Too much obsessing over optimization and not enough over content and traffic

I wrote this this morning as part of an article. I'm pretty new to this forum but I've been reading a lot of the posts. A lot of "newbies" seem to get caught in the trap of adsense optimization way too early and lose sight of the purpose of their website and the fact that its' success is reliant on traffic (which is obviously reliant on content).

I thought I'd share it with everyone and see what you thought:

Successful Adsense publishers know one thing. Real money with Adsense has nothing to do with Adsense. The optimization strategies that haunt every forum, blog and article are only a very small part of the story of receiving a sizeable monthly cheque from Google.

The fundamental rule of Adsense is traffic. Without traffic, no Adsense clicks, regardless of how precisely you’ve picked your placements or how much time you’ve spent perfectly blending the ads into the structure of your content so that they now appear as additional links and not advertisements.

The large majority of Adsense Publishers forget this very important fact and focus on solely trying to improve their click through rate. Finding your optimum click through rate is extremely important but cannot take precedence over traffic as without the latter you can not find the former.

If you obsess about optimization before you’ve fleshed out your site and expanded its reach into the search engines you will never actually develop your website and even if you get your CTR up to something quite formidable you will only be making a fraction of what you would be if you’d focused on your sites expansion.

So what should you do? If the fundamental rule of Adsense is traffic, the fundamental rule of traffic is that you can’t get a repeat visitor until they’ve been a first time visitor, and a first time visitor can only come to your website through a certain number of channels.

Putting advertising aside as unless you’re playing the arbitrage game you won’t convert on the margins, you are left with two serious options - the search engine results and incoming links from other websites. The latter supports the former so I always concentrate on getting as many pages under as many keywords into the search engines as are related to the particular website I’m working on. This is Search Engine Optimization territory.

With SEO you are trying to force the search engines to recognize your website and individual pages within it as relevant to particular keywords. What you’re trying to say is that “my website is more relevant, and so more valuable, to that keyword search than the first ten that are already there”. The more times you can convince the search engines of this the more traffic your website will receive. The more traffic your website receives the more clicks it will generate on Adsense and the more money you will make.

Focus on working out which keywords are related to your particular niche, build content of value that answers the question of each keyword phrase and then get supporting links to back up your relevancy. If you do this for your website you will significantly increase your traffic. Once your traffic is organic and automated then turn to optimizing your Adsense ads through testing different placements, colors, formats etc.

 

Nice article, I have found myself trying to 'figure it out' when in reality, keeping with the adage of building a page for the end user is the goal here, the rest should follow.

 

I think you make a good point. Optimization like placement and color and such is to get you that last 5% and squeeze out as much as you can. If you have not done the work to get the first 95% of your revenue, it is pointless.

 

Kelvin

That is a real nice way of putting it. I personally would never click on ads on websites that really look like they have been designed for adsense. However, many times I would click on ads on pages that I have stayed long and read the full article.

 

Yes, true...only that for most folks it's easier to obsess over ad placement than to get good quality traffic...

 

I agree completely. Recently I did a test on a single page article. I kept the page completely clean, no navigation links. The article was long ( over 2,000 words) and was about one very focused and powerful topic - for two days I used a 336 x 280 rectangle in the traditional top position with the article wrapped around it and then for the next two days - I only used the 468 x 60 at the bottom next to where I signed the article off. The CTR for the 336 was good but the 468 was 4.5 times higher. Just under one in three people were clicking off on it once they'd finished the article.

Publishers have got into the habit of chasing clicks. Be a little cleverer and have confidence in your content. If you're getting relevant traffic you should absorb them into your website and if they become abosrbed a nicely placed (even small ad) at the bottom of the page can convert like crazy.