“How to make money with AdSense” is one of the most popular topics in Internet marketing forums and the subject of many books and special reports.

Its popularity isn’t surprising given the extensive coverage of AdSense in mainstream newspapers and magazines as well as the program’s importance in driving Google’s every-growing advertising revenues. Website and blog owners can’t help but perceive Google AdSense to be an easy way to make money online.

 

While it’s true that adding AdSense a web page is trivial — all you do is paste some JavaScript code that Google generates for you — learning how to make money with AdSense — especially how to really make money — is decidedly non-trivial. Like anything, it takes time and effort. There are no overnight successes with AdSense.

The key is to know what to work on. Four factors come into play:

1. Traffic. By far the most important factor is how much traffic you can drive to your pages. After all, you only make money when visitors click (or in some cases view) the ads shown on your pages. If no one’s visiting your site, you won’t make any money. If you want to make more money with AdSense, you need more traffic. (That traffic should be targeted, too, otherwise smart pricing will kick in and reduce your earnings.)

2. Niche. The niche you’re targeting also has a huge effect on your AdSense earnings. You need to target niches where advertisers are actively seeking customers: if there are no advertisers, you won’t make any money. The simplest test you can do is to search Google for related keywords and see how many ads appear in the “Sponsored Links” section on the right-hand side of the results page. If there are few or no ads, that’s a sign that the market’s not a big one and probably isn’t a great choice for monetization via AdSense. (But you may be able to monetize it in other ways.)

3. Content. AdSense is all about content. It’s not about search results. It’s not about random collections of scraped data. There’s a reason why AdSense users are called publishers: it’s because they publish content. You need great content on your pages, written for humans and not search engines. Content is what’s going to keep visitors on your site, looking for the information they need. The longer they stay, the more chance they’ll click an ad.

4. Optimization. Many AdSense publishers spend too much time trying to optimize their pages when they should be spending their time on getting more traffic and writing more content. Luckily, many AdSense optimization techniques do double duty as search engine optimization (SEO) techniques. Concentrate on the basics, like: * Blending ads by removing borders and matching colors. * Positioning the ads in the “hot spots” of a page. * Choosing the right ad formats. * Tracking performance with channels.

These and a few other techniques can make a dramatic difference in your earnings — but only if you have enough traffic.

Note that even a poorly-optimized AdSense site can make its publisher a lot of money if draws a lot of traffic with quality content in a competitive niche. Don’t place too much emphasis on AdSense optimization.

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