A question for those folks who are doing well with AdSense and have been at it for at least a year... If you had to start all over, what's the one thing you wish you had done differently, or wish you had known when you first began? Obviously, I'm not looking for secrets here. Just extremely interested in hearing your thoughts on this. Thanks again.
I haven't been at it for a year yet but by reading tips and doing research, you can have the experience of an expert in a few weeks. Doing something different would be optimizing the ads immediately by blending, etc. All of which you should've checked out WHILE waiting for your site to be approved.
I would have placed every single scrap of adsense code in a PHP or SSI include, or in plugins on blogs. Hard coding it into pages will only bring you a lot of extra work when you want to tweak later. Imagine - a year from now, you have over 1000 pages online and have to change all that by hand to test a new color combo! (I went through this about 3 months ago) With php or ssi includes, you change one file per channel and the changes show up on all your pages. Days worth of work can be condensed into less than an hour. K
You should've looked more into this, there are programs to mass change/replace text in text files. But the obvious choice is to go with includes.
Just within 7 months of using Adsense, I think I would have put more emphasis on creating pages for content. I had high hopes that my forum website would bring in lots of money and wasted a good 4 months on it, until realizing that it was a waste of time.
Four things: first, if you think of a niche, research briefly and then build a sub-domain site with content. Do this a lot and update regularily (I started with blogs so that came with the territory.) The fact is that Google's sandboxing policy means you have to wait, and wait, for any search engine traction. If you have to wait you may as well start immediately. Second, traffic! Have a plan to generate traffic to your site which is not "Put it up and wait for the search engines." I had to start my sites over two months ago. This month I already have 500,000 PV and virtually no search engine traffic. The SE traffic will come and it will be worth waiting for because my CTR will go up significantly. But while I wait I am hitting decent money every day. Third: have plan "B". The chances that the site you start with will be the site you have in a year are close to zero. Which means you need robust content management, a linking strategy, an alternative when your host vanishes, ads from someone other than google, a weekly full back up of your site, a stats package behind the stats package you are using, three Paypal accounts, a tested alternative design for your site, a bunch of revenue sources which are not google...the list is endless. The point is that the net is entirely about change. You can look at sites and literally date them by their presentation, architecture and sensibility...hint, blinking text is not good. Fourth: Simple is good. The simpler your site is the less time you have to spend on upkeep. Website gardening - so called because it never ends - takes time away from promotion and reading threads like this one. A simple site with, perhaps, three colours and CSS to make changes easy will leave you with time to gain traffic, build plan "B" and fire up the next site(s). Oh, and buy a lot of text links...
I started using the text includes on my second site, and it was a pain in the butt to change the old site over as well, but I knew that once I got it to includes life would be much easier in regards of tweaking etc.
If I would have to start over I would have started optimizing my ads sooner. No t just place the standard Google Adsense ad on my page for the first 6 months. The is some great tips at http://www.jensense.com and Problogger.net. You can also apply the blog tips to regular websites to some extent.
I wouldn't have wasted a year building up a forum (religion/philosophy) thinking it may pay off. Religious ads don't pay good at all... lol.
I would have experimented with ad position a long time ago. I didn't make much money until I started messing around.
This is such a great thread that I had to make my first post just to say how helpful these tips are. However, I have one question. I've been reading the threads here for a little while and thought I was beginning to get the hang of how this AdSense business is meant to work. Then I go and get all confused again. I checked out that Problogger.net link and now assume I've misunderstood something. On my Safari (on my Mac) the AdSense ads at the top of the Problogger page are the same colour as the background. I thought this was against the Google rules, since the first naive mistake I made was to assume that confusing visitors in this way would be an easy way to generate clicks. I've since moved to white ad boxes against my sites blue background but wonder if I've overdone it and I might be able to 'blend' more subtly as Problogger recommends elsewhere on his site. TIA, Duncan.