Beginners Increase your Adsense Income

09.19.2007 | 2:27 pm | AdSense, Beginners, Getting Started, Google, Income, PPC, SEO, Site Building, Tips

If you are really wanting to make money with Google AdSense I think there are a few things that are important for you know or do.
Of coarse as always these suggestions are only my opinion. Please make sure you test what works best for your site . I can only tell you what is working for me take ‘m or leave ‘m but I tell you this same info made a big difference with my online income increasing.

  1. First off the most important thing I can recommend is to read Google Adsense’s Terms of Service. This is an agreement made between you and Adsense when you joined. It tells you a lot of information on what you can and can’t do while the ads appear on your pages. Not only do I suggest reading it once I suggest reading it so many times you could recite it by heart. It’s that important. Breaking Google’s rules can get you banned for life and nothing is worth that!
  2. Never EVER click your ads There is NO reason that its ever ok to click your own ad. There are always other options!
  3. Certainly don’t ask others to click your ads. I found out that the clicks will happen naturally.
  4. Play around with your ads colors.
    • Try blending your ads background with your pages background color Remove ad border I.E. Blend border color with your background too.
    • Use the same text colors that you have within your page. Maybe a slightly darker or bolder color for the Subject.. maybe your pages content links color.. color coordination is very valuable.
    • Although many have found the border improves their CTR as well as making ads stand out more different colors than the page. Try. Test. Try. test
  5. Text is your best friend. Use it as much as you can. I could never begin to stress this enough. Google AdSense ads are created by the text found on your page as well as search engines use text to include you in searches.
  6. Use your META Tags. Be descriptive about your page in your title tag. Use Meta tag for keywords and pick out the best keywords from your page Use descriptive alt tags for images.
  7. Keep adding the code to more and more pages in visible spots. Don’t be shy with them. Higher in the page and close to content is best.
  8. Don’t talk with others (friends,family ect) about your ads or that you are or not making any money with it ect.

Setting Google AdSense Alternate Ad URL

08.20.2007 | 7:47 pm | AdSense, Google, Income, PPC, Statistics and Reports, Tips

Are you monetizing your website with Google AdSense? LOL

If you are you’re going to want to take a moment to set up alternate or default ads for your AdSense Ads. Alternate ads would be an ad that would replace the AdSense Ad when there are no available ads and instead a lovely PSA (Public Service Announcement) appears that when clicked will not result in any revenue for you (Example of a PSA RedCross.org). These ads, while helpful to communities and/or non for profit organizations, will instead lower your CTR (click through rate) as well as ePCM (Page View Value per 1000). I personally had no idea how simple it was to set up a default ad until fairly recently and wanted to take a moment to pass this valuable information on as it did increase my overall CTR and ePCM as well as created an additional source of revenue.

First, you will need an alternate advertiser and/or affiliate program. There are many to choose from like Chitika, Amazon ect. but I suggest a non contextual affiliate program since you are probably running more than one AdSense ad block on a page and you want to stay within the rules of the AdSense program.

Second, you will need to create a basic template page. You can use Note Pad or HTML-Kit or a similar text editor. You will need to make this page a .html, .shtml, .php or what ever page type you want. I prefer .php myself so I will create a page called google-default.php. I suggest keeping your HTML in this page simple but you will want to at least a 0 left margin in the BODY Tag.

google alternate ad jpg

Then in the BODY area of the page you place the code for your alternate affiliate source. Upload to your site in a location you can easily remember. You can use this text as your initial AdSense alternate ad HTML code if needed. (To save code : Right click the link and “Save Target As”)

Third, you will need to update your AdSense code. The best way to do this is to login to your AdSense account and visit the create code area. When updating ad settings for your pages ad you will need to place your default ads URL, or web address location at your site, in the box for the “Alternate Ad” and it will automatically ad the proper code. It will ad a line in the code that looks similar to this

google_alternate_ad_url = "http://mysite.com/google-default.php";

You will need to repeat this process for various sized ads so the alternate ad that appears is the same size as the original AdSense ad would be so the alternate ad will appear correctly on your page.

Origanilally posted (12-08-05) by me at another blog.

How to Run Google Adsense and Chitika eMiniMalls on the same page

10.28.2005 | 2:35 pm | AdSense, Beginners, Chitika, Google, HTML, PPC

So how does one “make eMiniMalls non-contextual” and thereby able to be run on the same page as Adsense?

Default Code

Chitika has made this extremely easy - in fact they’ve made it so easy you don’t have to do anything different at all because they’ve just changed the default of their ads to be ‘non contextual’. So when you log in and click the ‘Get eMiniMalls Code’ link and design your ads they’ll supply you with the code that makes using eMiniMalls work with Adsense without you having to mess around with adding code.

The all important code in what they give you is:

ch_non_contextual = 1;

If you’ve previously inserted code into your site it might be worth checking its in it or else your ads will be contextual.

Targeting Keywords - Rotation

So the question many will no doubt ask is “If the ads are non contexual - what determines what ads will now be served?”

Good question. If you look at the code that Chitika gives you you’ll notice another new line of code that comes to you by default like this:

var ch_queries = new Array(”digital cameras”, “ipod mini”, “sony playstation”, “dell laptop”);

This is the line of code that tells Chitika what ads to serve your site. If you leave it as is it will rotate four types of ads through your pages - ads for ‘digital cameras’, ‘ipod minis’, ’sony playstations’ and ‘dell laptops’. The beauty of eMiniMalls is that while these ads might pay ok per click - they are not likely to be highly relevant ads to the topic of everyone’s site - so you’re able to change them. Simply remove the words between the “and” marks and insert relevant words to your site. If your site is about MP3 players try “MP3 Player”, “ipod mini”, “ipod photo”, “iriver” etc. You can insert as many keywords as you like. This will help to keep your site looking fresh and hopefully stop your regular readers becoming blind to your ads.

For example, on a cameras site,you might change the list to be:

var ch_queries = new Array(’Canon Powershot S2 IS’, ‘Canon Digital Rebel XT’, ‘Canon Powershot A520′, ‘Canon PowerShot A510′, ‘PowerShot SD400 Digital Camera’);

You might also like to periodically check and change the ads you rotate to help with ad blindness. I know of a couple of sites who are changing the keywords that they target once per week to keep things fresh.

Targeting One Keyword

If you just want to target ONE keyword do so by:

1. deleting this bit of the code:

var ch_queries = new Array(’phrase1′, ‘phrase2′, ‘phrase3′);
var ch_selected = Math.floor((Math.random() * ch_queries.length));
ch_query = ch_queries[ch_selected];

2. replacing it with:

ch_query = ‘ipod mini’;

Targeting Titles as Keywords:

One of the things that is done on many of sites is picking keywords that are pretty specific. ie instead of just adding “digital camera” you can add “canon eos 20d” and get ads for a specific digital camera. This is particularly useful on a page about a specific digital camera as it will increase your click through rate quite a bit.

One way of targeting specific words is to target the titles of your pages (if you use titles that include the keywords of your pages that is). How you do this will of course depend upon the system that you use to make your site or blog - but if you’re using Movable Type or WordPress you’ll find that both of these systems have title tags that will trigger the title for a particular post.

For example on a MT blog they line of code targeting keywords would look like:

ch_query = ‘< $MTEntryTitle$>‘;

In WordPress to target the title you’d use this…

‘< ?php the_title(); ?>’;

If you use another blog platform please feel free to let us know what the code would be in comments below.

Keep in mind that this will only be effective if you use titles on your site that are pretty specific to products. If you don’t you might want to consider specifying some keywords as you might end up with empty ads or very irrelevant ones.

Using Chitika eMiniMalls With Adsense

10.28.2005 | 2:01 pm | Ad Networks, AdSense, Beginners, Chitika, Google, Income, PPC

Many of the questions I’ve heard asked about Chitika eMiniMalls have been related to whether or not they can be used on the same page as Google Adsense ads. This was initially of major concern for a number of us when we first came across eMiniMalls. As a result, many wrote an email to Adsense for clarification some a couple times even. The final response is that it was allowable from the perspective of Adsense to use Chitika eMiniMalls on the same page as Adsense ads in the following circumstance (I’m told by a YPN publisher that this is also true with YPN):

1. eMiniMalls must be made to be NON-contexual

This is great news as it added Chitika eMiniMalls as another revenue stream to the sites of many without compromising another important source of income like Adsense.

Note: Chitika has another ad system, called RealContext, that is NOT allowed to be used in conjunction with Adsense - don’t get them mixed up.

It is worth noting that different webmasters and bloggers have seen difference results from using Adsense and Chitika’s eMiniMalls on the one page. These results have included:

A few publishers have reported small decreases in their Adsense earnings. Some have even noticed a 5-10% decrease in overall Adsense earnings since adding eMiniMalls. Of course, this is considerably less than the overall increase in earnings that the eMiniMalls have returned so many are willing to take this hit knowing that an overall considerably better financial position.

A smaller number of publishers have noticed increases in their Adsense earnings when they replaced one of multiple Adsense Ad units with a Chitika eMiniMall unit. This sounds crazy - bit it makes sense when you realise that sometimes less Adsense Ad units on a page can result in increase click value amount for some ads (thats another topic for another day)

* Some have found eMiniMalls to be so well suited to their site’s that they’ve removed Adsense altogether and are just running the Chitika ads (I wouldn’t recommend doing this straight away without testing things first).