You Might Need To Compromise A Little

Any number of people have probably awakened one morning and thought “It’d certainly be easier to get out of bed today if I worked in a job I loved!”. But the fact is that most of us do not work in jobs we love. I don’t imagine that that is news to many people – we may like or tolerate our jobs, but some people hate theirs and others just have a low-level resentment at having to do something boring.

You may have people tell you that AdSense allows you to make money from doing things that you would do anyway. While there may be some spirit of truth in that suggestion, it is not wholly truthful. If you really, truly adore Greek mythology, the truth of the matter is that that’s not massively likely to pay off for you online, and certainly it won’t make you rich through AdSense.

Compromise is something that the average worker in any country does every single day. If we had our way, most of us would wake up in the morning and decide to have a duvet day – but we wouldn’t get paid so we bite the bullet and go in to work. Making money through AdSense has a similar tone – you may have to write content about something you’re not wild about if you want clicks.

While this may all sound quite fatalistic – “you can’t make money and have fun” – the most important point to remember is that you can make real money without a lot of work. Be prepared to work smart rather than hard, and you can make a killing through AdSense.

You Will Only Get Out As Much As You Put In

With any new (or even new-ish) system that comes in to play, there will always be bold claims made about how rich it will make you, and for how little work you can become successful. Some people are naïve enough to believe that this latest program will end their money worries at a stroke, but the fact is that it’s not likely to happen.

Imagine for a moment that someone designed a machine that printed viable money, in whatever currency and denomination you wanted, and you could spend that money in any shop. Would the machine retail for a low price? Of course it wouldn’t, because it has the potential to give you money without you working for it. Why, then, would you believe that any plug-and-play system would make you immediately wealthy without you needing to work with it?

Adsense can make you real money, there is no doubt about that. However, you have to work with it. Just as having an exercise bike in your garage will not develop your calf muscles if you don’t actually use it, Adsense won’t make you any money if you don’t harness it and put your own effort into the mix.

If you have a website and you host Adsense ads, then maintain your content, add to it at least occasionally and check your Adsense results regularly so you can see what is working and what isn’t. Lose the stuff that isn’t making you money and do more of the things that are. Work with Adsense – the more you do that the more you will learn.

Does Blogging Fit With Adsense?

Building a website takes time, money (usually) and effort. If your sole goal is to turn around a website that pays off for Adsense purposes, than you may be one of a growing number of people who feels that the effort that goes into building a website is not really repaid by the financial return that comes from Adsense. You could probably be making more money doing something easier.

It is accepted by many that the easiest way to gain a personal, undivided presence online is to set up a blog. The page is largely your own, but it is more or less automatically structured and maintained because it is put together using a content management system. You can tweak it to a greater or lesser extent, but it is pretty much ready to go from the moment you sign up.

How well does blogging fit in with Adsense? The truth of the matter is that it depends what you are doing – are you adding advertisements to your blog, or are you blogging to advertise? The difference is small but crucial. In the former, you can’t expect many people to click because you aren’t setting up for commercial success. Your blog may be fun to read, but it is not ad-friendly.

If you want to make a blog commercially successful, you need to learn a few salient facts. Firstly, you likely won’t see big money until you have upwards of a hundred posts. Secondly, the more you personalise it the less you monetise it. Unless you’re already a household name, you cannot blog for money and for fun – just as you can’t expect to sell advertising space during your conversations with friends.

Picking Your Topic

It makes sense that your subject will have an influence on how much of a return your site brings in from Adsense. After all, the number of readers will have an impact on the number of people checking out the ads, and the topic will inevitably have an effect on the number of readers. As much as you may love French jazz music, for example, it’s less likely to pull in big numbers than Hollywood blockbusters.

This leads many people to think that they should ignore the niches that are more esoteric, which in fact really define the term “niche”. However, there is a growing body of opinion that suggests that, contrary to the received wisdom, a beginner should start with a lower-paying niche. Sure, it won’t bring in big money, but it is a gentler learning curve.

The bigger a crowd gets, the narrower its interests are. One person may like French jazz, as mentioned above. Then if you put them in a room with 99 other people they may be the only one who likes French jazz, one of ten who like jazz, and one of fifty who like music. It goes without saying that the more specific you get, the less interest there will be.

To reach a bigger crowd, you need to be more general, but the tricky part is that there are already plenty of sites catering to that. What you should look to do is begin by writing about what you know, so that you learn the process without having to stick to something you are less sure about. As you learn the vagaries of the process, you can then build a money-maker using what you have learned.

Where Should The Ads Go?

If you want to have success with Adsense, the way you put your site together is going to be important. Many people think that as long as there are ads, and they are somewhere near the content, they will score a lot of clicks. This just isn’t the case. Indeed, Google themselves have published extensive details of what makes a page more likely to score using Adsense.

Ad placement is a very important part of the equation. No doubt, there are some aspects of this you will have worked out for yourself – for example, if the ads are right down at the bottom of the page, they are unlikely to deliver many clicks because fewer people read that far down. If the ads are right above the content, they will be clicked more often, because they are right in the eyeline of the reader.

It is also fair to say that ads on the left hand side of the screen garner more clicks than those on the right – at least, they do for most languages. This is because we read from left to right, and when we reach the end of one line we go back to the left to start another one. Ads on the left catch the eye more than those on the right.

This does not mean that ads on the right of the screen will just be ignored. Your content has a part to play, and how you set up your website. If, for example, you have a list of useful links or a blogroll on the right of the page, then you will get more clicks for ads placed there than otherwise. The closer ads are to something relevant, the more they will interest a reader.

Why Does Adsense Work?

With the right tools, and done the right way, any job can be done successfully. It helps, of course, to know exactly what you are doing and why it works. Without this knowledge, it is only to be expected that things will go a little wrong from time to time. Hence, if you want Adsense to work for you, you need to know how it works and why it works. That way you can make sure you get it right.

It would be tricky to explain exactly the coding and the technical wizardry which goes into making Adsense work – and would take a very long time as well as possibly a course of lessons in advanced computer technology. What is easier to explain is why it works for some users and not for others, and how you can make it work for you.

There are a few things you need for Adsense to work. The first of these is a website – without that, you have nowhere to place ads. More specifically, you need content – a reason for people to come to the site – so you will need to write this or have it written for you. This content will need to include keywords, so that advertisers know that you have the right subject matter to make their ads attractive.

Finally, you will need to actually sign up to Adsense to make any of this matter at all. You can stuff your site with excellent content, which is keyword relevant and well-written – but if there’s nothing to click you will not get paid. So in order to make sure your Adsense campaigns are successful it is essential to write well, include keywords, have a site worth visiting and be signed up to place ads.

Adsense Mistakes #12 – It’s Simple, But Not THAT Simple

The simplicity and automatic nature of Adsense can go one of two ways. Some people can think that, with the seeming simplicity of the program, there must be more to it – and drive themselves mad trying to find the “secret” of success. Others can settle on the fact that it is simple and think that they do not need to do anything to make it pay – and they are just as misguided.

Adsense will do most of the work for you. But that’s the point – most does not equal all. If you are building a house, you will leave most of the work to builders, but don’t assume that everything has been done and move in or put it on the market, because you need to make sure that it is what you wanted. Don’t think that money will come to you without your input, because that’s not workable.

There are tweaks and changes that you can make with Adsense, to make the ads fit in better with your content and the look of your website. For example, leaving the default settings on can make the ad stand out a mile, and if you do this on a site that does not fit in with it you might as well just have a sign pointing to the ad saying “THIS IS AN AD. CLICK IT NOW, PLEASE. I WANT MONEY.”.

An hour or so spent playing with the settings to make the ads fit in better with the look of your site can mean the difference between lots of clicks and hardly any. Such a small amount of work for potentially a higher return is really not too much to expect. Do yourself a favor by getting it right out of the gate.

Adsense Mistakes #11: Not Knowing Your Keywords

If it seems like there is a lot to remember about Adsense, then there is a reason for that – it is. Sometimes it takes almost as much knowledge not to do the wrong thing as it takes to do the right one. Sometimes you don’t have to specifically apply that knowledge, but just avoid going against it. So for anyone who feels that there is a contradiction between “don’t rely on keywords” and “make sure you use keywords”, it’s important to know where the safe ground lies.

You shouldn’t specifically rely on keywords because they can be overused and make a mess of your content. However, you need to have them there because they are important in terms of attracting visitors. It’s like making a chilli. You need to have some peppers in there or it won’t be spicy – but add too many and it’s inedible.

What you need to do is use the right keywords, and use them enough to attract visitors. You might wonder what the right keywords are, and there is a ready-made tool to help you with this – the Google Keyword Tool. You have a subject in mind, and you enter this into the Google Keyword Tool, which furnishes you with the highest-paying keywords.

Your task from there is to put these keywords, in large enough quantities, into your content so as to attract advertisers (and to pull in readers who will click on those advertisements. The more attractive the keywords, the more visitors you will get – and your role is to fit these words into good content.

Adsense Mistakes #10: Not Being Image Conscious

Catching someone’s eye in a subtle way is not always easy. If you are in a crowd and want to get someone’s attention, you’ll pretty much have to jump around like a total buffoon and shout their name at the top of your voice to even stand a chance. But on the internet, this is not an option. You have to be more subtle if you want to get anywhere beyond the attention of a select few.

With Adsense, the bottom line is obvious – you want people to click the ads on your page. In order for them to click those ads, they need to see them, and to feel that they should click them. Now, you can draw people’s attention to the ad by placing a very big image on the page right next to them so they are hard to miss – but Google does not like this, as it is seen as influencing the customer.

It doesn’t matter if you are doing it deliberately or accidentally, it is in Google’s list of things you must not do, and if you do it you will be ranked lower than you would be otherwise. If you are doing it deliberately, then you need to learn about more reasonable ways to influence them – like powerful content.

We’d all like a short cut to make things easier for us, but the truth is that a short cut which pays out every time is not going to be sustainable. If it were that simple, everyone would do it and everyone would be rich – and any economist will tell you that someone has to lose out for someone to win big. To make money you need to be good at what you do – whatever limitations are placed on you.

Adsense Mistakes #9: “It’s About Content, Forget The Keywords!”

Now, for all that has been said about writing to your subject and providing interesting content, there should be no confusion on the matter of keywords. They are certainly important, and outright ignoring them is not going to get anyone very far in terms of Adsense clicks. The question of balance is an important one here, and too many people make the mistake of ignoring one thing to serve another.

The question “content or keywords” is a red herring. Ignore content and you will find that few people read the site even though the keywords have got them there. Ignore keywords and they won’t ever get to the site to read the content that might have been well-written and thought-provoking, but failed to grab Google’s attention.

It’s not impossible to write good content and hit the keywords at the same time. It’s more difficult than focusing on one or the other, but that’s why there is a higher pay-off for managing it. It may be quicker to knock out a keyword-laden site or to write what comes into your head, but you have to put something in to get something out.

Practise writing to your subject and reading over your content to make sure that you aren’t ignoring keywords. After a while it begins to come naturally, as you will structure sentences to emphasize a subject and lean on keywords where necessary. It might take a while to get to that point, but no-one rises to the top and stays there without putting in time and effort as a minimum.

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