Forget About Adsense

If you want to significantly increase your current Adsense earnings the first thing you need to do is forget about Adsense. Sounds strange doesn’t it, but if there is such a thing as a secret to making money with Adsense, it is that it has nothing to do with Adsense.

All Adsense is is a way of monetizing your website traffic. Therefore to make more money from Adsense you need a website and you need more traffic. No traffic, no Adsense clicks. Lots of traffic, lots of Adsense clicks. That’s the bottom line. You can get more traffic in two ways:

1. By bringing more to your existing website(s), or
2. By building a new website and bringing traffic to that.

Almost every forum post, blog entry and article that discusses Adsense and how to make money with it wrongly focuses on optimizing your website for your Adsense ads. Where should I place them, what colours should I use, how many units should I include on a page, should I use Adlinks, what format produces the highest click through rate – all of these questions belong to trying to increase responsiveness from your traffic to your Adsense ads. The prerequisite is traffic - if you’ve only got a few visitors coming to your website a day, even a 100% click through rate will only generate a dollar.

Now at this point I’d like to defend myself - the point of this lesson is not to devalue the importance of optimization. I’ve taken sites in the past from $5 to $50 a day without increasing their traffic, through things like re-structuring and correct format and color choices, but the trick with optimization is to know its place and to focus on it at the right time. Don’t get caught optimizing a website that has not been fully developed. The forums are full of these people puzzling over how they can reach $100 a day with Adsense when they’ve not broken down what is actually necessary to generate that amount of money.

From my experiences with Adsense, you’ll make good money with it by integrating it into “successful websites”. My example above was already receiving close to 1,000 visitors every day. A couple of weeks spent optimizing and monitoring resulted in a 10 fold increase in income but that site was already “successful” so to speak. It had good placements in the search engines, a strong supporting link structure and a growing repeat user rate – it was the right time to optimize.

But a successful website isn’t necessarily one that gets thousands of visitors a day, it’s one that fulfils the purpose it was originally established for. For example, if you’ve built a website about choosing a baby stroller you want people who are coming online to find out about baby strollers to find it and use it, if you’ve built one about making money with Adsense you’re looking for those people who want to make more money with Adsense ;)

A site is successful when it’s connecting with a significant proportion of its’ intended market or users. Once you’ve made this connection, monetizing your traffic with Adsense is very easy and improving your visitors interactivity with your ads (which is the same as saying your click through rate) becomes a legitimate focus. There are hundreds of different things you can do to increase your CTR and I’ll cover many of them in future lessons. Just make sure you’ve done the groundwork and have got targeted traffic coming to your website first.

It Always Comes Back To Content

Now you can only connect with “a significant proportion” of your intended market if your website actually provides what those people are looking for. This is why whichever direction you walk off in – optimization or increasing traffic, you always end up coming back to content.

No content means nothing for people to see, nothing for people to see means no traffic, no traffic means no Adsense clicks. The whole process of making money with Adsense is made much easier if you actually build something for your end user. Spam sites can make a couple of bucks a day for a couple of months but they’ve got no longevity and their purposelessnees makes them depressing to build. It’s worth spending the extra couple of days building something which fits nicely into its market and that can justify its position there. This isn’t difficult to do, it just requires you to go that little further.

My philosophy - whether I’m adding content to an existing website or building a new website is to do what is necessary to compete in that niche – this includes everything from site design and content quality to the external optimization and marketing I carry out, including search engine optimization, link building and distributing articles among other things. Less competitive markets require less work, more competitive markets require more. There’s no point doing more than is necessary just as there is no point doing just a little when more is required to make the site successful. Work out what is necessary, do it and develop a strategy for doing it quickly. The more you get involved with your projects, the more you’ll learn, the more you’ll know the internet and the easier it will be to build successful websites that serve their purpose and attract their intended market. The trio of tools I use to reach these people are: XSitePro, Keyword Country and SEO Elite. Once you've got them, Adsense is made for monetizing them.

That is the road to real money with Adsense.

Different keywords pay different amounts. Other things being equal a website based around debt consolidation will generate more revenue per Adsense click than a website based around football cards. This is why an industry built around selling high paying keyword lists to Adsense publishers has become so profitable.

But it’s more complicated than this as different keywords in different niche markets also pay different amounts. If your website is not targeting the “right” (as in profitable) keywords you will probably be earning less money per Adsense click than you should be.

For example – if you increase your average CPC (cost per click) from $0.20 to $0.30 you will increase your revenue by 33%. There are two ways of doing this on your already existing website and the best tool for doing the research is Keyword Country.

1. Better target your existing webpages:

Which words are you using in your Title Tag, Meta Tags, H1 - H3 Header Tags and inside the body of your content? Google's content matching technology generates ads related to the meaning of the words on your page. If the high paying keywords for that page topic aren't in those 4 hotspots I just listed the quality (relevancy) and CPC of your ads will be lower than if they were. Google wants to match their advertiser ads to the pages which are going to offer the greatest return otherwise their whole system collapses.

This means that you want to make sure the high paying keywords are included in your hot spots. If I use UnderstandingAdsense.com as an example I logged into Keyword Country with the intention of finding the highest paying keywords for the Adsense market. I typed in Adsense and was presented with a list. "Making Money With Adsense" has the highest average CPC of $0.73 so when I've finished building the site I will optimize the home page and several other pages for that keyword so as to generate the most relevant and high paying ads possible. I will do this by including that keyword phrase (and related ones like "make money with Adsense") into the four places listed above.

2. Add additional content to your website which targets related high paying keywords:

The most important word here is related. Don’t add content pages about Viagra to your website which is themed around motorcycles just because the average CPC for Viagra is very high. Instead do one of these two things:

1. Type your primary keyword, in this example, "motorcycle" into Keyword Country, wait for the results to appear and then click on CPC. This will arrange all the related keywords by their CPC value bringing the most profitable to the top. I did this and found that -

“Motorcycle Insurance In Michigan” has an average CPC of $10.25
“Motorcycle Insurance” has an average CPC of $4.28
“Motorcycle Loan” has an average CPC of $3.34

These are very high average CPCs for which you could develop new content. These content pages would generate higher cost per click Adsense ads from your visitors.

2. Your second option is to type in keywords which are related to your principal topic. Continuing with the motorcycle theme you could type in Harley-Davidson a popular manufacturer of motorcycles. The results show that “Harley Davidson Boots” has an average CPC of $0.84. You could build a page today pre-selling Harley Davidson Boots and generate a nice Adsense stream from that page. Another extension would be the keyword “chopper”, a popular type of motorcycle enhanced by the big shows of the last few years. On Keyword Country a search for chopper brings up related keywords like West Coast Choppers, a famous chopper builder which has an average CPC of $0.95 – again a page or several pages around this topic would be a nice addition to a motorcycle based website.

Whatever your topic, virtually every website can incorporate new high paying content. So before you try and build a website in a new niche check that the website(s) that you’ve already put the groundwork into (link building and seo) can’t be better optimized for higher paying keywords and / or have additional high adsense paying content added to it. There will be at least five new pages of content that you could add to your existing website today that would create higher paying average clicks than what you are already generating.

The large majority of Adsense Publishers are still not taking advantage of these tools and are still working in the dark so to speak - unsystematically adding content, optimizing their pages and building new niche websites with no fore-knowledge of the value of a particular topic nor its potential profitability. I guarantee that if you test Keyword County for just a day you won’t want to unsubscribe - it makes our job of making money with Adsense that much easier.

They also have a free “sneak peak” tool whereby you enter your target keywords and it will give you the most high paying keywords related to that phrase. If you follow this link and click on the “try now” button in the top right you can test the three different parts of the application yourself.

The profitability of an Adsense niche is primarily based on the amount that Adwords advertisers are spending to compete in that niche.

Remember that an Adsense ad is only an Adwords ad that is appearing on your site and not Google. The amount that an ad generates per click is therefore directly related to the amount that Adwords advertisers are paying per click. Bottom line - if they are paying more we earn more.

So how can you find out which niches (and which keywords inside those niches) advertisers are spending more money on?

I use two different methods:

1. Keyword Research With Keyword Country

As you will have probably have started to gather I cannot lay enough praise on this tool. In fact I struggle to understand how I researched, chose and targeted niche sites before I got hold of it...it's that good. Aswell as being able to search by category or keyword you can also search by price range. For example, you can decide to find keywords that have an average cpc of say between $18 and $20. If you enter this price range it will return a list of keywords which fall inside that parameter - in this case - 3957 different keyword phrases.

The top 5 rated keywords in this cpc range were: "credit card", "free credit report", "mortgage rates", "consolidate debt" and "website hosting". All you need to do is go down the list work out which ones would be suitable for an Adsense monetized information site, extend your keyword research by taking your chosen phrase and entering it into the search box, build the content, integrate the Adsense and promote your new website.

This is a simple and effective way of finding out where the advertiser dollar is being spent and consequently where the Adsense dollar may be earnt.

As a side issue - with tools like Keyword Country available you should never pay for a keyword list. For less than their cost you can get access to a complete keyword database which includes extensive analysis and ratings in terms of profitability and potential for every keyword or keyword phrase entered into the search engines. Spend your money wisely.

2. Affiliate Analysis With CJ

A different method is to forget keywords for a minute and to focus on markets and their advertisers. Adwords advertisers are made up of two types of people - companies and affiliates. We can't easily find out how much companies are making but we can find out how much their affiliates are by joining up to a third part affiliate network like Commission Junction (CJ), which connects companies that are selling products and website publishers like me and you who are willing to promote them for a commission.

My premise is that if you find the markets that are profitable for affiliates you will find the markets that are profitable for Adsense monetized sites. Why? Because a profitable market is one that you can spend a good sum of money on advertising and still make a healthy return.

Where the affiliates are earning good money, the companies and the affiliates will be spending big money on Adwords advertising.

You can find which markets are profitable in CJ by using their catrgory lists and sorting features. Once logged in simply follow this process:

1. Click on Get Links > this will take you to a categorical listing of all the advertiser programs.

2. Choose A Market From The Category List > this will bring up all the advertiser programs inside that niche category.

4. Click "3 Month EPC" > this will bring the top performing affiliate programs in that niche to the top of the pile. EPC stands for "earnings per click" (at CJ this is earnings per 100 clicks) and illustrates on average how much affiliates are earning for each set of 100 people they direct to that program. For example, the top performer in the financial services niche is a company specialising in mortagage refinance and equity release, with a massive 3 month epc of $354.90.

Now I have my profitable niches - "mortgage refinance" and "equity release" - I go to Keyword Country to see if my theory is correct. If I type in those two keyword phrases, Keyword Country will return to me average cpc, number of searches, competition, number of Adwords advertisers and profitablity rating for every keyword related to those two seperate niches. If I'm right the average CPC for these two keywords will be very high.

This is what Keyword Country told me:

Mortgage Refinance - average cpc $27.17 across 823 related keywords.

Equity Release - average cpc $10.145.

The theory proved correct and I've found two profitable niches that I could build a mini informational site around. In addition, I would integrate the appropriate high paying affiliate program which would give me a second means of monetizing my traffic.

There are hundreds and hundreds of these niches you just have to do the research and find them. If you're using the correct method and know where and how to look you'll be able to build a targeted site around a profitable niche within a few days. Again, these type of mini targeted sites are best and most effectively built using XSitePro.

Best of luck,

Kelvin

PS: I am just finishing a new site of my own which I discovered, researched and built using the methods in this article. I will post the details of it shortly with a run through of what I did, why and how. In the first day it made $20 - not bad for the first day!