There is a growing demand and an opportunity today for those who can optimize websites for Google AdSense - this opportunity can be capitalized on via books and information site - but most importantly by working as a consultant.

Google AdSense today is displayed on thousands of websites across the world, and especially in the developing world, where the dollar goes a lot farther, it has transformed the lives of individuals running websites with substantial Google AdSense income.

So how much income can you expect from Google AdSense?
Difficulty of Success with AdSense
Many ways of Implementing Google AdSense
Best Practices
Test, Test, Test
Getting Free Traffic to Website
Generating Serious Income from AdSense
Success Examples
Resources

Google's own case studies give us a clue about the types of websites that are raking in the big bucks.

Large websites such as askthebuilder.com generate $1400/day (!) - that is, $40,000+/month.

Many website developers who have been working on their sites upwards of 2-3 years have reported incomes in the $3000-$4000 range.

Early site developers on the other hand, take much longer to establish themselves and report $30-$40 over a period of 3-4 months.

And all this is not counting the many hundreds of websites that are possibly generating even lower or no income through AdSense.

Difficulty of Success with AdSense

Succeeding in any money-making endeavor, including Google AdSense, requires your time and effort and patience. Some common reasons for failure include:

• Competing websites - There are now websites that number in the billions and growing each day. Establishing your website as a desirable destination is a multi-year effort requiring you to produce quality content over a period of time that increases your reach and makes your site as a trustworthy resource. Abandoned websites are a commonly seen phenomenon.
• Weblogs or Blogs - The new craze of the Internet, blogging, has made maintaining and updating a web-property extremely simple. And most bloggers rely on AdSense to provide a supplemental income stream. Blogs attract heavy and loyal traffic as well.
• Click Fraud Policing - If Google senses that you have clicked on advertisements on your websites, it will throw you out of this program unceremoniously without even paying you for any pending amounts. Detecting click fraud is a highly imperfect science, and thus at any time, with Google AdSense, you are on thin ice with this program. Viable competition is emerging and could become alternatives to Google AdSense.
• Cost of bringing in traffic - Obviously the best way of getting traffic is through search engine placements and by links from other websites. However, this may take a long time to bring in substantial traffic and you may have to rely on other means (press releases, article submissions, Google AdWords and so on) to bring in traffic (assuming you do not have other means such as a radio show, or newspaper column to bring in traffic). The cost of this traffic should be factored into your calculations.
• Fight for click-through-rates: Even if you have a large number of visitors, what would motivate your visitors to click on the Google Ads? In fact, sometimes, websites that provide less information start doing better with Google AdSense than those with substantial information. Over time, the odds start favoring a better site, but still there is no guarantee of a large number of clicks occurring on your website.
• Low Payment per Click - This is another factor that you cannot really control - and that is the payment that you are due per click. Each click may pay you anything from $0.01 to $1-$2. If most of your clicks pay you in the $0.01 to $0.05, your earnings are likely to remain low (unless you have a very large traffic and a high click-through rate).
• Variability in earnings from month to month - Several AdSense publishers have reported drastic changes in month-to-month earnings, with some months dipping to as low as zero! You will have to roll with the punches and plan for such periods.
• Google may make modifications to how they display their ads, and the change in algorithm could have adverse affects on your earnings due to the nature of your site and traffic. Large publishers are likely to be less affected than smaller publishers by these changes.
• Overall, give yourself two to three years before you can expect to generate substantial income from Google AdSense.

Many ways of Implementing AdSense

Google's website maintains a complete list of advertising possibilities, ranging from skyscrapers to single advertisement units, as well as link units that take the user to a page of website links on that topic. In addition to the size of the advertising box, Google AdSense offers the publishers ability to pick from a vast range of web-colors to properly match or contrast the advertisements from the rest of web-content.

In addition there are image advertisements as well as cost per thousand impression advertisements (which show up like the image advertisements) that Google can serve up on your website.

There are some large publishers who show Google advertisements as part of their content, where the text links within the editorial are really AdSense advertisements. It has been difficult to find information related to these types of advertisements and what criteria does Google apply in allowing a publisher to use these types of links. These are bound to be more successful in generating clicks from users.

Given the wide array of choices, what are some of the best practices recommended by Google AdSense publishers?

Best Practices

Google's website has tips on optimizations which is a fine list of techniques to enhance Google AdSense revenue. But going beyond that list, some of the largest and most successful publishers indicate:

1. Have Google AdSense units show "above fold" - In other words, publishers have seen greater success with AdSense units that show up on a web-page before the user has to scroll down. This does not mean not to have AdSense units elsewhere on the page. In fact, for the more content rich sites, having AdSense units lower on a page may be extremely helpful whereby the user, having just finished reading the content, is now primed and ready to click to go elsewhere. Having a relevant AdSense advertisement may offer just the right incentive to do so.
2. Having the AdSense units wrapped by editorial content. In other words, to make the AdSense seem a part of the article itself, it is useful to have the text of the article wrap around the AdSense advertisement.
3. Left Placement of AdSense units: Based on heat-map studies of how users read a webpage, the left top side of a web-page, and in general the left side of a page is where the reader's eye spends a generous portion of its time during reading. Placing AdSense units on the left with the article content wrapped around it allows the readers to actually look at the advertisements naturally and easily.
4. Breaking the article in the middle and introducing AdSense units has improved click-through rates for many publishers. It almost has the same sense of loss of continuity that happens with television (interruption marketing).
5. AdSense units in the left and right navigation bar. This keeps these units away from the main content, but when the user is ready to navigate away from the page, there is a tendency to use the left or right navigation bar to do so, and AdSense units in these locations then helps to increase the click through rate.

Test, Test, Test

Having mentioned these commonly suggested steps to improve click through rates and eventually earnings from AdSense - the most critical and valuable suggestion is to test each of these variables (and more) for your particular website situation.

Testing is a whole art (or science) unto itself. The most basic suggestion is to compare your earnings from AdSense between two identical setups with only one variable changed.

In other words, you can test the click-through rate between an AdSense unit that is placed on the left-side of your content, versus one that is placed on the right side. But you must try to control all other variables and test with:

• Similar amount of traffic flow to that page
• Approximately same time of the year (if possible)
• Same sources of traffic (for example: if AdWords is being used to generate traffic, then the same advertisements should be bringing in the traffic)
• All other content in the page should be identical
• Traffic total should be large enough to smooth out any minor fluctuations (say 10,000 visitors)

An A/B split testing model would work the best in these situations. However, most publishers are ill-equipped to conduct this form of test on their AdSense units, and thus must rely on data that may be pointing in the right direction but cannot be ascertained for sure.

Obviously, one variable that cannot be controlled is the actual quality of the advertisement put forth by AdSense, but once data is available against a large number of visitors, it can smooth over a lot of these differences.

As the size of your AdSense revenue increases, especially past the $1000/month mark, it might be worthwhile testing with A/B split testing to further boost revenue potential of the website.

Getting Free Traffic to Website

The holy grail of AdSense publishers is to generate free traffic to their website. This affords the best margins for AdSense income. Some of the large publishers may have their own radio show or books to help drive visitors to their site. This alternate means of reaching their audience also helps establish credibility.

But for the vast majority of publishers, search engine traffic, link exchanges and direct links from other websites are the key to getting plenty of interested traffic to their site. The formula for success in such an endeavor follows the beaten track of:

1. Develop a Unique Value Proposition for your website - what value are your bringing to the visitors of your site? A good value proposition will bring repeat visitors and fetch links more easily.
2. Select keywords for your website using which you wish to attract visitors. You can use programs like WordTracker for this purpose. Another program is Keyword Discovery to achieve the same end. Here is a fine article on how to choose keywords for your site.
3. Now start creating articles around those keywords, using the keywords in title, in headline and in the text, aiming for a 5-20% keyword density. Until the reality of a semantic web can be established, keyword density will remain the king. The Search Engines are smart enough to detect "keyword stuffing", and yet a certain amount of keyword density is required to catch their attention.
4. Link to other websites with relevant information from your articles, and especially do so for your keywords. This has a surprisingly positive effect on your own articles.
5. Maintain a steady frequency of articles (at least twice a week, once a day is even better).
6. Implementing a linking campaign is fruitful as well, as similar sites start linking back to you. Some folks succeed without any linking campaign whatsoever. However, linking does seem to help.

This formula will take you a year or two to begin bringing in solid traffic, but it will happen and it will be all free!

To initiate the process, it is worth spending some cash for getting your site listed in directories on the web, as well as in creating a few press releases (spend at the $30 level to get the hyperlinks activated) - which will then have links pointing back to your site. These high quality links will quick-start the Search Engine bots in indexing your site. Of course, to further help with that process, make sure that all your content is easily accessible from your home page (creating an index, or archive list is helpful in that regard).

Generating Serious Income from AdSense

To make serious income from AdSense, you have two choices:

1. Focus on generating plenty of content for one website. This is the traditional approach where you create the depth and breadth on a particular subject matter. It has some side-benefits too - and that is, it will establish your site as a place of "expertise" for that topic. You can potentially parlay that expertise into other forms of monetization by offering back-end products, e-zine sign-ups, affiliateships and so on.
2. The second technique is to create multiple web-sites, each with its own niche and focus. Over time, you can see which ones are doing better and focus on those sites. Slowly, over a period of time, you can develop a portfolio of websites all of which perform at a reasonable level, generating $1000/month each. You could even auction off your slightly below- average AdSense websites on e-Bay for a reasonable sum - if you can prove the type of cash you are generating (like selling a business).

On the flip-side, you could carefully purchase a portfolio of websites from eBay for AdSense, and see what type of progress you can make with those sites (first, if it really does generate some income for you, and if yes, how can you make it better).

Limiting yourself to one website makes most sense when you are serious about that area and are developing that site as part of a larger business plan. If however, your goal is to simply generate some extra cash through AdSense, developing a portfolio is your best bet.

Success Examples

1. Google has case studies on several web-sites that are worth going over.
2. http://www.plentyoffish.com/ is said to be the million-dollar from AdSense website.
3. http://www.mobiletracker.net/ is said to generate $5000/month

There are several similar sites that you will find - take a look and learn from what they are doing right. But in the end, you must test to find your optimal strategy.

This ends this report. Part III of this Report will focus on making AdSense as part of your overall wealth generating strategy, and if it makes for a sound business plan. Use the following resources as well in helping you better implement your AdSense program.

Resources

1. Tips on Google AdSense - fine article
2. Delivering Google AdSense and Yahoo! Publisher Network Dynamically - an implementation article
3. AdSense optimization article
4. Nice forum thread on how to handle the situation if Google asks you to leave (and how to avoid that in the first place).

We hope you enjoyed this part of the Report. Please send us feedback at shri_ajay@characterandwealth.com on what you liked or disliked about this report or post on the forums!