RUNNING Google Adsense on your website can offer a simple way of earning money, but it is essential you get some things right about their placement on a page.
Adsense works by bringing advertisers and publishers together, with a small payment being earned every time someone clicks on an advert to find out more about an advertiser's products.
For Adsense to start bringing the money in you need readers and the more the merrier, but you could still earn a handy sum if you use some simple techniques.
A key element of Adsense is that you have a choice of different shaped adverts and can change the colour of the text and links that people see.
The best way to get people to click on them is to make the ads blend into your site so the text should be the same colour as your articles and any links should match those on your site.
Also I’ve found that taking any borders off your adverts will allow them to look like part of your site and as people arrive from search engines your ads will match the article you’ve written.
A thing to remember is that most websites work in columns, often two or three, and we place the important content in the middle and run the adverts around the side.
In effect you are conditioning people not to look at your ads, so if you can place the Adsense adverts within the body of your articles you will see an increase in the money you earn.
From my own observations I saw the number of clickthroughs increase dramatically by placing an advert block at the foot of each article, once people have finished a piece they need to click elsewhere, so why not a related ad?
Another tool provided by Adsense is the Channels option, this lets you track your adverts by using a descriptive name so you could, for example, compare how an advert in the right column works against one across the top of the page.
You need some patience to let an advert block run so you can see if it its positioning works or not, but there is a good rule of thumb - if it annoys you there is a good chance it will annoy your readers. [Craig]
It's worth pointing out the two big downsides of adsense too: first of all, ads that run on the site may well be for the people you're railing against in your blog posts, so for example I've written endlessly about online quackery and the adsense ads next to my posts are for, you've guessed it, online quacks; and there's the ever-present danger that you might be tempted to craft your content to boost ad revenues. If you don't, AdSense sums will pay for your hosting and that's about it.
There is a competitive ad filter that's designed to censor some ads, but in my experience it's useless.
Posted by: Gary Marshall | June 12, 2007 at 11:52 PM
Hi Gary - yes I have seen a hint of this. Shiny Media has a blog called DollyMix which has lots of earnest posts from young women about how women should be afforded greater equality and freedom in all sorts of walks of life. Unfortunately, these are accompanied by ads for pictures of Japanese women, or Russian women, or well any women really.
Posted by: Linda | June 13, 2007 at 11:45 AM
Hi Gary
I must agree that comment based sites are usually much more difficult to generate Adsense revenue from.
What I hope people do pick up from the piece is that with a little thought on colours and positioning, improvements can be seen.
All the best, Craig
Posted by: Craig | June 13, 2007 at 10:18 PM