How much revenue do you generate from Google Adsense?

Recently there has been a lot of discussion about people who earn over $10,000 a month just from Adsense. Furthermore, there are rumors of a few individuals who earn over $1 million a year just from using the power of Google advertisements.

So what is Google Adsense and how can you use this program to earn a six-figure income?

About two years ago, Google created this program to help websites to monetize their web-traffic.

Here’s how it works:

Webmasters obtain a special code from Google which then displays targeted ads on their website. Whenever a visitor clicks on one of these ads, the webmaster earns a commission. Unlike other online businesses, there is no selling involved. All you need to do is get people to click on the ads.

Although this is an excellent way to generate an income, many websites are not effectively maximizing their Adsense potential. As a result, they are leaving a lot of cash on the table.

The question is how can you increase your Adsense revenue without increasing the number of web visitors?

The key to earning an income with Google Adsense is to have your ads match the rest of the site, making them look like part of your content. Your focus is to avoid having the Adsense blocks look like blatant advertisements.

The following are six ways that you can do this and increase your revenue at the same time:

1) Find the right place- Most website visitors read content that is in the middle of a webpage. As a result, the best place to put your Adsense block is in the top part of the page, at the beginning of your web content. You want to weave the Google Ads into your web content to give the appearance that they are extra links which expand on the information of the page.

2) Use the Large Rectangle–With Google Adsense, you have the option of picking different ad formats. Most of the time people opt to use the Leaderboard (728×90) or Wide Skyscraper (160×600) style ads. Unfortunately, this is the wrong choice, because both look like blatant advertisements. Instead smart webmasters have found that using the Large Rectangle (336×280) yields the best amount of click-thrus.

3) Ditch the border– Many people experience a sharp increase in Adsense revenue when they changing their border. What they change is very simple…they get rid of the border on their Adsense blocks. This is another way to make the advertisements look like useful web content.

4) Adapt the font- Whenever you write content, it should be the same font size and style as your Google Adsense block. This will help make it appear that the advertisements are a natural part of your website.

5) Match the colors– In addition to changing the fonts, you also should match the colors of your website. For instance, if your content is written in black, and your hyperlinks are blue, then the Adsense blocks should also be the same color. Again, this helps the advertisements appear to be normal web content.

6) Don’t have too many distractions- On a webpage, it is important to give web visitor a limited number of options. By having too many links and graphics, the web visitor might go to a section that doesn’t help increase your profits. While it is important to inform and entertain your web visitor, it is also vital that you monetize your site. So if the main focus of your site is to earn an income through Google Adsense, then get rid of all non-essential links and graphics.

By taking the time to implement these six simple steps, you’ll see a dramatic increase in the click-thru ratio of your ads. If added to all of the content of your site, your Adsense income will skyrocket!

Scott J. Patterson is a self-proclaimed Dunce, yet last month he earned $12,124 from one of his online businesses. To find out how YOU can do the same, download his fr*e ebook- The Secret-Guide to Online Businesses: http://www.duncemoney.com/adsense.html

Google is beta testing a new product which allows website owners and AdWords advertisers to automatically generate their AdWords campaigns by submitting a list of their product details via data feeds. The search engine uses the information from the feeds to determine the best keywords for those pages and automatically creates ads that link to them. This is brilliant news for any site owners who have a large database of products as they can now upload the whole lot at once.

The new Google ad automator feature is initially only being offered to select Froogle merchants who also advertise on the AdWords platform. The tool allows you to manage large, scalable campaigns without investing much time and effort. The ad automator dynamically generates accurate AdWords ads targeted to search queries. The content for these ads comes from the data feeds (that you submit as often as you like) containing your product descriptions, specifications, and information. These data feeds are simply tab delaminated text files. You can in fact use your existing Froogle data feed with some extra columns.

The AdWords system then generates ads from the content in your data feed (or from information you submit through the AdWords interface). This means that you can either let Google create your ad copy for you or you can set it yourself. It then continually analyzes all search queries to see whether they’re relevant to any of your products. When it finds a relevant match, it shows your ads on the search page results.

Once setup, you can set daily campaign budget much like a normal adwords campaign. The CPC is set in one of three places. You can either specify your maximum CPC in the data feed, in the AdWords interface, or you can allow Google to determine it for you. The later method automatically sets your max CPC by using the average CPC of the competing ads. As with normal AdWords campaigns, you can have your ads displayed on both the Search Network or the Content Network, and geo-target them.

Some benefits of Ad Automator are that ads are dynamically targeted to queries. They are also automatically compliant with AdWords policies; once your data feed is approved, ads don’t need to be reviewed again. You don’t need to create new ad text. You can leverage existing product descriptions that are likely already on your website. (However, you may submit customized ad text in your data feed or through the AdWords interface if you like.) You can supplement existing marketing efforts without much additional effort.

All in all I think this is set to be a big improvement when it is fully launched. It will compete with Yahoo’s Search Submit product whereby advertisers can pay to have their pages included in the search results.

For more information see http://www.ad-automator.com

Dear Friend,
Webmasters have a revolutionary new method of collecting income from their websites.

Whereas in the past advertising revenue was reserved for those sites with large a coming and going of visitors, now even teenagers are making a quick buck with their online hobby blogs. People place adsense on their online family photo albums, their blogs and their business sites. The minimum you would get, even with a small amount of traffic, is for adsense to pay for your hosting costs.

Adsense revolutionized the world of paid advertising; banner advertising is based on the number of visitors you attract to your site, so the number of banner impressions dictate the revenue you receive. Google Adsense is quite different; it is the number of visitors that actually click on the advertising that determine how much you earn.

There is also a great disparity between payouts; because advertisers bid up the price for certain keywords, some ads pay more than others. As such, a site with few visitors but expensive keywords in their google ads can potentially still pull in a hefty payout.

Google really has taken the web by storm; attracted to passive income, more and more people are seriously capitalizing on their Google adsense advertising. Some of the highest earners manage to attract enough visitors to make a four figure monthly income, just from using adsense alone! This is not one of those get-rich-quick schemes and Google’s adsense success is largely thanks to the fact that Google already enjoyed a fantastic reputation before introducing the program. They are a publicly traded company with physical headquarters. This, and the fact that anyone can apply to use adsense for free, has caused millions of people to sign up. For google it was a smart move, because now they extend their presence to countless websites and generate millions of dollars in advertising revenue. People were never reluctant to sign up, because the program is free. Google benefits by more people using adsense, so offering it for free was the best thing they could do.

One of the driving forced behind the program are its relevance to each and every page on a website; the program picks up keywords appearing in the website copy and automatically displays relevant ads. This increases the chances of people clicking through, and the webmaster collecting more revenue.

People are leveraging their income by operating several websites and attempting to attract as many targeted visitors as possible; in many instances we can observe that people work hard at a site, then once it is established they can largely leave it alone, yet still collect significant checks.

A major concern for entrepreneurs was the danger of a competitors ads showing up on their site; thanks to the adsense feature where it only displays relevant advertising. However this problem was solved by offering webmasters the option of filtering out unwanted ads. They can submit the URL of the competing site in their account, and any ads from the website will be blocked.

Google recently came out with a new feature: small targeted keywords based on the site’s content are displayed; then as people click on those, a page opens showing a variety of pay-per-click ads based on that keyword. This gives webmasters the chance of displaying more advertising in less space.

Adsense also adds creditability to your website; the more focused the content, the better the ads will be and this encourages people to built high quality websites. These make the net a better place and generally provide a free service; site owners can afford to share their expertise or passions because they can receive indirect revenue’s. The visitor does not pay for the information; instead the advertisers do, making the website’s existence possible in the first place.

It is no surprise Google adsense is the most widely used form of advertising; they have created a program that is beneficial to both advertisers and users with their no click no pay mechanism, or more popularly called pay-per-click. Advertisers do not pay for ads that are not drawing visitors, and website owners are paid more for each click than they would if the system were based on the number of people viewing the ads, instead of clicking on them.

All in all Google adsense has developed itself into a powerful tool, used by large corporations and the kid next door. They have truly revolutionized how the web thinks about advertising and made the process more profitable for site owners, while less costly for advertisers.

Matt Bacak became “#1 Best Selling Author” in just a few short hours.
Recent Entrepreneur Magazine’s e-Biz radio show host is
turning Authors, Speakers, and Experts into Overnight Success Stories.
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Search engine optimization can take a long time to show results. The Google sandbox alone can delay optimization results by 6 to 8 months. So, what can you do to get traffic while you wait? Pay-per-click [PPC] campaigns fill the time gap. This article discusses the basics of PPC advertising.

What Is A PPC?

A PPC search engine allows you to bid for placement in search results. Search engines such as Google, Yahoo, MSN, AOL and most others bolster their organic search results with sponsor advertisements. If you search on Google, links in blue across the top and the little ads down the right side of the search results are PPC listings. In one form or another, similar listings appear on every major search engine.

How Does It Work?

When you use a PPC, you will bid for placement in the search results under particular keywords. Instead of optimizing your site to appear high in the listings, you simple pay for the position. While this may sound great, keep in mind you are paying for the listing and have to watch the return on investment closely.

To get started, you must open an account with the PPC in question. The two biggest PPCs are Google Adwords and Overture. You will need to register with the PPC, provide a credit card number and, depending on the PPC, deposit money into the account. Next, create ads with a title, body text and link to the landing page of your site. The title of each ad should correspond to a particular keyword you want to promote. If at all possible, include the keyword in the actual title. Finally, you will be asked to bid on placement in the search results.

Bidding for placement is not as simple as it my sound. Ideally, your ad should be in the top 3, but never below the 10th position. This has to be balanced, however, by the return on investment of the campaign. If you sell a product that produces a $10 dollar profit per sale, you probably can’t afford to pay $.90 per click. If your site converts 1 visitor out of every 100 into a sale, you will spend $90 for every sale. Obviously, that is going to work out very well. The one caveat to this situation is a business with reoccurring revenue.

If you site charges clients a reoccurring monthly fee, you can bid in excess of your immediate profit margin. To do this safely, you must determine how long the average customer will stay on your site. For example, if you make a $10 profit per month and the average customer pays for 5 months, the total profit is $50. In this situation, you can spend $20 or $30 to obtain a customer and still turn a profit. To properly manage a PPC campaign for a reoccurring charge site, you must recalculate the profit per customer ever week to protect yourself.

PPC Cons

Why not just use a PPC campaign instead of pursuing search engine optimization? There are a number of reasons. First, you are paying for each click with a PPC, which requires a budget and may impact your cash flow. Second, PPC bidding is competitive and that translates into higher costs, so much so that a profit may be hard to make. Third, many people simply do not click on PPC ads with the figure being as high as 20 percent. Fourth, you run the risk of having people click on your ads with no intention of buying, whether they are just browsing or are trying to exhaust your advertising budget.

PPCs definitely have a place in the online marketing field. Manage your campaigns with an eye for detail and you should fine.

Halstatt Pires is with Marketing Titan – an Internet marketing and advertising company in San Diego, California comprised of a search engine optimization specialist providing meta tag optimization services and Internet marketing consultant providing internet marketing solutions through integrated design and programming services.

If you’re a regular internet user, you have undoubtedly used Google recently. And why wouldn’t you? It’s a great service. It’ll find what you’re looking for faster and more accurately than anyone else. Of course, Google is a publicly traded company that needs to make a profit and in the process of commercializing their technology, the company has created one of the most consistent revenue streams for webmasters today, AdSense.

(This article geared towards advertisers, content publishers see AdSense)

AdWords is a pay per click program in which ads are targeted to search results and website content with advertisers paying for each click received. Where your ad appears depends on how much you bid on certain keywords and how relevant the ad is to the search. In contrast to other types of affiliate programs, you do not pay a percentage of the sale you make, but pay a few cents (the minimum is five) for every visitor sent to your site.

This approach has several advantages. First, using the same technology that drives Google’s search results to deliver your ad results in your message appearing to only the most interested potential customers. Also, instead of having to recruit affiliates, your ads begin appearing immediately across Google search results and its network of AdSense publishers.

The key to success with this program is to be as specific as possible. Once you are logged in to your AdWords account, you can see estimates of the number of clicks that certain keyword combinations will bring. There are two benefits to being specific. One, The more you give Google to work with, the better targeted your ads will be, and therefore the more successful. The other benefit is that general keywords (for example, hosting) receive more bids and therefore cost more than more detailed phrases (Linux web hosting 30GB bandwidth / mo). Use this to set up a small budget to test the program and learn what works for your specific site. Be sure to take advantage of the free statistics Google offers to perfect your campaign.

Of course, even if you don’t have a site you can still take advantage of this program to make money. One common technique is to sign up as an Amazon Associate (their free affiliate program) and make ads on AdWords using their links as the destination. Essentially, you are paying a few cents for every click you send to Amazon, but are receiving a percentage of every purchase made on the site. Moreover, you can use Amazon’s ad copy and product titles to make your ad. If done correctly, this alone can be a successful business.

There is a lot more to explore and experiment with, remember: advertising is an art, not a science, but by now you should have a general idea of how AdWords works. Good luck!

Chris Rivers
This is an introductory article to AdWords, visit ClickForDeals.net to learn more about making money through pay per click and affiliate programs.

Introduction

Pay per click (PPC) is by far one of the easiest and quickest methods of driving targeted, consistent traffic to your website. While this may seem like a daunting method of advertising for some, it’s actually quite easy and can end up becoming that one marketing method that you can’t live without.

What I’d like to do today is provide some tips and techniques that I personally use when creating and monitoring PPC ad’s. Hopefully these tips will help you in your future marketing endeavors.

Experimenting With Different Search Engines

There are many PPC search engines, with some being better than others. The top two are Google and Yahoo, which was previously known as Overture. It’s a good idea to start your PPC campaigns with a small budget, spreading it out over a few different search engines to experiment and see where your target market may be lurking.

Generally speaking, I’ve found Google Adwords is better for more technically orientated products or services, including software, hardware, web design etc. Yahoo, on the other hand, is better for general consumer products, including insurance, toys, music etc.

What I wrote in the previous paragraph is very general, and you should analyze your campaigns carefully to see where they are performing their best. We’ll discuss this in detail a little later in the article.

Selecting the Right Keywords

The keyword selection process is probably the most important of all when it comes to creating your PPC ad’s. You’ll need to select keywords that are specific to your product or service offering, but you need to be careful not to select keywords that are extremely popular, as this may deplete your PPC funds sooner than expected.

The keyword selection process begins by asking yourself just one question:

“If I was searching for a product just like mine, which words or phrases would I search for?”

Using your answer(s) to this question as your base, you can then use a thesaurus and common sense to start building your keyword list with plurals, synonyms, similar words, etc.

To see which keywords your competitors are using, simply try searching for them. If you see a PPC ad along the side for your competitor, then note that keyword down and add it to your list.

Another way of coming up with great keywords is to use the overture search suggestion tool: http://inventory.overture.com/d/searchinventory/suggestion/

Type in a set of keywords and it will list similar keywords, including the number of times that keyword has been searched for on Overture (Yahoo) in the last month!

There’s often a fine line between selecting keywords that are either too specific or keywords that are too general. Try to keep away from these, as they can often result in wasted PCP funds.

A typical example of this would be an ad that I created recently for our latest product, TrackPoint, which — not coincidently — is an internet marketing return on investment (ROI) tracking tool. Although the product is heavily geared towards internet marketing, using such a broad term would have made it virtually impossible to compete with the other advertisers.

The term “internet marketing” is searched for 825,674 times per month on Overture alone. Combined with the huge number of different advertisers that target this keyword, the top bid for “internet marketing” on Google AdWords is $13.84 per click! With an average of 240 clicks per day, a single day of advertising alone would cost $505!

Now, unless you have an extremely high conversion rate of visitors to sales, or you’re selling a high priced item that usually has a high customer acquisition cost, I suggest targeting more specific keywords. Not only will this decrease your overall competition with other advertisers, but it will also increase the chances of turning your newly found web site visitors into customers.

Back to my earlier example, I chose to be specific with my keywords. One keyword was “ROI tracking”, which is searched for 1,828 times per month on Overture and has a much cheaper top bid. This keyword is also more targeted to the product I was marketing, meaning that a large percentage of people clicking on my ad should turn into customers.

It’s also helpful to note that taking the top bid is not always necessary, and anywhere in the top 5-10 can generate great leads. This really does come down to budget and analysis.

Attracting People to Your Ad

Now that we’ve selected our keywords, we need to get those searching to click on our ad, which in turn will result in them clicking through to our web site and potentially purchasing our product.

One of the simplest ways to get peoples attention is to use their search keywords in the title of your PPC ad. This has been proven to increase click-thru rates on ad’s by over 50%.

Why? Simple. If the potential customer is searching for “ROI Tracking” and the title of a PCP ad begins with “ROI Tracking”, then their attention will be grabbed instantly. He or she doesn’t need to know much else, other than that the PPC ad is catered specifically for him or her.

One thing to keep in mind is that you can sometimes create a more relevant title by combining your different keywords into one PPC ad. For example, I could have easily used something like “ROI Tracking PHP Script” as the title of my ad, which effectively would have decreased my click-thru rate, but definitely caters my ad more to a specific audience. Once again, this comes down to analysis and adjustment.

Another important technique to attract attention to your ad is to differentiate yourself from your competitors. In our particular case, the majority of our competition offer hosted solutions, whereby they manage the software on their servers in return for monthly or per traffic fees.

Our product caters to a different audience, those that want more control over their software, as well as those not wanting to pay monthly fees. So, in this example, I would make the title of my ad “Pay no monthly or per traffic fees”.

Next — and this is where experimentation is extremely important — we need to create a description for our PPC ad that will attract the potential customer and let them know that our product is exactly what they are searching for. To do this, I start my ad’s description with “Track PPC, campaigns & search”.

Finally, it’s good practice to add a “Call to action” at the bottom of your ad. If you’re not familiar with this term, its usually an instruction to tell the person to do something, such as “Click here to view a demo”, “Download Now”, etc.

Marketing experts seem to agree that the average human needs to be prompted to click on an ad or take action, so we’ll add this line to the end of our PPC ad’s description:

“Track PPC, campaigns & search. Try demo!”

Reducing Click-Thru’s

Sometimes it’s important to reduce the number of clicks your PPC ad is receiving. This could be because you are attracting people who are only after free products/services, or even the wrong target market.

The two quickest ways to reduce click-thru’s are to make the description of your ad more targeted and to add the price of the product to the ad.

Making the description more targeted (as I’ve discussed above) can reduce your overall click-thru rate, but potentially increase the likelihood of a click resulting in a purchase.

In my earlier example, by adding the words “PHP script” to the description, we are effectively filtering out those looking for a hosted solution, downloadable software or even those with a server that isn’t capable of running PHP scripts.

We also increase the targeting of our ad because we now know that the majority of those clicking on the ad are looking for a PHP script, which is exactly what our product is.

Secondly, by adding the price of the product you are selling to the end of the ad, you instantly eliminate those looking for free products, and target those willing to purchase your product or service.

Tracking Your Clicks and Conversions

The fundamental core of a successful advertising campaign — whether it be a PPC ad, banner ad or even newspaper ad — is knowing whether or not your ad’s are actually converting into sales or not.

If your ads aren’t making you money then you’re more that likely better off saving your advertising dollars and adjusting your ad’s or using your marketing budget elsewhere in your company.

Both Google and Overture have built in tracking and conversion tools that you can use to get a holistic view of your current PPC ad campaigns. You can even use external tools which let you add conversion code to your website to tell you exactly which of your ad’s are converting into sales and which aren’t. This is often referred to as knowing your ROI or Return on Investment.

We need to know exactly how much money we are making per dollar spent on every PPC ad. If the ROI is positive and we are making more money than we are spending, then the ad is working and we can use this knowledge to further improve our other ad’s or increase ad spending for that particular ad/set of keywords.

If, however, our ad’s are costing us more than they are returning, then we can reduce our spend, change our approach, or remove these ad’s altogether. It’s a rather simple formula, but frustratingly ignored by many advertisers.

You must track your ads if you want to succeed with any form of Internet advertising. You should also constantly monitor and adjust your ads according to how they are performing, your return on investment, etc.

Conclusion

Hopefully I’ve provided you with a clear insight into PPC advertising and techniques that you can use to improve your advertising campaigns. It pays — pun intended — to do your research and understand your target market, because the rewards can sometimes be much more than you expected.

Eddie Machaalani is the Interspire marketing and project manager. He’s most recently been kept busy helping out with the interface design for Interspire’s ROI and Conversion Tracking Application, TrackPoint. To see how TrackPoint can help boost your revenue, go here: http://www.interspire.com/trackpoint