Most people would tell you that having a click through rate of between 1 and 5 percent is average for adsense publishers.  One way to make a decent amount of cash from adsense is to drive a ton of traffic to it.  The rest is how well your ads perform.  Your ad performance depends on a lot of different factors, one of which is placement.  Since google has a vested interest in people clicking as many ads as possible, they have done some research into the area.

The research shows that people generally scan web pages in an F pattern.  If they don’t like what they see they’ll spend less than a few seconds on the page before either clicking a link on it or hitting the back button on their browser.  The idea here would be that you hope they click on one of the ads placed on your page to exit it.

This makes optimal ad placement down the left column of the page, as well as right at the top.  Many sites have forgone a large banner up at the top in favor of a small one coupled with an ad.  The next area to look at would be right above the fold but below some content.

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Traffic traffic traffic!  You need traffic.  If you want your site to be profitable you need traffic.  But did you know that all traffic is not created equal.  There are returning visitor, there are visitors finding your site through a link, and there are visitors finding your site through search engines.

All three are important.  You want returning visitors since they’re more likely to post a comment on your site thus adding to the content.  These visitors however, are going to be the least profitable for you.  Returning visitors become blind to ads very quickly and will not click on them.  In fact I suggest you disable ads for users that are logged in.  You know they’re a frequent visitor if they’re logged in, and they’re ad blindness will cause your click through percentages to go down.

Users that click onto your site through a link are the most likely to convert to regular users.  Presumably they found your site because they found a link to it on another site with a similar topic to yours.  Since they’re already interested in what your site has to offer they’ll be less likely to click on ads, but more likely than if they had visited before.

People that find your site through search engines are the most likely to click on ads.  They typed in a search and often the search wasn’t specific enough or it was too specific.  Your site came up and it is pretty close but not quite what they’re looking for.  People scan web pages in a matter of a few seconds and if they don’t think they’ll find what they want on your site they’ll leave.  Either through the back button or a link on your
site.

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We discussed earlier that you need backlinks to your website to drive traffic to it.  This practice is called backlinking.  When looking for a site to put a link back to your website you need to do a little research first.  Blogs and forums are a common place to provide backlinks to your site.  However, many blog owners add an additional property to the link called ‘nofollow’.  What this means is that the link will work and anyone can click on it, but in will mean nothing for your rank in search engine results.  The nofollow property tells search engines that they should not follow this link.

Different search engines treat the link differently, but Google and Yahoo both do not count the link towards a link to your website when calculating search results (the more links to your site the higher it will appear in search results).  This practice has been adopted to discourage people from spamming sites with links to their own site.

If the blog or forum relates to your sites topic then you’ll at least get traffic from people that are interested in what your site is about.  But you’ll only be getting half of the benefit.  There are many forums and blogs out there (this one included) that do not put the ‘nofollow’ property on their links provided by users.  If you can find one of these then you should go there a few times a week and post something relevant to the topic
at hand.  Doing this will help you slowly build up some backlinks.

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There are differing opinions as to when a person should add Google adsense to their website.  Many people will tell you that you should wait until you have a strong userbase and are getting over 1000 unique visitors per day.  Their logic follows that if you clutter up your site with adsense ads then you’ll turn potential repeat customers off to your site and it’ll take that much longer to gain a userbase.

Others will tell you to not wait and put the ads on right away.  It can take years to get to over 1000 unique visitors a day.  During that time your website isn’t making you any money, little as it may be.

They’re right, you shouldn’t wait until you get 1000 unique visitors per day, unless you’re the first into a popular new niche that’ll take a long time.  But you should also not clutter up your site with adsense.  You should add your ads in a way that makes them part of the overall template so that they don’t look out of place.  To do this you need to incorporate them much sooner than 1000 visitors per day.  But when doing so don’t make your site look like it’s just made to serve ads.  You definately should wait until you have most of your pages indexed by google as your adsense ads will be wildly off target until google has most of your site indexed.  You can determine this by using google’s webmaster tools.

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It’s a common line of thought that the more you know about your website and the traffic that comes across your site the better you’ll be able to manage that traffic and achieve a higher percentage of conversions.  Since Google is in the advertising game through adsense it’s in their best interest to have higher click through percentages of their ads.  Unfortunately for Google they don’t get to determine how their ads are presented on web pages.

To help webmasters with this Google provides a few tools to help you learn more about your website and the traffic that visits it.

Google Analytics: probably the most well known tool that google provides to webmasters.  You simply sign up for an analytics account at analytics.google.com, Google will give you some javascript to paste into your site.  It’s important that you put it on every page since pages that you forget to put the code on will not show any statistics.  With analytics you can find out how many users visit your site, how they got to your site, what pages are viewed the most etc.  You can even integrate analytics with you adwords account to see how well your adwords ads are performing.

Adsense reports: if you’re signed up to use adsense you probably have a few channels set up in adsense to see which ads you’ve placed on your site are performing the best.  Every website is different and different ad placements work better than others.  The same goes for blending ads into the content (so the ads don’t stand out) vs making the ads stand out in the content, on some sites blending works better and on others it does not.

You should try this with pages that are similar.  Get a couple different ads and put them in different channels.  Blend one and make the other stand out.  That way you can track which method works better for your site.  Likewise you can do the same for ad placement.  Use a lot of different channels to determine what works best by tracking which channels provide higher CTR percantages.  Note: you’ll want to wait until you have at least ten thousand impressions per channel before deciding which style works better.

Google webmaster tools:  I came across this one by accident.  You go to google.com/webmasters/tools, there you can add sites to your account.  You’ll have to verify the sites by either adding a meta tag to the index page or you simply create a new file on your server.  Once done you’ll have access to the webmaster tools provided by google.  In the tools you can see the data that google has on your website.  You can view the sitemap google has registered for your site, you can see how many other sites link to your site.  You can see which of your pages are linked to the most, which of your pages have the highest pagerank.

You can also see which Google searches were the most common that showed your site.  And related to that you can see which searches displayed your site and the user clicked into your site from that search.

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Using the WordPress blogging software makes blogging a breeze for even the most nontechnical people.  While writing the blog posts and moderating comments is easy through the admin page there are times when the nontechnical person has to do some things that are daunting to them.

WordPress constantly bugs you to upgrade to the latest version when a new version comes out.  Upgrading to the latest stable version is a good idea since it means that you’ll have the latest bug fixes and new features.  But to do an upgrade you have to overwite all of your WordPress files.  You should back up your database before doing so, you might accidentally overwrite your theme.  Doing all of this as a writer instead of a programmer is a nontrivial task.  Thankfully, there’s a plugin for WordPress that allows you to automatically upgrade WordPress right from the admin page.

WordPress Automatic Upgrade

WP atuomatic upgrade will automatically back up your database for you and only upgrade the files you need upgraded.  It’s a great tool that I use because it saves me time.

Another time you have to upload files is when you want to install a new plugin.  There are hundreds of good plugins for WordPress and you’ll invariably end up instally a few of them.  If you don’t like the idea of having to upload files to your server there’s a plugin that will let you install other plugins straight from the admin screen.

Easy Uploader

Easy Uploader is great because it saves you from having to ftp up new files to your server.  Being able to ftp isn’t always available, and if you are wary of writing new files to your server you don’t have to worry about accidentally overwriting files already on the server.

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As a blogger you should always be on the look out for new developments in your blogs topic.  Keeping abreast of all information regarding your topic can be a lot of work, visiting many websites and sifting through them for information on your specific topic will take a lot of time out of your day.  There’s an easy way to have all that information delivered to you.

Google makes it easy by using their news engine to deliver the news to your inbox.  You simply go to news.google.com and search for your topic.  Google will return results on your topic from various news sites.  At the bottom of that results page they ask you if you want to create an alert.  You simply provide your email address and then choose what news sources to search and how often you want the alert delivered to your inbox.  Then all you have to do is check your email once a day to find all the latest news about your topic.

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