57 am
11 Expert Tips to Set AdSense Income Straight…
1. Place ads following the F (golden triangle, top-left) pattern.
2. Blend the links with your site.
3. Use a rectangle in top-left, with one paragraph over it, and a link block in the footer.
4. Use two blocks (not more) to get expensive ads.
5. U…
June 15th, 2007 at 8:16 pm
Hello,
It’s kinda wierd that you don’t have a single ad on this site.
What’s up? or is it the SEO thing(SEO people don’t click on ads)
Thanks,
Taras
June 15th, 2007 at 8:43 pm
The tips on ad blindness is great. Thanks
June 15th, 2007 at 9:27 pm
The whole article was very good.
Well I would also like to what kind of ads can get us more revenue?.Just softwares,books or anything else?
June 15th, 2007 at 9:46 pm
Nice article to start with. Thanks for sharing such a wonderful piece of information.
June 15th, 2007 at 9:58 pm
I tried a Long-term Strategy how you said and this works fine for me.
June 15th, 2007 at 10:48 pm
These are great tips. Thanks for sharing. I will definitely be making some changes based on these recommendations and I know my readers will benefit.
June 15th, 2007 at 11:36 pm
I’m glad you all liked it. I was really trying to get Mystery Mentor to write something up himself but he wouldn’t go for it. I’m working with these tips and will see how it goes. Spelled out it looks so logical. And I’ve been getting comments from other Adsense pros that this is a solid article (not that I had any doubt!).
@Taras Mankovski - Irony, right? This is actually an informational site turned commercial. It started as my notepad and grew from there. I do have some ads floating around to test things out and get a general feel for how the different programs work but nothing serrious. If I pull $50 a month off of it I’m happy. The money for me is in the client work.
But as I work on the redesign some ads may creep in…
June 15th, 2007 at 11:43 pm
An excellent article with great tips. I especially like the one about having ads from the start.
June 16th, 2007 at 12:12 am
It’s indeed a really interesting article.
I especially like the tip for ad blindness!
Thank’s alot!
June 16th, 2007 at 1:10 am
Very good article.
Thanks
http://www.ebooksbay.org
June 16th, 2007 at 2:36 am
“Never use more than two ad blocks. The more have ads you have, the more room there is for cheap ads to appear.”
That depends. If you have a lot of pay per view ads, you obviously have to put as many ad blocks as possible (=3) on your site.
June 16th, 2007 at 5:01 am
Hmm the rotate color one is very nice ill have a loook in that, last time i tried to chance google adsense code it broke the ad heh
June 16th, 2007 at 5:51 am
Is tip to handle ad blindness as per to the TOC of Google AdSense? Will google allow this type of tricks?
June 16th, 2007 at 6:10 am
What’s the use? I don’t see any ads anywhere thanks to AdBlock and AdMuncher
June 16th, 2007 at 6:31 am
Well The thing is that this is pretty simple. Basic stuff. Helpful to the people who really need it, but not the people with a great deal of experience.
June 16th, 2007 at 6:46 am
very nice tips, mate. thanks for sharing.
June 16th, 2007 at 7:17 am
Thank you for sharing that. Where did your ‘mystery mentor’ find the random colour trick ?
June 16th, 2007 at 9:20 am
Very nice and very informative… thanks for sharing the tricks
June 16th, 2007 at 10:24 am
@Moe - PPV ads usualy don’t pay very much compared to PPC. I know some Adsense users that despise them. I don’t really have an opinion on that issue yet.
@Gopinath M - Google doesn’t really care what color your ads are and they are the ones that create and manage the code and how it works. Put another way, that bit of code is a hack developed by Google that most people probably aren’t aware of. So yes, within the TOS.
@Jacques Mattheij - I don’t know but he’s been at this for years so like anything… you pick stuff up as you go.
@Rohit_INDIA - MM saw your question and told me this:
June 16th, 2007 at 10:28 am
Hi there. Nice article. You don’t mention having clean URLs in the articles as a good force driving more traffic to your site. Did you guys talked about that a bit? BTW your site is not using clean urls based on your article title but just the article number.
Virna
June 16th, 2007 at 11:23 am
11 pequeños secretos de Adsense que debes conocer…
En del.icio.us he visto una entrada llamada “11 Little Known AdSense Secrets You Ought to Know” que da titulo a esta entrada y que enlaza a Adsense tips from an Expert. Son 11 pequeños y conocidos secretos (o trucos, si lo prefieres) que s…
June 16th, 2007 at 11:50 am
@Virna Jones - This article is just about effective use of Adsense. SEO is a different topic and there is plenty of info on that on this site.
The clean URLs are part of the website update that I’ve been working on… plus a lot of other things.
June 16th, 2007 at 12:49 pm
“Dim the URL in the ad (under the text) as much as possible… The color will be overruled if it is too close to the background color”
Once you apply the maximum dimming allowed by google all you do is highlight the URL, rather than make it hard to read. I trust people are lazy enough to click links rather than type them in, I am. Even if they decide to copy and paste the URL it’s quite hard not to accidentally click.
Other stuff is quite good however.
June 16th, 2007 at 4:38 pm
Thanks for the tips, I found them interesting and encouraging (especially the 4cents/page/day = a lot if you keep at it)
June 17th, 2007 at 3:10 am
Very usefull tips indeed. Vote for this story at http://www.bestofindya.com.
-Indya
June 17th, 2007 at 3:38 am
Just the kind of article I needed to see today, thanksssss!
June 17th, 2007 at 9:23 am
AdSense Tips from an Expert…
I recently stumbled into someone that is a wealth of knowledge regarding AdSense and how to make it pay. I asked this “mystery mentor” to guest write a post here but he declined preferring to stay anonymous. However, he did encourage me to share wh…
June 17th, 2007 at 11:49 pm
Excellent. Thank you for sharing this. Useful informations could not be found in “other” tips!!
If you do not mind please advice on my website. I do not have good knowledge on html. You said “Make good use of and tags to get better targeted ads”. How can I apply this in my site?
thank you
Sandy
www.homewebwork.com/sfi.html
June 18th, 2007 at 10:47 am
Great tips! looks like I need to revamp my ad space.
July 2nd, 2007 at 3:42 pm
These tips helped me greatly. Thanks dude!!
July 8th, 2007 at 8:55 am
Very good post but only one problem…..you could easily ear more tan 4 cents per page….say 10$ per page.
July 9th, 2007 at 8:20 am
Thanks all! I’m glad you found this post helpful.
@Vedant - Sure and some of the tips above will help with that but it really depends on topic, competitiveness, and a bunch of other things beyond the scope of this post.
Though what you mention is a better “ideal”.
July 9th, 2007 at 4:30 pm
Great Tips! I implemented a few of them before I even finished reading!
I believe that the “Long Term Strategy” you mentioned is the JEWEL of the whole article, but how would you go about creating all those pages when you have to spend time advertising?
I had a couple of good websites a while back that I stopped promoting for about a month or so and they did not receive a single visitor during that time.
Is there any way to guarantee even the smallest amount of traffic to all the websites you create?
Thanks
July 9th, 2007 at 10:38 pm
You bet! A lot of it has to do with promotion and online that generally means SEO (at least some) and hopefully getting some word of mouth links and traffic. However you want to look at it, links are gold online for traffic, link juice, SEO, whatever.
Links bring traffic - direct and indirect. I have an article on picking up free links on this site and a somewhat updated version on the sister site, Linker’s Union where you can ask for a free link.
July 21st, 2007 at 8:39 pm
great article
thanks
August 4th, 2007 at 12:26 am
nice tips thanks
August 9th, 2007 at 2:06 pm
From what I’ve read it’s quite a post. Is this your own research or have you noticed similar paths elsewhere?
August 9th, 2007 at 3:40 pm
The information comes from “Mystery Mentor” but I’ve been trying them out on some of my sites with increased success. The format/placement works, the change ad colors thing works, and the content tips to draw higher-paying ads also works. I’m still implementing things but so far everything I’ve tested has been spot on.
August 12th, 2007 at 1:45 pm
Thanks for the tips. I will most definitely be making some changes to this particular blog.
September 21st, 2007 at 3:14 pm
Just a re-write of the hundreds of already written articles about adsense! Nice try to get nice ads though!
September 22nd, 2007 at 1:10 am
SpamFinder, this article was posted June 15th. I inserted the ads a couple days ago on September 20 including the Adsense referral ad at the end of the post. This blog started September 5, 2006 and has been pretty much ad-free for the last year. You can read about the addition of Adsense here.
But if you feel these ads detract from the quality please let me know.
October 4th, 2007 at 4:35 pm
Yo pienso que cada cual gana lo que se propone, yo tengo una red de blogs y me estoy ganando aprox unos 500 doplares mensuales…. Este ingreso lo genero con tan solo seis meses de estar en el programa. Todo es cuestion de proponerselo.
Un saludo.
Christian Bolaños
October 5th, 2007 at 8:59 am
Hey Christian,
My Spanish is a bit rusty. I think you’re saying you have a network of sites and pull $500 per month. But what’s the bit about entry to the program?
October 14th, 2007 at 11:57 am
To know even more deep secrets about adsense: adsensic.blogspot.com