Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I started in Adsense about 3 1/2 years ago making $10 a day with one website and have progressively worked my way up. I've done this by adding additional websites, additional content, and tweaking my ads. I now have 6 websites that are earning me consistent income with Adsense and I finally reached the 5 figure club for the first time.
Here are some of my tips that I wanted to share with others since I have gained much by reading this forum and haven't given back much.
1. Content is King. By this I mean the more content you have the more visitors you will get and the more clicks you will receive. The past year we have added blogs to most of our sites that get updated every couple of days. We have noticed that our main site has been losing traffic this year, but our blog is gaining traffic. Our blog has also been more of a money generator (CPM) then our main site which has helped increase our revenue.
2. Some niches pay higher then others but make less money. I see so many people asking for a list of the highest paying clicks. I admit that I have tried making some websites for those niches. The problem is that many of them are hard to rank in so therefor don't make as much money. There are plenty of lower paying niches that are easier to break into that will pay more in the long run. Work with what you are good with and the money will come along.
3. Constantly test, but not too much. I see on the adsense blog that you should constantly be testing new ad formats to find out what works for you. I agree with this as many of the suggestions given on the adsense blog and the adsense tips have helped increase CTR. But, you need to be careful of doing too much change. Try to focus some of that time working on content rather than trying to get a little more CTR.
4. What works for one person won't work for another. A couple of months ago we were invited to have a member of the Adsense team look at our website and give suggestions for improvement. We accepted and tried out their suggestions. After 12 hours we pulled their suggestions and went back to our old format. Doing their suggestions saw a 50% reduction in revenue and I could tell leaving them on longer would just hurt us more. Be willing to try suggestions but don't assume that since it worked for one person it will work for you.
This is what I have noticed for the websites that I work with and I hope that it might help others. Don't fall for the get rich quick e-books. Hard work and patience will make for consistent income without the fear of being banned.
I meant to ask, is your ups club income only for your site and personal account or is it a combination of all partner sites and income split with the other owners?
We have 6 sites that my partner and I work on. I might have misspoke in another thread if I gave the impression that each site had its own owner. The ups club income is for those 6 sites and not any of my personal sites.
The one thing that stands out from your post to me is the comment about content. Content is king. The more you have, the more chances you have have that someone will land on your site while searching for whatever. We've watched our traffic grow steadily over the years pretty much linear with our content growth. Of course, user retention is important as well to build a good base of direct type-in visitors. They can help carry a site during low search times.
Thanks again for the post!
Shouldn't Google limit the number of ads in an area of their page to 4, (teach by example) and shouldn't those ads be moved to the hot areas of their pages, per their 'heat map'?
This is a very interesting question and one that I have wondered myself. In my experience Google would make more money if they followed their own guidelines and used the 'heat map'. I have been watching videos lately about the "golden triangle" and how users eye movements start at the upper left and move down. Many times users eyes never go to the ads on the right. I know that when i search I rarely see the ads on the right.
One of the sites that we have is a search engine that I built. I did some redesigning of it a couple of months ago to try and improve CTR. I had a banner across the top that was doing fairly well, but could do better. I moved that banner to a skyscraper and changed the look to match Google's search results page. I found that I received very few clicks on the skyscraper. After a couple of weeks I went back to the way I had originally had things.
After that experiment and reading research, I have always wondered why Google continues to use their ads in a skyscraper when most people have developed ad blindness to it.
The heat map isn't something that is set in stone and works the same for every site. It's just another tool. It's a guideline representing what works well for some sites, perhaps even the marjority of sites.
You need to try different layouts and see what works best for you. G tests different serps layouts from time to time. No doubt they are mindful of what ad placement on the serps means to their bottom line, their useability, and their reputation and have chosen to go with what works best for them ALL things considered. I know I make trade-offs, and I'd expect Google does too.
I can increase my CTR by about 30% just by installing an adblock in a prominent hot spot on most of my pages. But that reduces my pageviews by about the same amount, so in the end it's income nuetral. Given that, I'd rather have the pageviews than a higher CTR at the moment.
But if I was up against a bandwidth surcharge I might go with the layout that resulted in fewer pageviews if I didn't want to switch hosts or pay the surcharge.
Back to tips on making it to the UPS club.
Experimenting is fine, and it's probably a good idea to keep researching new ideas and refining old ones, but not at the cost of doing more of what you already know works.
How many pages-of-content & page-visits-per-day is it taking you to make over $10k a month?
Pages of content is difficult to say since some of the sites have dynamically generated content. If going by number of pages indexed by Google it would be around 250K. The user generated static content does better and there are about 5000 of those pages.
For page-visits-per-day it would be about 30K.
Also, is it high or low maintenance content (ie, does contain require up-do-date information or not)?
Very interesting...
While I am not UPS club I have always earned between $2700 and $4100 per month for 3.5 years. Well over 100k in total.
All of my sites were already in existence before adsense. And before google in fact! They were written purely in the spirit of sharing useful information in the days before ads were ever considered. I have 12 small sites (about 100 pages in total) hobby and other niche sites.
None of them has been updated at all or added to since the addition of adsense. I mean I have not even fixed a spelling error!
All the content is (was) out of my head, and comes from being an old git that has done a lot of interesting hobby and technical stuff!
Its the ultimate in low maintainance evergreen sites and hosted on free web servers. Because I never understood its value when written and cannot move it now without loosing years worth of links and history.
The original posters "content is king" is the ONLY thing that really makes any real difference. Nothing else (other than luck) works!
If your site is interesting, genuine and useful to your visitors it works. The world automatically link to you. People send links to freinds etc. Google Search automatically like you too. Traffic is almost guaranteed then. I had 7k uniques yesterday, and 193 dollars. That was the second highest day ever!
The income consistency overall is amazingly consistent since day one. Over all 12 sites the average epc and ecpm only varies by about 15 percent max. Its also higher now than in the beginning. Adsense seems to reward "real" websites with good pay! (Smartpricing?)
Of course it could all go wrong tomorrow, google scrap adsense for publishers etc. But the useful real content is still there and still valuable.
You cant just "get content" because if you can find it elsewhere on the web or in a book its got no unique real value. I dont thik any of the "tricks" work or work for long.
Of course IF I had the time I could have added say 30 or 40 more sites on the same basis as the ones I have already got over these last 3.5 years. Then I would undoubtedly be in the UPS club! Once you understand how its actually easy!
Tip. Keep your eyes on those MFA ads! My filter has been full for two years and renewed every month. Takes about 4 hours a month to kill all the bugs I can find for UK and US with the preview tool - when the 200 limit is reached I stop! Thats my complete workload and maintainance sorted!
[edited by: Genuine1 at 12:15 pm (utc) on Oct. 2, 2006]
The other half of the sites are dynamically created pages that get updated about once a quarter. These sites have thousands of pages, but make ver little revenue. They have also been consistently losing traffic from Google. They are not MFA sites, since I don't believe in using them, but they are sites that probably shouldn't belong in the Google index. But thats another topic.
wonder why? did you get invited into the club with an email or something?
is the 5 figure threshold the qualifier?
[edited by: Pengi at 8:35 pm (utc) on Oct. 3, 2006]
i thought sergy and larry would ring my doorbell with a giant adsense check and bikini girls with champagne
well maybe not exactly that but I thought it was some kind of "official designation" - like i log in and it says your a UPS now -
didnt i read somewhere that UPS members get a human contact person or something?
is UPS just a made up webmaster world label?
Electronic payments being available to all earning levels made the UPS Club into just a simple way of indicating someone made over $10,000.00 a month.
But real & interesting unique genuinely useful or interesting content is not something everyone can "create". In the same way most artists, writers, singers etc fail dismally. These things dont suite everyone. You cannot buy or make "filler" content! The filler IS your site!
It has to be the best info available anywhere in your niche, or the best widget site bar none. You cannot buy or knock up that sort of data.
Well you can but you just have another crappy nondescript page that nobody much links to. Then its already failed and a waste of energy..
Spend much time thinking and planning and offer something of real value! Something that you cannot find elsewhere. Thats the secret. The only secret. And its no secret! We all allready know that really. And you really only need one page or idea!
Its not about SEO or Buying traffic, or millions of pages, or mfas, or whatever
Valuable content always pays - long after adsense has gone or pays so little its a waste of time.
If you offer something of value you cannot really fail!
[edited by: Genuine1 at 1:21 am (utc) on Oct. 4, 2006]
Take care,
Christina
Spend much time thinking and planning and offer something of real value! Something that you cannot find elsewhere. Thats the secret. The only secret. And its no secret!
And it's a lousy secret, since it doesn't work at all if there aren't significant advertising dollars being spent that are relevant to that "something of real value".
Boiling AdSense success down to one rule is guaranteed to produce a rule that will fail for a great many people.
Of my 12 sites 3 of them produce 90 percent of the money. The rest have no chance. You cannot "make" advertisers pay more than the going rate - only reduce the effect of smartpricing and get accurate traffic.
If you only have one site/subject and its in an area where there is little adverising money being spent then you are screwed no matter what you do to an extent!
But you will still benefit from a good real site over a junk site.
Eg many thousands of visitors that WANT to read your site that find something useful that link and tell freinds (and click the ads) over a few hundred (if you are lucky) that just take a quick look and hit back!
You still get the lions share of the "little adverising dollars" being spent and its all low maintainance free traffic with good smartpricing that will naturally get more traffic and better search results as time goes on. Wheras sites that have little intrinsic value drop in the search results and get less and less free trafic instead!
Even your low paying niche pays well if you have masses of free quality traffic!
[edited by: Genuine1 at 8:59 am (utc) on Oct. 5, 2006]
"After that experiment and reading research, I have always wondered why Google continues to use their ads in a skyscraper when most people have developed ad blindness to it."
Not my traffic. Most of the ads are skyscrapers. It depends on the site and layout. If you know how to use skyscrapers, you can be successful.
My concern is that one day Google Ads will be so ubiquitous that no matter the shape or size almost everyone will have ad blindness and ignore them, except the newbies, kids joining the WWW.
p/g
