www.affiliateconfession.com

I get lots of people who comment on the blog here about my meager Adsense earnings of $1,300 or so every month thinking they could never earn that much because they only bring in a few pennies every 30 days or so. I’m saying $1,300 per month is meager because there’s just a lot more potential available in that revenue stream and if you’re struggling to even make a $12.37 payday every month, keep reading because there is hope.

If you are new to the Adsense game there’s no need to go over the basics because they’ve been done a million times so check out my three tutorials on how to earn more from Google before moving on. Part 1 is here, Part 2 is here and Part 3 is here.

Okay, now that you have the basics let’s talk about what makes a good Adsense site and how to make your ads more appealing to your visitors. You never want to trick your visitors into clicking on your ads, but you can do a lot to make the ads more interesting and to give them more exposure. The longer your visitors see your ads, and they look appealing, the better chance you have to earn some revenue.

Starting out let’s look at what kills Adsense revenue. The first thing is hideous placement or color schemes that are a huge turn-off. I can’t tell you how many Adsense blocks I’ve seen that are outside the margin of the column they’re placed in, covering text on the page or are of such bizarre color schemes you can see how desperate they really are, which is an automatic no click in my book.

People are so much less likely to click on an ad if it’s obvious the webmaster doesn’t know what they’re doing or if it’s equally obvious that they desperately want you to click on their ads. Vivid purple background Adsense units with contrasting yellow ad headlines to click on are tantamount to those screaming automobile dealership tv and radio ads. Really, how much time do you spend listening to those dinosaur modes of advertising any longer?

Another thing that kills Adsense revenue is placing your ads way outside the main body of your content. Let’s say you have a 4 column template running on your site and you have your 160 x 600 Adsense tower in the far right column, 350 pixels away from your content, you probably won’t get more than a trickle of revenue every month from those ads. People don’t come to your site to click on ads, they come to your site to read content and to gather information, they will only click on ads if they are of interest to them and if they are convenient to click on.

Secondly, what makes for a good Adsense earning site is, as I have mentioned before in the Adsense tutorials, the niche. But, it is the niche and the placement that is the winning combination. Both are huge factors and don’t really work one without the other. I don’t know why some niches work and why some don’t. I was extremely fortunate to stumble upon a winning niche in travel when I placed my first Adsense units. The second full month running Adsense back almost 4 years ago earnings were at $930. It would be nice if everything I’ve tried worked out so easy, but it’s only been this one thing that, I guess you could say, clicked right from the start.

What you’re looking for in a niche is where people shop and are looking for information before they buy. You don’t want buyers or people who have made up their mind, you want shoppers. Shoppers are clickers. The more people shop, the more they will click on ads and the more choices you give them in your info, the more revenue you stand to earn.

You would think that people interested in American Idol would be the ultimate consumers and click ads like they’re going out of style. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen, at least in my experience. Maybe American Idolers are too young, too tight with their money, maybe they don’t click ads, whatever, after a season of writing on AI and trying every placement trick in the book, it just didn’t work out for me on this one. No biggie, on to something else, which brings me to point number 3…

Don’t work one niche with Adsense and give up because it didn’t work out. It doesn’t matter if you have a site that gets 10,000 people per day, if it’s not the right niche, it’s just not right. I have a Christian website that used to get 400 to 500 people a day, but Adsense was only paying about 5 to 10 cents per click tops for that niche so I removed it from the site. It just wasn’t worth it to run ads on that particular site.

I just checked my Adsense earnings for today at the time of writing this post (Sunday evening 2-08) and it’s over $50 at 10:15 pm EST and the stats show that 8 individual niches are generating revenue. If you aren’t trying Adsense in at least 4 or 5 different niches, you aren’t trying hard enough. It’s not always about the niche that you think will generate the most revenue because advertisers are paying outrageous click prices, it’s about the niche that does generate the most for you. If you only have one Adsense niche, you will never know if another could have done 10 times better.

In closing, here are a few top niches that either work for me now, have in the past or probably will in the future.

Travel– Killer earnings with a minimum of traffic. I average 12 cents in earnings for every visitor that goes to my top travel site. I run both Adsense and TripAdvisor to monetize this site.

Air Purification– A niche where people love to shop before they buy. That’s what your looking for in Adsense revenue generation, shoppers.

Nutrition – requires a moderate amount of traffic on the order of at least 1,000 visitors a day to make it worth your while.

Precious Metals – The economy is bad and people with money are trying to preserve their wealth. I’m just starting to see some decent Adsense earnings here and expect it to get much better.

Now put on your thinking cap and figure out where the shoppers are before you raise the white flag and give up on generating Adsense revenue.

Popularity: 17% [?]

July is already a record month for my Build A Niche Store sites through the eBay affiliate program and with 5 days left (of accounting) in the month it should be a record by quite a large margin. As of July 26th total earnings from eBay are at $1,063.45 and total earnings from Build A Niche Store Sites are $1,047.57. I have a couple non BANS sites earning a trickle of cash from eBay.

This is the first time earnings for BANS and eBay have exceeded the $1,000 mark as the next closest month was $893.54 for total eBay earnings. The month started out very slow and I was anticipating riding out the summer slump not earning that much through eBay. During the first week of July, total earnings for eBay were a measly $80.46 and by the end of the second week they were only at $242.02. However, the next 12 days have been great, earning more than $800 or around $66 per day.

I do have one store that continues to be the revenue leader bringing in slightly more than $800 and the plan is to continue to build on that store and work on another store in the same niche, but expanded to cover a much broader range of products. And of course there are 9 more BANS stores that get tweaked on once in a while.

It is interesting to note that the best producing BANS store is also the first store I built. Finding the right niche, with a popular, high priced item that sells for $400 or above is what makes all the difference. You can learn how to find one of those niches here.

If you’d like to know more about how to make money with BANS, you can read my 7 part tutorial series here and read about the most basic steps to getting started with BANS.

If you are interested in using BANS you can buy Build A Niche Store here.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Not intending to write this post at all after part 1 and part 2 of the Adsense series, I discovered something interesting the other day about Adsense earnings while looking at some click-thru statistics on specific pages. So the How To Earn The Most From Google Adsense series continues.

Obviously the best way to earn the most from Google Adsense is to get people to click on your ads, but you can’t just ask people to do that or even trick them into doing so by making your ads appear like anything other than what they are. So how do you get people to click on your ads? You do so by making them the most appealing thing or subject on the page to click on.

But the secret to this goes a little deeper. What I found out after looking over my statistics in the past few days is that most of my pages get anywhere from no clicks (we all have pages like that) to around a 5 to 10% click-thru rate. But then I have a few pages that get an astounding 20 to 26% click-thru rate month after month after month. That means one out of every four to five people that lands on one of these pages clicks an Adsense ad (By the way, if you aren’t using Adsense url channels to track clicks on individual pages you need to be).

How is this happening?

Okay, Here’s The Big Adsense Secret

You can only do this on certain kinds of pages written a specific way. The big secret is, you need to write in a general manner instead of a specific manner. What I mean by this is that if you are writing for your travel based site and write about lets say, the city of San Francisco as a place to vacation, the more general you write, the better your CTR. Here’s what I’m finding out – If you talk about walking along Fisherman’s Warf being around the water and the restaurants, and shops, and sights, and sounds and what it’s like to be in that area and even provide links to some of these things, the ads on pages such as this usually turn out to be the most attractive thing on the page for visitors to click on.

However, if you write about a specific restaurant you visited or hotel you stayed in and go into detail about what you ate, what your hotel room was like, the view you had, etc., and then provide a link, your visitors are more than likely going to go visit that link because that’s where you have driven their interest. Of course if you have an affiliate link you can send them through, that’s the way to do it, but that’s not always possible, especially in the case of a restaurant.

As an example of this, my best converting Adsense page has 9 other links in the content of the page to various parks, shops, attractions and flight information all related to the area I’m writing about, yet 25% of the people that visit that page choose to click on an Adsense ad. To contrast that, I write about many of the establishments Jean and I have stayed in or explored and provide pictures and links and these are my worst converting Adsense pages. Everyone wants to go visit and see these places for themselves, they don’t want to read all about the great place you stayed or ate at and then click on an ad.

A warning is needed here though. This doesn’t mean you should go out and create sites full of nothing but general information, that will eventually bore your readers. Visitors do like to read interesting and specific things on a variety of subjects you may have some expertise in. There is always the likelihood someone will get to your pages looking for something specific and and up on a general page because they are looking for the history of an area or want to get the general feel of being where you’ve been or experiencing what you’ve experienced.

If you have a site that isn’t doing well with Adsense, take a look at part 1 and part 2 of this series on the kinds of sites that do well with Adsense and how to optimize your site for Adsense and if you still aren’t doing well, try doing some summary and general info pages based on the info in this post. That’s probably where you’re going to find your Adsense sweet spot.

Popularity: 10% [?]

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.

Popularity: 10% [?]

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.

Popularity: 10% [?]