Adsense do's and don't's to actually make serious money

If you want to get out of "few cents here, few cents there" normality that is Adsense then you need to know a few things and implement some measures in order to do so.

Probably the biggest mistake that 90% of Adsense marketers do is they put Adsense on their landing page. Let me get this straight up right here, right now. If you put Adsense on a page where you are hoping to make sales, you are giving your potential customers reasons not to buy from you. Imagine this, you walk into your favourite Ford dealership, browse a few cars and see one you really like. You call over the car salesman to discuss the fine details and he tells you "You know you would be so much better off with a Hyundai, they are safer, cheaper and less expensive to run. Tell you what, I can give you a ride to the nearest dealership if you like, you will like them much better than our Fords"

This is what you are doing if you put Adsense on your money page!

You are prompting your potential customers to leave your site and go to a direct competitor (Adsense is very intuitive) for the sake of a few cents. Now you try telling me that's the right thing to do. Remember that Adsense is inviting your customers to leave. If you want your customers to stay then don't use Adsense.

Adsense T&C state that the ad must be opened up in the same window, so you can't get around it by opening up a new window, keeping your own open at the same time. Now if you had affiliate product links instead of Adsense then you can make your own rules generally.

So if you want to keep your traffic, lose the Adsense, put some related (but not directly competing) affiliate product links on there instead. Product that will compliment your own product.

Get that first tip straight right now and you put yourself above thousands of other marketers.

Ok so are there any good times to use Adsense? Yes there are. If your site/page/blog is there only for the purposes of Adsense advertising then yes it can be very lucrative. If your page has any other purpose (eg promoting a product, list building or CPA marketing) then leave it out, there is more to be earned by keeping your traffic than letting it go for a couple of cents.

So effectively, to really profit from Adsense you need to optimise your site for Adsense. This means making the ads recognisable and visible. Any content you put on there is largely irrelevant (I say largely and I will come to this in a moment) your main focus should be to get your traffic to click the ad, not read the content. This means no external or internal links (other than the ad). This gives your target 2 possible options, navigate away or click the ad.

Ok I said I would come back to the content and I will, it really needs to be keyword optimized, that's really all it needs to be, it doesn't even really need to make much sense as long as it's keyword rich. It does however need to be updated at least twice per week and I wouldn't suggest you do this manually (for reasons I will soon touch upon). For this I would suggest using RSS syndication.

RSS is free, quick and easy. And as people publish RSS feeds you can then place these feeds on your own website or blog. So if you know some gurus in your field who produce blogs, find out their RSS details (there will be a link on their site) or alternatively many article directories have RSS feeds too. So find some of the best ones and subscribe to the feeds. Now to get them all on your site automatically all you need is a reader script. There are many free ones available if you do a quick search for them.

Like this search.

This will keep your content fresh. Ideally you want to archive your content every week (so the site doesn't get too cluttered, too much content gives your readers reasons to stay) and your archives shouldn't be shown (remember, no internal links).

Now the reason I suggest using a script to do it automatically is that you are not going to be using only one site. Once site one is up and running and grabbing content effectively, you need to do exactly the same with a second one (change the optimal keyword though), and then a third. You are going to need at least 100 in total (they can be on free web 2.0 properties/blogs so you don't need worry about the domain/hosting costs).

Now the more people that use Adsense, the lower the rates of return and with so many people using it these days, it's difficult to find keywords that will pay you above the $1 mark. Some of the best ones (upto $60 per click) come through asbestos and the diseases that are caused by it so do a little research and find some of these good performing keywords.

Now as we have covered, there are no links within your pages so you can't link to your other pages to enhance their popularity. Advertising is a pointless endeavour as your profit margin will be non-existent, and we need to spend as little time as possible promoting them. Outsourcing the link-building is also going to cost you more money than necessary at the start so the way I do it is through xrumer. Don't go buying the program as it's really expensive (although good value for what it does) just purchase a few blasts from the services section in BST.

The more links and traffic you get, the better it will perform in the future so don't worry if you see very little return in the first few months. My own experience shows traffic increasing at roughly 8% per month and in the long term you can really cash in big time. But you have to use your time effectively.

Anyone got any thoughts?