Adsense - Increase Your Earning Potential

The popularity of using adsense to make online income from your blog or website is still going strong. This is probably the easiest way for someone to learn and earn to make money online as a beginner.

What is Adsense?

Adsense are ads, prepared by Google, that you publish on your website. A piece of code, which Google provides, is placed on your website. When someone clicks on one of these ads you get a percentage of the revenue Google collects from the advertiser.

Sounds pretty simple, right? In fact that part of it is pretty simple, the challenging part, and the reasons most people make little to no income from adsense, will be discussed in just a minute.

Adsense in Their Early Years

In the early days of adsense, and the internet, it was much easier to make a LOT of income online by just using adsense, those days are gone. But, you can still make a nice online income for yourself, and everybody has a different idea of what Nice Online Income is, so I will leave that number for you to contemplate.

Before we look at the factors that can take your adsense earnings from zero to hero, lets take a quick look at the good and bad sides of adsense.

It seems that Google has clamped down on the number of applications it approves these days. This is due to a number of factors, but primarily they are trying to control the integrity of the program for the sake of advertisers, and this is a good thing.

If advertisers feel the value is leaking out of the ad base, then for you and I, who really try our best to give the advertiser a shot at interested customers, the online income potential will dissipate. To maintain the value of advertising in adsense Google has went through a series of algorithm changes which tries to elevate quality websites and reduce the rankings of websites that are just adsense hunters.

All of this reverts back to content. Consider it pre-selling, this is one of the factors that will take your adsense earnings out of the dumpster.

What's Good About Adsense?

Ease of use, relevancy, payment processing and reporting.

Once you nose around the back end of the adsense system you will see that adding ads is as simple as inserting a snippet of code on your website. The code is pretty "Hack Free" which means it's hard for someone to steal your money.

Built into the adsense system is a program that reads the content of your website and then sends advertisements relevant to your subject and area.

This is very important because if your website is targeting dentists in Ohio and the ads showing up on your site are for car parts in Texas, well, who's going to click your ads.

When someone clicks an ad on your site the payment due you will show in your account. Google does all the accounting and collecting of monies.

The back end reports are numerous and once you learn how to use these reports the information will allow you to further increase your adsense earnings.

What's Bad About Adsense?

The bad thing about adsense is control, on our side it is lack of control. Google controls everything, the biggest thing is shutting down your account.

Sometimes justified and in some cases they make mistakes, in either case if you use adsense as your only source of revenue on your website you are always under this dark cloud.

If you follow their guidelines and build quality sites with good content the odds are greatly reduced that this would happen, but mistakes are made.

The other factor is - what if they decide to modify the adsense program or just shut it down completely? At this time it seems highly unlikely that this would happen, but.....

So the thing here is to at some time, diversify your online income sources.

There are five major factors that affect your adsense earnings. In no particular order are:

1. Website Content
2. Ad Blending (colors, size, etc.)
3. Ad Placement
4. Keywords
5. Website Traffic

In reality if you have little to no website traffic the other four factors won't matter, so I guess traffic would be at the top of the list.

Lets focus on Keywords and Traffic.

Keywords

99.9% of the time search engine traffic is used for these types of websites.

Search engine optimization is the key to getting ranked highly in the search engines. Lets run through an example.

You want to build a website about beds, you plug beds into Googles keyword tool and it comes back with a bunch of related keywords. There will be hundreds, what you look for are words that have good ad revenue. Next look at the competition.

You want keywords that are not too competitive but still attract people will have an interest in your products/services.

Lets say bed covers is one keyword that qualifies, here is what it might look like:

• Ad Revenue - $6.98 per click
• Competition - medium
• Online Purchases - Yes, why? Lower prices and more selections
• Good Content - You can write reviews and product comparisons for your readers

Now when someone visits your site you stimulate (pre-sell) their desire to look further for bed covers by providing them with good content. The next logical step is for them to click on an ad to look for more bed cover information. That's it!

Traffic

To utilize all that good content and advertising that Google provides us, we need people to visit our site. We need traffic and lots of it.

This is where making online income from adsense becomes a numbers game. The more traffic you get the more money you make. And don't you know that everyone else is trying to make money using adsense know the same thing, or not?

This is an area you might have the edge in if you are still reading this far.

Many people look at this as an easy way to make money online, but they skim over the SEO part. The mindset seems to be built a website, place adsense ads and let the search engines do their magic. Then when their adsense earning suck they conclude it doesn't work, the plan is another internet scam.

Folks, if it were that easy then everyone in the world would be making a living building little websites using adsense and living happily ever after.

It just ain't so...

I want to dig just a little deeper into SEO so you understand the importance of it.

To maximize your adsense revenue you need traffic, and you need a lot of it for free. You can use social sites such as Stumble Upon and Digg, but this is traffic that is blind to ads and you will make very little money from adsense.

The traffic that comes from search engines is Free. These are people who are genuinely interested in looking and buying stuff. It is already proven that this type of traffic provides the best CTR (click through rates) when it comes to adsense.

For Example: Your bed cover website gets 30,000 visitors a month, mostly from search engines, your CTR is 10 percent. Your average click is $1.00, the revenue calculation is simple, 3000 clicks x $1.00 = $3,000.00 in online income.

SEO Consists of Three Factors:

1. Onsite Optimization
2. Offsite Optimization
3. Backlinks

Linking is the biggest factor in town when it comes to SEO. Compare it to a recommendation.

If your website has 10 links coming to it and another site has only one what will Google think?

Google will think your site has the better info so your website should be ranked on top, that's the way it works.

The BIG question is, how do you get these backlinks, these precious links for SEO rankings to your website?

So, do you still want to make money online using adsense? Listen, one area where there is still a lot of money being spent even in a bad economy is advertising, and making websites and selling advertising is a Great way to start.