If you spend time and energy keeping your blog updated, relevant, and engaging, you should also implement methods to generate at least modest income. There are several ways to monetize a blog or feed, such as affiliate marketing, selling information products or services, and advertising. Even if you’re using other monetization methods, AdSense is an excellent way to optimize your earnings. Here are six ways to increase your revenue with AdSense.
Create Custom Targeted Channels and Sections
AdSense allows bloggers and publishers to select specific sections of their websites to use for ad targeting. This results in relevant ads that drive a higher click-through rate (CTR). You can group ad units together into custom channels and make them targetable, which means allowing advertisers to bid for spots on specific areas of your website. These more precise targeting options are often appealing to advertisers. More competition means higher bids, resulting in more AdSense revenue. Custom channels are also useful for determining how different ad layouts and ad units are performing on different areas of your site.
Use AdSense to Fill in Monetization Gaps
If you’re a strong affiliate marketer, you’re probably using a good portion of the potential ad space on your blog to promote affiliate products. AdSense is a straightforward way to both fill up that extra space and monetize it. With the custom channel options provided by AdSense, you can easily make specific sections of your blog available for display advertising and reserve other locations for affiliate ads. A little testing determines where different types of ads perform best, to fully maximize your earnings.
Place Ads Strategically
Strategic ad placement can increase your earnings substantially. By placing ads above the fold, visitors don’t have to scroll in order to see the ads. This increases the likelihood that you’ll earn a few clicks, even from casual visitors. A visitor may click through to your blog but then scan your content and decide it’s not what he’s looking for. If you’ve placed your ad strategically, though, it will capture his eye right before he clicks away. In this case, you’ve earned revenue, even though your content wasn’t a precise match for the visitor’s needs.
Place Ads Within Articles
Another strategic location for ad placement is within your articles, which makes visitors who do read your content less likely to overlook the ads. If your ad is above the fold and within an article, you capture both visitors ready to bounce and those reading your content. Placing your ads within articles and experimenting with colors and fonts can also result in a blended experience, where your ads appear as a natural extension of your content. This can lead to increased clicks as readers perceive this type of ad less as an advertisement and more as an enhancement. This is especially effective when you’re using custom channels, resulting in highly relevant ads that offer value to your readers.
Monetize Smaller and Low-Traffic Blogs and RSS Feeds
AdSense is a viable option for monetizing smaller and low-traffic blogs, especially if you run several websites and focus most of your attention and effort on your larger properties. Implementing AdSense is easy, and on smaller, lower-traffic blogs, you can often place ads more aggressively and get results.
Additionally, AdSense for Feeds provides another option for monetizing your loyal readership. If you have a decent subscriber base, placing ads below your feed can produce some additional revenue.
Integrate Google AdSense and Google Analytics
Google Analytics offers a number of reports and metrics that can help you optimize your AdSense earnings, such as AdSense Exit Reports, AdSense Revenue as an experiment objective, AdSense eCPM, ads clicked, AdSense CTR, and others. Integrating the two accounts enables you to capitalize on this data.
Simply log in to your Google Analytics account, and from your Admin dashboard, select AdSense Linking and then Link Accounts. Monitoring your Analytics and AdSense metrics from a single dashboard tells you what’s working and provides key indicators of areas for improvement, so you can better your blog content, layout, and SEO to boost your revenue.
Running a blog is a major time investment, so the more return you get on your investment, the better. AdSense is a viable means for monetizing your blog or feed, with a multitude of tactics, customizations, and targeting options to fully optimize your earnings.
Try different AdSense settings
There are tons of positions, sizes, colors, etc that you can choose to use on your AdSense ads. Try changing it up from the default. If your site is in WordPress, you can use a plugin like AmpedSense to automate the split testing.