Hate The Grind

If you’ve been reading online for tips on how to make money with websites, a common theme you’ll find is that you should continually make changes and monitor the results to see what is working and what isn’t. These tweaks to your websites are simple changes such as the color of the ads, the location of the ads (left align or right align?), or even the number of ads being displayed. Here are a few changes that I have done that have helped increase revenue.

Improve Relevancy of Ads
This one is a no-brainer, but many people are so used to systems like Google AdSense that they forget about ad relevancy. Many people think that they do not have control over what ads are displayed by Google, but in reality you do have a degree of control. For bloggers, the best way to control your ads is to include the appropriate keywords not only in your title tags, and meta keyword tags, but also in your post titles, and of course the blog post itself. It wont always be possible to include keywords into post titles so don’t stuff keywords into the title of every single new post. The more information Google has about what your blog or website is about, the better they can deliver the best ads. If you are using other ads such as AuctionAds, be sure to include ads that relate to your post. For example, if you’re writing a review of a brand new computer monitor, include ads for computer monitors or better yet, include an ad for the exact monitor you are writing about.

Remove The Low Paying Ads
If you run a mix of advertising on your website or blog, check the stats to see which ads are paying the least and either remove them or get them out of the prime ad locations. Why put ads that don’t pay as much in front of your readers if you can have a higher paying ad for them to click on? For Google AdSense, there is an easy way to filter out the low paying advertisers. Ads Blacklist is a website where you can plug in your URL along with some keywords and it will pull up ads that could potentially be served on your website. These sites could either be Made For Adsense websites (sites that are just full of ads), or sites that pay very low per click. By copying this list, and pasting it into the Competitive Ad Filter section of your Google AdSense control panel you effectively block these cheap advertisers from running ads on your website resulting in higher paying and higher quality ads to be run instead.

Removing these low paying ads also results in another positive side-effect. Your users will be presented with better ads, that lead to higher quality websites. Filtering out Made For AdSense websites improves the user experience, which will result in more click throughs from your users because they found what they were looking for the last time they clicked on an ad.

Display LESS ads
You may be asking yourself, “WHAT? Why would I want to display LESS ads? I want MORE ads so theres a higher chance my users will click on one of them!”. There are two reasons you would want to display less ads. The first one is so your website is not cluttered with ads, driving your users away. Of course the exact number of ads is going to be different on every website so you’ll have to experiment with this one. The second reason, is so you can make more money. Oh yeah, thats what this blog post is about. I’ll try to explain a bit more on how running less ads can sometimes result in more money.

Google AdSense drives ads to your website that advertisers have set-up on another Google service called Google AdWords. Advertisers compete for certain keywords by building ads, websites (landing pages) and through search term bidding. Google uses an algorithm to determine the rank of the individual ads, but one very strong variable in the algorithm is how much an advertiser is willing to pay for a single click. Generally speaking, the higher an advertiser is willing to pay for a click, the higher up their ad will be. The next highest will be second, and so on and so forth. Now, on your website or blog you display these Google Ads in various ad formats. If you are using one of the larger ad formats, you will be displaying ads for 3 or 4 advertisers, and if you are running the maximum number of allowed Google Ads on a page (which is 3 at the moment) then you are potentially displaying ads for the top 12 advertisers. If you are following, you’ll know why you’ll want to display less ads now. It is highly unlikely there are 12 advertisers all paying top dollar to run ads on Google. More than likely there about 2 - 3 advertisers paying a higher cost per click and another dozen or so advertisers bidding near the minimum allowed value. If your users clicks on one of these bottom feeders, you are now making a lot less than if they clicked on an ad that was displaying the top 3 or 4 advertisers. Earn more per click by displaying less ads!

There are a lot more tweaks you can do to make more money online, but these are the three that not everyone thinks about when making changes. As with all advice on making money online, the key to success is to test, test, test and then do more testing. Watch your stats, and compare results with changes you make to find the winning formula.

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