First of all, this article is aimed primarily at those who already have an AdSense account and have been struggling to make more than a few meagre dollars a month with their efforts, creating websites for this purpose.
I don't claim to be an expert, or rolling in money with AdSense earnings exceeding tens of thousands of dollars monthly (like some claim) but I have had, and continue to have moderate success with AdSense. And I expect my income from AdSense to continue to grow over time by following a few simple guidelines which I would like to share with you here.
One of my sites (I won't mention it here) has in the best perfoming months earned me on average around $45 a day. My best day being over $60. Not fantastic money I know, but not bad for one website. I must admit it, it's in a popular niche which brings me around 1200 visitors a day on average.
That site however is quite a large site and not just six or seven pages of useless content. It took over 2 years to build and it's only been over the last year that I have made a good steady income from it.
Recently however, I have learnt a few new tricks to help me improve my AdSense earnings. I also tested these new techniques with a new but small 10 page website that I put together in around 3 days.
When this particular site got ranked in Google (within the first week of publishing it online) I began to average around 100 visitors a day. But the thing that surprised me most was my clickthrough rate (CTR) which is usually under 3% on average, had increased tenfold! (By the way, I now intend to improve the results for my larger site by using the same simple tips and techniques which I used on the smaller site, and which I have listed below if you care to try them out)
This new site by the way was averaging around $4 a day in the first month. Not a huge amount I know, but another 20 or 30 sites like it will probably double, if not triple my current AdSense income.
Just remember, the nice thing about earning money with Google AdSense is that once you have your site up and running, and hopefully well ranked for your chosen keyword/phrases, any earnings you make from Adsense can provide you with an ongoing passive income. Of course, you will need to choose your niche carefully, (avoid too much competition) and design your site so that it doesn't require constantly updating.
OK so here we go with my top 10 AdSense tips and techniques.....
(you may have come across some of them before, but hopefully you will learn something new that will make a big difference, like it did for me)
1. Ensure your website is targeted precisely at one subject or topic. (Don't dilute the content of your site by having pages unrelated to the main subject or theme)
2. Provide original content. (On the homepage at least) with keywords carefully placed in your web page body text, headings, title tag and alt tags for any pictures used.
3. Research your keywords and phrases carefully. Use the free tools available to find keywords that are applicable to your website's theme. Try Google's own free keyword suggestion tool and Wordtrackers free tool to begin with. (You can find them by doing a search on Google by typing in 'free keyword tool')
4. Avoid keywords and phrases with too much competition. There may be a huge amount of searches done on certain keywords, but the chances of getting your site highly ranked for them are slim to none.
5. If possible, include your chosen keyword/phrase in the domain name of your website, or at least include them in one or more of your page names.
The next 5 tips are important to improve your clickthrough rate.
6. Keep your page content reasonably short and your AdSense ads 'above the fold' so visitors don't lose site of the ads. If your visitor has to scroll down the page then make sure you have another ad showing at the end of the article.
7. Try to avoid using bright backgrounds and garish colored text. Make your AdSense ads subtle so they don't stand out too much from the rest of the page.
8. Text ads work better than image ads, so I usually avoid the option to provide text or images. I suggest you do too.
9. A large rectangle ad (336x280) is known to bring the best CTR but it pays to test out different sizes and different positions on your web page to see which ones work best for your particular page design.
This last tip is probably the most important one I have found to improve your clickthrough rate, and thus increase your AdSense earnings.
10. Avoid having other links on the page!
(apart from the menu links of your website)
Also, make sure your site includes a site map to all pages.
Apply these last 5 tips to all your website pages and you should see a marked improvement in your AdSense CTR.
Of course, if you have little traffic to your website you are flogging a dead horse! So make it a priority to learn traffic generating techniques to improve your chances of success.