How to Increase Profits from Adsense

You’re getting pennies per click. You’re looking for a way to get those pennies into the dollar range. What can you do? There are a number of things you can do to help increase the amount of profit you get from working with Google’s Adsense. Following are some helpful tips on how to increase your earnings.

Put on a Show for Adwords Bidders

In adwords, people compete to have their ads show on your website. It makes sense, then, to make certain that your site looks decent, credible and legitimate. Consider that a bland looking template may not inspire as many bids as a vibrant and top-notch theme. Following is what the adsense guide says on this matter:

Ad targeting: We only consider ads that are relevant to the content or users of your site. Through placement-targeting, we’ll also consider ads from advertisers who have specifically chosen to show ads on your pages when they’ve found a match between their offerings and your site’s users.

Just like in a traditional auction, the more advertisers that bid to appear on your pages, the higher the competition is for your ad units, and the more you can earn.

This is what it all boils down to, folks. When you make money from adsense, it’s not entirely about Google’s algorithm and whether or not it decides to value your pages more or less (though this can come into play with your ad placement). It’s more about putting on a show for the bidders. The more people who bid on your pages,the more money you will make. Instead of appealing to the bottom-of-the-barrel advertisers, make a site that appeals to the top paying advertisers, and then their ads will be the ones that show.

Therefore, when you stick ads into your text so that they look like they’re a navigation menu, that may gather more clicks, but your advertisers can see it. You will not have high competition for your ad slots if you’re tricking people into clicking ads. The last thing you want to do is have people accidentally click on ads, first because Google will detect this and refund the advertiser, but also because advertisers can sense this will happen, and they won’t bid very highly on your website.

Pick the Right Niche

Here is a real world example of how to pick the wrong niche. I’m well known for my guides on on-page SEO balancing. Therefore, I often get messaged on skype in order to help balance a page’s on-page, and to glance over whether there are any additional factors that may impede rankings. The niche of this website is what prompted this article on how to increase your adsense earnings.

The niche was basically how to make breakfast (that wasn’t the exact keyword, but it was very similar). He didn’t pick the niche, he got it from a seller that produces pre-made “authority” sites (note the scare quotes “”). The keyword the site was made for received around 3500 exact searches per month. He wasn’t ranked anywhere in the top 100.

The first thing that came to mind is how many people are competing to be placed on recipe type making food sites? My gut instinct is not many, or if there are, they’re not placing bids that are very high. Adwords showed competition as “medium”, but whatever competition there is, I’m certain they’re putting in the minimum bids. He is getting 7 cents per click. Ouch.

My advice to the guy was a little something like this. The niche is 3500 exacts. That’s around 116 searches per day. If you’re #1 for that keyword, you may get a lion’s share of 40% of that traffic, which is about 46 visitors per day. Your clickthrough rate on ads may be around 1%. That produces one click on a banner, every other day. At 7 cents per click, he’s making around 3.5 cents per day, or roughly a dollar per month, if he manages to rank number one. Currently, he’s not even in the top 100. My advice was to let the site sit, forget about it and move on to better keywords.

If your goal is to make good money with adsense, you have to write about profitable topics. Let me reveal a niche that works the opposite of above. Consider for a moment DJ equipment. I’ve had some fair experience with not only promoting DJ equipment, but having relationships with the actual suppliers who bid on DJ equipment terms through adwords.

DJ equipment suppliers get great deals on various products by buying lots of them. They have to guess how much product they’re going to sell, and they often make wrong guesses. For instance, they might believe they can move 100 Pioneer headphones, but two months later they’ve only moved 40. They’re running out of cash, as it is all tied up in stock on stuff that isn’t moving quickly enough. How do they make super fast cash? That’s easy. They turn to adwords. They don’t care if they’re selling product cheaper than they bought it for. They simply don’t care. They need the money. They’ve already made their profit on the buy, but now they need to make payroll and order even more product — product that they’re out of, that moves faster. Sure, those 60 leftover Pioneer headphones would sell in five months or so, but that’s not quick enough. Got to sell them now!

Then they start bidding on terms. They want liquidity. Any website that is vaguely DJ related is good enough. They’ll slash the price on the product to below what they paid for it, and bid prices so high that they’re really not turning any kind of profit. Like I said, however, they already made their profit by getting market prices on the ones they already sold. They’re just liquidating their stock. They do it all the time, on various pieces of equipment. You’ll typically get excellent competition for your adwords if you’re promoting terms like these.

Before you scramble out to start promoting DJ equipment, consider the thousands of niches that work exactly the same way. How many niches are there where the suppliers and adwords bidders take huge amounts of stock to get it cheaper, then sell it through adwords? Practices such as this encompass a surprising amount of niches.

But how to make breakfast? Ain’t nobody got time for that. It’s like celebrity gossip, perhaps you can make money on it if you have an extremely high volume of traffic. If your goal is to make money with adsense, you have to pick profitable keywords.

Don’t Get Smart Priced

The last thing you want to happen is having people click on an ad by mistake. Google can sense whether ads are actually converting, or whether they clicked the “back” button and continued on your site as though they clicked on an ad by accident. This will drive down how much your ads pay. Similarly, if nobody wants to bid on your website pages — because your site looks dumpy or unprofessional — you won’t have bidders competing over your terms. You’ll make nothing. Google will pity you, and get you some bottom-of-the-barrel bidders for your site. You’ll get nickel, or 7 cent clicks — because Google will help you monetize your site at the level it’s at. If you’re getting nickel clicks, your site is in a sorry state. You need to improve your content and improve your ad placement.

Likewise, Google reduces the amount of money paid per ad when you’re showing the maximum ads (3). However, lets say one of those ads is in your sidebar, and you have a responsive theme. Did you know that ad isn’t even going to show to your mobile traffic? That 3rd ad in your sidebar is driving down how much adsense is paying per click, and mobile traffic can’t even see it! Get rid of it.

Less Ads Per Page, More Pages

WordPress has a feature called < !–nextpage– >. This can take a page that is perhaps 2000 words long, and chop it into four articles that are 500 words. By doing this, and subsequently reducing the amount of ads you have on each page, you will be able to show more ads that yield higher prices.

Keep in mind how this could affect your on-page SEO. If you have a page that is already ranking well, I would not suggest changing it into four pages. However, if you are starting new articles from scratch, this is an excellent way to get more adsense money from your articles. This is especially the case if you are driving traffic through social or methods other than organic rankings.

Summary of Things You Can Do to Increase Adsense Earnings

• Write about profitable topics. You must do the proper keyword research for your website, in order to develop for profitable, high-competition keywords. Likewise, if nobody is interested in your particular topics, you will have less bidders on your site. Your topics should have either buying intent, or be in a niche like health, that fits a wide variety of advertisers who will bid on your pages.
• Pick a theme for your website that looks highly professional. The better your website looks, the more inclined individual adsense advertisers will be to bid on your website.
• Use wise placement of your ads. Do not use them where they may be clicked accidentally, as if they’re a navigational menu. Also, be warry of using them in the sidebar if you get a lot of mobile traffic.
• Consider using more pages of shorter length. By doing so, you can greatly increase the number of ads shown, while keeping ads-per-page at a minimum, so you will get a higher value per ad clicked.