This is a guest post by Spencer Haws from Niche Pursuits. Guest post guidelines here.

I have been building niche websites for a few years now. However, it has only been about the past year and a half where I really started to make great money with Google Adsense currently over $10,000 per month. In fact, I am now making enough just from Google Adsense to work full-time from home and support my wife and 3 kids with plenty of money left over. In the process of building these niche sites and testing out different ad layouts, I have learned how to maximize my Adsense earnings. Today, I am going to share with you how to dramatically increase your earnings with Adsense.

How To Double Your Income With A Few Tweaks


I often get asked by my blog readers to take a look at their niche websites. They want to know what they are doing “wrong” and why they aren’t making any money. The most common reason is because they have picked bad keywords to target. Either keywords with much too high competition or that don’t pay enough. However, there still are plenty of people that pick great keywords and are ranking well and getting decent amounts of traffic, but simply have not optimized their sites for maximum click through rates (CTRs).

In the past few months, I have helped several people double the earnings on their sites with just a few little tweaks. Since I can’t look at everyone’s site, I am going to lay out the main principles that you need to understand to maximize the earnings on your own website. Also, this is not only for Google Adsense – these principles can also help you maximize Amazon, Clickbank, or any other products you are selling.

Follow the Eyeballs – 4 Placements to Consider

First, you need to know where the eyeballs are going on your website. Once you know where the most common places for people to look when viewing a website; you need to place your ads (or any other offers) in those prime locations. Here are a few locations to consider when placing your ads:

  • Above the Fold. This simply means anything that a visitor can see on your site without scrolling down. So, in general your ads placed above the fold will get higher click through rates than those further down the page.
  • Common Navigation Locations. Visitors to your sites will tend to look at the top of the page where navigation bars tend to be. Link units often work really well just below your top navigation bar. In addition they will look at the sidebars because these commonly contain links to other pages on websites.
  • Within the content. Ads placed within the content AND above the fold by far get the highest click through rates for me. A great option for Adsense is a medium sized rectangle unit placed directly under the title of your article. I tend to have the ads right or left justified with the text wrapping around. I will provide examples below.
  • At the end of the content. If someone reads through your entire article, this is a great place to put some ads. You can test out both regular ad units or link units. I tend to use link units at the end of my articles. Either way, these get a much lower click through than ads above the fold, but ads at the end of your content can help round out a great strategy.

The other strategy that I need to mention for success is blending your ads to match the colors and feel of your site. I have heard some people that like to make their ads stick out like a sore thumb, but I personally like to make my ads look like part of my site. Not only does this provide a more professional look, but I also believe it helps maximize earnings on your site.

I do have just one additional thing to mention when considering the colors of your ads. You need to realize that in the “old days” of the internet, all hyperlinks were BLUE! Even though links are of all colors now, people are still trained to know that a blue underlined word is something that can be clicked on. So, whenever possible I like to make sure that the title of my ads are blue. I don’t always do this, so its a judgment call; but I believe if you can make your title blue on your ads – you should.

3 Examples of Adsense Layouts

Here are 3 Adsense layouts with my comments for improvements on them. These are NOT my websites. I also point out what has been done well on each site. This should give you some great examples of exactly where you can place ads on your site to maximize your earnings. (Please click the images to see a larger version to read my comments easier).

Layout #1

Layout #2

Layout #3

Now just because you CAN place all over your site doesn’t mean that you have to. You need to consider if too many ads will turn off your readers or make your site look too unprofessional for your own tastes. So, just because I have shown you all the prime locations to place Adsense ads on your site does not mean that you always should. This is something you have to consider for each of your sites.

Finally, what I have touched on today really can turn a “losing” site into a winner. So, if you are interested in maximizing your earnings with Adsense (or any other type of earnings), then I highly recommend that you consider the advice I have shared here.

So, what do you think? I am interested in hearing your thoughts on what I have shared with you today. Do you have any additional questions? Do you have any of your own tips that you would like to share on this subject? Let me know below!

– Spencer Haws

About The Author: Spencer Haws is a six figure earning Google Adsense expert. If you want to learn more about how he makes over $10,000 per month with niche websites you can download his free step by step guide here.