Maximising AdSense Revenue
In this series on Internet Marketing we've already looked at AdWords Campaigns you have also been presented with an introduction to AdSense and I've even provided you with lists of the top paying AdWords keywords.
Essentially these are all the tools you need for your AdSense campaign. This article will take you through the process of optimizing and enhancing your website to maximize your AdSense revenue.
Profiting from Knowing Google's Top-paying Keywords
By doing your homework and finding out the best-paying keywords in Google's AdSense program then you can websites and web pages based on these keywords. These sites and pages will tend to serve expensive ads and/or promote affiliate offers that reap high bounties when clicked or completed.
However, the real challenge is driving traffic to these sites; most especially as there is considerable competition to drive taffic to pages displaying these ads. Of course you can take the time to grow your website organically, building good quality in-bound links and ensuring that you have sufficient internal links within your website for the search engine spiders to locate your new pages. Then you can use search engine optimization techniques to ensure that the pages you've created rank highly on the search engines' results pages. This way you get what's effectively 'free' content. I can vouch that this method does work, but it takes time and you may not notice any significant results for two to three months. Though you can accelerate this process by posting on-line articles about your pages or content (and including the appropriate URL in your signature). You can also use your Blog to publish the URLs and to write notes about the pages you are creating. These methods will accelerate the indexing of your pages and will reduce the time taken for them to be included in the search engines' indexes. That said, waiting for organic recognition of your pages by the search engines can be a very frustrating process.
The other method used by many to drive traffic to their pages is to use on-line advertising. But you have to be very careful when using this method, especially if you are using Google's AdWords program. The important thing to consider is the correlation between keywords. You want to pay as little as possible for your keywords in AdSense whilst ensuring that the ads you place lead to a page which display expensive AdSense ads (whilst remembering that only about 1% of your visitors will click on the ads you present. This menas that the ads on your AdSense targetted web page must be more that 100x the value of your AdSense campaigns just to ensure that you maintain a profit. For example, say that you're bidding on the keyword 'painting' for $0.20 per click and this directs your visitor to a page about 'home redecorating' which pays $2.10 per keyword. This differential between the price you are paying for your AdWords ads and the price you are paid for AdSense cicks is the price 'spread'. Only if this is large enough can you ever hope to make any money from AdWords advertising campaigns.
Remember though that AdSense ads aren't the only creatives you can place on your web pages/websites. You can also use Affiliate Marketing to run banner ads or text ads. You can use these to gain more revenue as a publisher but you can also submit your own banners to on-line advertising networks. In this case you're looking for a CPM (cost per impression) deal where the cost of adverising is typically much lower than the price of he keywords you're targeting.
If you gain affiliate offers associated with your list of high-paying keywords then you advertise using inexpensive means (e.g., via pay-per-click advertising on inexpensive keywords or CPM advertising) and direct traffic to high paying affiliate offers.
Another way of gaining traffic to high-paying keywords is to set up your own search engine. This isn't as complicated as it sounds since there are several companies that allow you to easily set up a search engine that serves PPC ads syndicated from Google, Overture or other PPC search engine networks. Once you create your engine, you can drive traffic directly to your PPC results, and get paid every time someone clicks on one of the results. Likewise, on your search engine’s home page, you can include many links to expensive keywords, so that when someone clicks on it, the engine shows expensive ads based on those keywords.
Maximizing AdSense Revenues by Up-selling
Up-selling is a sales technique whereby a salesman attempts to have the consumer purchase more expensive items, upgrades, or other add-ons in an attempt to make a more profitable sale. Up-selling usually involves marketing more profitable services or products, but up-selling can also be simply exposing the customer to other options he or she may not have considered previously. What you may not have realized is that this can be applied to websites using Google’s AdSense program.
Consider how this might work on an AdSense-driven website. We'll use the example already discussed of a painting-related website. You've designed your website around the keywords 'paint' or 'painting' and it is these keywords that Google will use to display ads on your site. If you look at your potential earnings then the top advertisers are paying $0.19 for 'paint' and $0.48 for 'painting'. Neither are particularly profitable, but by applying the technique of up-selling to the original painting website it's possible to do much better than this. The key here, as in all up-selling is to etermine expensive, correlated products to up-sell. In the painting case, one keyword that quickly comes to mind is “home remodeling” as painting is often part of a larger home remodeling project. Moreover, “home remodeling” has a price of $2.05 &2014; nearly nine times the price of 'paint'. Furthermore, finding keywords correlated to “home remodeling” yields even more expensive keywords such as “home improvement loan” which currently has a price of $6.50, or thirty-four times the price of the original term 'paint'.
Now that you've identified these more lucrative correlated products you need to create web pages with quality content specifically about these products. Then you need to entice, via text and links, visitors to go to these pages. The higher quality the content, the more enticing the product or service becomes, and the more likely a visitor is to click on one of the high paying AdSense ads.
This is a technique that almost every website owner is missing out on. OK, so it will require some work to extend your website with new pages and good content. Yet, this can significantly improve the revenue generation potential of your website. All you need to do is to do your homework and find the keyword costs and associated products or services that relate to your website.