What about some AdSense basics?

[Anthony Buchalka]

A good place for those starting out in AdSense is this Google AdSense help page.

We would like to hear some of your experiences or questions regarding AdSense.

[c14h20o4]

I love adsense! It's 100% of my income at the moment. A lot of people say they hate it but most likely, they don't have an objective or realistic method for evaluating keywords or they're not willing to do the amount of work necessary to see any benefit. I love creating content which is perfect for adsense. The best part is that it's pretty much a mathematical certainty in regards to earnings. Write an article now, make it good, and it's not likely to make you any money right away but be patient and it'll start to earn it's keep. Say it takes a year for that article to earn you a couple bucks a month... well you know then how many articles it'll take you to get to the earnings you want. Watch your search stats on how people are finding you and you'll be able to improve your article and your rankings. It's not fast but it's certain.

[Jezza31]

I love adsense! It's 100% of my income at the moment. A lot of people say they hate it but most likely, they don't have an objective or realistic method for evaluating keywords or they're not willing to do the amount of work necessary to see any benefit. I love creating content which is perfect for adsense. The best part is that it's pretty much a mathematical certainty in regards to earnings. Write an article now, make it good, and it's not likely to make you any money right away but be patient and it'll start to earn it's keep. Say it takes a year for that article to earn you a couple bucks a month... well you know then how many articles it'll take you to get to the earnings you want. Watch your search stats on how people are finding you and you'll be able to improve your article and your rankings. It's not fast but it's certain.

Just started here, find your post most helpful thanks, however, I have a question: If I currently have a high performing adsense page say earning $500 plus per month and I then set up a totally new blog with similar keywords, add my adsense code, drive about the same amount of traffic to it, will I get the same income from the adds on the new blog.(Given same amount of clicks views etc) And what if for the first 6 months the traffic is low to the new blog/adsense page. Excuse my ignorance here, I tried to get the info from google, but got lost in jargon.

Jezza31

[c14h20o4]

Hi Jezza,

Wow blast from the past!

I'm sorry to say though, the answer to your question is going to be it depends and here's why:

If I currently have a high performing adsense page say earning $500 plus per month and I then set up a totally new blog with similar keywords, add my adsense code, drive about the same amount of traffic to it, will I get the same income from the adds on the new blog.

Search Volume - Similar keywords as you say you'll be targeting can have very different search volume and I'll give you an example. I have an ESL website (ESL=English as a Second Language) and I recently created a page about teaching the different parts of the body. Parts of the Body has 14,800 searches per month, Parts of the Body for Kids has 320. Body Parts for kids 3600 searches, body part for children 170. So similar keywords can have very different search volumes and therefore, your traffic will be largely based on your rankings. You can try other traffic generating streams like article marketing but a lot of directories have so little traffic you're limited to just a few.

Another factor deals with the long tail, in that the content you create will draw different long tails searches and so you have that whole mess to consider which leads to the ads which appear on your site. By default, google is displaying ads based on what the visitor was looking at previously. For example, I live in Japan and when I'm on this forum, the ads displayed are in Japanese. This is important because what people are paying to have the ads varies. Advertisers pay more to have an ad in one niche and pay less for others. If the visitors coming to your site were looking at inexpensive advertising venue type topics the ads displayed on your site will have a lower cost per click and your cut will be equally lower.

Another factor is how aggressive are you with the ad placement? Site A and Site B have to have equally aggressive ad placement and let's not get into colors and size and corners and borders and all of that.

And if that weren't confusing enough, advertisers can choose to advertise directly on your site so if you're using adsense, ads can be place contextually, that is by the google algorithm or the advertise can say to google they want their ad to be on your site and in that case, it costs more for them and you get paid more as well.

On top of that, I'm probably not hitting every variable so the only thing you can really do is test.

And what if for the first 6 months the traffic is low to the new blog/adsense page.

I don't really know what the aim of this question is... are you asking about whether or not you should put adsense on a site that doesn't have a lot of traffic yet? It won't hurt you to put adsense on your site as soon as you launch it as long as it meets the adsense TOS. The real danger of putting any kind of monetization on a site is checking you earnings too much.

Hope that helps,
Chris