AdSense make money

This page is the third part of our AdSense make money guide which includes 36 tips and tricks to help you generate revenue from AdSense. This part of our AdSense make money guide focuses on A) How to increase Earnings-Per-Click (EPC), and B) Important things nobody tells you about (as we call it "vital but often neglected know-how").

Tips and tricks described in this AdSense make money guide are proven to work and based on many years of experience with AdSense.

This page is the third part of our AdSense make money guide. The following links take you to the first and second part:

Make money with Google AdSense (part 1 - introduction - 4 pillars)
Make money with AdSense (part 2 - tips & tricks - impressions & CTR)

Now let get to the details.

AdSense make money guide - tips & tricks - EPC

This part of our AdSense make money guide deals with strategies focused on How to increase Earnings-Per-Click (EPC). The term Earnings-Per-Click (EPC) is closely related to another term called Cost-Per-Click (CPC). When your web site visitor clicks an ad, the advertiser has to pay something to you through Google. He calls that Cost-Per-Click (CPC). After Google deduct their share from this payment, they pay out Earnings-Per-Click (EPC) to you. Your goal is to maximize this per click cost/earning.

Note, we talk primarily about Earnings-Per-Click (EPC) in our AdSense make money guide which relates to so-called Pay-Per-Click (PPC) advertisement. Although some ads can pay you when they just get displayed on your web site even without anyone clicking them, vast majority of nowaday's ads is based on the Pay-Per-Click concept. You get paid only when someone clicks an ad. Our strategies apply to both schemes, but because PPC is the most used on-line marketing concept today, we focus especially on PPC.

Find niche

You can use AdSense to make money on a general web site with topics on everything under the sun but having niche in some area helps a lot. That is because AdSense advertisers have to pay premium to bid on a niche site. If you have many advertisers but only a few good niche web sites, there is more competition on the advertisers (AdWords) side. This means higher earnings per click for you!

There are two sides of the coin though. Advertisers in investments, mortgages, loans, real estate, health insurance pay more per click than cheaper niches, but it is also very difficult to rank high in search engine terms with a web site dedicated to for example mortgages. You can compensate for this disadvantage by getting into less competitive niche and rank higher.

The best advice is, if the main goal of your web site is AdSense make money, choose a topic that you know a lot about so you can write a lot of quality content for your web site.

Content is the king

This has been said many times in many places, but we have to say it again. Of course, there are many MFA (Made For AdSense) web sites out there that have poor content and still make money. But their job is getting harder every day. Web sites with quality content constantly increase their traffic and get indexed by search engines. Google is extending immense effort to crack down on MFA web sites. Some AdSense accounts are said to have been shut down by Google because they were used on MFA web sites.

Avoid inappropriate content

This is probably obvious, but better to mention this AdSense make money tip than be sorry later. Google AdSense is not designed to be used on xxx web sites. You can still make money on such web sites, but you have to find another ad service.

Avoid bid gap

Bid gap is something that not many people talk about, but it can cause lower total AdSense earnings and underutilization of your potential. Bid gap is the difference between the high-paying and low-paying ads on your page. Bid gap often happens when you display too many ads on a page.

Be selective about keywords

This AdSense make money tip related to EPC deals with selection of keywords for your content. Let's say you have already decided to develop a web site about mortgages. But, should you have a web site about "mortgages", or "mortgage applications", or "mortgage refinancing"?

Depending on which of these three you choose, AdSense will display different ads on your web site, and your Earnings-Per-Click (EPC) will differ as well.

AdSense make money - tips & tricks - vital but often neglected know-how

This is the fourth section of our AdSense make money guide which explains some aspects of making money online that do not fit into the previous three chapters but are no less important.

Forget not about RSS feeds and video

Did you know you can make money with AdSense through your RSS feeds? Yes, you can. Many people focus on just the AdSense for Content ad units. Some developers take advantage of the AdSense for Search ad units, and the AdSense for Feeds units are used very little. The same applies to AdSense for Video. AdSense for Feeds is a fairly new product by AdSense. Log into your AdSense account and go to the AdSense Setup screen to learn about it. Although RSS feeds will not contribute significantly to your AdSense revenues, every cent is worth if it is "free", no?

Besides the money part, RSS feeds also contributes to your traffic. Allowing people to subscribe to your site feed, you are practically guaranteeing yourself repeat readers.

Get your own domain

Ok, this is a very important tip in our AdSense make money guide. Having your own domain (http://www.YourSite.com) compared to free web hosting (http://thefreedomainhost.com/~memberXYZ/home.html) has three main benefits.

1. Professionality: Free domain web sites are often plaqued with banners and pop-ups. These take up space on your web pages and eat away from the money you can make with AdSense. Having your own domain also looks more professional.

2. Reliability: If your free domain provider goes out of business, so does your address and your web site. If you have your own domain, you can move it any time and not be left at mercy of your free domain provider. Having your own domain makes you independent.

3. AdSense rules: AdSense implemented policies in late 2008 by which AdSense no longer accepts sites created on free domains.

4. Search engine ranking: Have you ever seen a free domain site to pop up at the top of search engine results? Rarely.

Getting your own domain is not expensive, you can get domains for as little as $3 per year. You can get hosting for as little as $2/month.

Tell Google AdSense what is important

Nobody would like to use AdSense to make money if the ads that display on web pages were not relevant to their content. People would not click them. In addition to the right web page design and content, you can also tell Google what is important using the google_ad_section_start html tag. You can use this tag to improve AdSense ad targeting which in turn enhances your Click-Through-Rate (CTR). See here for more details about the Google Ad Section tag.

Avoid down time, be up 100%!

This AdSense make money factor is often neglected but it is very important. Avoid free hosting. Get good and reliable hosting provider because any event of down time can cost you a lot. You loose not only visitors and clicks while you are down, but any down time also hurts you in terms of search engine ranking. When a search engine crawler comes to your web site and finds out it is down, it adjusts the crawl rate down (See How to find out the last time Google crawled and indexed a website).

Publish regularly

This AdSense make money tip is imperative for web site to be successful. Both people and search engines too will only keep on returning to your web site if they think there will be something new on your web site when they return. Especially from a search engine's perspective "No new content = dead place." If you stop publishing content both your visitors and search engines will stop reading and indexing your web site and start reading someone else’s.

Publishing regularly does not mean that you have to keep on writing articles every day. First, you can set up a Comments section under your articles, and people will add content as they come. Second, you can write a number of articles in your free time and then adjust their release timing. Modern content management systems (CMS) allow you to set a date on which you want your articles to go live.

SEO, SEO, SEO

You have been waiting for this AdSense make money tip, weren't you? SEO or Search Engine Optimization is a technique that helps you to rank better in search engines. There are two kinds of SEO:

A) on-site SEO,
B) off-site SEO.

We have already mentioned many ideas related to both. Your web page design, layout, structure, ad placement, and others are all on-site SEO. Building links is off-site SEO. If you have time and skills, you can do SEO yourself. People have written thick books on SEO, and you can find them easily via Google. If you think serious business, it might be worth to pay a SEO professional to do the job for you (contact us, we can help).

Use analytics, analyze your data

Whether you hire a professional SEO consultant or not, you need to analyze your data. There are two very easy tools that are available to you for FREE.

AdSense channels. You might have noticed that when you log into your AdSense account, there is a tab called "Channels". Each AdSense ad unit can be assigned channel which you can then use to measure impressions, Click-Through-Rate (CTR), and earnings. Do use channels to learn about trends in your traffic and ad units effectivity.

Google Analytics (http://www.google.com/analytics). Google Analytics is a great tool to analyze your traffic. Google Analytics tells you where your visitors come from, how long they spend at your site, what pages they visit most, where they enter and leave your web site, your bounce rate, and a lot of other valuable information that you can use to optimize your content, layout, and design.

You can also sign up for web site traffic counters which give you a lot of valuable information about your visitors such as their origin, screen resolution, browser, and simply anything you need.

Do not be afraid of experiments

We already mentioned it, but let's voice this AdSense make money tip again: Google AdSense is about experimenting. You can't make money with AdSense without experimenting. If some AdSense units makes you $10/day it does not mean it can't make $20. If you loose only one dollar per day due to underutilization of your potential, add it up to find out how much it is over five years ($1825). Maybe all it takes to make the extra dollar per day is to move something a little to the left in your web page template or give it different colors. Try it out and document your changes for future reference. You can always reverse your changes.

Do not get upset by low PageRank

Many web site owners loose too much sleep over having low page rank (PR). Professionals tell you not to worry, and they are right. Although it makes a difference whether your home page page rank is 1 or 7, it really does not matter as much whether it is 4 or 5. Here are the reasons:

1. The page rank which you get from various on-line tools, usually measured on a scale from 0 to 10, is only a very rough and imprecise approximation of the true page rank.
2. Each page on your site has its own page rank. If your home page has PR 8, it does not mean all pages on your web site have the same. They can have zero or not even be indexed.

Use page rank values only as a measure of tendency. If your page rank was zero several months ago, and it is 4 now, then you know you are doing good job and you have the potential to "AdSense make money"!

Do not get discouraged

Do not get discouraged if you do not start making money after a week or even a month. AdSense takes time and experimenting. Many people never see any real money from AdSense because they set up a web site and think they will start earning from day one. Depending on your efforts, it takes a few months for a new web site to get fully indexed, build its credibility, and start building serious traffic. There is some learning curve on your part too. As you experiment with ideas, design, optimization, ads, you get better at it, but it takes some time. We can only say: Perseverance pays off, hang tight and do not throw the towel into the ring too soon.

Make more money without AdSense

Some times it happens that AdSense just does not work with your brilliant idea and business concept. We have seen people complaining about low payouts from AdSense no matter what they do and how hard they try. There are many other services that are worth trying, for example: Chitika, Clicksor, ValueClick, Fastclick, Yahoo Publisher Network, and many others. After all, making money on-line is about experimenting.

Thank you for reading our AdSense make money guide. If you follow this guide, you can be sure you WILL MAKE MONEY WITH ADSENSE. We hope you found this Google AdSense guide helpful, and if you did please leave a comment either in our discussion forum or via email (see below).

If you like, you can download this AdSense make money guide here: [under construction, pls, check back or email us].

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Note, AdSense earnings is taxable income, see How to report and tax Google AdSense income.