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One of the most inspiring business podcasts I’ve listened to recently was a “coffee with Kelly” at WahmTalkRadio where Kelly talked about examining and improving what you’ve got.

I’ve already shared the bit of work I’ve done an one of my low producing content sites and that I immediately saw in increase in earnings (from zero affiliate sales to 3 in one week). I also shared that I’m doing more tracking of the AdSense activity on another site that already performed well, and the results were very exciting there too.

So I thought I would share a few tips on examining and improving your earnings for those who are monetizing with AdSense.

First of all, AdSense isn’t right for every website. It shouldn’t be on a sales page that you’re sending affiliates to, for example. Webmasters have experienced varying degrees of success with Google’s Adsense program, and the ones who report higher satisfaction with their Adsense income have learned to monitor the performance of their ads and make changes that increase click-thrus.

This is where testing and tracking comes in. It can huge a huge and very quick difference in your earnings. You can start tracking with the Channels that AdSense offers inside your account. Recently, Google made tracking with channels even easier because you can now track different areas of your website without changing the actual code in your site’s html.

Some of the things you want to track are:

• Best performing ad block size
• Best performing ad block placement(s)
• Best performing colors (for the text and url)
• Best performing pages of your site (so you can add more like those!)

Some general advice for improving click thru:

Ads that work best for most websites are those that blend in with content and appear high up in the page – “above the fold”. They look almost like part of the site’s design or navigation. Make the clickable links blue (you can do this inside your AdSense account when you get the code to add to your site), not a fancy color that matches the color scheme of your site. And for me at least, borders around the ads mean less money.

And finally, more traffic almost always equals more earnings. So work on traffic building alongside tweaking and tracking your AdSense. Trust me – I have gone from my monthly AdSense income being my daily income, and it’s realllly nice.

Moms Talk Radio

Tags: adsense

This entry was posted on Friday, February 15th, 2008 at 1:47 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.