Writing for Your Wealth

As I’ve mentioned before (numerous times!), my first site was a flop as far as earning me money went. It taught me a useful lesson though:

It pays to think of the money first.

Before starting a website, know how you’re going to make money from it. If you start a site first and hope it’ll make money somehow… well, that’s why most of us fail.

In short, have a plan.

Fortunately, that’s what we’ve been talking about in the How to Build Passive Income with Article Sites Series, and today we’re up to Part 6: Adding Google Adsense.

Yes, we’ve got our niche, we’ve got some articles up, and we have some links pointing to our site. Now it’s time to add our ads. But where shall we put them? What size shall they be? What color and font shall they use? (How many times can I use “shall” in this post?)

Let’s examine these considerations (one last time for good measure…) shall we?

Page Layout

The idea with these article sites is to keep the pages simple. Title, article, navigation menu, ads, and that’s it. You can work in pictures if you want, but I never bothered. First and foremost, I wanted people to notice my ads.

Not everyone is going to click, of course, and that’s fine since we only want to send real leads to the merchant’s site, but we want to make sure anyone who might be interested notices the ad and isn’t distracted by too much bling.

A popular layout puts the content on the left or right, the menu on the side, and wraps one more more ads into the text itself. Here are a couple of example layouts:

That is from my home security site. For those of you who have been wondering about my sites, there’s one you can take a peep at. It’s four years old and not perfect by any means (some articles were written with SEO and keyword research in mind, and some were written… because I felt like it!), but it’s a real life example of something that started out as 10-article site and grew to about 100 articles. It brings in a decent amount of largely passive income each month (I usually add a blog post or two a month and try to get a new link here and there).

This screenshot is from AsktheBuilder.com, which is one of the Adsense case studies. The site layout is actually busier than this with another menu off to the right, but I think what I captured here is a good example of the menu on the left, content on the right, ad wrapped in sort of style.

Ad Size

There are a lot of Adsense ad format options, and if you’re new to making money with the program, you might feel a little daunted by the selection.

Let’s narrow things down and just pick the winners.

You can see in the examples above that small ads aren’t the way to go if making money is the primary motivation. Yes, bigger is better.

Depending on who you ask, the top three best performing ad sizes are

• 336×280 large rectangle (four ads)

• 300×250 medium rectangle (four ads)
• 160×600 wide skyscraper (five ads)

or perhaps the

• 300×250 medium rectangle

• 728×90 leaderboard
• 160×600 skyscraper

Just based on my own experience, I’m inclined to believe the first source is correct, even if the Google Adsense blog itself is the second source. The wider rectangles take up more screen estate, so it’s natural for them to perform better. They also lend themselves to being closely integrated with the content itself, and we know that improves performance.

In the end, though, click-through-rates (CTRs) will vary from niche to niche, site to site, and demographic to demographic, so it pays to experiment with size and placement in your layout.

Ad Style

When you create an ad, you get to choose the border color, text color, and link color in addition to size. Here’s another area where it’s worth experimenting, but in general, the more your ads look like standard links (blue text), the better they perform, especially with less web savvy demographics (choose something fancy and they might not even realize it’s a link they can click).

In regards to border, there are all sorts of studies around the net that tell us that an invisible border works best (so choose a border color that is the same as the background of your page), and I’ve definitely found that to be true.

Ads that blend in perform better than those that stand out. It seems contrary to what you’d think, but so many of us have an aversion to advertising that it makes sense that we’d click on things that look less like advertising (especially less like banner ads) than integral parts of the site.

You’ll have to decide, however, where you draw the line, since the argument could be made that you’re tricking visitors into clicking ads when you make your ad blocks look like normal site navigation elements.

I’m a little on the fence myself. I want to send qualified leads to merchants, but at the same time I don’t want to leave money on the table, er, site. I do usually use blended ads with no border, though I draw the line at trickier tactics such as putting huge blocks of ads across the page and forcing the visitors to scroll down before seeing a menu or any actual page content or anything useful. (Not that most of these types of sites have any useful content anyway.)

Adsense Links Units

You may also want to sprinkle some Link Unit style ads into your site:

When Link Units first came out, many publishers were reluctant to use them. These little ads require folks to click twice in order for you to get paid. They click on a keyword they’re interested in, get a page of results, and then have to click again.

However, they seem to perform admirably, and they can work well when added to a menu area or at the end of an article. This is another area where you’ll want to experiment. Use channels to monitor performance of all your different ads and different domains (you can even monitor individual pages if you like).

The folks who experiment and compare their results are the ones who end up earning more. When you’re getting a decent amount of traffic, an increase of 1 or 2% in CTR can mean hundreds of extra dollars a month.

How Many Ads Per Page?

I’m not crazy about throwing multiple ad blocks all over the page, mostly because I hate clutter (you wouldn’t know this from looking around my home office…). Even though you may be able to fit more ads on a page, you might actually earn less than if you just had one or two well placed ads. I believe that the more distractions there are, the more likely people won’t click anything.

That’s just my theory though, and again you’ll get the best results by experimenting and seeing what performs best on your sites. Most of my article sites have one big rectangle ad and one link unit, either in the menu or at the bottom of the page.

Okay, do you have any questions on monetizing with Adsense, or any stories or suggestions you’d like to share?