Forget About Adsense

If you want to significantly increase your current Adsense earnings the first thing you need to do is forget about Adsense. Sounds strange doesn’t it, but if there is such a thing as a secret to making money with Adsense, it is that it has nothing to do with Adsense.

All Adsense is is a way of monetizing your website traffic. Therefore to make more money from Adsense you need a website and you need more traffic. No traffic, no Adsense clicks. Lots of traffic, lots of Adsense clicks. That’s the bottom line. You can get more traffic in two ways:

1. By bringing more to your existing website(s), or
2. By building a new website and bringing traffic to that.

Almost every forum post, blog entry and article that discusses Adsense and how to make money with it wrongly focuses on optimizing your website for your Adsense ads. Where should I place them, what colours should I use, how many units should I include on a page, should I use Adlinks, what format produces the highest click through rate – all of these questions belong to trying to increase responsiveness from your traffic to your Adsense ads. The prerequisite is traffic - if you’ve only got a few visitors coming to your website a day, even a 100% click through rate will only generate a dollar.

Now at this point I’d like to defend myself - the point of this lesson is not to devalue the importance of optimization. I’ve taken sites in the past from $5 to $50 a day without increasing their traffic, through things like re-structuring and correct format and color choices, but the trick with optimization is to know its place and to focus on it at the right time. Don’t get caught optimizing a website that has not been fully developed. The forums are full of these people puzzling over how they can reach $100 a day with Adsense when they’ve not broken down what is actually necessary to generate that amount of money.

From my experiences with Adsense, you’ll make good money with it by integrating it into “successful websites”. My example above was already receiving close to 1,000 visitors every day. A couple of weeks spent optimizing and monitoring resulted in a 10 fold increase in income but that site was already “successful” so to speak. It had good placements in the search engines, a strong supporting link structure and a growing repeat user rate – it was the right time to optimize.

But a successful website isn’t necessarily one that gets thousands of visitors a day, it’s one that fulfils the purpose it was originally established for. For example, if you’ve built a website about choosing a baby stroller you want people who are coming online to find out about baby strollers to find it and use it, if you’ve built one about making money with Adsense you’re looking for those people who want to make more money with Adsense ;)

A site is successful when it’s connecting with a significant proportion of its’ intended market or users. Once you’ve made this connection, monetizing your traffic with Adsense is very easy and improving your visitors interactivity with your ads (which is the same as saying your click through rate) becomes a legitimate focus. There are hundreds of different things you can do to increase your CTR and I’ll cover many of them in future lessons. Just make sure you’ve done the groundwork and have got targeted traffic coming to your website first.

It Always Comes Back To Content

Now you can only connect with “a significant proportion” of your intended market if your website actually provides what those people are looking for. This is why whichever direction you walk off in – optimization or increasing traffic, you always end up coming back to content.

No content means nothing for people to see, nothing for people to see means no traffic, no traffic means no Adsense clicks. The whole process of making money with Adsense is made much easier if you actually build something for your end user. Spam sites can make a couple of bucks a day for a couple of months but they’ve got no longevity and their purposelessnees makes them depressing to build. It’s worth spending the extra couple of days building something which fits nicely into its market and that can justify its position there. This isn’t difficult to do, it just requires you to go that little further.

My philosophy - whether I’m adding content to an existing website or building a new website is to do what is necessary to compete in that niche – this includes everything from site design and content quality to the external optimization and marketing I carry out, including search engine optimization, link building and distributing articles among other things. Less competitive markets require less work, more competitive markets require more. There’s no point doing more than is necessary just as there is no point doing just a little when more is required to make the site successful. Work out what is necessary, do it and develop a strategy for doing it quickly. The more you get involved with your projects, the more you’ll learn, the more you’ll know the internet and the easier it will be to build successful websites that serve their purpose and attract their intended market. The trio of tools I use to reach these people are: XSitePro, Keyword Country and SEO Elite. Once you've got them, Adsense is made for monetizing them.

That is the road to real money with Adsense.