Optimizing AdSense Ads – Content

Bloggers and webmasters who are into monetizing their websites using Google’s AdSense usually undergo stages of trial and error in attempting to optimize their sites for best revenue generation. There are the design tricks, such as making the ad color scheme flush with content, to make them look like site links, or even add images right beside ad links to attract clicks. These are all good ways to improve clickthrough rate.

However, one must consider the following:

• Clickthroughs are a function of traffic. Therefore, one’s site must have readership to get clicks and, consequently, revenues.
• Revenue per click is a function of the topic. How much you get each time a user clicks on your ads would depend on how much advertisers are willing to pay for the type of content and the keywords you are writing for.

So you can go either of these ways:

• Write for popular, but low-price, topics
• Write for very specialized topics that will fetch you a high cost-per-click.

It’s best if you can strike a balance between these two, or maybe even get yourself popular topics that pay well per click.

Themes, niches and topics

When you’re running your site for revenue, say, with a contextual-advertising programme like AdSense, it would suit you best if your website were as specific as possible. This would ensure that you are targeting for a limited set of keywords, and that no non-relevant advertisements would appear on your site. If you run the mistake of being too generic on your website, then you would have a mix of different advertisements on different products, services, or topics. And this would be unattractive to your readers, who are most likely looking for information (or products) on related and relevant topics limited to certain niches.

So if you want your advertisements to all be on the topic of cancer research, you should limit your website or blog content to cancer resarch. If you want your ads to be all about entertainment and the movie industry, you should limit content to such.

Diversify

Different themes and niches have different keyword/click values. And being too focused on a single topic only might hurt the performance of your programme.

One advice experienced publishers give is to diversify one’s web holdings. This means you shouldn’t only focus on a single or even a couple of websites or blogs if you intend to earn well from AdSense. You should create many websites. We shall discuss this next.