Google Adsense Wired Collection

I ran into this question today while looking at the latest news of the day. 

What are some alternatives to Google Adsense? 

If anyone has any better ideas please add to the comments section. I would love to see how others are making out.

Personally, I don’t know if your going to get anything better than adsense at the moment. But their are a few alternatives out their that I use.

1. shoppingads.com - If you have a high traffic site this alternative may give you a higher payout than adsense. One thing, the ads have to be highly visiable like in the top left of articles to have this to work for you. Also, high traffic sites get a better deal from them.. They evaluate the sites that enter their program and if the site does not produce traffic they will doc the site and only give a return if someone buys something after clicking through their links. Higher traffic sites will get a click through rate that pays per click.

2. Kontera - I love kontera’s program. Right now kontera in conjunction with adsense has increase my return on a few of my sites 2% to 5% depending on the traffic.. Their program is based on the same click model as adsense. But they don’t provide banners or kontera boxes. Their code will look at your site and turn keywords into links that redirect to paying customers in thier system. Their payout is consistant and with the right model you can make a lot of money with them.

These are two of my best alternatives.

And their is alway yahoo.. But their program is a little harder to get involved in. 

What do you think? Do you have any better alternatives to speak of? 

Full Article

In this series I’m examining tactics that can be used to increase AdSense earnings immediately. Read the introduction to this series here.

Today I want to talk about positioning your AdSense ads - something that has a very significant impact upon the amount of money that they are able to earn.

I learned this lesson after I’d been using AdSense for some time - I often wish I’d discovered it earlier - because not thinking it through earlier cost me a significant amount of money!

My Story of Learning about AdSense Positioning

I remember clearly the time that my AdSense earnings almost doubled over night through me simply moving them from one part of my blog to another.

Up until the point where I made this discovery my AdSense ads had been largely in a banner position on my blog. I don’t remember my exact reasoning for putting it there but it was probably because that’s where I saw all the big sites doing. My blog’s post pages looked like the diagram to the right.

Performance with this positioning was OK - but then again, I didn’t know any different so while I was earning enough on my blog at this point to make a day or two a week of earnings I was blissfully unaware of the potential that my blog had to take me a step closer to going full time as a blogger.

I’m not sure of why I decided to experiment with my ad positioning but after a while of positioning my AdSense ads this way I decided to have a ‘play’ with other positions. I began to think about where on my page my readers would give their full attention and decided at the top left hand side of the content area would probably be the most logical position for people to look at a web page (as that’s where they start reading). This was at a time before AdSense brought out their ‘heatmap’ which confirmed that this was a wise move.

So late one afternoon I decided to move my ad unit from the banner position to this spot at the top left hand side of my post area.

My ads now looked like the diagram to the left.

I was actually a little nervous about making this move. What if my earnings went down and I started going backwards?

I decided to give the new position a couple of days testing. I could afford to lose earnings for two days but if they didn’t at least match the previous positioning I’d switch it back.

That night just before I went to bed I decided to log into AdSense to see what the results were like after a few hours.

Imagine my surprise when I saw my CTR 40%!

40% more readers were clicking my ads and this was obviously already impacting my overall earnings!

I didn’t sleep too well that night as I realized the power of what I’d discovered. I could potentially see a 40% increase in my earnings with a simple move of my ads.

The next morning I awoke earlier and logged into AdSense and found that the CTR was now up by just under 50%.

That day I’d increased my earnings enough to dedicate at least another day a week to blogging by simply changing the position of an ad unit!

Tips on Ad Positioning

Ad positioning is vitally important to the performance of ad units like AdSense.

In general - the positions that are ‘hot’ can be seen on the heatmap to the right (this is the official AdSense heatmap which they put together from their own research and observations of where ads work best. You can see how anywhere at the top of content can work best (the brightest orange area) but that in general above the fold and to the left seems to be the ‘hotter areas’.

This does vary from blog to blog and there are some specific spots that work best on blogs (I’ll show them below). The key is to try different things and to find what works best on your blog.

Further Reading on Ad Positioning:

Previously on ProBlogger - Introduction to Advertising Optimization - Ad Position
AdSense Help Page - Where should I place Google ads on my pages?

Next week I’ll continue this series of tips for increasing your AdSense earnings overnight with the continuation of my own story of learning to use AdSense and some more tactics that took my earnings to even higher levels!

Share This

Full Article

What would you say if I told you that there are things that many bloggers could do on their blogs that could bring about large increases in their AdSense earnings in 24 hours or less?

One of the misconceptions about making money from blogging that is out there is that the best way to increase your blog’s earnings is to increase the traffic to your blog.

“Double your traffic and you’ll double your income” I heard one speaker say at a conference earlier in the year.

Well that speaker is right…. increased traffic generally does lead to increased advertising income…. but doubling your traffic can be a massive task one that could take months or even years to achieve.

Growing readership is something every entrepreneurial blogger needs to be working on as it does help with income levels but…

What if there’s a faster way to grow your AdSense earnings?

Over the next week I want to look at a few methods of increasing the revenue from AdSense on your blog that can have immediate impact upon earnings.

Before We Begin:

I should say before I go any further that these won’t work on every blog - if you’ve already optimized your blog well they’ll have less impact - but if you have a blog l like I did a few years ago you could see some significant improvements. These tips will be more basic for some readers than others - so if you consider yourself to be at an advanced level you might want to just scan over the posts (although a refresher can’t hurt).

I also should say that these principles don’t just apply to Adsense. The same can be said about Chitika, Shopping Ads, WidgetBucks and other ad networks.

Lastly - I want to say that I’m not usually one to use claims like ‘increase your earnings overnight’ - as we all know, blogging for money is a long term thing. However these lessons did have immediate impact upon my own earnings. I had already been blogging for some time - but together what I share increased my own earnings by over 100% very quickly.

Stay tuned for Part 1 shortly.

Share This

Full Article