For years, I focused on affiliate marketing and local business promotion. While both are excellent, failing to use AdSense was a big mistake. In fact, I think not using AdSense cost me at a minimum hundreds of thousands of dollars and perhaps millions of dollars. Because when I focused on affiliate marketing, I went after fairly competitive keywords that had buyer intent. I published massive websites that only published buyer-intent content with affiliate links. Because those keywords were fairly competitive, I did old-school link building which ultimately ended up receiving Google Penguin penalties.

How to Make Money With Google Adsense

Had I used AdSense on those sites, I would have published all kinds of content and probably would have been less aggressive with link building and focused on building large, popular niche websites which is what I do now. Please note that some of that revenue was generated from paid traffic so not all of it is profit.

You can also read my income reports which covers 2 niche sites, one of which is monetized with display ads. In fact, one big reason I publish Fat Stacks Entrepreneur is to spread the word that display ads can be a very lucrative way to monetize a website.

Google AdSense Tutorial - How to Use and Manage AdSense

Just so you know, I use the term AdSense to refer to display ads in general. However, AdSense is not the only game in town when it comes to display ads. Other display ad networks I use include Media.

And then many niches can be monetized with many revenue streams including AdSense, native ads, affiliate promotions, selling products, sponsored posts etc. Frankly, the more effective revenue streams you develop, the better your website. When I started my biggest AdSense revenue website, I had no intention of using AdSense. It was going to be affiliate promotion only. However, one day I decided to put AdSense on it and it earned hundreds of dollars immediately while affiliate commissions were still non-existent at that point.

Obviously you may not have the same success I did, but you never know how AdSense will perform unless you give it a shot. Generally speaking, AdSense is great on the following types of sites for lack of better monetization options:.

Implementing AdSense is super easy. You copy the code and put it on your site where you want the ad units to appear. A lot of work. If you read biz-op and make money online websites, some will tell you AdSense is the worst way to monetize a website. In fact, there are many benefits of AdSense. They are as follows:. This is a huge benefit. If you have very little traffic, revenue will fluctuate a lot because a few clicks one way or another can make a big difference.

AdSense, which is owned and operated by Google is a billion dollar company. They pay on time and like clockwork. Their inventory is huge and so there are almost always ads to fill a spot. Not easy to get approved these days: Your site has to be high quality.

Risk level can be high due to AdSense will ban accounts and keep accrued money: If you do anything that breaches terms of service, even unintentionally, you can lose your account and lose accrued money in your account.

Revenue does fluctuate throughout the year: Generally, revenue drops in the Summer. Of course this depends on your niche. Some niches do better in Summer, but generally Summer is not good for display ads. Ad blockers may threaten display ads: I have no idea where this is going, but ad blockers do. Stringent terms of service: AdSense has tough rules to follow. I could make way more money if I had carte blanche with ad placement; however, AdSense has rules to avoid accidental clicks so one must ease off the aggressiveness for fear of losing an account.

Lower revenue on mobile: Mobile revenue per one thousand visitors is almost always less.

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However, this is generally the case with most methods of monetization. To increase your revenue, you must increase one, two or three of the variables traffic, CTR or CPC.

The only ways to increase the CPC is to focus on USA traffic it pays the most and choose niches with some commercial viability. Moreover, choosing the high CPC niches such as law, insurance, website hosting is no fun and is pretty difficult to break into.

You can increase AdSense CTR with Ad placement. The higher up in the content usually the higher the CTR. Other CTR variables include ad text color and ad sizes.

If your AdSense CTR gets too high, you may incur penalties such as losing the Nessie Arrows or even losing your AdSense account altogether because of accidental clicks.

Therefore, there is a cap to how high you should strive for a CTR. Ad placement options are pretty standard. The following are the main spots for ad placement:.

Generally this is a terrible location for ads. I do not do this. This can be a great location if the ad is aligned with the content. I love this placement. It works great on desktop and mobile and tablet. However, it can attract accidental clicks so if you have an unusually high CTR, this may not be good for your site. Instead push the ad down after paragraph 1 or paragraph 2.

On mobile, do not use ads that are longer than at the top of a post. This is the mobile leaderboard. Below paragraph 1 or 2: This is a great location.

Right or left aligned: Middle of the content: I have one ad unit in the middle of the content. It does okay but not nearly as well as units above the fold. This is a great location for me. This arrangement performs well. The visibility is awesome.

Instead I put Monumetric ads there which do really well for me.

That leaves increasing traffic as the key variable to increase AdSense revenue over which you have the most control. Once you have , monthly visitors, little tweaks can result in nice revenue bumps for sure, but long term growth requires growing traffic. Seriously, this is important. Instead, give people what they want. It can be a photo gallery, a video, a long article, a slideshow, a useful tool… anything as long as it does what the title suggests.

When people like content, they will share it. They will visit other parts of your site. Other sites will link to it although it never hurts to contact other publishers and let them know about it. For example, listicle clickbait gets a bad rap. Because people like it. They like the lists. They like the images. They like the brief, easy-to-read write-ups for each item. Sometimes words is good enough. While Google is a pretty darn smart search engine and will impute keywords into content, why not be more blunt and incorporate the keyword s clear as day in the title and in the content?

You may or may not profit from paid traffic with display ads. There are many variables involved. Nevertheless, if you can get close to break even, investing in some paid traffic to get eyeballs on your site and content can be a worthy investment.

Start with small investments and see what happens. Visitors are visitors and if they share the content and come back to your site and join your email list, it could very well be worth it in the long run.

You can shoot for the moon by going after monster keywords with huge search volume. You can target many long tail keywords by publishing a lot of content. Keep in mind the content still needs to be good. However, you can focus on publishing and spend less time promoting.

I tend to prefer going for more long tail keywords and publishing more content. I like this approach because by publishing more content I have more social media content to post.

However, the more authority my sites gain, the more interested I am to swing for the fences. In late June , another ad network I use in alpha — read review here started earning more than AdSense although part of that is due to my losing Nessie arrows — UPDATE — I got my Nessie arrows back with AdSense , but even with arrows, my other ad network still out-earns AdSense which is pretty amazing.

You may just find, like I have, that other ad networks can earn as much or more than AdSense. While I earn more from display ads than affiliate commissions, I still earn a healthy 4 figures per month from affiliate offers. I think affiliate promotion has a role to play on every site. You can choose to turn display ads off on posts with affiliate offers. In fact, when it comes to the Link Unit concept, Media.

The thing is, Media. With the widespread Nessie penalty these days, here are a few more tactics that can land you in hot water:. Ads adjacent to images: I almost always have a buffer between ads and images especially above-the-fold. This placement tactic attracts accidental clicks with AdSense ads that have the Nessie arrow.

The arrow appears to be the button for continuing to the next page. Ads placed in anyway to attract accidental clicks: Therefore, when placing ads, be careful to avoid placement that may attract accidental clicks. On every site I have display ads I make my content areas wide enough to accommodate a px wide banner ad. Above or below post titles: I like placing a leaderboard either above or below post titles. You can split test this. Please keep in mind that these days if ad CTR gets too high, you can lose your Nessie arrows in text ads which will hurt ad CTR no matter where the ads are placed.

If you want to avoid the Nessie penalty, consider placing your first in-content unit after paragraph one or two. This is less aggressive that will likely avoid Nessie penalties not a guarantee, but does lower the risk.

High up in the sidebar: I use a right sidebar. This unit does well.

Have plenty of white space on your site: I like simple looking sites with plenty of white space so ads stick out. Customize ads for each type of device: I use Ad Inserter and WP Mobile Detect plugins to fully control which ads appear on different devices. I explain all this here. While those tips worked great for many years, these days with the Nessie penalty which is losing Nessie arrows in text ads , you want to be careful with getting too high of an ad CTR to avoid the Nessie penalty.

The key is building up a high traffic website and doing plenty of ad testing to maximize RPM without overdoing it. Generally speaking, display ads earns more for the big media than anything else. There are months it outperforms typical x rectangles 6 or 8 to one. So for people learning to make money online, what makes more sense — earning with 30 thousand visits to their website or earning with 3 million visits per month?

I totally agree with you that specific types of content targeting specific keywords, can achieve a MUCH higher RPM with affiliate offers than AdSense. However, restricting websites to content that promotes affiliate offers results in a fairly narrow site and for me I prefer publishing on a broader set of topics i.

I think websites that incorporate affiliate promotions and AdSense is a good mix. That said, I do own a few B2B sites that only earn with affiliate offers. These sites require little upkeep which is great. Keep in mind most of the selling is done via email instead of on the site. Are you still using Ezoic, Jon? I used it for months but then my revenue dropped considerably as the revenue by displaying 5 ads from Ezioc was much less than displaying 3 ad units from Adsense alone.

Not sure if it is still profitable for you. Adsense is the only game in town. I like that sir. I really understand this wonderful post about making money online. I will make use of most of these tips here to increase earning. Hi Jon Gives me a huge motivational bump to make money online using display ads. Amazing article, I have bookmarked it for later reference. A very informative article!

Thanks for this tips, i am a beginner and adsense is the first thing come to mind about monetization. Home Categories Niche Websites Monetization Content Social Media Website User Experience Video SEO Email Marketing Reviews. Home Niche Websites How to Make a Lot of Money with Google AdSense. By Jon Last updated Feb 23, Why would avoiding AdSense cost me so much?

Table of Contents Why would avoiding AdSense cost me so much? Increasing CTR Ad placements 3. Increasing Website Traffic How to increase website traffic AdSense is NOT the ONLY Game in Town Mixing in affiliate offers Are AdSense Link Units Good?

AdSense Mistakes to Avoid AdSense Tips for higher revenue Conclusion. Prev Post Narrow vs. Next Post Should You Block Website Access to Visitors Using an Ad Blocker? You might also like More from author SEO. Hello Jon, Do you use Q2W3 Fixed Widget plugin to manage your ads? Or maybe some another plugin to increase your revenue from your websites? Thank you for a really good post. Hey Nathaniell, I totally agree with you that specific types of content targeting specific keywords, can achieve a MUCH higher RPM with affiliate offers than AdSense.

Can You Still Make Money With AdSense?

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