Use Adsense to Make your First Money Online

If you’ve placed AdSense on your blog and want to increase your eCPM (earnings per thousand pageviews), then read this article carefully. I’ve struggled long to make Adsense worth to have but finally figured how you can use it for nearly every niche you are in. It’s not a big secret but you have to apply these things before you really start earning money with Adsense.

Control your Ads

Not long ago publishers had not much control what ads were shown to their visitors. That has changed, luckily. You can specify to Google what kind of ads you want your visitors to see. Google is really good at finding relevant contextual ads but you can experiment with targeting users in different markets at any time. If you e.g. run a men’s bodybuilding site, you might experiment with ads targeted at single men, as many bodybuilders are motivated by women. You may or may not get higher CPCs or CTRs; as usually in Internet marketing, the only way to know is to test.

Ad formatting Tips

Ad Google Adwords you have the chance to change your fonts. By selecting larger-sized fonts, you can often draw more attention to your AdSense blocks. Play around with different fonts and font sizes, track them with channels and see what kind of results you get. But be careful. You don’t want to put solely the emphasis on your ads. The content is what is important, it’s not the ads. Integrate your ads into your content and visitors may see it as an additional information rather than ads.

Adsense typically performs the best above the fold, especially if they’re right below the title. Some bloggers feel that putting an AdSense block too close to the title is distasteful from a design perspective. So it is really a question of personal taste. Your user comes first. Always. In general, aim to have your ads either blend in or stand out. Make ads blend in by matching the color scheme to the rest of your site. Make an ad unit stand out by using contrasting colors and strong borders. But don’t forget. The user comes to your site because he wants to read your content. He found you on the search engines and hopes to find an answer for the question he has. So when you now forward him to a page where he sees nothing but ads he may just press the back button. So in my eyes it is better when you integrate the ads into your content. Maybe the ad offers something valuable to your reader and makes him click through?

Adsense in your RSS Feeds

Many bloggers use RSS Feeds but never monetize them. This is totally OK, you don’t have to but you may miss an income source. When people don’t come to your website but read your RSS Feed instead you may lose a lot of potential income. You need to check carefully though:  Sometimes people feel that you are just selling to them if you put ads at this place. But again, try it. In some niches it might not disturb anyone while in others people may not like it.

Google AdSense takes care of this issue with AdSense for feeds. Once you turn on AdSense for feeds, you can make money from both visitors to your blog and people who follow your blog via RSS feeds.

There have been a lot of changes to Google AdSense in the last year or two. It is usually a good idea to make an informed decision. What I highly recommend is the book from Gabriele Taylor, Google: How To Build And Market Your Business With Google. Gabriele has added step-by-step instructions so it is great for those who just start out to learn more about where to place there ads, how to place them and how to increase their click-through rate. It is a well researched book and when you want to get started with Adsense I really recommend it so you know what you are doing.

The other site: Adwords to drive Traffic

While Adsense is the program to use when you want to make money, Adwords is the program if you want to spend some money to get traffic. More often than not you can earn much more than you spend when you get traffic from Google to your sites.

You can be a publisher on Google Adwords and drive traffic to your site. Imagine the possibility when your ad is displayed on tons of related blogs out there. When I just started out with Adsense I go myself this book from Amazon.

Perry Marshall goes in detail about how to set up ads without wasting your money. If only for that it would be a good investment because you can quickly lose money on Google Adsene if you don’t know what you are doing. Don’t be afraid though. You can set daily limits and if you see that things are not going well after a few days you can stop your campaign. Still, if you want go learn about Adsense in-depth this is your book because it will help you to make informed decisions.

Go to Amazon now and get the Ultimate Guide to Google Adwords

As you can see I love reading books 😉 Actually, that is how I go usually. I discover something new and rather than spending hours crawling the Internet I look out for an Ebook to learn all I need to get started quickly.

Filed in: Blog • Traffic Generation
Tagged with: adsense • adwords • google adwords