How to really make money from adsense

So you've signed up for adsense, got the ads up and running, got some traffic but money just isn't pouring in as promised all around the web.

Everyone who has set out to make some money online has gone through that, even after learning from the best of the best, we still had trouble on our first blogs. Mostly what happens is that you are targeting the wrong audience.

But my content is relevant, the ads seem just fine, I got a good amount of traffic from related keywords, how is my audience the wrong one?

There are many types of audiences online, just as there are marketing segments or demographics offline. It's some basic marketing thing, to separate the possible buyers from the rest of the world, because advertising to them is a waste of time, since they are not likely to buy; they may occasionally or impulsively buy from time to time, but you can't count on that for serious business.

The same thing happens with blogs and sites in general. If the information you provide is for people that aren't likely to click your ads, then you don't have a chance at moneymaking. Some known examples are webmasters/bloggers, freebie seekers, regular internet users (see ad and banner blindness for more info), and social media users, who are people just browsing for interesting or weird stuff, only to hit back for more weirdness online.

That doesn't mean you can't profit from those audiences, in fact the so called A-list of bloggers does just that for a living: they offer a freebie to webmasters, who are very likely to be regular users that use social media sites. Seems like a tough market eh?, for adsense it is, because there's no way they are clicking ads, since they know that you are making money from it, and they don't want anyone making money from them.

The A-list uses the approach of selling and endorsing, they are basically the online version of Mr. T. selling you the awesome new grilled cheese maker that makes a million different dishes in seconds.

So back on the adsense topic, you are most likely to get some revenue from people coming from search engines, mostly google. They are probably looking for info on how to solve a problem now, and are more likely to click ads that offer just the kind of thing they are looking for, that it just oh so happens to be the best paying adsense block on your site.

That is your target audience, even if it's really not. Confused yet?, here's an example to help you get this concept a little better.

There's this big shot make money guy that goes by the nickname of grizzly brears. He has a make money for beginners blog that has all the affiliate programs and guru ebooks you can possibly imagine, that he himself says are a bunch of overpriced pieces of junk people sell to make money telling others how to make money by selling ebooks.

So did he get his audience wrong? people who want to make money online, his regular readers, are the kind of people that buy from the A-list, and yet he writes that that kind of stuff won't make you money, but here's the catch: He knows that since most of his visitors come from the search engines, looking for a quick fix of make money tips and tricks, he can advertise that kind of products, while advising his regular followers to do some real work and learn from example, his own and others not trying to sell them on stuff, but to actually teach them how to do things right.

He ultimately removed adsense from that blog, because his regular readers clicking the ads and not buying actually caused his account to be smart priced, yet he makes a lot of money from google searches, and he actually does want to help his regular readers, so he set up his blog in order to better serve both purposes.

So you see, you don't have to give up your regular readers to get money from adsense, you just have to diversify your sources of traffic, in order to better convert them to clickers.

There's also another thing to know when making money from adsense: there is only so many links you can get yourself, so you are going to need the link love of other webmasters, and you have to cater to them in some way to get in their good graces so they'll link to you. To do this, what I like to do is to just remove adsense when I know webmasters are coming from that way, which most often than not, referral and direct visits are from people looking for you, not your ads.

There are many easy scripts available to block adsense from certain posts, complete areas of your site, or by entrance path, so as to only serve adsense to google searchers that are likely to click, while giving the webmasters and bloggers an ad free layout: just the kind of clutter free experience they like and have come to expect from possible link partners.

Now there's also keywords and the ads triggered on your pages. As you know, adsense matched the ads served to the keywords it finds on your pages, but there are times when just one word can trigger ads that have no relation whatsoever to the content on your site, thus making people see irrelevant ads that they don't want to click on.

That same mechanism you can use to your advantage, by carefully controlling the keywords you use and on what topics to elaborate on, using the keywords that give the best ads: best paying and more relevant.

There's no magic formula to determine the kind of keywords that give you better mileage, you have to figure that out for yourself by analyzing the keywords you have used on your best performing pages, so as to use them on other, related posts, elaborating on those keywords while still keeping the overall focus of the page on the topic you want to write about, not the one that pays better. Its all about the balance.

Now that's a lot of adsense advice, but also remember to do your seo or people won't be able to find your site on google, from where the most click happy visitors come from, and also remember to work on economies of scale: the more posts you have, the more likely visitors will find your site, just don't trade quantity for quality, that's just spam.

See you around.