Just started making $1k/month on adsense alone - lets see how to make more

[sbsb]

As of last month I have hit the magic milestone of 1k/month after about 1 year of very part time work. As with all of us, my current income is not enough.

I want more.

I havent quit my very intense day job (yet) - this is my long term goal - to be able to work on what I want when I want.

So I am looking at how to drive my ad based income even higher till I launch my new products. Some of my learnings I will post in this thread as I go.

1) Increasing $ / click

I have, through experimentation, manged to double my CTR on some pages with adsense (different layout/adunits), however my $/click has dropped (overall ECPM is up).

It seems as the number of ad elements within the adunits is larger the average auction price per click drops. I am considering dropping 1 or 2 of my adsense blocks to see if the $/click rate goes up. Has anyone done testing on this before?

If I can drop a adsense unit or two and replace it with some other vendor, drive a higher $/click on remaining units due to more competitive site space auction, then in theory my net income might be able to increase more substantially.

I'll wait for a bit of feedback on this one and then perform an experiment and post some results.

2) Increasing quality of ads

A large portion of my pages have user generated content. Some of these come up with public service announcements occasionally. I need a strategy to increase the quality of ads because the newest content is often the most frequently seen content by users.

This seems to be far more common with non-OECD regional areas. Content (on the same site) that references non US/UK/CAN/AUS locations tends to end up with useles ads even when the remaining 90% of the content is similar to other pages from US regions.

Options here
a) Make the regional nature less clear to search engines
b) Make the content more obviously niche related somehow
c) Reprioritise content so newness is less popular/promote older content until new content is more accurately indexed
d) Other?

3) Add an option to pay to opt out of ads

Kind of counter intuitive - but I figure if people are willing to pay to avoid ads they probably wouldnt click them anyway - i.e. its probably a win win - I turn a valueles customer into a valuable customer and improve their customer satisfaction at the same time.

Has anyone here tried this? How well did it work for you?

Biggest downside on this one is that you are then no longer operating with a purely free model.

Next steps

I am interested to hear all your feedback before I construct some experiments to take forward. Comments/criticism welcome.

[andybolton]

For people to respond to your questions you'll need to divulge more about your own PLOT first.

Most people know the the GENERAL techniques used in adse*nse; and no doubt some will offer their help. But for surfers to re-visit this page you'll need to give us as much as you can without naming the keywords your WINNING with.

#1 Less is more with adse*nse - fewer ads better cost per click
#2 Keep adse*nse block above page fold
#3 Try and get your keyword in header tags before and after your Adse*nse ads
#4 Make sure page name and page title are your keywords
#5 Opt Out? - test it on one of your sites. Good concept but my gut feeling is that it would only work on member sites where content is valuable. General content and the surfer would click away.

Now expose your success so we can all be fueled with excitement!

Andy

[markowe]

Keep us posted. Just out of interest, have you tried selling banner space and that type of thing? I am coming up against the dilemma of having to add more content to stop Google slapping my sites, knowing full well that CTR will go down when there is too much going on on the page. Though on the other hand, optimising your pages for a high Adsense CTR is a good way to get smart-priced, which you don't want. So I am wondering whether selling ad space directly might be a good, and more stable option.

[stevmark008]

How I wish I could have that kind of income also. Good for you. You already reap you rewards. Anyway, thank you for inspiring us.

[greatseoservice]

Thanks for the post, keep up the good work!

[John Williamson]

Try different themes, colors, ad layouts, etc. to try to increase your CTR - sometimes a simple tweak that takes 2 seconds can make a huge difference.

[pethanks]

That is indeed a very good news and I would like to congratulate you for that. $1,000 a month is very good income already. I hope I can have income like that also.

[Angela Marshall]

sbsb,

Do you mind sharing how many sites you have to reach your 1k monthly income?

[Mike Grant]

Originally Posted by Katie Byrd

I spoke to an Adsense rep and he said that regardless of the # of ad units on the page, the highest paying ads will always show first.

This isn't true.

The highest converting ads are shown first.

[paulgl]

Originally Posted by mgtarheels

This isn't true.

The highest converting ads are shown first.

People make that mistake all the time. They don't know how
adwords works. The best are rewarded with a lower cost
for the top ad.

This means that the person paying the biggest CPC may be the
bottom ad. That's why I always do 3 blocks.

However, when your page rocks and you have adwords users
targeting you, and they all have a QS of 10, then the highest
paying is probably the top ad.

Let's say the top 3 are bidding, and the rest is left to the wannabes.
That means that ads 1,2,3 are all paying less than #4. #4 had to bid
real high to even get in. Even though #4 pays more, the other ads
take top billing. But if #4 gets a click, his QS goes up. And around we
go. No wonder people pull their hair out with adwords.

There are many other scenarios.

Paul

[sbsb]

Originally Posted by Angela Marshall

sbsb,

Do you mind sharing how many sites you have to reach your 1k monthly income?

3, however, 90% comes from one, 9% from another and the third is really a supporting site that I have put no effort into CTR's, layouts etc.

Traffic split is similar, however more than 90% of traffic goes to the 90% site.



In terms of their nature:

• The 90% is is a genuinely "useful" free members site. It operates in a very very competitive area. As it is free I have been relying solely on my SEO to get traffic. I havent been able to successfully buy traffic at above break even price yet.
• The 9% is a authority niche info site with forums, and genuinely useful information in that area that I wrote. I havent done any work on this one for a few years
• The last one (1%'er) is a blog primarily used as an article repository with original content for quality relevant link building. More growth to be had here but its not a high priority yet.

Side note:
I have done some experimentation with xfactor-eqsue sites and had some success but more with amazon than adsense. The success here is usually very delayed (~6mths) IME.

[sbsb]

Originally Posted by paulgl

People make that mistake all the time. They don't know how
adwords works. The best are rewarded with a lower cost
for the top ad.

This means that the person paying the biggest CPC may be the
bottom ad. That's why I always do 3 blocks.

Thanks paul. The possible varience here certainly makes it sound worthy of testing. With all of this there is user experience to consider, as drowning a site in ads is a good way to push away users. So I have to balance returning users with a decent CTR.

If I can pull the same (adsense) revenue from 2 blocks as 3 then that would be good.

Maintaining or improving adsense revenue with less adsense units would open up the ability to try niche targeted ads that differ from what google has to offer. As I know a fair amount about my users I may be able to setup ads targeted to them rather than based on page content.

[sbsb]

Originally Posted by John Williamson

Try different themes, colors, ad layouts, etc. to try to increase your CTR - sometimes a simple tweak that takes 2 seconds can make a huge difference.

John - I agree, you're very right. I've found just shuffling positioning has made a difference. I will post some stats once theyre statistically meaningul.

I do plan on doing some additional split testing with colors, fonts etc.

[Angela Marshall]

That's great income from just 3 sites sbsb and very encouraging. Thanks for sharing.