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.
Your comments paint a picture of a common sense approach that works, and apparently quite well.
Congratulations on your success.
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.
totally agree with you about this, you are the best judge of what will work for you and to sort of prove the point, we went up about 250% (of an already good figure) in the month when we worked with an AdSense rep :)
I started in Adsense about 3 1/2 years ago making $10 a day with one website
So you actually started far above the average for AdSense publishers. Can you reveal what the shape of the revenue curve was since then? Linear? Exponential? Parabolic? A random walk?
You're saying:
websites + blogs = fresh content, visitors, and clicks?
I always heard blogs didn't do very well for adsense, is this not true anymore?
I always heard blogs didn't do very well for adsense, is this not true anymore?
How long did this take to happen? In our case the blog hasn't converted near as well as our main site, even when linked directly to it. I suppose once the blog picks up links and propagates this will change for the better?
I started in Adsense about 3 1/2 years ago making $10 a day with one website
To my knowledge Adsense didn't exist 3 1/2 years ago and only started in late June 2003.
I started later, end July 2003 but I am still down there with the plebs in the 4 figures club. Maybe I should travel less and work more.
have a member of the Adsense team look at our website .. their suggestions saw a 50% reduction in revenue
:-) Now that's interesting!
Tell us more please, did they suggest
a- More ad units per page?
b- Link Units?
c- Less Blending?
d- Video Ads?
e- All the above?
Did they come back to you with an explanation when you told them how their suggestions bombed?
Yeah, please answer Hobbs.
Is your website and blogs on a different domain? Is it better to separate them?
Thanks.
As to what was recommended for the website, they actually took our highest paying blog as the page to optimize. They wanted to move our adlink from the top of our page where we blend it in with our top pages navigation and instead move it to our right-hand navigation. Putting the adlink in our right-hand navigation reduced CTR in half. At the time we only had 1 ad unit other than the adlink that we displayed at the top of our page along wih the adlink. They recommended putting in a skyscraper and a blended ad within our content. The skyscraper had a very low CTR and was removed since it didn't fit in with the site. The blended ad had a low CTR, but it worked within the site design so we kept it.
After trying the changes I thanked Google for their recommendations and let them know that I kept some but not others and said that I would welcome some ideas on some of our lower converting sites. I didn't hear anything back from them after that which was disappointing.
One other thing that I wanted to add is that much of our traffic is international. I know that it has been brought up whether sites that have visitors outside the US can make money. My sites get approximately 60-70% of their visitors from outside the US and much of my Adsense revenue occurs at times when much of the US is asleep. We had tried YPN for about 6 months but found that it didn't pay as well as Google. I think the cause was that most of our visitors are international.
Lastly, I misstated when I started with Google. I always like to round high. Always the optimist :). I started with Adsense in June of 2003 after I heard about it here at WebmasterWorld.
they actually took our highest paying blog as the page to optimize ..
I would welcome some ideas on some of our lower converting sites. I didn't hear anything back
Ehm,
Probably the AdSense reps are motivated internally at Google by getting credit for high paying domains under their belt, not by the % increase in earnings they achieve.
Also I am guessing those reps are not seeing more data and statistics than we (the publishers) do, I would have thought that they have a gold mine of analysis information at hand.
....not by the % increase in earnings they achieve.
I'd be very surprized if the Adsense optimization team members are not recognized for large % increases in earnings for the sites they advise.
[edited by: Hobbs at 1:33 am (utc) on Sep. 30, 2006]
Like others I was hoping for something a little more personalized with all of the data that they have. I think there is some tremendous ad optimization that could take place with the right knowledge of the data.
I didn't hear anything back from them after that which was disappointing
Too much automation, too little personalization, low on courtesy, over protective and even obsessive when it comes to employee productivity.. Sounds toooo familiar.
Even though we've heard your techniques on more than one occasion, it's always good for new Adsensers to hear them again.
Two things stand out in your post for me. I'm not suprised they didn't help you with your low performing pages so thats not one of them.
One, I read blended, blended, blended.
Two, I didn't read anything about them helping you optimize to rank higher or get you more traffic for keywords your missing out on.
If all they have to offer a guy that has been doing this for 3 1/2 years :) is ad placement and blending... why bother? I'm sure you've done much of your own testing over the years... we all have.
Is this income only on your individual account or on a combination of all 5 accounts that you manage? The company with all 5 'partners' you had said you were planning on starting or did start where Google made the check out to the company name and not individually?
And did you finally have to comply with the D and C order from the big company? Just would like to know if you lost much ground in your stated plans for rectifing the situation and it's broad effect to your adsense earnings.
I think it is great that you were able to overcome your obstacles and hit the ups club. :) Way to go.
Ann
Is this income only on your individual account or on a combination of all 5 accounts that you manage? The company with all 5 'partners' you had said you were planning on starting or did start where Google made the check out to the company name and not individually?And did you finally have to comply with the D and C order from the big company? Just would like to know if you lost much ground in your stated plans for rectifing the situation and it's broad effect to your adsense earnings.
For the first 2 years my business partner and I each had our own adsense accounts and I used a script to rotate our ads. At the beginning of this year we decided to incorporate to make things easier. We were able to get all of the sites under a business account with Google and continue to use the other accounts for our personal sites. The income that I'm making now is with the business account which is a combination of our 6 sites. One interesting thing with this is the amount that we made seperately was more then what we made using the one account at the start. I would have assumed that it would have been close but it was about 75% of what we were making using seperate accounts. I don't know if this was some type of smartpricing taking affect or not.
We are still feeling the pain of the cease and desist order. The site prior to the order was receiving around 15,000 unique visitors a day. After the order we were forced to change our domain name. I followed all the recommendations I could find and did 301 redirects which helped, but we lost alot of our rankings in Google. Once the domain expired we were not allowed to renew it so I did a removal request with Google to remove all of the pages for the old domain from Google so that no one could profit by taking the domain once it expired. This was probably the worst thing we could have done. All of a sudden our traffic dropped dramatically since Google was no longer associating the old domain with the new one. We have been working on regaining our old rankings but the traffic is half of what it used to be. Luckily the other sites have grown to pick up the slack. I still don't know if we should have fought the C&D order or not. The company we were up against was a Fortune 500 company if not a Fortune 50 company. We just do this on our spare time and at the time didn't have the funds to fight. Its a shame that large companies can bully smaller ones.
Keep up the good work. :)
Ann
See ya at PubCon?
dk
I can give you an example of this. Look at the Adsense heat map.
[google.com...]
You note that the light yellow and white areas are deemed low or no performers, while the orange and dark orange are hot zones.
If this is so, then why are Google search results with Adwords on the pages not configured to take advantage of those 'hot spots', in order to help generate more revenue for the advertiser and Google?.
They have their Adwords ads in the search results on the right side of the page, in that white and yellow area in the heat map. There are 8 ads on the right side. A normal ad block would have 4. That means there are two ad blocks used to display those 8 ads.
Those ads in the second block, would be in the white area of the heat map, below the yellow. White is a non-performer.
What is the purpose of placing Adwords ads in the white area, if that area doesn't perform?
More importantly, if the ads don't perform in the white area, why are Adwords advertisers penalized for low performing ads that have a low CTR, inspite of the fact that Google has placed their ads in an area, they deem non-performing?
[adwords.google.com...]
Penalties are applied to advertisers using the Quality Score, which is in part calculated by the clickthrough rate (CTR). This clearly penalizes those companies who wind up in slots 5 through 8, just because Google put the ads, deliberately, in one of the lowest performing areas of their page.
Worst yet, isn't the CTR rather pathetic when the ad gets bumped onto the second page of sponsors: More Sponsored Links »? I note there is no content (search results) on those pages, and I have to wonder how many people really go to the second page of sponsor links.
Still, I wonder, who knows the exact position of each and every one of their ads shown on Google?
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'?
Why are there no Adwords ads shown in Google search results at that dark orange area deemed the hottest spot on the page according to the heat map?
Also, why are there no Adwords ads shown in search results above the footer, in that orange area on the heat map?
So many questions, so few answers.
Excellent posting - thanks for sharing. (BTW what's the UPS club?)
"... 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."
I have a theory that any changes can take several week to properly "bed in" I assume that is some sort of review process that automatically kicks in. After three months of intense activity on my site, I've not touched it for the last 3 weeks. Over the last three weeks my income has increased steadily and rapidly, and is now three times what it was when I last edited my site.
Maybe the 12 hours wasn't long enough - and G's changes would pay off long term. On the other hand ...
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?
Ann
As to where we got the content. My business partner has been using search engines and other tools to find hard to find links that would be useful to others.
