Fortunes Creator

I recently discovered something about Google Adsense that I didn’t want to know…

You see, when I was first re-vamping my site Cheap-Plastic-Surgery.com, I added Google Adsense text ads and search boxes to my site. The site had been in existence for about 4 years, and had a decent amount of traffic on its own. I didn’t have to do much with it and all was working well, but I decided it was time for a “face lift.” (Pardon the terrible pun…)

Instead of redesigning the site first, then adding my Adsense code and then going live, I opted to just add the Adsense code to a few “skinny” pages and my Error Pages, and take my time recoding the other 22,000 or so pages of the site.

To my delight, I checked my Google Adsense account a few days after starting this experiment and found I was already making money! Dollars even, not just a few cents here or there.

Encouraged, I broke night for a few weeks redesigning the site, adding video content, RSS feeds, a new blog…the works. Excitedly, I went live with these thousands of newly swankified pages, hoping for a windfall of Google Adsense income.

What happened? Did it make me a millionaire like so many Google Adsense Gurus’ success stories we see scattered all over the internet these days? Nope! To my dismay, I found just the opposite. My site stopped getting Google Adsense clicks altogether! Baffled, I tried adding more content, more interactivity, more info and more fun for my readers. Still nothing.

How can this be, I thought. What am I doing wrong? All this work making a great site, and where is the money? Did I do all of this for nothing?

Well, no. My readers love my site…the feedback has been great and traffic is improving daily. But still no Google income. Finally, I figured out the two main reasons why this particular site will probably never make much more than $10.00 a month from Google Adsense.

REASON #1: Too much good content. When you have a site packed with great content, your readers/visitors have no reason to leave your site or seek outside information through Google Adsense ads! Dee-dee-dee! It never dawned on me, but if people are busy watching videos and reading the exact information they were hoping to find on your site, it decreases the amount of clicking they are doing on your sidebars. When my site was under construction, it’s skeletal remains encouraged readers to click my Adsense ads in search of more information on the topic they were researching rather than just hit the Back button.

REASON #2: The subject matter of www.Cheap-Plastic-Surgery.com does not stimulate Google’s Adsense algorithms or biorhythms or whatever to serve ads that attract clicks. I get served the same 5 or 6 ads from plastic surgeons in Thailand and Argentina and the like over and over, on all of my pages. So, my visitors who are not interested in overseas plastic surgery are not going to be bothered clicking any ads.

So, what is the remedy for this situation? First thing I worked on was discovering some other advertising channels that I had more control over. Commission Junction is one of my favorites. CJ serves ads from hundreds of the biggest companies on the internet, including Ebay (a big money-maker for many web sites). Also, the companies themselves supply professionally designed ads including banners of various shapes and sizes as well as text ads. You can choose exactly what type of ad you want for the space you have designated on your page.

Also, Commission Junction has what is called “Smart Zones.” These are awesome…you put a little line of code on your site where you want ads to show up, then from the CJ dashboard you can ad or remove any ad you want without having to go in and re-code your site through your cpanel! The other great thing about “Smart Zones” is that it rotates the ads, so you can have an assortment of different ads being fed to your Smart Zone, i.e. a different ad will be seen by your visitor each time the page is refreshed. You also have control over the “weight” of the ad, so if you have one ad that you want to be shown more often than others, you can tweak that as well.

Although Commission Junction is much more time consuming to use than Google Adsense, you will probably find the benefits worth the extra effort. Commission Junction has been an internet staple for years, and it seems that even those companies who start out running their own small affiliate programs end up switching over to CJ sooner or later.

More Tips for Using Google Adsense

Like anything else, you’ll get out of Google Adsense what you put into it. The following optimization tips can help you grow your Google Adsense dollars:

• Write interesting content and write every day.
• Have more than one site. The more sites you have, the more ads have the potential
  to get clicked.
• Set up channels and monitor your statistics across all sites. If one site is performing
  poorly, consider changing the content or the ad layout. Experiment!
• Change the ad layout and notice which layout works the best for you. There are
  many different layout options and there’s no way you can know going in which
  one will perform the best.
• If you’re blogging or building a new web site just for making money with Adsense, Keyword Elite will help you find keywords for profitable topics. Then you have less of a chance of putting in a lot of work on a topic that doesn’t pay in the long run.
• Google different key words and phrases and notice how much and what kinds of content and ads you see.
• Don’t be afraid to ask questions.

More About Google Adsense

The author, JoAnn Roselli, is a successful living consultant, screenwriter, webmaster, entrepreneur, real estate investor and author of “How to Get High-Quality Plastic Surgery…CHEAP!” She resides in the Dominican Republic with her husband and their 12-year-old son.