Successful Adsense publishers know one thing. Real money with Adsense has nothing to do with Adsense. The optimization strategies that haunt every forum, blog and article are only a very small part of the story of receiving a sizeable monthly cheque from Google.

The fundamental rule of Adsense is traffic. Without traffic, no Adsense clicks, regardless of how precisely you’ve picked your placements or how much time you’ve spent perfectly blending the ads into the structure of your content so that they now appear as additional links and not advertisements.

The large majority of Adsense Publishers forget this very important fact and focus on solely trying to improve their click through rate. Finding your optimum click through rate is extremely important but cannot take precedence over traffic as without the latter you can not find the former.

If you obsess about optimization before you’ve fleshed out your site and expanded its reach into the search engines you will never actually develop your website and even if you get your CTR up to something quite formidable you will only be making a fraction of what you would be if you’d focused on your sites expansion.

So what should you do? If the fundamental rule of Adsense is traffic, the fundamental rule of traffic is that you can’t get a repeat visitor until they’ve been a first time visitor, and a first time visitor can only come to your website through a certain number of channels.

Putting advertising aside as unless you’re playing the arbitrage game you won’t convert on the margins, you are left with two serious options - the search engine results and incoming links from other websites. The latter supports the former so I always concentrate on getting as many pages under as many keywords into the search engines as are related to the particular website I’m working on. This is Search Engine Optimization territory.

With SEO you are trying to force the search engines to recognize your website and individual pages within it as relevant to particular keywords. What you’re trying to say is that “my website is more relevant, and so more valuable, to that keyword search than the first ten that are already there”. The more times you can convince the search engines of this the more traffic your website will receive. The more traffic your website receives the more clicks it will generate on Adsense and the more money you will make.

Focus on working out which keywords are related to your particular niche, build content of value that answers the question of each keyword phrase and then get supporting links to back up your relevancy. If you do this for your website you will significantly increase your traffic. Once your traffic is organic and automated turn to optimizing your Adsense ads through testing different placements, colors, formats etc. Once you’ve done that, this website can be left pretty much on auto-pilot and you can turn your attention to the next project where you will be very easily able to replicate what you’ve just done. Now you’re into Adsense Empire Building territory and this is where the “real” money lies.