A lot of people are using Adsense on their websites whether they be a blog, a forum, a community or even just a standard single page. But are they using it in the right way to maximise their income?

Maximise Traffic

The whole idea of Adsense is to display relevant ads on your site that, when a viewer clicks the ad or views it, you earn a small amount of money. Now this one person will not make you much, so ideally you need to generate a huge number of traffic in order to make some sort of beneficial income. Now their are many ways to get people visiting your site and one could write a book going into all of the details and methods, but there is only one guaranteed way - good and relevant content.

Whatever your site is about, make it the best. Include a fair amount of relevant text so that spiders will harvest your website and will help give your site a better listing for certain keywords and in time bring more visitors looking for what your website provides.

Of course there is a lot more you can do to increase traffic to your website but this is definitely the most effective out of all of them. If you would like to do more, check out the SEO category of this site.

Layout

Another big factor in how well Adsense performs on your website is its placement, size and type. Make sure that the ads blend in well with the content on your website, usually matching the text, link and headings colour to make sure it doesn’t stand out any more than it should. Ads are usually never attractive so make sure it doesn’t do any damage to the aesthetics of your site.

I’ve seen plenty of sites with Adsense where the ads are placed in a corner, far far away from anywhere the viewer is going to look. This isn’t going to work at all, you need to implement the ads into the actual content of the site so that the viewers mouse will be hovering near where your ad is going to be.

It seems that pure text link ads work the best and you can see why when they are properly blended. You can experiment with layout and positioning using the channels provided by Adsense.

Another tip is to try implementing the links near the navigation where the viewer is going to click a lot.

Experiment

By using channels you can see what works, and what doesn’t. Set up a number of ads on your site (no more than 3 per page) under different channels and see what works best and where. Note down what is good about the decent performers and narrow down your ads to what works best and is making you the most money.

Tools

Here are a couple of Adsense tools that will help you in trying to monetize your site.

Adsense Sandbox - Allows you to preview what ads are most likely to appear on your website.

Google Analytics - The best web site stats tracking application. You can then see where your traffic is coming from, what keywords are bringing visitors to your site and much more.