How to Make AdSense Work For You - The Google AdSense Strategy

Google AdSense is the most popular way that website publishers monetize their sites and blogs today on the internet; However, it is surprising how many people fail at being successful with Google AdSense. When approached with the proper strategy, an excellent income can be had by anyone willing to put a little time and effort into making AdSense work. Some people have even replaced their day jobs with the money that they receive through AdSense, and it is possible to replicate their success - however, it is realistic to make $1,000 a month after the proper steps have been taken, and all of that money comes from one single website, with only an hour a day of effort. This Google AdSense Strategy will outline the best ways to maximize your profits, and these steps can be replicated on as many websites as you want to earn even more money over time.

The first step to achieving the AdSense dream in this strategy is to choose the proper niche.  The proper niche is not always something you know a lot about, or even something you like.  The marketing materials that you can purchase on the internet that try to tell you how to become a millionaire with AdSense will disagree with me, but I have yet to find anyone with a success story that says otherwise.  The main thing to keep in mind is that you need your website to pay well, and while you might love a certain topic, it's important to know how many people feel the same way.

The reason you need a good, high paying niche (i.e. consumer electronics, credit cards, home mortgage loans, etc.) is because the ads that will be displayed on your website will pay you more for every click.  Some ads have been known to pay over $5.00 per click, and 99% of the time those ads come from highly competitive sources who pay a lot of money on developing attractive ads.  Those companies and people only want their ads displayed where readers are most likely to purchase something from them, so it is important that your niche is unique, relevant, and has good competition.  A good website to check the prices of AdWord campaigns is Spyfu.  Start searching for keywords that might relate to your website, and you can instantly see how much people are paying to place those ads on a website just like yours.

It is very important to do a good amount of keyword research rather than picking some relevant words and crossing your fingers. You need to know how often a word or phrase is searched for, how much competition there is, how much competition there will be tomorrow, and how you can beat the competition by making your website more relevant and dense with the aforementioned keywords.

A good tool to use is Wordtracker at www.wordtracker.com Just enter the keyword you are thinking about using and Wordtracker will return 100 popular related keywords. The results will also explain how many times per day the term or word is searched for in Google - only choose keywords that have daily search ranks of 5 and higher, and then search for that term in Google with quotation marks around the word (i.e. "keyword") The Google results that appear will show the number of pages that are optimized and based around the keyword or phrase.

The next step is to determine which of the keywords you picked has the least competition. For example, if one keyword search in Google returns 1,000,000 pages, and a similar related keyword search returns only 10,000 pages, you are more likely to show up on Google when someone searches for that keyword which only has 10,000 pages. The lower the number of pages on Google, the better chance you have.

So, to recap, you want to pick a relevant keyword for your niche that is searched for a lot, but has relatively low competition. The next step in the process is to build your website around the information you have just gathered.

Whether you are using a free Blogger blog or just a regular website to display the content you wish to share with the world, it is important to build your website specifically around your niche, and make it dense with the best keywords you could find with keyword research.  The first recommendation that is given to people wishing to make an AdSense friendly page is to build your blog or website with at least 10 unique pages of content - each of them keyword rich.  If you can't come up with the content yourself, because you don't know much about your topic or you are just bored or lazy, you can pay a ghost writer or copy writer to write the content for you.  This will usually cost around $0.01 per word all the way up to $0.10 per word, depending on the topic, and with a relatively large website, the total cost can be into the thousands of dollars.  Therefore, I recommend just doing some research on websites that will be similar to yours, and then make your content better - more keyword dense, more user friendly, better structure, etc.

Next, you will need to get your AdSense code and start placing the ads on your website.  Usually, the best performing ad available from Google is the large 336 x 280 rectangle block, or a leaderboard image ad, placed above the content on every page.  When dealing with text ads, there has been much debate, but I have found that the best format for placing a text ad is to make it blend seamlessly with the content of your website.  This way, people are less likely to see the links as ads (which most of us just skip over anyway, right?) and more likely to see the links as good content and might be enticed to click them.  

Remember, you can place AdSense ads on your website more than once, but not more than three times per page.  I recommend you place as many ads as you can while retaining a professional looking page.  Usually, this can be accomplished by placing the rectangle ads toward the top of the page, a one line text only ad in the middle of the page between content, and a leaderboard footer image ad at the bottom.  Don't forget, that ads displayed at the bottom of the page don't USUALLY perform as well as other ads.  This is because you should be displaying the most eye-catching content at the top of the page to get your readers interested.  This part of the page will be where the most time on your website is spent, so try to place the most enticing ads in this area.

How do you know what ads are the most enticing?  Track them.  AdSense will allow you to track the clicks from every ad unit you have, so make the most of this free service and see what ads do best for you.  Sometimes, an ad you think looks good, or the content on your website you feel is the best, is not what everyone else thinks, and as a general rule of thumb, you will learn what works best by tracking your ads.

So at this point, you have researched keywords, developed a niche, built your website to be rich in high quality, traffic-targeted keywords, and placed your ads. This is the stopping point for most people, and they think that they can now "set it and forget it" - and this is where they fail. The most important part about making money on AdSense that this strategy can tell you is to get more clicks. When I first joined AdSense, it took me more than 3 years to make my first $100 with a very professional micro niche website. This is because I did not think about increasing my traffic - instead I blamed the ads and just fiddled with ad placement.

The most important thing that you can do to drive traffic to your website, without having to buy ads of your own, is to write articles that link to your website, which are about your website. You can then place these articles on social bookmarking sites and article directories. However, if you write one stellar article and place it on more than one directory or bookmarking page, you have just hurt yourself and wasted your time. Every article that you submit needs to be unique, have good content, and link back to your website. Considering that there are over 200 popular social bookmarking pages, and hundreds more article directories, this can add up to a lot of work.

The best thing to do is to constantly keep in mind what you want people to know about the content on your website, and everyday write a 2-3 page paper about your website and its content. You can, of course, do more than this, or write many articles everyday, but it is unlikely that you can submit articles and press releases about your website to every bookmarking page and directory in a single day. Some people attempt to accomplish this using article spinner software, which rewrites an article or set of articles until there are hundreds or thousands of variations, but a lot of time the result is a jumbled mess. Remember, people like quality, and will only want to visit your website from the backlinks if the articles you submit are of the caliber of the great content on your page.

After submitting all of your unique articles, you can then start a blog, a Squidoo lens, a free Yola Site, a Hub on Hub Pages, an article on Seekyt, or all of the above, specifically about your website. Again, after you accomplish these tasks, with all of that content being unique, you can social bookmark the pages and submit links to followers on facebook and twitter. Now you have hundreds or thousands back links all pointing to your website, with traffic sources from all over the internet. Furthermore, you can also make AdSense revenue on those websites since they are revenue sharing, increasing your earnings twofold.

Finally, once you start to see a decent amount of traffic, you can assume that some people are repeat visitors to your website. This is a good time to place an "add this" widget on your site, which will allow everyone who visits to also submit your website to their own social bookmarking accounts. Over time, you can generate millions of backlinks, which means millions of visitors, which can potentially mean thousands or more clicks on a regular basis.

So that's it! You now know everything you need to know to make legitimate, real earnings with AdSense. Basically, in order - low competition, yet highly in demand niches - a good website or blog - social bookmarking and article writing - press releases - driving traffic - making a lot of cash. This might seem like a lot of work, and in actuality, it is, but hard work will not go unrewarded, and nothing good comes for free. So take your time, do the right thing, and watch your earnings explode. Hopefully, this AdSense strategy has been useful to you, and I hope that everyone can learn how to make money with AdSense following these techniques