Making money with AdSense is all about three things: traffic, content and stickiness. You need traffic so people can see your ads, obviously. Content must be worth looking at in order for people to want to see it, so make sure that’s interesting. Stickiness is a term I like to use to describe the difficulty from leaving a website — the higher the difficulty to leave, the stickier a website is.
Before I dive into my methods for boosting traffic to your website- if you’re honestly driven to make more money, you should check out these AdSense videos by Michael Cheney (click for link). He gives you a step by step way to generate a bunch of money in a relatively short amount of time, so check that out.
Traffic
Now obviously getting traffic to your website is never easy unless you’re already well-established on the internet. For those who are new or even moderately new to the web, getting website exposure is difficult. You do have options though. You can advertise on a PPC (Pay Per Click) network, you can start up a mailing list, put the word out on forums, do a press release, leave comments on blogs, hold a contest and tons of other things. Let’s discuss a few of these methods.
The easiest way to get traffic is to advertise on a PPC service .. that is, if you have the money. Depending on your niche, you may have to spend anywhere from $5 to $10/day to make this effective. If you aren’t making more than you’re advertising, it’s obviously not going to work out in the long-run. What you can do is advertise for a set amount of time, say– a month. And in that time you will have established a nice base of users if you use the Stickiness techniques described below.
It’s important that when using a PPC service, you concentrate on getting the most VALID click-thrus to your site. It’s not all about volume. Yeah, you could have a million visitors that you pay to go to your website but if your website is all about power tools and you get a million techno geeks, those views are almost worthless.
What’s great about services like Google AdWords is that it uses contextual advertising to attempt to display your ads in the most relevant context. When using AdWords, for instance, you can specify whether you want ads to show up in Google Searches and/or on content pages where AdSense ads are displayed. You can specify the location you want the ads to show up in based on country, region and city. This is especially important because AdSense pays less for views that are from outside the United States. Yes, you read that right. This is why I recommend targeting your ads to US traffic.
On top of this, you can specify all the keywords you’d like your ad to show up for. Keep in mind though, when using keywords- the more popular the keyword, the more competition there is for that spot and therefore the more you’ll have to pay per click to even show UP for that search or keyword. This is not only why I recommend finding keywords that don’t require a large per-click cost ($0.06 - $0.19) but also why you should use at least 200 keywords for each campaign you start. This will increase your chances of getting displayed and also, listed. Oh yes– and the more you pay per click, obviously, the more often your and more prominently your ad will be displayed.
Mailing lists are another way of generating traffic, and also stickiness but we’ll go into that later. You should *always* have a mailing list sign-up sheet on your website or blog, for five reasons:
- There is always going to be a handful, if not more, who are interested in what you’re talking about!
- These people are willing to get your e-mails and therefore, you aren’t SPAMMING them!
- Many of these people will end up returning to your website on a fairly regular basis.
- You can let them know about other things you’re working on and therefore, cut down on your advertising costs.
- You can put affiliate links in your e-mails for products you’ve created or tried and earn even more money!
So mailing lists are quite obviously a huge boon to a webmaster and you should take advantage of them as soon as possible. A great mailing list service I recommend is Aweber. What’s great about this service is that they allow you to do scheduled mailings, time-released mailings (E.G. once someone signs up, you can give them a 3-day course or a 5-day course on something) and of course you can do regular announcements. There are free services available as well, but in my experience they don’t offer nearly the same benefits.
When sending out mailings, make sure you don’t do it too often. Once per day is even pushing it, but people will put up with it most of the time, especially if the information is helpful. Of course, you can do whatever you want with your mailing list but I recommend that you always provide a helpful service to those people receiving the letter. This way you’ll keep your audience, you’ll be helping people and your list will most likely grow just by word of mouth. One more word of caution– if you’re using mailing lists for product releases, make sure to send the e-mail out about 10-20 minutes before, as mailing lists use queues.
Speaking of word of mouth, when was the last time you used a forum to promote your website? I’m not talking about spamming (I never spam, I hate it)! I’m talking about asking other people to review your website, posting in relevant forums about your service, helping other people and offering your website as a helpful resource to help them get what they’re after, etc. In fact, I just started a forum here on Adsense Fire- click here to visit the Adsense Fire Forums. Another great forum site, if you haven’t heard, is DigitalPoint.com’s forums.
The trick is putting your links in your signature as well. Make sure to follow the guidelines of the forum. For instance, if only 2 links are allowed in your signature, don’t put 3 in or you’ll get banned and all your posts will get deleted.
Be careful, when spending your precious time in forums, to make sure they don’t put the infamous rel=”nofollow” in your hyperlinks. This will cause Google to ignore your link when it is indexing the forums; however, it is still a valuable way to get people to visit your website, so it’s up to you.
Another great tool for promotion is a press release. There are tons of paid press release resources available but not many free ones that are worth much. One service that does both is PR Leap and here are some of their free services:
- Scheduled press release submission
- Search-friendly press release formatting
- Press release localization by ZIP code, city and state
- Spam protection on your email address
- Statistics: page views and search engine pick ups
So you can see the value in such a service. Not only do they provide you with a decent amount of traffic but also statistics, email protection and the whole lot. When you actually do a press release, make sure you do it correctly the first time so that it is accepted. You can view these 10 tips for getting your press release approved the first time.
Moving on, let’s talk about leaving comments on other people’s blogs. Like posting threads and responses in forums, typically you may leave links to your website in your comments on blogs (make sure to only leave one!). The bad news is that some blogs will put the nofollow attribute into your hyperlinks, so watch out for that. But again, all links are good links and you will most likely get some traffic inflow.
To increase your chances of getting people to visit your links from comments you leave, make sure to leave quality feedback on posts. This most often includes your opinion or some good feedback on the subject, so just make sure you think it through. People appreciate that and will be attracted to things that you generate.
If you own a blog yourself, sometimes you can leave what is called a Trackback on other people’s blog. This happens when you are writing an article about, or in response to another blogger’s post. You can place their hyperlink in the trackback section and when you post, it will appear as a comment on their blog. This is also a handy way of getting traffic your way.
Now when I first launched BlogFlare.com, I tried to think of a dynamite way to get traffic to the website but if you know me, you know I like to keep things honest and helpful. This is why I made a Traffic-based Contest. The idea behind the contest was that it would help BlogFlare while at the same time helping to increase traffic to other blogs. The person with the most unique hits at the end of the contest was the winner, and I paid him $50. Small change, right?
Well, not everyone has $50 to throw around but I felt it was a great advertisement. In the future, there will be more contests but the trick is letting people know that there is even a contest going on. So use the above techniques to your advantage when creating a contest and it should work wonders. You just have to worry about keeping track of your winning participants! You can read more about contests in the DigitalPoint forums by clicking here.
Of course there are many other ways of driving traffic to your site, and incidentally I have written a free eBook on those ways. Feel free to download it here.
All of these things are wonderful ways to get traffic to your website and I tell you about them only after personal experience. The trouble is that none of them will work without the right content, so let’s talk about that next.
Content
Most people say that content is king when it comes to AdSense, and they’re right. But if content is king, then your web traffic is a god (see how much you mean to me?). In order to appease the gods of traffic, we must provide them with quality content that is not only helpful but also rich in relevant keywords and information. At this point, you should ask yourself a rather difficult (for some) question: can I write good? If you answered “yes” to that question, then you should not be writing because it was bad grammar! You should be able to write WELL! 
I’m mostly kidding, but the ability to write is not a gift bestowed upon all of us. When we’ve come to the acceptance phase of our denial, it’s time to pay someone else to write our heavy content for us. But wait– this doesn’t apply only to our actual content but to the structure and design of our website as well. It’s always best to have professionals build what you don’t know how to do. So keep that in mind on your internet journey!
If you have writing difficulty, you can pay $5 and have someone write a decent article for you if you’d like. Then, you can alter what they give you and fill it with keywords that pertain to your website’s topic. It’s a beautiful system. You can use www.rentacoder.com or www.elance.com for this purpose.
Additionally, if you are paying someone to design your website for you, make sure they include a place for your ads. Ad placement is a huge factor in determining your success with Google AdSense so also make sure that the placements will catch the eye of an oncoming visitor.
Now if you are good at writing excellent content, make sure you know *what* should go into your content. You should fill your text with keywords so that AdSense can more easily display contextual ads, and so that search engines can increase your ranking for those keywords when people search for them.
Also, and I can’t stress this enough, you should optimize your website for search engines. I know you’ve heard this a million times, but it’s more than worth it to do so. Pay someone if you have to or do a Google search on the subject. Just get it done and you will be glad you did.
Make sure your title pages reflect the context that is inside the content of the web page. Blogs will typically do this automatically, so it’s mostly important to do manually on your typical website. Another great way to drive traffic to your site via search engines is to pick titles that people actually search for. The title of this post, for instance, is one of the top searches on Google. Not bad, eh?
Stickiness
Stickiness - the art of keeping people occupied on your website. That’s my definition, feel free to quote me! You want to keep people occupied on your website because the longer someone is on your website, the more likely that user will see an ad they like and visit it! It’s a no-brainer.
When practicing the art of stickiness, you must keep in mind that annoying things suck. What I mean by that is, don’t put those annoying ads on your site that say “kill the mouse and win the ipod” or “shoot your hunting buddy and win a presidency.” No, these are annoyances that should die. When keeping people occupied on your website, you should always focus on lifting people up- that means helping or providing them a way to become better somehow or make better decisions.
The ability to post comments on a website is a great sticky feature, especially if it’s not a blog or a forum. Having a chat that loads over your page is also a great technique– a great way to do this automatically is to use a service like Gabbly. Gabbly will load a chat window over your website so people can still browse the internet while they chat.
Having a forum on your website is a great way to keep people occupied as well. This allows them to correspond and interact with each other. You can my previous post on AdSense optimization techniques for forums. Anything that gets updated frequently will keep users coming back, even if it’s not something they can interact with.
The best way to keep users occupied, in my opinion, is to have some kind of social interaction though. So focus on adding social interactivity to your website somehow, be it through comments, forums, chat or a ratings system, it will ultimately increase your CTR with AdSense.
Conclusion
There are, of course, additional ways to make money with AdSense. These will be discussed in upcoming articles, but hopefully this has given you some perspective of what it takes to earn residual income with AdSense. You must always keep in mind that, like anything else that is good, building a steady inflow of money takes time as it takes time to build traffic and a sturdy readership. Just keep that content updated and keep putting out the word. Building it isn’t all it takes to make them come these days. Unfortunately, you’ve also got to sell it.
That’s all for now.
Again, if you’re serious about making money, check out Michael Cheney’s AdSense videos (click for link) and there are even more techniques you can use.
- Scott
Just a quick edit and a post to the Adwords section.