The Big Adsventure

I was just browsing the code library at webdigity to get a little script to add to the blogotition website. While I was checking out if there where any other scripts that are usefull to me, I came accross a script for AdSense.

This simple little script stores some different AdSense ad color settings in an array and each time you show the AdSense ads on your webpage, one of the color settings will be used at random. Great idea! There is probably a color setting that will get the most clicks (= the most money) but what this setting is depends on your website. What works for one site doesn’t work for all sites.

We can change the script a bit to also store channels in the array. For this to work you’ll have to create a new channel for each color setting you want to use. You can create custom channels in your AdSense account. After running the ads like this for a while, you can see which colors get the most clicks on your website and stick with those. Thanks for sharing this code Olaf!

With AdSense you are paid for each time a visitor clicks on an ad that you are showing on your website. These kind of programs are know as PPC (pay-per-click) Some programs will just give you certain amount on each click. The AdSense clicks have different values and a single click can earn you anywhere between 1 cent and over $10. The trick here is to get those top-paying ads to show on your website.
So which ads are that? Like everything else Google will not tell you, but you can do some investigation. If you have signed up with Google AdWords, which is the advertisers end of AdSense, you can see what your ranking on the ad lists would be if you would pay a certain amount for your ads. Playing around a little in your AdWords account you can find the high-paying words.
You could also buy a list of top paying keywords, but the lists are expensive and often very old which makes them highly inaccurate. I think a better option is to get some software to find your high paying keywords. One such software package is Keyword Elite by Brad Callen. It’s amazing how easy this software makes finding the right keywords to target. You can also use the program to optimize your AdWords ads so you don’t spend more money on advertising then needed.

The one thing people love most are free things. It doesn’t really matter what it is, as long as its free. Think about something you can give away, that is related to your website. Maybe a key hanger or decal or other small item that you can get really cheap. You can give this away when people have done something to support your website, like placing a one-way link on their own website or if you are running a forum the persons post count or number of people referred could be the criteria to receive a free gift. In this way you are buying traffic but could end up paying a lot less then when you buy it directly. You could also have your website name printed on the item you are giving away for even more potential traffic.
On the other hand this could become quite expensive and if your website fails you could be stuck with 1000 thisdidntworkout.com key hangers sitting on your desk. Well here’s another idea: give away a digital product. E-books are a hot item on the internet and people are willing to pay between 10 and 90 bucks for them. If you don’t want to write your own e-book you could just buy one with master resale rights and give that away! You can even give away the same book on different websites because you can easily change the website name and links in the book.
Lets Work Online is currently giving away a free e-book ’24 AdSense website ideas’ with one complete ready-to-upload ‘made for AdSense’ website. And the free book even comes with branding rights enabling you to replace the affiliate links in the books with your own.

Now that the summer holidays are over traffic is picking up again. During the holidays a lot of people go on vacation and spend more time outside, working on their garden or house. I can really see this in my sites page views and AdSense™ income. Still my income is growing and this month has been good for almost $25.
So, why is the income growing while there is a drop in page views? One thing I’ve been trying out is different ad colors, so the ads blend in better with the site. I’ve also been busy submitting my sites to web directories, which I think has resulted in more targeted visitors to my sites. A highly targeted visitor is one that is interested in your sites subject and is more likely to click on an ad for a related subject. I also noticed more relevant ads showing on my sites (instead of those public service ads that don’t earn you anything when clicked) This is probably because more of my pages have been indexed by Google…

You’ve probably seen sites that ad pictures next to their AdSense ads (like on Letsworkonline.com) Those ads seem to get more clicks then just the plain text ads. Google has now noticed this as well and is using the same strategy on the AdSense ads. Have a look at these two I noticed at Digital Point:
the usual ads:

and the new one with picture added by google:

If you check out AdSense Help Centre on a regular basis you probably know already, if not you should check it out, the Optimization Tips page has been greatly improved, giving you tips on how to select the best color palette, ad placement and ad formats to use for optimal AdSense performance and maximum profit on your website.

Not every AdSense ad makes the same amount of money, it seems that the first ads displayed on your site make the most money per click, with my current sitedesigns these are the first ads displayed on the page. So what if the bottom ads on your site get more clicks? You want the highest paying ads to be in the location of your site where the most clicks occur. By using CSS to design your site you can do this, with CSS you can put the bottom ads in the top of your website source which will cause Google to display the high paying ads in the bottom of your website. I’ve started redesigning my sites with CSS, it is a lot of work and people wont see the difference when visiting my site, I however hope to see some difference in my AdSense income after the redesign.

The lack of traffic lately is not only because I have not done much promoting these last couple of months. Talking to fellow webmasters it seems that their traffic has gone down as well. Quite logical if you think about it: the weather has been too good to sit at home browsing the web. Schools are done for this year and people are going away to enjoy their much earned vacation. Time for me to sit in the sun with a notepad and a couple of beers, thinking up new ways to get those clicks in!

It’s been a while since I’ve added an entry to this blog, the reason for this is that I’ve been without an internet connection for a while. Anyways I’m back online again and want to keep you updated om my AdSense adventure.
The past few months my AdSense revenue has been rather poor, the lack of promoting my sites has become noticable in my AdSense revenue faster then expected. It’s time to add some new content to all of my sites, there must be some content for most of them in the 50,000 articles I’ve purchased…
Being without an internet connection for some months has also filled my mailboxes up, appart from the usual spam I also found a lot more new articles in my maibox. Adding an article submission form to one of my article sites seems to have paid off, now all I have to do is read thru them (all 1,800 of them!) to see which ones I can use…