When it comes to making money with Adsense, it seems that the opinions in the Internet Marketing community are a bit split. Some say that Adsense is a great money earner, others believe that all the talk about it is B**S** and you should stick to “more solid” forms of making money online.

I admit, at the beginning of my IM career, when I had my first site up and running with lots of Adsense ads plastered around its webpages (http://www.mybeachdecor.com), I started to think that Adsense was not what it was made out to be – because I had literally no clicks and therefore no income. So – this clearly didn’t work very well!

Making Money With Adsense

It has pretty much taken me the last year and a bit of learning, trying, asking questions etc. to find out that making good money with Adsense is indeed possible, and what you have to do to make it work. I’m not surprised now that so many Newbie Internet Marketers give up on it because they want to see fast results, and they are just not getting them. How should anybody at the beginning know what it takes to be successful with Adsense?!?

So here is a list of points I have discovered that can make a huge difference to your Adsense earnings:

• Which topic/niche your website/webpage is centered around. This can determine whether you get cents or dollars per click – literally! As Google will display ads relevant to your sites or pages content, if you choose your niche or topic wisely, it will pay off. For example, if you are in a highly competitive niche like Internet Marketing (my blog here belongs to this category), the advertisers who’s ads are displayed on your site will usually have to pay a higher price for their advertising than advertisers in a much smaller niche, like gecko wall art (just using my sites as example) – all because of the higher competition. Of course it doesn’t mean that all the clicks you receive will always result in higher Adsense earnings, but in general these ads will make you more money than ads in less competitive niche markets.

Adsense CPC "Adsense"

Adsense CPC "Beach Decor"

What I like to do is go to Google’s External Keyword Tool and check some numbers; I type in keywords that are relevant to the niche I plan to build a website for, and then check the “Estimated Avg. CPC” number (estimated average cost per click; note it says estimated and average). Check the two examples; one is for the search term “beach decor”, and the other for “Adsense”. See the difference?? Mind you, Adsense is a bit out of the norm. But even niches with keywords getting even $2 or thereabouts for clicks can well be worth it! So needless to tell you that my beach decor site is usually making me a lot less per click than, for example, this blog you are reading.

• Where your ads are placed. People do not have a lot of patience any more. When they arrive at your site they will quickly scan the content and then decide whether they stay or go. It has been proven that Adsense Advertising blocks that are placed above the fold (that’s what people can see on their computer before they start scrolling) are doing much better than the ones below. Simply because often people don’t even scroll down the page so the ads wouldn’t be visible. So place at least one ad unit above the fold. Also, try to blend the units within the content. A good way of doing this is to have an ad unit actually inside your main content. Research has shown that ad units that are only placed into the sidebar – for example, this is probably the most popular spot – do not attract much attention any more. So don’t make yor ad units stand out if you can, and they will look more “natural” and have a higher click-through-rate.

• The amount of traffic you get to your site. Of course it makes a huge difference if your site gets 10 visitors a day or 1000 – the more visitors, the more chances that one or more of them will find something interesting in the ads displayed and click on them. So keep working on more traffic to your site, and on the optimization for the search engines.
  

  Traffic

  My organic traffic (through search engines) has picked up heaps since I have been working a lot on SEO for my site My Beach Decor, and I can see a direct correlation to my Adsense earnings. Even though I don’t get much per click, I get quite a few clicks so I DO make money! Now, my blog about Internet and Affiliate Marketing Advice is not getting anywhere near as many visitors a day (yet ) as my beach site, but when somebody clicks on an ad I often make as much as 6 or more clicks COMBINED on my beach site. So if I can get the traffic up to my IM blog, then I should be laughing!

• Blend your Adsense Units to match your sites look and feel. Don’t make them stick out like a sore thumb, incorporate them as much as you can by picking colors that match your site and blend with it. Google let’s you do that, you know? It can also be a good move to make the URL in the ad the same as the text so it looks a little less like an ad.

This is all I have for you at the moment, – I hope I could help you a little with your Adsense endeavour! If you want to know the ins and outs of Adsense and have lots more great advice, I urge you to check out DuoBlogger, they are two great guys who have a lot of knowledge about Adsense and are more than willing to share it.