How to maximize your Google Adsense income.

Google adsense is a great program for normal people to earn residual income on the web; while most users can write content that will allow a fairly decent amount of impressions, the hard part is actually getting people to click on the Ads, and thus earn some income.

The techniques below are more for users with their own websites or blogs, but some of the principles can be applied to content oriented sites such as Hubages and Squidoo.

Positioning is important – as the web is a place where the reader tends to browse and only read content that grabs them and hold their attention. There’s a sort of goldfish effect where the reader has a limited attention span, and thus if your google adsense ads are below your content then it’s very unlikely get clicks.

What you should aim for is to get one ad or banner at the very top of your content so that the reader doesn’t have to scroll down to see them. If you’ve written your content well then the ads will be highly relevant to your content and hopefully to the search they used. There’s a fine line to draw though – you don’t want the Google banner or Ad to take away from the look or feel of your site as you still want to look professional and thus more trustworthy.

If you can actually bring in Google ads that actually look like they are your content then the reader will actually be more likely to click as they won’t realize it is an ad and will think it is a hyperlink. It is very difficult to do this though, and often you are reliant on Google, but if you can achieve a nice blend of ad to content then you’ve really enhanced the chances of getting clicks.

What a lot of designers fail to understand is that content is king – if you create a tag and keyword laced website that really has no depth and content and is filled with ads, you’ll probably get a lot of impressions but very few clicks. To be blunt, web users are getting tired of the number of sites that are simply designed to get Google Ad clicks and thus anything that looks like it has no content will get a very poor click through ratio – I do note though, sites with millions of visits will sadly still get a decent amount of clicks!

That’s not to say that keywords and key phrases aren’t important; good use of key phrases that are natural and compliment your content are very important.

As an example, for this site, I would use phrases “this will help you increase Google Adsense Impressions” or “this helps increase your click through ratio” as they are both relevant to the content. A better trick though is to try and ask questions, especially ones that you think people will search for. So I’d probably be better of asking the questions

“How can I increase Google Adsense impressions?” “how can I increase my click through ration” or even ‘How do I increase my Google Adsense income?” – the important thing is to actually answer these questions in your content, otherwise again you lose trust.

One thing a lot of people do not do is use some of the tools that Google offers. One of my favorite tools is the Google Adsense Channels. One of my favorite sites I use is Webanswers, so I have set up a channel for each major category in Webanswers and this allows me to view where I am getting impressions and clicks and thus understand where I need to focus when I use Webanswers – this really makes me use my time productively and ultimately increases my Google Adsense income.

It takes a lot of work to get the best out of the Google Adsense tools though, and there really is a lot of trial and error. As an example, there is a tool that is called the competitive Ad filter – this allows you to filter the ads of certain sites and can be useful if used correctly; however it’s possible to over use this tool and reduce your impressions and clicks! What I tend to do is to use certain tools and filters and analyze my results and then change a few thing and see what changes – it takes a good six months to really get decent results!

Google Anaytics are also very useful and give you an amazing amount of information on traffic, keywords used to get to your sites, where the traffic is coming from and much much more.

So, how do I increase my click through ratio?

This really is the hardest question to answer. The above techniques will undoubtedly help, but the biggest thing is to try and get in the mind of the reader and understand why exactly they would want to click on an ad on your website. There are no answers that will be right for everyone, but I find that by creating decent content on a subject that has high demand or is a niche subject will increase impressions. If your content is very useful and the Ads also have the potential of adding value to the reader then you will get clicks. That’s the key – relevancy – and that is the hardest part as you don’t have full control over the Google Ads, Quality, content oriented writing, with well placed relevant ads will get clicks.

So, how can increase Google Adsense impressions?

The simple answer is increase traffic and you’ll increase Google Adsense impressions. Easy? Sadly no – if it was that easy then we’d all have millions of readers daily. There are some methods that will increase your traffic, and while they do require work, the effort is definitely worth it.

The ideas are easy, and to summarize them:

• Actively participate in forums and blogs – the key here is active – build up a decent reputation and get people to trust your input.
• Find a niche – there are plenty of niches that can get you a lot of traffic, and amazingly some of these niches are barely covered. As an example, during the recent Soccer World Cup, I created about 20 websites dedicated to the tournament, and got 10s of thousands of total traffic over the four weeks – it is a short term increase, but for that period I had far more impressions and clicks.

For a lot more detail visit my hub…how to increase backlinks.

Conclusion

We all want simple and easy ways to improve our Google Adsense income but the truth of the matter is that there are no simple and easy ways – it takes work, and a lot of know how to really improve the number of clicks you get on your Ads. Intelligent design, clever blending of ads, and the ability to grab the attention of the reader and make them trust you is important. At the end of the day hard work will pay off.