Treble your Adsense Income in 60 MInutes

by: Kenny Hemphill

Google's Adsense is one of the most powerful weapons in website publisher's arsenal. It enables you to monetize your sites easily and if used properly can generate a very healthy income. However, if you're not using it properly and maximizing the income you squeeze from it, your leaving money on the table something we all hate doing.

Boosting your return from Adsense can be done very easily and quickly, and you'll be amazed by the results.

I ran Adsense on my sites for over a year before I discovered these techniques, and like many people, I though I was doing pretty well. My clickthrough rates and CPM figures were very healthy, and I didn't honestly think that they could be improved a great deal. How wrong I was. Immediately after I implemented a few quick changes my clickthrough rate more than doubled, and by doing some fine tuning I manged to get nearly three times as many people to click on the ads as had been previously doing so.

The first technique is one that was 'discovered' by the amazingly helpful Debs, on SiteSell's SBI! forums. When I read it originally, it made sense and I decided to goive it a go, but I wasn't prepared for the immediate impact it would have on my income. It involves making only a few simple changes to the format and positioning of your Adsense ads.

Firstly, forget about using banners or skyscrapers. These ad formats are almost universally ignored by surfers. Why? Because we've all been conditioned to recognise a skyscraper or banner as an advert and as these adverts are rarely of any interest, we ignore them. What's needed is a way of integrating Adsense ads into the editorial on your site as seamlessly as possible. To do this you need to do three things:

1. Use the 250 x 250 rectangle format 2. Make the background color of the ad the same as the background color of your site, or as close to it as possible. 3. Make the ads borderless by setting the border color to be the same as the background color of the ad.

These changes can be made by logging into your Adsense account and creating a custom format. Just select the 250 x 250 ad format, and create a custom color palette. Use the color picker to pick the coor you want. The Javascript is automatically generated at the foot of the page, ready for you to copy and paste into the pages on your site.

Now, you need to position your ads where surfers are most likely to click on them. Research using retina scanning technology has shown that the place that surfers tend to look at first and most often is the top left. I don't know the reasons for this, perhaps it's because that's where we're used to seeing the most useful search engine results (at the top of the rankings) and search engines are the sites we most often visit, so we automatically look at the same place on other sites.

Whatever the reasoning, as soon as I made the above changes to my Adsense ads, clickthrough rates doubled, immediately.

The second technique is much newer and one which is entirely based on my own experience. Google has recently added a new type of Adsense format, called Adlinks. This displays a series of links on your page in the same style of Ad unit as regular Adsense ads. When a user clicks a link they are taken to a page of adverts that resembles regular Google search results. As a publisher, you are paid every time a user clicks one of those ads.

Adventurous soul that I am, I jumped in with both feet and started to trial Adlinks on my most visited pages as soon as it was launched. I'm using the four links in a square box format, positioned top left of my page content. After a few weeks of running Adlinks alongside regular Adsense ads, it's clear that the return on Adlinks is about a fifth to a quarter higher than regular ads. There's no clear reason for this but one explanation may lie in the fact that clicking on an Adlink takes the user to page of 'results'. When a user clicks on one of these, you are paid for the click. If the user finds what they want, great, if not, it seems that they hit the Back button on their browser and try again, just as you would for normal search engine results. Then they click on another result, and you get paid again. So it's possible to be paid more than once from the same Adlink click. Now, this reasoning is speculative, but it does make perfect sense in the light of my Adlinks results.

Finally, Adsense has some excellent tracking statistics that allow you to track your results across a number of sites on a site by site, page by page, or just about any other basis you choose. This is a very powerful tool and you should use it to find out which ads are performing best for you and fine tune your Adsense and Adlink ads accordingly.

So you see, by spending an hour or so of your time making a few adjustments to the Adsense ads on your sites, you can very quickly treble your Adsense income. Give it a go, you'll be amazed by the results.

About the author:

Kenny Hemphill is the owner and publisher of The HDTV Tuner and has been using Adsense for two years.



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How much will I earn through Adsense ?

If you're looking at Google's AdSense program you're surely asking yourself how much you could make from such a program, and you probably think you can't make as much as you can from traditional advertising schemes.

Google, of course, keeps a great deal of secrecy regarding how much AdWords advertisers pay per each click directed to their site and the same applies for how much AdSense banner holders make from their websites.

While there's nothing official, rumors circulate around the Internet concerning the amount of cash a website can earn by using AdSense. And many people (illegally) disclose how much they have been making with AdSense. There are stories of people raising over one thousand dollars per month using AdSense.

There are also stories of people exceeding $100,000.00 per month but it's a bit hard to believe such stories. The truth to the matter is that if you have a small website and you just want it to support itself, and don't wish to reach your pocket for its maintenance costs you can probably do this with AdSense.

AdSense is also very good for people who host a lot of pages. Even if the said pages don't generate a lot of traffic individually, every click counts and you can earn up with a lot of money by doing this. And that just goes to prove that sometimes quantity matters nearly as much as quality.

There's no telling how much money you're going to make by using Google's AdSense but you can sort of tell for yourself, before actually starting, by taking a few things into consideration.

First, is the amount of visits you get every day. While there's no way to estimate precisely on this, you can generally make a safe assumption that if you have a lot of clicks per day you'll be making good money.

Also, this depends on what exactly your site is about. If your site is about anything popular (music, sex, whatever) you're bound to get a lot of banner clicks. These have a coefficient associated with them, called the CTR (click through ratio).

Basically, what it translates to is that if a large proportion of your site's visitors click the ads you'll be making more money. And the best way to do this is to have some popular content in your site, ensuring the links direct users towards popular items as well.

Then of course, there's the position and number of ads on your website. While you don't want to overdo it, having many links will undoubtedly generate more income for you as a webmaster. Do not however believe, that if you just add a lot of ads in an important portion of your site, visitors could always just skip them (and be assured that many do just that).

There's something between an art and a science to positioning your ads. People generally look in certain places and never look in others, and knowing this a website author and/or webmaster can do a great deal of things to increase his earnings with AdSense.

All in all, the amount of money you make with AdSense depends on many factors. But if you have a site with interesting contents and/or many pages, and if you see a constantly large amount of traffic every day, you can bet you'll be making a lot of money with AdSense.

Even if you aren't in the above categories, AdSense is still worth using because there's very little hassle in setting it up, and many times it can help financially support the site, whilst being a nice bonus to get through the post at the end of the month.


The Google ads you which you can display on your content pages can be moreover cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-1000-impressions (CPM) ads, while AdSense for search results pages show entirely CPC ads. This resources that advertisers pay either when users snap on ads, or when the advertiser's ad is publicized on your site. You will receive a segment of the amount compensated for either bustle on your website. Although Google don't divulge the exact revenue share, the goal is to enable publishers to make as much or more than they could with other marketing networks.
The best way to find out how much you'll earn is to sign up and start showing ads on your webpages. There's no cost, no obligation, and getting started is quick and easy. You can sign up now from the AdSense home page.
Once you're a part of Google AdSense, you can view your earnings at any time by logging in to your account and clicking the Reports tab. You'll be able to see the total number of page and ad unit impressions, ad clicks, clickthrough rate, effective CPM, and your total earnings so you can get an idea of how well the program is performing for you and how much you can expect to earn over time in the program.

Information source http://adsense.google.com
PerMoney.com

Take a Web break: Watch a video, play a game, learn something new

After a long day at work as a professional moving planner, Bonnie Marks doesn't have the patience to sit through an hourly newscast on television to catch stories that matter to her.

Instead, the 38-year-old mother of two prefers to go online to news sources, such as CNN and MSNBC.

"Watching news on TV just takes too long," explains Marks. "With the Internet, I have the freedom to pick and choose what I want to watch—information that's relevant to me."

Marks says she also enjoys e-mailing funny video clips to her friends, and she watches movie trailers online to make sure that the content is appropriate for her kids. And she is not alone. Thousands of Web surfers have discovered that the Internet is an endless source of interesting videos.

Why Web video?
Unlike television, online video lets you choose when the action starts and stops (or pauses); it's accessible wherever you have an Internet-connected computer (try watching stand-up comedy during your lunch break at work); and you can view personalized content from all over the world (in your native language). You can even watch comedian Amy Sedaris learn (sort of!) all about the 2007 Microsoft Office system from her rabbits on the Microsoft Video Portal.

Full-length movies and television shows are now well established on the Internet—some even in high definition.

What you need
Watching video on the Web is a fairly easy process—providing that you have the right setup.

For hardware, it's recommended that you have a high-speed (broadband) Internet or DSL connection (rather than a telephone-based dial-up service), as video can be quite choppy to watch on slower speeds.

When it comes to software, you simply need a Web browser, like Windows Internet Explorer. Depending on the site that's hosting the video you've selected, you may also need a media player installed on your PC, such as Windows Media Player. If you clicked Windows Media file, the program will automatically open in a separate window for you. You can choose to watch it in full-screen mode, if you like, by double-clicking the video.

Windows Media Player supports many popular video file types, such as those with the extension .WMV, .AVI, .MPEG, and DivX files (with a free plug-in), but some videos may require another program. For instance, .RV video files require RealPlayer, while .QT or .MOV files require QuickTime.

You might also be asked to select a specific speed, such as 100K, 300K, or 500K. This refers to the speed of the video as it streams to your PC. You can tell how fast your download speeds are with free online tools, such as the one provided on MSN. It takes about eight seconds to complete, and your speed is shown in an easy-to-read graph. So, when you're faced with specific speed choices and you have broadband, try to go with the fastest one first to see how smoothly the video begins streaming.

If a video doesn't play, you will likely find a note on the site about the program you need to play the file. The site may also include a link to download that program.

Sometimes you'll have the option to download a video and save it to your hard drive instead of watching it in your browser. To play the clip offline, you'll need one of the media players mentioned above.

Happy viewing
Here are a few recommended video sites to get you started:

Epicurious (cooking techniques and chef videos)
DIY Network (wide range of topics, from designing your home to selecting a real estate agent)
Oprah.com Video (clips from past shows, divided into categories)
MSN Video (news and entertainment)
Microsoft Video Portal (tips and tricks for using Microsoft software, fun videos, and ads, including the popular Bill Gates/Jerry Seinfeld ads)
Spike (movie trailers, entertainment news, and online gaming)
Weather.com (weather-related video clips)
Podcast.com (audio and video podcast directory for news, self-enrichment, and popular culture)
WindowsMedia.com (entertainment videos)
Hulu (feature films, and current and archived TV programs)
YouTube (amateur videos, TV programs, music, and film clips)
Netflix (expansive collection of feature films, documentaries, TV programs—available for instant download)

Involve yourself
Watching isn't the only way to engage with the Web. Perhaps you're in the mood for something a little more interactive? You can test your wits against an array of puzzles, riddles, and logic games at BrainBashers. At JigZone, you can spend a little time (or a lot!) working out jigsaw puzzles, and you determine the complexity level. The site also lets you upload your own photos and convert them into puzzles. The best part is that you never lose a piece under the rug.

The popularity of Sudoku has exploded lately, and the number of Web sites satisfying the craving has kept pace. Two of the best are Sudoku.com, which offers games and variations at all difficulty levels, and Sudoku Online, where you can also hone your word smarts with acrostics, cryptograms, and other puzzles.

You might also spend your Web break brushing up on old skills—or learning a new one. As a medium for learning at your own pace, the Internet is hard to beat, whether you're working toward a graduate degree or just getting tips on your golf swing. DIY Network presents step-by-step how-tos on everything from growing better tomatoes and installing a sink to knitting a scarf and building a deck.

On the Web, the old cliché "something for everybody" really applies. Here are a few more free learning sites worth exploring:

•Guitar for Beginners and Beyond (lessons, theory, music clips, and players' forum)

•StudySpanish (tutorials in vocabulary, pronunciation, and grammar)

•TED (online lecture series on arts, technology, business, science, and other topics)

•Microsoft Videos (how-tos, technical guides, and training for Microsoft products)

•Learn-to-Draw-and-Paint (tips and techniques for various artistic media, such as pencil, pastel, oil, and watercolor)

•Online-History (extensive coursework on Western civilization and U.S. history)

•Learntodance (video and text lessons to get you started on the cha-cha, swing, flamenco, and more)

Article written by Marc Saltzman and adapted from an original piece from Microsoft Home Magazine.