By: Eleanor Phyllese
Making money with AdSense can be one of the easiest methods to make money online. It does however require that you have a website that receives traffic. If you do not have your own site then consider learning about search engine optimization to help you create a site that ranks highly and receives traffic.
The biggest key to search engine optimization is to create unique quality content sites that people will want to talk about and link to from their own sites so always make content your primary focus and make sure it is unique. Once you do have a site that does receive traffic the next step is to make sure that you are using AdSense the best way possible so you are making the most money from it.
The AdSense program allows you to use 2 link units and 3 ad units on every content rich page. Remember to never place ads on pages with little or no content. The niche you are in is also important. Make sure that you are in a niche where there are many advertisers as this will help to ensure that you get the most relevant ads and also you will get paid the most since the average bid is higher due to higher advertiser competition. The AdSense program now also comes with YouTube video units.
Consider adding these video units to your site and test their effectiveness. It may be best to manually pick the videos to ensure they are relevant and informative and not just pure sales pitches. Make sure to have at least a few ad units above the fold on your site. Perhaps add a horizontal link unit and one ad unit in this part of your site. Above the fold is the part of your site that can be seen without scrolling down. Also try to center your ads as much as possible.
The center of the page is where most people focus on the page so placing ads towards the middle of the page helps to get them noticed more. The search box is usually not a very profitable thing to add to your site unless you have a directory type site in which case it may add to improving your sites functionality. The main idea is to blend your ads as much as you can with the rest of your site.
Removing borders from the ads is usually a good idea for most sites as this will make your ads fit in better and look more like a natural part of your content. Adsense comes with channel tracking which enables you to track the effectiveness of the ads. Make sure to use custom channels so you can know which ads are performing best and simply do more of what is working well.
It may also be beneficial to only use text ads in your ads and disable image ads. Most image ads have very low click through rates since people easily see them as ads. Make sure that the pages that have ads on them are focused on a specific topic. AdSense ads are drawn from the content of your site and in order to get relevant ads your content must be clearly written about a certain topic. Remember that ad relevancy is very important in order to increase click through rates, you can even use the AdSense preview tool to help you see what kinds of ads you will get on any page.
There are many programs out there that may encourage you to build hundreds of sites in order to make more money with AdSense. Resist the urge to use this strategy and instead focus on building one or at most a handful of sites that you want to become authority sites that rank well for competitive terms. Also consider adding affiliate links in your site too to create another potential income stream. Build a few quality sites and they should be able to do well enough to make you good money from AdSense.
