www.affiliateconfession.com

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.

In the last installment of the Build A Niche Store Series I talked about making your eBay affiliate store look unique by making a few minor modifications. In part 5 we’re going to cover something even more important and go beyond mere looks. We want to actually make our store different by adding unique content, titles and H1 tags to each and every page. As I mentioned before, I see lots of BANS stores with nothing but auctions and this isn’t the way you want to do things, because you want your store to stand out and not only attract the search engine spiders, but also offer something to your visitors.

When you do this you are likely to get repeat visitors instead of having them just go straight to eBay the next time they need a product such as you are offering. Of course, they can always go to eBay, but what if you offer them information that they can really use. Not only do we want to add titles, H1 tags and a couple of paragraphs of content to each page of our BANS store, we want to add articles on separate pages as well. This is probably one of the easiest things to do to a BANS store however, it is often the most overlooked thing.

I’m going to start with the first store page on the site entitled HEPA Air Cleaners and modify the title, meta keywords and description tags and add a couple paragraphs of content. The content doesn’t have to be any big deal. Think of it more of a product description than anything else. As you can see from the screenshot below, this is what your individual store page interface will look like:

There are already keywords, a description and a title in place and most likely you will want to change this to fit your products more closely. But even if you choose not to, it is nice that this info is now automatically put in place for you when you set up your store in the newest version of BANS. Even if you don’t have time to build up your BANS store immediately, you can at least get it started and have it in the process of being indexed with the available default tags.

I changed all that info to better reflect the products up for auction and to better reflect the keywords a visitor might be using to locate themselves a product of this type. If you are unsure what to put in the title, keywords and description, head over to the Keyword Discovery Search Term Suggestion tool and plug in the name of your page and see what kind of matches you get. I usually find something I wasn’t expecting and then add that term to the mix.

Once you get done with your meta tags, it’s time to add some content to the actual page. I usually start out with an H1 tag at the top of the content that is almost exactly the same as the title tag. Sometimes I mix it up for a little variety. Next comes your product description. Frankly, I didn’t know much about what a HEPA filter is so I ended up at the HEPA Wikipedia page to get a few bits of info so I could write 2 short paragraphs of text. I usually use Wikipedia or click through to one of the listed auctions if I need to get more info on a product.

I won’t do it now, but over the next couple of days I will do this for every page on the site and for any new pages I create as well. I will also add a few content pages on the site that don’t have any auctions on them and they will discuss different kinds of air purifiers, indoor air pollution, studies and various aspects of air purification for your home. On those pages I will link to auctions around the site.

Next up for the BANS series is article marketing and getting links so you will get indexed by Google and start getting some search engine traffic.

If you are interested, you can get Build A Niche Store here.

Well, it finally looks like the Google mothership is going to be sending this blog some search traffic. Most of the traffic to Affiliate Confession has been through comments on other blogs, links from other blogs, a paid review, Entrecard, rss readers clicking over to the blog, direct type in traffic and a few other sources. Yesterday however, saw a significant increase in organic Google search traffic.

Now, it’s not a ton of new visitors, but it is significant because the percentage of traffic I got from Google yesterday and apparently so far today has gone from about 8% to 15% of total traffic. Affiliate Confession has been averaging around 20 people a day from Google and did have a previous high of 29 a little more than a week ago, but yesterday this blog received 40 visitors from Google search as you can see below. It’s good to finally see an upward trend.

Traffic from Google Feb 5th through March 6th:

What’s the difference? I don’t know if can tell exactly why I’m getting more traffic other than the fact that the blog is now in its 5th month of existence and I also installed the wpSEO plug-in at the prompting of John Pratt. What the plug-on does is give your posts meta tag information, especially keywords and the more important meta tag description. I didn’t know it, but my blog didn’t have keywords or a description in the header. I’m usually pretty much on top of things like that, but with getting the new theme up and looking correctly and other things going on in life, somehow it just fell through the cracks. Thanks goes out to John for pointing that out to me.

I’m hoping this traffic source continues and increases, but I wish I could find out why it just started to increase. The best reason I can narrow it down to though, is those 2 factors of the age of the blog and the new wpSEO plugin. It could also have something to do with the number of links coming in on a regular basis, but I managed to get a lot of links right away, so again, it’s kind of up in the air as to what the deal is.

This new traffic will bring a little bit different kind of reader to Affiliate Confession and it will be interesting to see how they react to the content here in the form of leaving comments, asking question and reacting to advertising. There have been mostly bloggers coming to this blog because of the traffic sources, and now there will be more people doing actual searches for the information posted here. I’ll be curious to see the results.

I’ll always take more traffic than less, so Google can send me as much as they like.

Alan