HTML Codes, Auction Templates, eBook Tutorials, & Blog Tips Cool HTML Codes, Auction templates, eBay Tips, Ebooks, & Tutorials

Sponsored Links

One of the things I love about blogging is being able to share tips with others. I think bloggers all share a common interest, and we need to stick together to help one another succeed. In fact, I have learned so much from other bloggers along my journey (both new ones and older ones), that I thought I would share a brief experience, and also give a few tips. I am also trying to make a habit of giving out backlinks to blogs and websites that have good content, so I felt a blog I recently discovered was worth the link love.

What I Learned About Blogging This Past Month

A few weeks ago, I was brainstorming on how to increase my website income. At this point, I was managing multiple blogs, and using only Adsense to monetize them. My Adsense income was decent ($300 or so a month), but I knew I could do better and make more overall revenue. Unfortunately, my efforts to increase traffic and revenue weren’t succeeding as I had hoped.

So I was typing into Google “blog income report” to see if any bloggers were posting their income information. I was hoping I could find a few monetizing methods that I could use to combine with Adsense without lowering my Adsense earnings.  I had already tried Chitika, Kontera, and others, but I felt they took away from Adsense and didn’t increase my overall income. So I took them off, and looked for other ways to increase income that didn’t affect my Adsense. Sure enough, I found a few.

One that caught my attention was a guy blogging about making money, technology, and some other topics. As I read over his blog post for his January 2010 blog income, several things stood out to me:

1. He was making roughly the same income as I was each month
2. He started blogging around the same time I did
3. He was making this income from many different sources (whereas I was making the same amount from one source)
4. His traffic was almost double compared to what I get for this site
5. My Adsense was earning almost 15 times what his Adsense averaged per month across all of my blogs, and at least 4-5 times more than his total earnings on this blog alone.

As I thought about this, I was very surprised. I immediately seen the potential income I was throwing away each month. I thought to myself, “Wow, I should have at least double or triple what I am making now.”  In fact, since reading that one post, I have decided to join socialspark.com (still in the process of getting approved), and a few other sites to increase my overall income. So I appreciated him sharing his sources and amounts of  income.  I am optimistic that I can increase my revenue very soon. In fact, this is as excited as I have been in a long time about blogging.

So the lesson I learned this past month is the importance of maximizing blog income by pursuing multiple income streams. I have always “known” that it was important to seek other methods, but I always just stuck with Adsense assuming I was doing all I could to maximize my income. In  hindsight, this was a mistake.

My Tips to DragonBlogger.com (Justin Germino) & All Bloggers on How to Increase Adsense Earnings

As I browsed a few of Justin’s articles, I came across a recent article where he was tweaking his blog Adsense placement. He was also expressing his interest in increasing his overall Adsense earnings. He wants to build his Adsense to a much higher level, so he doesn’t have to focus on time-intensive monetizing methods (like paid posts, etc.).

So as I looked over his site, I immediately noticed several pieces of advice I could give him. After all, he gets more traffic than me, yet I have higher Adsense earnings. Our blogs cover similar topics, so I thought I may be able to help him out a bit. It also felt great to return the favor since his post led to social spark and a few other sites which I didn’t ever knew existed. So he helped me, and I wanted to offer a few tips that hopefully helped him.

So here are my tips on how you can immediately see a jump in your Adsense Earnings:

1. No Adsense for Search–While it certainly won’t make you rich, I do earn a few dollars through the Adsense for Search feature each month. I didn’t notice this on your blog, so when you get the chance, I would consider adding this to it. You can see mine on almost every page (and I also have the standard WordPress search). Again this is my smallest Adsense earner, but the few dollars add up over time.
2. No Link Units–This is a biggie: Adsense allows up to 3 link units per page. While they may seem irrelevant or pointless, I can assure you they do pretty well. Many times I can get clicks that range from a few cents to a dollar or two. So I would highly recommend you ad all 3 link units (I would add them where your current skyscraper is located–or somewhere where they will be visible).
3. Not Enough Ad Units–At a quick glance, your post pages only show 2 ad units. I would recommend using all 3 allowed by Google. In addition, the largest ones seem to work well (larger skyscraper, large squares). You will notice a big difference by using all 3, trust me.
4. Consider Changing Ad Locations–Every ad location you have, is the exact spot where I get the least clicks. If you make a switch to match what the heat map shows (which I have basically duplicated on my site), you should notice a nice jump in earnings. Put the ads that earn most where the heat map indicates (I would stick with skyscraper and large squares), and I would probably put all 3 link units where your current skyscraper is.
5. Consider Changing Color Schemes–As I scrolled on your site, I was almost completely blind to your ads. You may want to tweak the color scheme a bit to see if that helps too. For example, below your post you have a large square. The titles for the ads are a light yellowish/white color. Instead, it may be more effective to change this to match the color of your blog  links (the blue color). You want ads to blend in so that they look natural, yet you also want them to be noticeable. To me, your ads did a good job of blending in, but weren’t very noticeable. You may want to see if removing the white outline on your skyscraper will help too, and play with different colors for that as well. If that doesn’t work, you may even want to consider changing the entire color scheme of your theme, or parts of the theme (such as the text/sidebar area).
6. Set Ads to Show Both Image and Text–I think you have already done this, but just in case, I would recommend you try that and see if that helps. Google uses an algorithm to show the most expensive ads (whether it is text or  image) so this could increase your earnings.
7. Consider Tweaking Your Theme–You did a great job with your design, and your theme is pretty cool. But to match the heat map, you may consider adding a left sidebar. Here are my most popular ads units (from most popular to least popularly clicked): Top large square, left skyscraper, bottom large square, link units, search. So if you tweak your theme to distribute your ads in different places, it may increase your earnings.
8. Tweak Your Adsense Plugin–You may want to tweak the Adsense plugin to display those ads consistently. For example, I noticed on the bottom of your post, it alternates between a large square and a small banner. You may want to just set it to the large square. Larger ads seem to perform better overall, and are more noticeable. I personally don’t use a plugin for Ads, I just insert the code directly into my theme files so they display that way on every page. If there is a page I don’t want to display ads, I either use a special template, or create a php switch code for my single.php template (which I recently implemented so that when I write a sponsored post, the ads wont display in the post area).
9. Keep Tweaking–Part of maximizing Adsense is to keep working and measure your results. If you don’t have channels, make sure to create channel for each site you run, and each ad unit. This way you can see what gets the most clicks. Then, if you move the units to a newer location, you can see if it increased or decreased your clicks. This helped out a lot for me in the beginning as I experimented with different blog designs. At this point, I honestly feel my Adsense placement is as maximized as it can possibly be.
10. Keep Blogging–Once you maximize your ad placement and color scheme, you should see a nice jump in earnings. Just keep blogging, and those earning should stay fairly consistent. The more traffic you get, the more ad impressions/clicks you will naturally receive from that traffic. It seems your blog is growing, so that is something to be happy about.

I hope those tips help any bloggers out there who need to maximize their Adsense. You don’t necessarily have to follow all of those tips. Some bloggers may not want to place ads in certain places, or may not like too many ads. That is perfectly fine. I just thought that I would throw those tips out there since they have worked well for me and my blogs/sites. Sometimes what seems obvious to one person is a completely new concept to another.

However, I feel pretty strongly that if any blogger implemented those basic tips, they will see their Adsense earnings double, triple, or even quadruple in no time. It is a really easy way to boost your income without having to increase your traffic. And it is all 100% safe, legal, and within Adsense’s terms and conditions.

Good luck everyone, and I hope those tips helped!

Sponsored Links

Posted under Blogging Tips