The top alternative AdSense advertiser would be YPN. IOW, Yahoo’s version of AdSense. You can give them a try but don’t expect to do even as well as you will with Google. Problem is the top alternative to AdSense is far below AdSense itself.
There are a lot of sites on the net advertising AdSense Google howto and AdSense traning or offering you advice on tricking Google AdSense. Well, here’s a tip for you. Don’t even try tricking Google. If you do and you get caught you and all of your sites will be banned from the system.
Considering the best alternative is miles below the AdSense system why would you even bother to try to trick Google? That’s some stupidity at it’s finest. There are also tons of sites offering you advice on beating the AdSense system or promising reveal AdSense big secret.
Another AdSense tip, there is no big secret, there is no legitimate way to beat the AdSense system. The way to beat AdSense is with hard work and testing. What works for you and your site and what doesn’t work. Researching your topics so you can get lots of traffic, figuring out which keywords surfers respond the most to, figuring out your site design for maximum click thrus.
Those are the big secrets. You can pay the guru’s for those big secrets or you can figure them out for yourself in very little time. A few weeks ago I was reading a guru who said the best response for AdSense ads comes from using the biggest box on the top left of your post and letting the words flow on the right side and below the box.
Lol, I was using a 468×60 text only banner on all of my pages and a long tower on the left nav so I decided to give it a try. Heh, it was a highly respected AdSense guru who makes a lot of money selling tips and trick to get rich from AdSense. His reasoning and supposedly his testing was the 468×60 look exactly like banners so people don’t click on them.
Now I know banners aren’t great so I thought I’d give it a try. Was this a successful AdSense tip or another worthless piece of crap so the guru could make money? Well, before I switched over to the big box my ctr was right around 9%. Not to bad. After the change it dropped to 3.86%. Hmmm, not so good.
After a week of testing it, I put the 468×60 banner type ads back on the pages and guess what? CTR started right back up and yesterday was 9.32% and I expect it to be close to 9% again this week. Guru’s don’t always know what they are talking about.
I thought perhaps it was a fluke so I tried it on three other sites in the same niche. The ctr also fell and is still falling on those sites so they will get changed back when the test is up. Had I not decided to test this for myself I’d have agreed with the guru. It’s logical but it’s also not true in my case.
Another question is how much does AdSense pay per click? Anywhere from pennies to 70-90 bucks. However you can expect pennies and not dollars. Few make the big bucks per click and certainly not me. However I don’t target that market either.
Google came out with another thing for AdSense the other day. They now accept ads from third party vendors and all you have to do to get the ads is make sure your ads are setup to display image ads. No big deal there. Anyone can do that. I do.
You should know that Google really likes sites that, in it’s eyes, are professional sites. I don’t know that Google subtracts anything if your site isn’t as professional as they’d like it to be, nor do I know if they give you some benefit if they do consider it a professional site.
What I do know is I’d much rather advertise on a professional site than some scam artist junk site built specifically for AdSense. I’d sure give more consideration to sites I thought were professional. I expect that someday Google will too, if they aren’t already.
One of the things I was reading was what they wanted you to put in your privacy policy. It’s quite a bit and it requires you to work on each site to change your policy and to link to the sites that are advertisers or possible advertisers on your site.
Once again, I don’t know this for a fact but I suspect Google will give a bit more benefit to the sites that follow their suggested guidelines for the privacy policy page. I don’t expect most people will follow the privacy suggestions. I am.
The fewer sites Google sees as professional the better it is for me. Googles suggestions are just that, suggestions and don’t have to be followed but I’m betting Google will be looking for updated privacy policies that are within their guidelines. So I changed mine.
It doesn’t hurt and it might help. Less than 1% of the surfers who come to any of my sites read the privacy policy so it’s not likely to hurt my sites at all. Google will like it tho and that’s a good thing. Here’s another AdSense tip. Do the things Google likes and you’ll make more money. Don’t do the things they like and you will make less money. It’s that simple.
So what do I have on my sites to convince Google they are professional sites? Robots.txt, favicon.ico, privacy policy, contact, about, sitemap and I don’t do anything to tricky with navigation. I make sure each page of every site has a title related to the page content, A description related to the page content, easy navigation, a h1-h3 header and that the site is totally about what the keywords suggest it’s about.
How does it benefit me to have all these little things? The more Google thinks I run professional sites the better ads they are going to run on my sites and the more money I’m going to make. Isn’t that what it’s about? Making money.
It’s simple, pick good niches, have good content, give Google what it wants for professionalism and make more money. Do it the way Google suggests and you’ll be better off in the long run.
Last fall, using the 468×60 banners I had a site that was averaging right at a 130% ctr. IOW some people were clicking on multiple ads. Freaked me out as I’d never seen stats like that before so I emailed Google asking if there was a problem. No response so I assume everything was okay. Site’s still up and still selling so I now know it wasn’t a problem.
It was a very topical and timely site and it lasted with a huge ctr for almost 30 days. Then it went back to between 5 and 10% where it is now. This fall I expect it to go back up over 100%. You can be sure I will update the site about 30 days before I expect the big ctr again. That site is about pheasant hunting so you can see that fall is timely.
The best AdSense tip I can give you is the guru’s aren’t always right but they do give you a place to start. However testing is a necessity. Just because a guru says it doesn’t make it true and even if true it doesn’t mean it will work with your site design. Test everything. Size, placement, colors, text, images and anything else you can think of.
If you believe the guru’s and you fail, it’s not their fault. It’s yours. If you don’t test things then you haven’t given it your best shot. There is no magic tip, no magic bullet, nothing but your own hard work and your own testing.
Lol, once upon a time I was a guru for selling memberships. Then I realized that being famous wasn’t all it was cracked up to be and went back to quietly doing what I do. Every now and then I write something like this, not to be a guru but to show that you don’t need to pay big bucks for information that isn’t all that great anyway.
There are people who would charge you $29.00-$49.00 for the information I gave you in this page, for free. None of it’s a secret and none of it will get you banned from the AdSense program. It’s just a few little things I know from having been a webmaster since 1996.
Google has some great information about AdSense and I recommend you read everything they have about it. If you want to go to a good blog about it then checkout Jen Sense. It’s a good place for good info and I suspect they will freak out getting a link from a porn site. Lol, still they do have good info. I recommend you read it.
