Standout Ads
There are various ways to draw attention to your ads (without breaking Google TOS):

• Google heat map
  Bt positioning your ads where your visitors eyes are naturally drawn they are obviously going to get attention and if relevant, clicks
• Using color can make them stand out from the rest of your content (though maybe not in a good way)
• Multiple units, I often see this on low quality sites where they are splattered with Adsense units and you often have to scroll to see the actual content. Whenever I see two vertical rectangles next to each other it’s the first and last time I’ll visit that site.

Blended Units

• Link Color
  Making the links on your ad units the same color as your regular links. I generally like this approach as it adds to the aesthetics of the site.
• Making your content look like an Ad unit
  This is when a site is laid out so that the actual content, or navigation uses the same layout as an advert.

Both of these methods can work, but it should never be just about the clicks, it’s also about quality. If you trick a visitor into clicking an ad by excessive blending you’re going to suffer in two ways. First you’ve lost and likely upset your visitor and second they are unlikely to convert for the advertiser which will upset Google, if traffic from your site has a poor conversion rate you are likely to be hit by smart pricing, meaning you get paid less per click.

What I find works best is to use adsense but not give it too much prominence to my regular visitors or visitors to new content, readers like this I want to make feel welcome and encourage them to come back (I’ll make money from these using affiliates and CPM ads) whilst with search engine traffic and older pages I’ll give Adsense more emphasis by both blending and optimal position, without I hope degrading the look of the site. I’ve been trialling this for the last couple of months and while Adsense income is down I’m finding affiliate income on the rise and I personally feel happier by the look of the site.

On the advertising theme I received the following great example of an offline advert in the post. It was a product I had no interest in but the way they’d done it certainly got me to read it.

If you don’t recognise the layout, in the UK you receive very similar looking slips when you miss a parcel delivery (something I do a lot) so I thought this was very cleverly done, if it was on your door mat would you of picked it up and read it?

Improve Relevancy with Section Targeting
One Adsense feature that I think is often overlooked is section targetting, this is where you can tell Google which areas of your page contain content that is the most relevant for contextual advertising. It’s simple enough to implement using html tags:


<!-- google_ad_section_start -->
Here's my content that is what the page is all about.
<!-- google_ad_section_end -->


Further info can found at the Adsense support center.

Position with CSS
This is a tip I’ve mentioned before, use CSS so that your most popular (best CTR) ad unit is positioned first in the HTML of the page, more info on how to do this here. It’s also worth experimenting with the number of ad units on a page it is often found that one ad unit can produce more revenue than multiple units (Jensense has also recently done a nice post on this).

Hide units from writers and yourself
Clicking your own ads is obviously a massive no no. The easiest way to prevent accidental clicks is not to show the ads in the first place. What I do is hide the ads from all of my writers and myself when we are logged in. To do this WordPress you can use the following code.

$lAdsDisplayed = 0;
global $user_ID;
get_currentuserinfo();
$lNotLoggedIn = '' == $user_ID;

if($lNotLoggedIn)
{
// Display Adsense here
}
?>

The main benefit of this is the prevention of accidental clicks but depending on traffic it will improve your CTR as writers wouldn’t/shouldn’t be clicking anyway.

Search
Text based Adsense units work really well when naturally blended into your own search results. So if you have a search feature on your site use it to display ads and then at the end of your results you can also provide a Google site search so if your visitor hasn’t found what they are looking for they can ask Google to help, giving you another change to monetise that visit. You can see an example of this for the search gadgets.

URL Color
Another way of getting more attention to your ads (without breaking Google’s TOS) is to use a different color for the URL. What I find works is to use your sites default link color for the title and then a more standard link blue for the URL, example in the image below.

(The dotted border is not a Google feature it is just how I have it positioned and separated from other content on the page)

Statistics
Checking your Google stats more than once per day is a waste of time. I know it’s addictive and that you want to but ask yourself the question “What am I going to do if they are slightly up or do, bleat about it on some forum or do nothing and wait until tomorrow and see if they’ve evened out?” If the answer to that was bleat you might want to check out these other time wasters.

The Heat Map
This next tip is a bit of an oldie but it works, the heatmap shows you the best areas for positioning.

Adsense May Not be the Best Option for your Site
We’ve spoken about this numerous times, just because Adsense generates revenue on your site it isn’t necessarily the most profitable stream. Jim Karter shared a great example of how one of his sites was making $600 per month from Adsense but when he switched to a different program saw something like a 1,000% increase, cool!

At the moment I’m in talks with a company that offers the potential for me to generate more revenue with them every month than I did with Adsense in December, will it be instead of Adsense, hell no! Hopefully there will be more to follow on this one after things have been finalised and contracts signed.

Traffic
This might be the last tip but it is the most important one, the best way to improve your Adsense income is to increase traffic. CTR has a limit, CPC has a limit, traffic does not. You can have the worst ad placement in the world in the lowest paying niche but if you have the traffic you’ll make good money. So spend time optimizing your ads but spend a lot more time building traffic, it will pay in the long term and that’s what this game is all about.

At the start of January I stated a list of 7 goals I wanted to achieve in 2008, so far No.2 on the list has been achieved – to get involved in an offline venture, a rocky start with the vehicle breaking down but a few jobs under the belt there and one landscaping job just signed up for this month that comes in at £4900 of which over 50% is naturally profit.

A goal achieved
This week I can chalk off No.7 – goal number 7 was working for one client on one keyword, my personal goal was to get them top 10 and then top 5, we reached top 10 in February and this week we reached top 5 which was quicker than expected. The good news is that this is an ongoing arrangement so the £800 ($1600) per month is to be added to my stable income for the foreseeable future.

A goal added
I really should have added an 8th target on my list – well I’d like to add one more, to be free from Adsense and organic listings, don’t get me wrong I love getting money from Adsense but it’s pretty infuriating that you can do the same thing each month, even have the same traffic and end up with totally difference results.

I wish that when you got to say $5k per month that Google would give you a contract guaranteeing that as a minimum for 6 months or 12 months, the up and down nature of the earnings means you are never really sure what the next month will bring. On top of that to be reliant on making money from my organic listings is hugely beneficial financially but it’s a risk that I don’t have full control over. I cannot guarantee with absolute certainty that I will maintain my organic traffic.

So, I’d like not to be reliant on this money and more than that not reliant on any one website, I won’t be going out of my way to remove any Adsense, I would always like to do something like $5000-$10,000 a month but I would like that not to be money the house needs. I asked the wife to total up all our monthly bills to see what the damage was and what we needed to survive on as a minimum wage. This includes mortgage, tv licence, Sky, Phone, Council Tax, Car Insurance, Home Insurance and food ect. The total comes to £1900 per month. So I want to make sure that I have a fixed income of over £1900 per month which isn’t too bad.

At present my fixed income consists of:
SEO work for a client £800 p.m.
Leased out domain (that was highly ranked) £500 p.m.

So during the course of the rest of the year I want to add £600 to my fixed monthly income and then I shall be Adsense free and not reliant on any organic rankings. My organic rankings and Adense will dwarf any fixed income but it’s probably prudent to make sure that if the shit was to hit the fan for any reason my bills are covered, after all I’d hate to have to get a real job!

With Adsense fluctuations like this are the nature of the game and when you see a drop it’s often a good time to reflect on your business model and what you’re doing.

It’s always a good idea to diversify your income streams, this could result in increasing your overall net income but more importantly it gives you less dependence on any one source. Daniel over at Daily Blog Tips did an excellent post explaining 28 ways to make money from your blog though most are relevent to any site. (Daniel likes using numbers in his titles sorry Scott).

Another thing to consider is not the sort term but your long term earnings. To maximise Adsense revenue for your current traffic levels you need to lose as many visitors as possible to a paying ad, if the ads aren’t paying as well as before why not use that site real estate to advertise your own site rather than somebody else’s. What I mean by this is get that visitor to be a regular reader, you can do this by pushing a newsletter, bookmarks, RSS subscription etc. You’ll lose out on ad revenue in the short term but in the long term you’ll have more readers which means more revenue. Scott did a cool post on this last year, Increase Your Traffic by 300%.

One change I’ve made which has improved earnings which I think is coincidence (but you never know with Google) is to update the code in all my units to allow server side control, that way I can change colors, Channels, etc from my Adsense control panel without having to edit code.

It would interesting to see how you are getting on so I’ll finish this post with a poll (if you’re reading this via our feed you need to visit the site to vote) and if you have seen a drop in earnings are you accepting it or being more pro-active?

Graphs are all well and good but the exciting bit are the figures

*1 – From the inline text adverts comparison.
*2 – With the Chitika income I’ve knocked off 10% to reflect the likely effect of auditing

Amazon.co.uk, Affiliate Future and Affiliate Window

All of these affiliates are UK based, even though I’m based in the UK I tend to target the US market (41% of my readers are in the US) but do write about UK stores when appropriate, I’ll also of earned a bit of commission on all of my Christmas shopping

Prank Place

This is one of those affiliates who don’t use a network for their affiliate program, I don’t normally use individual sites but at one stage I was crazily getting a fair amount of traffic for the daft tattoo sleeves, so I joined the program and automatically convert their links to affiliate ones which for the sake of 10 minutes work was certainly worth it.

Blog Ads

I made more from affiliate sales from my own blog ads experiment then I did from blog ads advertisers, so so I reckon some advertisers got a bit of a bargain here.

Click Bank

I only started messing with one product on Click Bank in November, I’ll do a full case study on this in a future post.

Tribal Fusion

This was a steady performer and as my traffic was up in December so was their CPM income. This is an area that I could certainly improve by selling the space privately rather than through the network. My 3 TF ad units combined have a Net CPM of less than a dollar which is absolute crap so I will be remedying this.

FeedBurner

This was probably my biggest percentile increase over previous months, I don’t know if it was caused by the Google aquisition or just the silly season, either way I don’t mind

Chitika

I still like Chitika, their RP units were my best performer but Chitika Lynx was also good.

Commision Junction

My two best affiliates with CJ were Think Geek and Hammacher both sell products that I’ll write about anyway and getting paid for them is an obvious bonus. I wrote various gift guides to push sales and learnt a lot about what products sell (guess what I’ll be pushing next year).

Amazon

I did quite a bit of experimenting with Amazon and they managed to just scrape into second place. During December we sold 2,414 products valued at $158,114.97 taking us to the 8.25% commission tier. The one downside is I sold a lot of electrical products (gadgets so expected) which only pay a commission of 4%, still I’m not complaining.

Adsense

I took Adsense off my affiliate pages, I pushed affiliates as much as possible but yet again Adsense continues to amaze me making up nearly 50% of the sites income, $30,334.66, thank you Google.

I had my first $1,000 Adsense day in November and they continued right up to just before Christmas and peaked at just under $1,500. I think I can safely say that Adsense works pretty well in my niche, Google still didn’t send me a present mind, though they did send me a card and I’m quite looking forward to the EFT off them at the end of the month .

Expenses

At the moment I don’t use any PPC or paid marketing, all traffic is organic from search engines, subscribers and natural links from related sites. My expenses are a dedicated server (~$350 per month) and a great team of 4 paid writers who are paid on a per post basis which amounts to under $3,000 per month, though they will be getting a surprise bonus .

Conclusion

On 22nd September 2004 I earned $0.82 from Adsense, after a lot of hard work, ups & downs and earning by learning I’m able to write this post. If you’re just starting out on your online adventure I hope you find this post inspiring, with effort the sky is the limit to what you can earn.

I said I’d give $100 to anybody that could guess the order of my revenue streams. The closest was probably David who got 2 out of the top 3, but there’s no prizes for closest (other than the link I suppose) so the $100 is off to charity.

So why am I writing this? Basically for inspiration and show that anybody with work and commitment can make a nice income on the web. I first started using Adsense on September 21, 2004 and my earnings for that day were $0.00 (great start), followed by $0.82 the day after. The rest of 2004 and most of 2005 I spent learning as much as I could from forums and my own experimentation and really started taking action in the second half of 2005, in hindsight it would of been more profitable to learn by doing more.

Over the last couple of years I’ve had various ups and downs and learnt from making plenty of mistakes along the way. I quit my day job at the beginning of this year (which is scarily marked by the massive dip on the above graph) and have continued to build ever since.

For people just starting out with Adsense or making money online and are finding it tough, it gets easier. I remember being excited as hell on my first $1 day and then the $10, when I hit $1,000 in a month I was over the moon. All it takes is an open mind, work, commitment and perseverance.

I now need to get back to pushing affiliates, it is Cyber Monday after all.

Still bargains to be had

Now just because it makes just under $10 per day just now doesn’t mean that has to continue and we have to wait 2 years for our money, I pretty much took the website and in one morning went over it dealing with the points listed on the seo checklist, I won’t mention the url as it’s a joint site and not just mine but I’ll give you the facts. The site is a tool based mini site that was already established and well linked to and is only two pages so not too much to deal with.

• Page title: ok bit short so was quickly updated/extended to add the second best keyphrase as well
• Long tail phrases: Hardly any text on the site so a few sentences added
• Footer Copyright: Changed it so it linked to the domain url and used keyword text (it used to link to index.php)
• Alt text -lacking, so added to a couple of images
• Adsense: Nicely blended – fine as is
• Banners/Design: The site had some flashing banners that had not made any income and detracted from the site so removed them which would help increase Adsense CTR.

That was it, nothing ground breaking, no voodoo or magic dust.

Adsense Income previously when the site was for sale
July $178 ($5.74 per day average)
August $271 ($8.74 per day average)

Bought the site middle of September
September Earnings from 19th -30th = $166 ($13.83 per day average)
October Earnings from 1st – 9th = $182.99 ($20.33 per day on average)

As you can see the daily average has pretty much doubled since taking it over and although we have a long way to go to get our money back I am extremely happy with it, weekends drop right down but weekdays are over $20 per day just now so we could have this zero maintenance site paid back within 12 months with the wind behind us which would be excellent. The difference between my mate and many other people is that even though he doesn’t have a great deal of internet knowledge he trusts my judgment and he took action based on the facts and knew the risks as well as presuming it would be 24 month to repay the money. It is much easier to deliberate and dwell and do nothing.

2 years is a long time to get your ROI but it shows that with a bit of simple work and a good eye even today on public forums there are some good deals still to be had that you can improve on, granted you have to search through an awful lot of crap to find them

What is Adsense for mobile?
Well it kind of does what it says on the tin, Adsense for mobile allows publishers to place adsense contextual advertising on website designed for mobile (cell) phones to monetise that traffic.

We have successfully conducted initial testing on the product and today, we’d like to invite you to try AdSense for mobile on your mobile website.

As part of our efforts to develop new and improved AdSense products for our partners, we will begin a limited beta test for AdSense for mobile. AdSense for mobile allows publishers to monetize their mobile websites through the placement of targeted text ads. Publishers can take advantage of the fast-growing mobile advertising market and benefit from our targeting technology. 

So if you are wondering when we will get Adsense for mobile site, have a mobile website or a mobile version of your site, Adsense have created a new product in beta to cater for just that!

One of the other revenue streams I looked at was Tribal Fusion. They are a CPM ad network meaning you get paid per impression rather than per click. I implemented them a couple of months ago and placed a 468×60 banner at the top of each page, a vertical banner on the left navigation bar and rectangle in between posts on index pages. These ad positions were previously not used for anything constructive so any income generated should just be an addition, thus reducing the Adsense percentage and increasing the income to boot.

The first full month of the Tribal integration resulted in $1000 of extra revenue, without adversely effecting the other income streams. In fact with my recent Adsense optimisations, overall income from Google had actually increased so if anything the Adsense dependency had increased (not part of the plan but who’s complaining ).

One thing I had noticed of late is that page load times have been getting slower, the site is very image heavy but I was finding that the top title section would display first and then a second or two later the rest of the page would load. As the highest paying adverts were in the the rest of the page this is far from ideal.

To resolve this the first thing I tried was a server side push, meaning as soon as the html containing the Adsense was generated on the server I would push it down to the client. I did this using the php command, ob_flush() (PHP manual). It was worth a try but in this case made no difference at all.

After a bit more investigation it turned out that it was the Tribal Fusion code that was causing the problem. When the TJ top banner was being displayed it was stopping the rest of the page loading, and when the TJ servers were busy it resulted in one hell of a delay.

The solution to this was the same as what I did with my previous Adsense optimisation, I used CSS to display the TJ adverts at the end. The result of this has been much faster page loads, a 25% (or so) reduction in TJ income but most importantly an improved CTR (~1% improvement) of my most profitable Adsense unit.

So in conclusion, I’m now earning an extra $750 a month from Tribal Fusion and my Adsense income has increased by ~$100 per day. So I’ve failed in reducing the percentage made from Adsense but as I’ve increased overall monthly income by a nice margin I won’t complain.

A chart clearly displaying your goals with dates is a great motivator. With my goal chart I have it clearly visible at home, this serves as an ongoing reminder and was a great motivator in the early days when friends snigger at the low earnings.

This is my chart so far.

As you can see I missed certain goals, jumped past others and still have more to reach (many more which I’ve not listed here) but putting the goals down in black and white has really helped me. The year 2005 was a learning year for me (forums, blogs, experimentation, etc. ) and I started setting proper goals and working towards them in 2006.

What are your goals for the remaining half of the year?