15. Your don’t understand how to brainstorm for
keywords. This isn’t meant to offend anyone, but there’s a solid chance that you
consistently choose the same keywords as everyone else. Niche keywords that you
wouldn’t easily think of are by far the best keywords for Adsense and ‘make
money online’ keywords are probably some of the worst.
14. Your ad placement is poor. I still see a lot
of people that are only using vertical banners in their sidebars. These honestly
don’t get clicked nearly as often as larger, rectangle units. Inserting large
and medium rectangles in your posts will almost always lead to getting more
clicks. Vertical banners are a nice addition but are best used as a supplement –
not as the primary unit.
13. You have Adsense on too many pages. Yes, I
said you have Adsense on too many pages. Adsense should be on pages that do a
good job of targeting keywords. When you put it up on pages and posts that don’t
target keywords well, you will have poorly targeted traffic that either won’t
click an ad or won’t convert well for the advertiser. When your clicks don’t
convert well for advertisers you get SMART PRICED.
12. Your pages aren’t Adsense optimized. If the
ads that show up on a page don’t match the topical content of the page/post, you
have a problem that needs to be fixed. The ads that show up should be very
similar to the ones that you’re trying to get traffic with. If they aren’t, they
won’t convert well for the advertiser and this leads to you getting SMART
PRICED.
Adsense relevancy optimization and onsite SEO
are alike in a lot of different ways. To trigger the right ads on a page you
should include your keyword in the HTML title, page headings, throughout the
text of the page, and probably as a tag or label if your site is a blog.
11. You aren’t testing which of your pages
convert well. I have started using an Adsense channel on each page that gets
search traffic – at least until I know that it converts well. I know that there
are a limited amount of testing channels available, but you can run a channel on
a page until you know that it’s doing well. You can then remove it so that you
can test the next page. If a page is converting at a low CTR, you probably have
a problem with your Adsense optimization or you have a keyword that doesn’t have
advertiser bids.
When I implemented channels I was blown away by
which pages were doing well. Pages that I counted out were doing well and pages
I thought were amazing were terrible. That led to me looking deeper into why
some pages couldn’t convert to clicks while others could.
10. You target keywords with extremely low CPCs.
I generally try to target keywords that have Adwords CPCs over $1. This can be
checked with the Google Adwords Keyword Tool. The higher the CPC, the higher the
potential to get higher paying clicks.
9. Your focus is far too wide. I talk to people
all the time that tell me how they’re adding 5-10 new articles to their sites
each day. This generally leads to a site eventually having thousands of pages,
most of which can’t ever produce a search visitor let alone a valuable Adsense
click. Most people would do a lot better by focusing on a few key keyword
targeted pages and getting people to link to them. Ask yourself what types of
articles you’re adding – what is their purpose? I understand that sometimes we
create articles to influence, entertain, etc. You probably shouldn’t have
Adsense on those articles/pages.
8. Your ads don’t blend well with your site.
Unless you have a very strange niche, matching the background color of your ads
to the background color of your site will almost always generate more clicks.
The color of the titles of your ads (the click-able part) should match the link
color of your site or should be blue. There are exceptions but I would challenge
you to test this and then try to beat it. You usually can’t.
7. You don’t know how to get people to link to
your pages/posts. If you can’t generate links, you can’t get ranked. Most people
spend all day working on their sites while they should be spending all day
trying to figure out how to get linked to. 90/10 is the rule and that leaves you
with 10% of your time to spend on your site itself and the rest figuring out how
to get linked to.
6. You don’t understand how to target a keyword
with a post page. This is why you generate almost all of your Adsense clicks on
your home page. This problem combined with not understanding how to get linked
to causes a nasty inability to get traffic and clicks.
5. You struggle to choose profitable topics. You
will therefore probably choose to do ‘make money online’ because everyone else
is doing it. Understanding the metrics of choosing solid keywords is a crucial
aspect of making money with Adsense.
4. You don’t know how to judge your competition.
That means you’ll get yourself into trying to rank for keywords that are above
your skill set and this causes you to get discouraged and stop working. After a
few months you will get more determined and will then continue to pursue the
keywords that are above your skill set. This vicious cycle repeats again and
again.
3. You have information addiction. Instead of
acting on what you know, you try to add to what you know. You know who you are –
you argue SEO theory on every site imaginable even though you’ve never made
enough money through SEO to buy a new computer. At some point you need to walk
away from the sites you love and start making it happen.
2. You’re too lazy to test. There are a lot of
metrics you can test while using Adsense. You can test your ad placement,
background color, link color, text color, and ad size. If you’re too lazy to do
performance optimization on any of your sites, you are probably seriously
under-performing. I can’t stress this enough – every single site will be
different. One theme will work great in one niche, and terribly on another. One
unit will work great on one site, and bad on another.
1. You’re a blogger. Yes, this can be a huge
problem when you’re trying to make money with Adsense. It’s very easy to get
caught up in becoming famous and as a result, you may sacrifice your original
goal – to make money. Blogging and Adsense don’t work together as well as many
people believe and if you lose focus you may lose your ability to make
money.
Blogging can work very well with Adsense if you
do proper testing, have the right focus, and use it on the right pages. In my
opinion most bloggers are probably getting smart priced. Some can still make
money and some can’t. The ones that do make money could make a lot more if they
got their account under control.
Have you spent months (or years) trying to make
money online...with no results?
Could your frustration be the result of having
no idea how to find keywords with high income potential and limited competition?
