Adsense Optimization

I cannot tell you much about making money from a blog without talking about the importance of optimizing your Adsense contextual advertisements. But what does optimizing really mean? In my terms it means tweaking your ad placement, colors, and blog keywords to get the best ads in the best location on your blog, for the best financial return.

Don't confuse ad optimization with blog optimization, something that is quite a bit different. Blog optimization is about preparing your blog correctly for the search engines, and to attract readers, and incoming links. It's also about making your reader's experience on your blog as useful, informative and entertaining as possible to attract visitors and keep them coming back for more.

On the other hand, ad optimization is about getting the most clicks and the most money from those clicks as possible, while staying within the guidelines, make that program policies of Adsense. So before you start trying to optimize your advertisements, go to the Adsense Program Policies and read them, re-read them even if you have already. That will help to keep you out of trouble.

Next have a look at my post about Ad Placement and follow that up with a peek at the Google Heatmap for blogs, go to the Adsense site, and look for it under optimization. The heatmap tells you where the best location is for advertisements. On most blogs. Sometimes, as they say on get rich quick infomercials on television, 'individual results may vary' which means what works on most blogs might not work on yours. You need to take a good hard look at your blog. Where do your eyes go? Ask a family member or friend to do the same thing, watch where their eyes go. That is more or less what the heat maps are based on. Where people's eyes go when they look at a webpage. The idea is that your ads should go there.

However, it's more than that. You can put your advertisements front and center, but if they are not of interest to the reader, they might see them, but they won't click on them, and that means no money for you. Not a good thing.

So when I talk about Adsense optimization, what I am really talking about is keywords and subject matter. Except for the odd ad that might be written in such a way as to catch someone's attention. Although they have no interest in the product, because the ad is catchy, they click it just out of curiousity. Usually these types of clicks are not much use to the advertiser. If the reader isn't looking for the product, just looking at it doesn't do much for an advertiser's sales. Yes, in some situations, in fact in most advertising situations except pay-per-click, and affiliate sales, advertisers are happy just to have their company name or product on people's minds. Not so with internet advertising. It is a horse of a different color more or less. Advertisers are not all that interested in paying to place an ad just for exposure, particularly on small sites with low traffic. They want proof the reader looked at the ad, and that comes in the form of clicks.

So how do you do that? How do you get readers to click on ads so that you can make money? It's actually not that difficult and consists of two things. First of all, is ad placement. Make sure your ads are close to your content. They need to both blend in, and stand out at the same time. Usually this is done by making the ad background the same color as your blog background, and making the title a bright color. Blue is the color of choice and accepted by readers as 'clickable"

The second thing is the most important, and the more difficult thing to pull off. Your posts....You need to write posts that are about something specific, and you need to fill your post with keywords that will help readers find you when they are searching in the search engines. This is where niche blogging comes in. If you don't know what that is, read this post What Is Niche Blogging?

Good keyword placement helps with page ranking, and that helps visitors find you. It also means you have the best keywords that pay the most money. Use the Google keyword tool, or one like it. Find the keywords that are most popular and the ones that pay the most. But don't stop there. Throw in some keywords that are not as highly ranked, there are still people looking for those words and sometimes they are some of the best traffic. You will have less competition in the search engine results page for the lower paying, less popular keywords.

Write your post to include those keywords, without turning the post into something stupid to read, which is what happens when people try to include their keywords in every sentence like as if I was to include make money blogging in this sentence...you get the picture...The keywords get you the organic search engine traffic from people searching for the information you have, and the information and products contained in your contextual advertisements. After reading your blog about making money working from home, readers look around and see an advertisement from a company offering a work at home money making program...and presto! You start earning money...

That is true optimization.