6 Way To increase Earnings

Welcome to our first-ever guest blog post on Inside AdSense. We're
thrilled to have none other than Blogging Evangelist himself, Darren
Rowse, to share his expert tips on AdSense optimisation. Darren first
discovered blogging in 2002, and initially thought he'd turn it into a
hobby to supplement his full-time job. These days, Darren runs a
handful of successful blogs, his most popular being Digital Photography
School, and has co-authored a book. He also posts regular tips and
advice on ProBlogger.net, a respected and successful resource for
bloggers around the world.We recently caught up with Darren at his home
office in Melbourne Australia, and asked him about his experience with
Google AdSense.October 4, 2003 is a date I'll never forget - that was a
day that my life changed. It was the day that I discovered AdSense and
added it to my very first blog. I added that first advertisement to my
blog on a whim, with what I thought was the lofty dream that I might be
able to pay for my blogs hosting costs. Over 5 years later, those
little text ads have paid my mortgage, fed my family, and enabled me to
move my blogging from a hobby, to a part time job, to a full time job
and beyond.It's not been an 'overnight success' by any means but as
I've learned to use it, AdSense has been one of my highest online
income streams. My #1 Tip for Using AdSenseIf I had to narrow my advice
on using AdSense down to a single word it would be 'experiment'. Let me
explain. That day back in October of 2003 I had no idea on what I was
doing. The next day when I logged in to see how much I'd earned it was
barely enough to buy me a coffee. However, on that day I decided that
those few dollars in earnings showed potential and I determined within
myself to learn how best to use AdSense to grow that income. Almost
everything I've learned since that day has been through trial and
error. It has been a long process of testing and tracking results. You
see, while there are a few good home truths that seem to work on most
sites, every website that I've used AdSense on is different. Some
things work well on some sites, but it is rare to find something that
will work on every site. As a result I tend to experiment with my use
of AdSense in these six ways:
- Ad Position - Most AdSense publishers have seen the neat little heat
map that AdSense has produced to show where ads work best on websites.
In general it works fairly well and is a great place to start, but make
sure you experiment with new positions for ads and see what works best
for your site. Hint: Ads near (or even surrounded by) content have
worked the best. I've also found ads at the end of content perform
well. People get to the end of reading your article and then are
looking for something to do or click -- an ad positioned there can work
well.
- Numbers of Ads - More ads earn more than less ads... don't they?
Unfortunately it isn't always the case. Test different combinations and
numbers of ad units on your site. There's usually a 'tipping point'
where you hit a ceiling of how many ads your users will accept -- push
it too far and you could hurt reader engagement, traffic, and in the
long run your earnings. On the flip side of this, don't be afraid to
have more than one or two ads on a page, particularly if you have long
pages with lots of content.
- Ad Design - I can still see the first ads that I first used on my
blog back in 2003. I can still see them because they fried their
imprints into my retina -- they were so LOUD! I figured that the ads
would do best if people noticed them so I went for the most crazy color
scheme I could come up with. Over the years I began to experiment with
different combinations of ads and found that more subtle or blended ads
tended to work best for me. Having said that, you can sometimes blend
too much, to the point that the ads become invisible to your reader. So
test different colors and designs of ads to see which work best. Use
the ad rotating tool that AdSense offer publishers to rotate different
designs to work against ad blindness among regular readers.
- Ad Sizes - AdSense offers us a range of different ad sizes, so
experiment with them all to see which works best. Hint: Some might
think that the bigger the ad the better it performs. This is not always
true. For example, I found that the 'large rectangle' ad (336 x 280)
didn't work as well for me as the smaller 'medium rectangle' ad (300 x
250). It turns out that more advertisers (at least those in my niche)
prefer the medium rectangle ad as it's a more standard ad unit size
than the larger one. Again, the key is to experiment and see what works
best for your site and niche.
- Ad Formats - I've found that choosing image and text ads works better
than just choosing text ads, but that's not the only choice we get as
AdSense publishers. AdSense also allow us to run link units, AdSense
for search, etc. I've found that each of these different formats will
work differently from site to site. I've had blogs where the link unit
ads were the best performing units on the site while on other sites it
didn't really perform at all. You'll never know unless you test it!
- Which Content Converts? - One of the best advances that AdSense has
made in the last year has been the integration between it and Google
Analytics. To be honest I'm still digging into the metrics that this
opens up, but the insight that this gives has amazing potential to
increase earnings. By looking at this data you can see what type of
content is converting and what isn't. You can also see what type of
traffic is converting and what isn't. For example, I've found that
search engine referrals are converting better than traffic from social
media sites on one of my blogs. Knowing this is powerful as it tells
you what type of ads to serve to what types of traffic, what type of
promotion to put effort towards, and what type of content to write more
of.Test Track Test Track....There are books, blogs, articles, forums,
and other kinds of resources available to AdSense publishers to help
them learn how to use AdSense better. However, in my experience the
best way to learn is to 'do'. Put time aside to try new things and then
put more time aside to review what you learn. But don't leave it at
that. When you learn something -- test it against something else (do
some research on A/B split testing to learn how to do this). This
continual learning will help you to grow in your own expertise of
AdSense and increase your earnings.Posted by Darren Rowse - Blogging
Evangelist and AdSense publisher

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