2 Surefire Ways To Maximize Your Adsense Earnings

Most webmasters know that Adsense generates a sizeable source of additional advertising income. That is why most of them use it to go after high paying keywords. They have with them the lists that tells what the keywords are and have already used various methods of identifying them. And yet, after putting up these supposed-to-be high paying keywords into their pages, the money they expected to come rolling in is not really coming in.

What is it that they are doing wrong?

Having the pages is with the proper keywords is one thing. But driving visitors to those pages is another matter and often the factor that is lacking.

The thing is, to get visitors to your high paying keyword pages, you need to optimize your site navigation.

Stop for a moment and think about how visitors are using your website. After a visitor has landed on a certain page, they have the tendency to click on another page that sounds interesting. They get there because of the other links that appears on a page that they initially landed on. This is site navigation. It is all about enabling visitors to move about your site. And one way of maximizing your Adsense earnings.

A typical website have menu links on each page. The wording on these links is what grabs a visitor's attention and gets them to click on one of the links that will take them to another page of that website. Links that have “free' or “download” are oftentimes good attention-grabbers.

This navigation logic can also be applied to driving traffic to your high paying pages. There are some websites that are getting a lot of traffic from search engines, but have low earnings. The trick is to try and use come cleverly labeled links to get the visitors off that pages and navigate them to the higher earning ones. This is one great way of turning real cheap clicks to real dollars.

Before you begin testing if this same style will work for you and you website, you need to have two things. Something to track and compare and some high earning pages you want to funnel your site traffic to. An option is to select a few of your frequently visited pages. This is ensuring fast result to come by.

Now, the next thing to do is think of ways to get visitors viewing a particular page to try and click on the link that will take them to your high earning pages. Come up with a catchy description for that link. Come up with a catchy and unique description for the link. Think of something that people do not get to see everyday. That will trigger their curiosity enough to try and see what that was all about.

You can also use graphics to grab your readers' attention. There is no limitation to what you can do to make your link noticeable. If you are after the success of your site, you will do everything it takes just to achieve that goal. Just be creative. As far as many Adsense advertisers are concerned, there are no written and unwritten laws to follow regarding what they write. Just as long as you do not overstep the guidelines of the search engines, then go for it.

Also remember that it is all about location, location and location. Once the perfect attention grabbing description has been achieved, you have to identify the perfect spot on your page to position that descriptive link to your high paying page.

There is nothing wrong with visiting other websites to see how they are going about maximizing their site navigation. “Hot pages” or “Most read” lists are very common and overly used already. Get to know the ones that many websites are using and do not try to imitate them.

Another way of doing it is to try and use different texts on different pages. That way you will see the ones that work and what does not. Try to mix things around also. Put links on top and sometimes on the bottom too. This is how you go about testing which ones get more clicks and which ones are being ignored.

Let the testing begin. Testing and tracking until you find the site navigation style that works best for you site.

Common AdSense Mistakes

Selecting The Wrong Topics

When I first started out with AdSense, I was one eager beaver. I wanted to create as many pages as I could, and I didn't care what topic they were about as long as it wasn't adult or gambling.

I put up a site on Old Time Radio Shows, and I was excited to see that I made a few dollars a month with it. What I didn't realize at the time is that my $0.10 clicks were the bottom of the proverbial AdSense barrel in terms of earnings.

I didn't know then that it paid to research the good, high paying topics. So I just put up sites on whatever I could think of that seemed easy to rank for in the search engines.

I was shooting myself in the foot! Once I realized that I could do a little keyword research and find out how much the keywords were worth, then I started focusing on the higher paying niches and started seeing the $1, $2, $5, $10 clicks and up. I don't get that much with every click, but often enough to keep me very happy!

So research your topics first using the AdWords Traffic Estimator Tool, or a good high paying keywords list such as Keyword Explosion.

Too Many Topics on One Site

Another mistake I see newbies make very often (and I made myself when I was a newbie) is having too many topics put on one website. I've seen sites that target everything from alphalpha to Zoro!

That's a bad idea for two main reasons:

1. It makes it hard to optimize your site.You want your domain name to be targetted to the topic of the site (a great search engine optimization technique). If you have every manner of topic on the site, you can't do this and lose out on the power that a great domain name can have with the search engines.
   
2. Google's Smart Pricing doesn't like it.If you're not familiar with it, SmartPricing is what Google uses to figure out how much your page is worth in relation to the ads showing on the page. The more Smart Pricing likes your pages, the more you will get paid per click.

   One of the things I've seen with Smart Pricing is that it likes tightly focused, targetted sites. You might have a lot of pages on one site, but they need to be related to each other.

“But I can't afford more than one domain right now,” you might protest.

If that's the case, the best thing you can do is to create subdomains for each of the categories that your site targets.

For example, if you have a site that targets “alphalpha” and “Zoro”, have two subdomains:

http://alphalpha.mydomain.com/

http://zoro.mydomain.com/

Do not have the subdomains link to each other either. That way Google seems them as seperate “mini-sites”.

Be Careful What Kind of Traffic You Send To Your Sites

Not all traffic sources are created equal. There are a lot of sites out there selling “one hundred thousand visitors to your site for $49.95!” and the like.

What most of these sites do is use software to “simulate” a visit to your site. They are not real people. I've tested this extensively with a couple of vendors who sell this kind of traffic, and not once have I ever gotten any “real” people.

The problem is that sometimes those bots goof and “click” the ads by following the links.

Google sometimes sees those clicks as fraudulent, and many a new AdSense publisher has lost his account because of it.

So beware of shady or “too good to be true” traffic promises, they will only hurt you!

Focus on search engine optimization and link trading, that's where you're going to get the most bang for your buck.