2009 was the first year my Google Adsense earnings didn’t increase significantly, but they didn’t drop either. Considering my sites sat on the back burner for the second half of the year (as you can see from the lack of recent posts here, I shifted gears for a while, spending more time on writing fiction than blogging), I really can’t complain. I’ve noticed others in the industry (webmasters and bloggers running Adsense) saying that there have been big hits to online advertising spending and their earnings have been down significantly.

In this post, I’ll share why I believe my earnings held up and what I think you can do to keep (or increase) your own Adsense earnings, even in troubled times.

Why My Adsense Earnings Didn’t Drop in 2009

I’d like to say that I had brilliant prescience back in 2004-2005 when I was picking my niches, but any brilliance was accidental. I have a short attention span, which led me to diversify my site topics. I’ve done a bit with fitness and travel, but many of my niches are in the home improvement arena, which is a pretty broad and flexible area. Today there may be fewer people reading my posts on luxury steam showers and $10,000 hot tubs, but there’s plenty of interest in my articles on home security, heating with wood stoves, and renovating on a budget. In short, I picked niches that were adaptable and could be popular in good times and bad times.

How You Can Make Good Money from Adsense Today (even if the economy gets worse)

If you’re just starting out and trying to pick a niche to write about, you might go the same route, choosing a subject that is going to be popular in any economy. What do people always want? What do they splurge on no matter how tight the budget gets? Beauty and dieting? Entertainment? Alcohol? Health care (lots of aging baby boomers out there)?

Also, what might they buy if they believe there isn’t a light at the end of the tunnel and the economy will be down for some time? Information on self-sufficiency? Fuel-efficient cars? Growing their own food?

You’ll have to do your own research for the niches you’re interested in. Use keyword tools (such as the Adwords Keyword Tool) to determine the popularity of niches and what advertisers are bidding for clicks. Remember, it’s not just about choosing a popular niche. It’s about choosing one that’s profitable, too!

To do well with Adsense, you need people searching for information on products and services in your niche, finding your site, reading your content, clicking your ads, and occasionally buying from the merchant.

If you’ve already picked your niche, and you’ve built a website, look at how you can make posts that are applicable for today’s economy. Also, if you want to score with Adsense, don’t forget to focus at least some of your posts on consumer-related topics. Someone reading your blog post about growing strawberries might click on one of the nearby ads, but someone reading your product review of the Ultra-Gizmo Space-Saving Strawberry Planter is a surer thing (people searching for product reviews are usually in buy-mode and are thinking of making a purchase before they even get to your site).

For more on doing well with Adsense, please check out some of my older articles:

• How Can You Make Money with Adsense (without spending any money)?
• What It Takes to Make $100,000 a Year from Adsense
• Why Your Google Adsense Earnings Suck

Post from: Writing for Your Wealth

How to Make Money from Adsense Even in a Down Economy

To start things off, a recent commenter asked…

How can you make money with Google Adsense if you don’t have any money to get started?

As I’ve mentioned before, I make a big chunk of my income from Adsense, so I’m always game to answer questions about the program. If you’re serious about starting a web site (or two or three or ten), I recommend buying a domain name and getting your own web hosting, an investment of less than $20 up front with an ongoing $5-$8 a month for hosting fees.

However, if you’re broke (which I was in the beginning, so I can sympathize!), you can indeed make money with Adsense without spending a dime out of your pocket.

The easiest way is to set up a Blogger account and build one or more blogs there. Since Blogger is owned by Google these days, they make it easy to apply for the Adsense program and serve ads right on your blog (when I got started, you actually had to have your own domain name in order to apply, hmmph!).

It’s actually not a bad idea to cut your teeth on freebie blogs. You can start several on Blogger and see which niches end up keeping your interest, drawing a decent amount of traffic, and making you noticeable money with Adsense.

Remember, content that is closely associated with products and services tends to do best for pay-for-click publishers.

Post from: Writing for Your Wealth

How Can You Make Money with Adsense Without Spending Any Money? (Reader Questions Series)

Some people are so disheartened from trying to make money online that they’ll flat out state that a normal person can’t make money with Adsense, or you have to have tons and tons of traffic to make anything. Well, I’m not sure how normal I am, but I don’t get zillions of page views a month to my site, and while Google isn’t the only way I make money, I do make enough from that program alone to cover all my monthly living expenses.

So…. what’s the secret?

There are lots of places where people go wrong, but here are perhaps the three most common problems I see, AKA, “Why your Adsense earnings suck.”

1. Site isn’t a good tie-in for pay-per-click revenue

This is the biggest one and honestly the hardest to fix. (2 can easily be changed and 3 isn’t that bad either.)

Sites that don’t have a clear commercial tie-in don’t tend to do well with Adsense. For example, if you blog about writing, exactly what products would people buy related to that? Heck if I know (books and other not very expensive items, I’d guess), and that’s why I don’t have Adsense on this site.

This doesn’t mean that sites focusing more on teaching and less on consumer-oriented stuff can’t make money (some people make a lot of money creating their own information products and selling them), but sometimes it’s not even worth putting Adsense ads on such sites.

I love Adsense because it’s perfect for introverts like me who don’t want to deal with the hassle of selling products, but you really do have to choose a niche and write content with related products and services in mind if you want to do well with the program.

2. Horrible ad placement

This is probably my favorite Adsense “problem,” because it’s such an easy fix. If you want to make good money with Adsense, you really need to get your ads as close to the content as possible. It’s a bad idea to “trick” people into clicking, but you don’t want them to easily ignore those ads either.

The small 480×90 banner ads are easy to ignore (the Internet has “grown up” with that banner size, and we’re all pretty good at blocking it out), and tower ads aren’t particularly effective if they’re stuck over in the side bar. It gets even worse if your ads are below the fold (meaning that people have to scroll down to even have a shot at noticing them).

What really does work is the 250×250, 300×250, or the monster 336×280 ads wrapped right into the content of your article or blog post. It’s hard to miss, and you’ll get a lot more clicks with this type of Adsense layout.

A lot of people don’t want to stick these big ads in right next to their content for fear of looking spammy or perhaps alienating a community of readers. It’s your choice, but if you want to make money, size of ads and placement can make a huge different. Putting ads where “they won’t bother people” is the same as putting ads where nobody will notice (and click) on them.

3. Not enough search engine traffic

You don’t have to get zillions or even millions of page views a month to make a nice living from Adsense (I average a little over 10,000 views a day, across all the sites I run Adsense on). You do, however, have to have some traffic.

And ideally that traffic will come from the search engines.

I know we all like to go out and comment on each others’ blogs so they’ll comment on our blogs and we’ll look popular, but someone returning a comment isn’t a likely candidate to click an ad and buy something from the shop on the other end.

You want someone who typed in “how to make mead” and landed on your blog post on “How to Get Started Making Mead in Your Own Kitchen.” They’re a much better candidate to click on the nearby ads for home brewing kits. They found your site because they were specifically thinking of getting into home brewing, not because they were just returning a comment to be cordial.

The best way to fix a lack of traffic (especially a lack of search engine traffic) is the tried and true method: get links to your site. This can be done through article marketing, guest blogging, forum posting, blog carnivals, and other methods. Pick one you like and put some quality time into working it.

Make sure your site follows all these rules (okay, they’re just guidelines… suggestions, if you will), and your Adsense earnings won’t “suck” any more!

Post from: Writing for Your Wealth

Why Your Google Adsense Earnings Suck