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).
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
Lots of people wrap the ads around the content..this is prove to work wonders..
“Black Seo Guy “Signing Off”
Yep, this is proven to be one of the highest CTR placements that there is.
Great tips! But what about your rubric for determining a profitable keyword that you make your site about?
Whats the average “exact” searches you try to get and the avg cpc price for it?
I would also be interested in seeing how you find profitable keywords to build your small niche sites around. It’s an interesting topic not covered by a lot of blogs. I’ve heard people mention Market Samurai. Anyone suggest it? 🙂
Dino – Great question! Choosing profitable keywords is definitely the MOST important thing you can do when building niche websites (whether for adsense or not). The minimum searches I look for is 1,000 EXACT match searches within the US (not globally). Of course I like to target higher traffic keywords – but 1,000 is a minimum. The CPC I look for is $1 or more.
I go into much greater detail in my free guide that is linked to in the post above. The entire guide is about picking winning keywords.
I’ll have to try the one that looks like a menu below the header on the sites I use Adsense upon. I do the above the content and sidebars, and those usually do quite well, especially on my red and white site where the Adsense blocks blend perfectly.
Kristi, that’s great! Definitely try out the link units below your header – these can give a nice boost to your earnings for sure.
Great advice but I’ll be careful about trying to go too far with trying to squeeze every dollar. Google has been known for getting rid of accts for no reason
I think I haven�t specified my niche enough and am averaging about 25 visits a day for my amazon affiliate site. How much traffic does it take to get to a site before it REALLY gets valuable to you?
Assume a 1% – 2% conversion rate on all visitors that come. Then you have an idea of what you need.
i.e. 1000 people a day = 10 sales a day x 7% etc. etc.
(you can calculate out roughly how much you can make with more traffic based on the sale price of the item)
Sam – it is definitely important to have a laser focused niche selection. I like to target 1 primary keyword. Well, since the cost of building a website is so minimal – earning $1/day on a site makes it profitable. Its nothing to get real excited about until you realize that you can replicate this many times over. I have lots of sites that earn more than $1/day – but that much is certainly profitable. This can easily be achieved with 25 visitors/day.
I was wondering if you have heard anything about Adsense CTRs dropping like crazy around March 28th, and continuing to be low to this day? I had my best month in March and I was finally feeling like I was on the right track to making a decent income between all of my sites. Then my CTR just dropped about 30% overnight and it’s been that way ever since. I’ve been researching this for hours and apparently there are tons of people that have noticed the same thing, and most people think it has to do with the Panda update somehow.
My traffic numbers are the same, and the US traffic vs. foreign traffic is the same. The only thing I’ve noticed different is that some of my popular pages are getting less traffic, whereas less popular pages are now getting more traffic, so that could be it. I’ve also noticed some untargeted ads showing up, whereas I never had this problem before (except on one site).
In conclusion, I’ve gone from being confident I was on the right career path to desperately looking for another career all in the span of 2 weeks. Anyone else?
I personally noticed no change in CTRs or traffic since March 28th. So, I can’t explain what may have happened in your case.
I’ve had problems in the past placing an Adsense unit below the post title. Sometimes I put an image in the beginning of the post. When I float the Adsense unit to the side the image below doesn’t fit well.
I’m a huge fan of this plugin: OIOPublisher check out that one if you want to better manage your ads on the site.
Hi Chris,
Quick question: what if I already have a top horizontal menu bar that only has three links so there’s room for some Adsense ads to the right of the last menu link? Would you put the ad block there, to make it appear as if it were part of the menu?
Another option is to add the Adsense block as a separate bar right under the menu.
Which approach would you take? Or what else would you do?
Sorry for the slow response Aloys. If I understand you correctly, it might be worth trying to place a link unit to the right of your existing menu. However, I’ve never tried that – so test it out and then test out placing a link unit directly under (as explained in the article). This would be the approach I would take – test them both.
[…] I found Spencer Haws from Niche Pursuits when he wrote a guest post on Make Money on the Internet called “How to Maximize Your Adsense Earnings.” […]
I would be interested in hearing what you consider being a “good” ctr. I’ve seen numbers on the order of 3-5%.
Spencer I love your examples. Would you be willing to share some of the site addresses to one or maybe two of your successful niche sites you refer to so we might take a closer look at what you are doing?
Cheers!
I don’t think he’ll do that because of services like Whorush.com etc. where if someone knows even one of your URL’s they can find every other site you own for that specific publisher ID.
He kinda spells it out clearly in the post and with the images above.
Hi
This is really a very good information about Adsence earnings. I do agree that keywords do effect the earnings.The features listed in the article were well chosen. Thanks for the information.
I believe that in order to make money with adsense, choosing the right niche and low competition is the key. Of course, tweaking abit the ad design and placement would help to increase the CTR and earning.
Spencer, I wonder how long you spend to build these website (Adding content) and how many websites you have to earn this figure every month?
Great post Spencer.
Regards,
Lee
Agreed. Niche selection and keyword choice are the most important factors to Adsense success. My current portfolio of “niche” websites I began building almost 2 years ago. I now have about 200 sites.
Spencer, great to see your guest post on Chris blog. 🙂 You are a great inspiration about making profit out of Adsense.
You mentioned that “I tend to have the ads right or left justified with the text wrapping around.” Have you tested out which one would have better click rate?
There are Pros and Cons for either one as end user perspective:
Right Justified – readers see the ads first before reading the text flow and may click it right the way. 🙂
Left Justified – readers tend to ignore the ads (better user experience)
What’s your take for this?
What a great adsense maximizing formula. I am going to implement on my blog right away, most bloggers online unknowingly to them have been leaving lots of adsense goldmine on the table.
I was looking for a way to maximize my adsense. This post is really helpful to a newbie like me. You have even gone further to give free ebook and3 wordpress themes. This is great.
I am also newbie in adsense. You answered all my questions about adsense.I want to have your free ebook.. thanks for this great post!
Excellent post. I just found this at the right time when I am trying to optimize my Kenyan site for Google Adsense. I am very delighted to have found your blog Chris because you are such an inspiration in my quest to make my first six figure online. Cheers.
Hi there, these are some great tips, I just started my Google Adsense account. I’m not familiar how to work with it.thanks for this great post.
Hey Chris, it would be nice to see/read how much you’ve made through Adsense in 2010 from the netbook review blog you recently sold.
Spencer, are you using adsense channels on your sites. Or are niche sites small enough to just study the site numbers as a whole?
$10000 per month, that is incredible
10,000 USD a month this is my goal, i like learn from peaple has been increase my goal. Thank you very much for your share.
Hi Chris,
Great article and tips! I’m just starting out with Google Adsense and Amazon Affiliates, do you usually use both on the same mini niche sites?
Thanks,
Young
Yah I’ll use both if the niche is related.
Thanks for the reply! Another question for you, I’m in the middle of writing a product review post, should I use a third-person point of view or 1st person point of view? I do own the product but was wondering which you think will work better for sales conversion?
Hi Spencer, Thank you very much for this great information on Google Adsense.
Can you look at my website? I am hardly earning $1/day from adsense ads. As you suggested, My ads are on prime locations only. Where I am making mistakes.
Please check it once. It will be very helpful to me.
Hi Chris, why don’t you use Adsense now? Maybe I missed it somewhere in comments
I do use Adsense actually 😀
Thanks Chris for this valuable information. By using some of your tricks, I increased my earnings up to 50%. Thanks a lot..
Happy to help
Great tips, but I�m wondering – did these AdSense maximization techniques change over time? It has been 3 years already.
I would also like to ask – I have a website with blue, red and grey colours. Maybe using green for links in text ads wouldn�t be a bad idea, would be?
great work. is content length matter in adsense earning?
This post may be some years ago, but is still very useful nice sharing
Ads within posts are working really well for me. Those are are attracting maximum user engagement. Also Experimentation is a key here. Every website is different and you have to keep trying new formats.
Great tips! But what about your rubric for determining a profitable keyword that you make your site about?
Whats the average �exact� searches you try to get and the avg cpc price for it?