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My monthly income report won’t be out until tomorrow because of the delay in the eBay Partner Network reporting, but I can tell you that last month, June 2008, was a record month for Google Adsense earnings. While I took apart Google in yesterday’s post, my main issue is dealing with things on the Adwords side, they have been very good to me on the Adsense side. June 2008 Adsense earnings came in at $1,492.96, a record by nearly $100.

The single best site for Adsense earned $711.33 and an additional $200+ from TripAdvisor.com bringing the total earnings for my top site in the travel niche to over $900 for the month. All this comes from a site that gets less than 300 visitors a day on average. If you haven’t heard me say it before I’ll say it again, travel is an incredible niche for Adsense. If you aren’t doing something in travel and monetizing your site with Adsense, you are leaving money on the table.

Usually when I post results such as this I get a ton of questions on how I did it, how many sites I have, how can you possibly earn that much from Adsense when I can only make $3 a day, where should I place my ads and so forth (by the way, there are several people who make that $1,400 every day with Adsense). You’re in luck this time (and so am I) because I’ve written a couple of long posts on how to get the most from Google Adsense. The first link is part 1 and part 2 is here. So, make sure you read those 2 posts before asking any of those, “How did you do that” questions.

The full income report will be out tomorrow.

In yesterday’s post about how to make money with Adsense I covered how to find the right niche that’s going to pay you on a consistent, long term basis. Today I’m going to cover how to place ads on your site to generate the most revenue and how to SEO your site so you will get the most relevant ads. The more relevant the ads, the more people will click on them and of course, the more you will earn.

All this comes with a warning though. You do want to maximize your earnings and generate the most revenue you can with Adsense, but you never want to trick people into clicking on ads or ever encourage people to click on your ads. If you try and fool Google, you will be caught and your account will be banned. Please read the terms of service for Adsense and follow them, because your revenue depends on it.

You certainly have to follow Google’s terms of service for Adsense, but there are lots of things you can to do place ads prominently so people will see them and have the best chance to find something that interests them. And that’s the mindset you need to develop when using Adsense to generate income. You want your advertising to be interesting, relevant to your visitors and in a place where they don’t have to look for it. If you just go plastering Adsense blocks top-dead-center on your site, you may generate some revenue, but not as much as you could be generating. Think of serving your visitors, not just seeing how much you can earn from them clicking on ads.

Google Adsense Secret #1

The best place to put your Adsense units to generate the most interest in the ads displayed is right within the content of your site so your text actually has to wrap around the ads. If there is any secret to Adsense, this is certainly the biggest one. If your visitors have to read around the outside of your Adsense block, they may have your ads in their sight for 15 to 30 seconds depending on how much text you have and how fast they read. That’s an eternity on the net and gives a huge advantage to ads that are placed outside of the content of your site. Other placements of Adsense will never generate the revenue this kind of placement will.

In general I have not had good luck with right sidebar type placements of Adsense because they are the opposite of what you are trying to do with in content placements. Visitors have to be looking around your page to click on ads in the right sidebar and they generally have a very low click through rate.

Google Adsense Secret #2 

To make your ads placed in the content of your site get an even better chance of being clicked on, you will want to make the background and the border color of your Adsense unit the same color as the page background they wil be sitting on. This has the effect of removing the borders so it looks like you just have a few text ads floating in the middle of your page content. The border acts as a separation of your ad from the content wrapping around it, so get rid of it and let your ads blend in with your text.

The screenshot below shows the Adsense layout on my best earning site so you can see exactly how I have things set up. This is a tried and true set up that has been working for me for about 4 years and it places the ads right in front of the visitor for the maximum amount of time.

This is another mindset change you have to get used to in order to maximize earnings with Adsense. The more you make your ads stand out by creating wild color schemes, off color links (I never use anything other than standard link blue) and ads that say click me, click me, the less those ads will be clicked. When you make your ads less noticeable and seem like they were meant to be there, the more they will get clicked.  I regularly get a 15 to 17% CTR on the site pictured above with this layout.

The last thing I want to cover in this post is SEO for Adsense. This isn’t SEO for your site, it’s SEO for Adsense and what you can do to get Google to serve you the most relevant ads possible. John Pratt sort of stole my thunder with his comment yesterday on how to set up your title, description and keywords, but I’ll expand on what he mentioned a little.

What you want to include besides great content on your specific pages are a keyword rich title, a keyword rich meta description, meta keywords relevant to your content (I still use meta keywords, but only include 4 or 5 phrases at the most) and a keyword rich H1 title at the top of the page above your content. This all helps Google read your page and serve you ads that fit your content and many believe your page title is probably the most important tag, so make sure to include relevant keyword phrases in it. Putting your keywords as close to the beginning of your page title as possible will also help.

Sometimes though, no matter what you do, Google doesn’t seem to be able to read your content correctly and they serve you completely irrelevant ads (This sometimes happens even on well established pages). You also at times may write about something that’s not that relevant to your site or you may mention something, such as your competitors, that you certainly don’t want ads appearing for. There is something you can do to force Google to read only certain sections of your page if they don’t seem to be able to serve relevant ads.

You can target certain sections of your content in effect telling Google only to read specific portions of your page. By using these tags at the beginning and end of text you think is most relevant to your page, Google will serve ads based on what you have between the first and second tag.

<!– google_ad_section_start –>
<!– google_ad_section_end –>

You can even use this on multiple sections of your page, skipping areas you don’t want affecting the kinds of ads that show up. It is best to use as large an area of content as possible so Google has a lot of keywords to determine relevancy.

I’m thinking this could have been a 3 part series on Adsense rather than 2 parts, so I hope you haven’t had too much to read in this post.

Try experimenting with the techniques mentioned above and in part one of the Adsense series and see if you don’t have a nice improvement in your earnings. Of course I can’t guarantee you anything will happen because there are so many factors that go into doing well with Adsense, but these principles have helped me generate a fairly steady Adsense income for several years.

I get questions and comments on a fairly regular basis asking me how I manage to earn a pretty consistent $1,300 per month using Google Adsense. They usually come from people who lament the fact that they only make $68.52 or some such amount per month and they want to know my secret for earning what I do. In light of that, here is part 1 of a 2 post series on how to earn the most from Adsense. This first post will cover what kind of niches and keywords to target and the next post will cover how to optomize your pages and Adsense placement to get the most clicks.

I just want to preface this post by saying that I’m no Google Adsense expert, there are people who make thousands per day and I’m not one of them. However, I have been able to discover what works quite well for me and I’ll share it in these 2 posts, but first, let’s clear up one huge misconception about Adsense. Very high paying Adsense keywords aren’t necessarily the best keywords to be basing a niche site around.The main reason for this is because if someone is paying $50 per click for one of those mesothelioma lawyer type keywords they probably don’t have their ads displaying on Google’s content network, and if they do, it is on a very selective basis and you and your sites aren’t in that picture.

You probably don’t stand a chance of building a site about mesothelioma, laser hair removal, or DUI lawyers and getting those very high paying ads to display on your site, much less get your site ranked in the search engines any longer. People and businesses who can afford to spend $50 to $100 per click to get traffic to their site are more than likely hiring someone who knows what they’re doing when it comes to Adwords, so it’s pretty certain they aren’t wasting their ads on your made for Adsense site.

To make long term consistent money from Adsense, you must base your site on keywords that pay relatively high, get lots of traffic, attract shoppers and are not based on a fad movements or lawsuit of the day clubs. When I say shoppers I mean people who are in a frame of mind to be looking at many different aspects of or products in the niche you are targeting. The more people are in a shopping mode, the more ads they will be clicking on, because they heven’t decided to buy yet. Remember, they’re looking, just like you are looking when you go out shopping for a pair of shoes and try on 15 pairs before you buy. Now translate each one of those shoe fittings into a click and you get my point.

That’s why I like the travel niche so much for Adsense. There are niches within this niche that I do very well in and won’t reveal, but in general, building a travel based web site is a good way to earn substantial revenue from Adsense. It works for the same reason mentioned above, people shop when they look for travel. Let’s say someone is planning a trip to Seattle, they will look at all kinds of things related to their trip, from several places to stay, to restaurants, to activities and attractions to airfare and more. If they don’t find what they’re looking for from an ad they clicked on your site they may hit the back button and click another ad on your site.

If you have a comprehensive enough content site about vacationing in Seattle, or Northern California, or Las Vegas, or wherever, they may spend a lot of time on your site and do substantial planning right from your very own informational pages that have Adsense and other revenue generating advertisments on them. Occassionally I will have pages that get a more than 100% CTR for Adsense, meaning people are hitting the back button and clicking more ads on my pages generating more revenue.

Finding the right niche for Adsense is the foundation for earning consistently high revenue. If you think about what you’re targeting, brainstorm on subjects where people spend a lot of money and therefore merchants are willing to spend a lot of advertising dollars to attract consumers. Travel is great because people are spending hundreds or thousands booking flights, finding places to stay, cars to rent, etc. On the other hand a website about your Beanie Baby collection wouldn’t be such a great idea because they aren’t a fad any longer and they cost $5 or $10 each, not something where an advertiser is willing to pay $2 a click on Adwords for.

In part 2 of How To Earn The Most From Google Adsense I’ll cover how to optomize your site and Adsense placement to get the most clicks and earn the most revenue. 

Allright, time to put on your thinking cap and figure out where people spend lots of their hard earned money for the long term. Get that down and you’ve got a great foundation to earn a nice income from Adsense.

Google Adsense for many online marketers can almost be considered free money. It is the golden egg of revenue on the net. All you have to do is have a decent site that has content related to high paying keywords and you can make money with Google Adsense. And once you find those high paying Adsense keywords, you can just duplicate your efforts 10 or 20 times over and you too can soon be making millions on the internet.

If it were only that simple…

The problem with Adsense, or nearly any affiliate program, is that it usually isn’t a static way to make money. The dynamic way niches come and go, the way Google adjusts landing page guidelines (this does affect your earnings per click), the way your sites get ranked in the search engines and many other factors, require that you tweak your web sites on a fairly regular basis. Google dangles the Adsense carrot in front of you, but they constantly adjust the distance you must go to get the prize. And the horse you’re riding to fetch the carrot? It must be fed, watered, brushed, walked and see the vet a couple times a year.

In my last installment of Lessons In Perseverance I expressed some of my frustration working with Adsense because of this constantly changing face of Google and doing business as an affiliate marketer. And as you may have read or commented on in my March affiliate earnings report I do fairly well with Adsense, earning an average of $1,200 to $1,300 per month. But what you may not know is that the niches and sites that earned me money with Adsense this month are about 50% different than they were last year at this time. And even the sites that are the same have gone through many changes to be able to maintain those earnings since last year.

Probably one of the hardest things to get used to is watching your Adsense earnings fluctuate, even on a day to day basis. I’ve had days where earnings were $60 to $70 one day and then come in at $25 or so only 24 hours later. You also have to get used to watching one site start to rise in earnings and anticipate living life a little larger, only to watch another site tank because Google happened to make some sort of a tweak or an algorithm adjustment and whatever adjustment they made, your site happened to be in the cross-hairs.

A good example of this is, only a week or so after my best day ever in Adsense earnings I watched a high ranking travel blog go from getting 100 Google search visitors a day to only 5 per day. A site that was earning $15 to $20 per day was now earnings me $2 to $3 per day. What had I done to deserve this treatment. As far as I can tell all I did was update it after not posting for 3 months and the hammer came down. Did I freak out? No, not at all, because I’m so used to seeing this, it was just another day at the home office.

The packaging in the Adsense egg basket is not quite as soft and cushy as I would like. This is about as good a reason as any to diversify your income streams on the Internet.

This past Thursday was a pretty exciting day when I checked my Google Adsense earnings and found out it was my second highest day in revenue, coming in at $69.05. It was pretty significant because Thursday’s are not usually high earnings days or high traffic days on the net, at least not for me. I had planned to blog about it over the weekend, but just didn’t get around to it.

It was nice to see that much for a single day in revenue and it was encouraging because of it being a low traffic day. I thought, it can only get better from here. Well, today I woke up and logged into Adsense to see that yesterday was my number one earnings day with Google. The previous best day had been more than 2 years ago on Tuesday January 17, 2006 when the total was $72.77. Yesterday’s Adsense earnings came in at $74.38.

It’s hard to believe that it has taken more than 2 years to top my earnings, but if you’ve read lesson 4 in perseverance you’ll see that at one point Adsense revenue dropped by 50% over a 6 month period. I’ve been able to slowly build that back up again and I’m hoping this is a trend in the right direction. Since the past day of record earnings, it has been 2 years of not being able to average much more than about $40 a day with Adsense, no matter what I did. However, having my third best and first best day for revenue in the same week definitely signals an upward trend.

The biggest earning sites for me are in the travel niche and more specifically for vacation rentals. Of the 16 sites that earned me Adsense income yesterday, just 2 sites brought in more than 60% of the $74.38 total. And the great thing about that is, those two sites had combined total page views of just over 525 and unique visitors of just over 300 for both. Now, if I could just get 1,000 visitors every day to each of those sites, I could live off of that income alone. Extrapolated out, that’s over $300 a day from 2 sites. I need to put some extra time into getting more traffic to these sites.

I’m not going to reveal those two url’s, but making money in the travel niche isn’t all that difficult. One site just lists vacation rentals and the other site is a blog where I just write about rentals, attractions and stuff to do in a popular vacation area in the southeast. Beyond fairly good content, the trick is well placed Adsense units. I am also partial to a particular size of ads as well. I like the wide 336 x 280 unit. They make all the difference.

One last thing, I talk about Build A Niche Store a lot, but it’s probably not the best thing for a travel site unless it is just a small part of an overall larger site. Travel just doesn’t seem to do that well on eBay.

The next milestone for Adsense earnings is the magic $100 per day. I’m hoping to get there sometime next month.

Alan