NetFxCafe

Best adsense advice

I have been reading and studying google adsense tips and tricks lately. While reading many opinions and articles, I have stumbled across what appears to be several common themes, and not surprisingly - this seems to be pretty common sense stuff.

The fact is - the longer I work with these ideas, the more I see that they do indeed work. Patience is a virtue, and in this case, a solid investment as well.

Although these ideas probably apply to other advertising programs as well, for the sake of this post, I thought it best to focus on what I have some experience with.

Slow and steady wins the race

Ok… so it’s not a race. But besides that one sticking point, the idea here is that you shouldn’t expect immediate results with adsense.

It would be tempting to expect immediate results because, well, it is so easy to get it all up and running.

I have done this enough now that I could literally set up a brand new blog with adsense and analytics in less than an hour’s time, and it doesn’t take a whole lot of time before you can start seeing numbers on the reports.

But the truth is that adsense revenue is a return on investment - and the investment is what you must put into your site up front. What I mean is - your site must add value to the end users. Either through original content, or a unique way of bringing content together, or through a service or some other means - if there is a valuable user experience, then your site will eventually build up traffic, and traffic is what drives adsense revenue.

Being able to find your site with search helps, but if you look around, you will discover that this also takes time. Even if google crawls your site tomorrow, they have some sort of window of up front time during which your site will not make it to the top of the heap. I think I read that they call this a sandbox period.

So use that time wisely. Rather than checking your adsense revenue every hour (don’t laugh - it’s more tempting than you might think!) - use that time to look for ways to improve your site for your users. That is what will pay off in the end.

Analyze, tweak, wait, repeat…

Another tip that might be more obvious to some than others - take the time to analyze how users are actually using your site.

You may be using a template with a big ad here or there, but you may study your analytics reports and find that users are focusing on a particular set of pages or type of content.

If you are lucky enough to spot that kind of pattern - that is an area you can consider targeting for better ad integration.

And if you can find a more valuable place to put an ad - maybe you can afford to pull it from a non-essential place, and in doing so - you might clean up your whole site a bit.

This takes time, patience, and an open mind. It also takes the commitment to actively engage in this kind of iterative feedback loop - analyze, tweak your site, wait and check the results, and repeat.

Forget the shortcuts, silver bullets, and cheats, or in other words…

“The sure way to be cheated is to think one’s self more cunning than others”

~ François de la Rochefoucauld

I love this quote because it gets at to the heart of all of the adsense scams out there.

Building on the other points in this post - because it takes time, and a keen awareness and analysis of YOUR site’s users, don’t be shocked if there aren’t any long term long lasting “cheats” out there.

Sure - there may be some short term shortcuts, but just remember - the value that google is able to deliver to its advertisers is dependent on this system working. This means that they have a very vested interest in keeping their advertising network clean and high quality.

All that time you spend playing the cat and mouse game - looking for shortcuts and cheats - I believe would be better spent doing — you guessed it — simply focusing on building a valuable user experience, and then analyzing, tweaking, and watching the results.