If you’re like most webmasters who have Google AdSense on their websites, you’ve no doubt been tempted by AdSense gurus who promise to teach you how to earn billions of dollars a month with no extra work. While this of course sounds appealing, 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 between $40 and $250 to learn.
Are you ready?
Are you sure you’re ready to receive this mind-blowing secret that will make you MONEY RIGHT NOW?
The secret is; There are no AdSense secrets!
Trust me, if there was a secret way to earn thousands of dollars a month with little to no work, none of these gurus would go to any lengths to tell the world about it. They would exploit the secret themselves and sit on their super walrus leather massage loungers on their solid gold super yachts and laugh at all the poor fools who follow the rules.
There are no AdSense secrets, just common sense and a couple of cool little ideas you can implement to increase the CTR (click-through rate) of the AdSense ads displayed on your website. And higher CTR means higher MIYP (Money In Your Pocket).
The first thing to realize is that content is king. If your website doesn’t have a lot 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 too many sites joined with the sole intention of generating AdSense income. In fact, for $40 or more on eBay, you can buy a CD with over 350 high paying keyword themed websites set up for Adsense. All you have to do is enter your AdSense information and sit back while the mailman struggles to deliver herniating bags of AdSense checks to your door.
This is a really cool fantasy, one that I like to entertain almost as much as winning the lottery fantasy, but it’s just not going to happen. These sites do not have original and valuable content. People who can be tricked into visiting one of the sites will see it in an instant and see Google AdSense ads as a desperate and annoying attempt to trick them into clicking. If a live AdSense publisher ever visited one of these sites, their AdSense account would be suspended faster than you can say click fraud.
The underlying no-secret that all the AdSense gurus want to sell you is that if your AdSense ads look like content and are closely tied to your valuable, original content, you’ll see your CTR rate double at least, and more likely triple or plus.
I recently started implementing the three steps I’m about to reveal to you, and my average daily CTR on one of my sites went from 0.86% to over 4% literally overnight. This is a new site, it’s just under a month old and I’m only getting about 100 visitors a day, but I’ve gone from $0.30 a day in AdSense earnings to an average of $6.00 a day in AdSense earnings. Now scale those numbers to the amount of traffic an established site is getting, and you can see how phenomenal this increase is.
1. Remove the AdSense border. By default, AdSense units are surrounded by a border with a text box at the top that says “Gooooogle Ads.” Your goal is to work the AdSense units into your content in the best way possible, so get rid of the borders. Now, Google won’t let you remove the borders, but it does let you control the colors of almost every element in an AdSense unit. Simply make the border the same color as the background of your website. This also applies to the background color of the AdSense unit, it changes it to match the background color of your web page.
two. Use rectangular box sizes for your AdSense units. Like most people, when I started with Adsense, I mainly used the horizontal skyscraper, you know, the one that looks like a banner. The problem is that people have developed an advertising sensory overload, not even watch commercials, visually disconnect them. You need to make your AdSense unit blend in with your content, so use rectangular boxes. I get the best response with box size 336X280. Most languages 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 about the colors. Google gives you incredible leeway with the colors you can select for your AdSense blocks. Use this to your advantage, in addition to changing the border and background color, change the link and URL color as well. Most people are used 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 is the URL of the website that pays for that ad. If you want to draw attention away from the URL and towards the clickable link, change the color of the link to match the color of the body of the ad, usually black.
Just follow these three simple guidelines and I assure you that your CTR will skyrocket. Keep adding more original and relevant content to your site, increase your targeted traffic and watch your AdSense earnings grow.
There are many more AdSense techniques that will increase your CTR, but these three are the most important. Keep an eye out for future articles where I explain the importance of ranking your AdSense units and how to track your AdSense campaigns through channels.
