If you’re like nearly every Webmaster who has Google Adsense on your websites, you have undoubtedly been tempted by the Adsense Gurus who promise to teach you how to make a gazillion dollars a month with no extra work. While this of course sounds enticing, like everything else on the web; if it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
I’m going to tell you up front, for free, what all the gurus charge $40 to $250 to learn.
Are you ready?
Are you sure you’re ready to receive this earth shattering, mind blowing secret that will MAKE YOU MONEY RIGHT NOW!?
The secret is; There are no Adsense secrets!
Believe me, if there was a secret method to make thousands of dollars a month with little to no work, none of these gurus would go through all the effort to tell the world about it. They would exploit the secret themselves and sit in their walrus leather super massage loungers on their solid gold super yachts and laugh at all the poor saps following the rules
There are no Adsense secrets, just common sense and a couple of neat little ideas that you can implement that will increase the CTR (Click Through Rate) of the Adsense ads being served on your website. And an increased CTR means increased MIYP (Money In Your Pocket).
The first thing you must realize is that content is king. If your website does not have an abundance of keyword rich, search engine friendly content that provides a valuable service to your visitors, no amount of Adsense tweaking in the world will make a difference. There are far too many sites slapped together with the sole intention of generating Adsense income. In fact, for $40 or so on eBay, you can buy a CD with over 350 websites themed to high paying keywords and setup for Adsense. All you have to do is enter your Adsense information and sit back while the Mailman struggles to deliver the hernia inducing bags of Adsense checks to your doorstep.
This is a really cool fantasy, one I like to entertain almost as much as the winning the Lottery fantasy, but it just isn’t going to happen. These sites have no original, valuable content. People who may be suckered into visiting one of the sites will see that in an instant, and view the Google Adsense ads as a desperate and annoying attempt at fooling them into clicking. If a live Adsense editor were ever to visit one of these sites, your Adsense account would be suspended quicker than you can say click fraud.
The underlying non-secret that all the Adsense gurus want to sell you is that if your Adsense ads look like content, and are tightly keyed to your own valuable, original content, you will see your CTR rate double at the least, and more likely triple or more.
I recently began implementing the three steps I am about to reveal to you, and my average daily CTR on one of my sites went from .86% to over 4% literally overnight. Now this is a new site, just under a month old and I only get around 100 visitors a day, but I went from $0.30 a day in Adsense revenue to an average of $6.00 a day in Adsense revenue. Now scale those numbers up to the amount of traffic an established site is getting, and you can see just how phenomenal of an increase this is.
1. Remove the Adsense Border. By default, the Adsense units are surrounded by a border with a text box at the top that says “Ads by Gooooogle”. You goal is to work the Adsense units into your content as seamlessly as possible, so get rid of the borders. Now, Google won’t allow you to delete the borders, but they do allow you to control the colors of nearly every element of an Adsense unit. Simply make the border the same color as the background of your website. This goes for the background color of the Adsense unit as well, change it to match the background color of your webpage.
2. Use Rectangular Box Sizes for your Adsense Units. Like most people, when I first started with Adsense, I primarily used the horizontal skyscraper, you know, the one that looks like a banner. The problem is people have developed an advertising sensory overload, they don’t even see banner ads anymore, they visually tune them out. You need to make your Adsense unit blend in with your content, so use rectangular boxes. I get the best response with the 336X280 box size. Most languages are read from left to right, so try to place your rectangular Adsense unit in a table aligned to the right of your text.
3. It’s all about the colors. Google gives you an incredible amount of leeway with the colors you can select for your Adsense units. Use this to your favor, in addition to changing the border and background color, change the link and URL color as well. Most people are accustomed to clickable links being blue, so make sure your Adsense links are blue, with one exception: if you use a different link color on your site, change the Adsense links to match that color. At the bottom of each Adsense unit there is the URL for website paying for that ad. You want to draw attention away from the URL and towards the clickable link, change the color of the link to match the body color of the ad, generally black.
Just follow these three simple guidelines and I assure you, your CTR will skyrocket. Keep adding more original, relevant content to your site, increase your targeted traffic, and watch your Adsense revenue explode.
There are many more Adsense techniques that will increase your CTR, but these three are the most important. Watch for future articles in which I explain the importance of positioning your Adsense units and how to track your Adsense campaigns using channels.
