5 Tips to Increase Your Website’s Revenue
1. Improve ad placement.
This tip is very important. If you increase your CTR from 1% to 3% through improved ad placement your revenue has increased by 3x due to a single change. Rather than explain how to place your ads well I will link you to some examples of good ad placement, if you copy one of the ad placements in the examples your CTR should be quite high.
2. Blend your ads.
Good placement is important, but if your visitors can easily tell that your ads are ads they will still tend not to click them. This is where ad blending comes in; combining good ad placement with ad blending leads to a truly high CTR.
In the image to the right you can see an Adsense link unit above the category navigation of a website. The category navigation uses identical CSS styles to the Adsense link unit so that the ad is very well blended. Since it is blended they will read it and decide whether to click it, rather than pass straight past it if it wasn’t blended (due to ad blindness).
3. Target good traffic sources.
Search engine traffic usually converts into ad clicks or sales far better than other traffic sources, here’s the reason why - if somebody arrives at your site after searching Google for ‘Make Money Ebook’ and they see an ad for ‘Make Money Online’ they are quite likely to click it, but if they arrived from the StumbleUpon toolbar and see an ad for ‘Make Money Online’ they will likely ignore it. Ads are usually targeted to the keywords on your page and so are search terms people arrive by, so ad relevance is perfect for search engine visitors. I for one focus heavily on SEO for this very reason.
4. Write about higher paying topics.
If for example you have a blog about cars, to find out the higher paying ‘cars’ related keywords you search for ‘cars’ in Adwords Keyword Tool and click ‘Show Estimated Avg. CPC’ on the report. After looking at this list you will see that ‘car wallpapers’ costs an advertiser $0.57 CPC but ‘Cadillac cars’ costs the advertiser $5.71 CPC. If you have the choice of writing a page about ‘Cadillac cars’ or ‘car wallpapers’ go with ‘Cadillac cars’ since those ads pay 10x as much as ‘car wallpapers’ ads.
5. Don’t overdo it.
Stick to one or two high earning ad programs, rather than 5+. If you use many ad programs on the same page you will have two problems; some visitors will click-through the low earning programs when they could have clicked-through a higher earning one, and 5+ separate and external javascript files loading on the same page can drastically increase page load times. Certainly you should test multiple programs (or read some reviews), but test them one or two per page and stick with the best ones. This tip is particularly important if you offer a product or service since you don’t want to sell your visitors to your competition for a small amount of money.
This tip is very important. If you increase your CTR from 1% to 3% through improved ad placement your revenue has increased by 3x due to a single change. Rather than explain how to place your ads well I will link you to some examples of good ad placement, if you copy one of the ad placements in the examples your CTR should be quite high.
2. Blend your ads.
In the image to the right you can see an Adsense link unit above the category navigation of a website. The category navigation uses identical CSS styles to the Adsense link unit so that the ad is very well blended. Since it is blended they will read it and decide whether to click it, rather than pass straight past it if it wasn’t blended (due to ad blindness).
3. Target good traffic sources.
Search engine traffic usually converts into ad clicks or sales far better than other traffic sources, here’s the reason why - if somebody arrives at your site after searching Google for ‘Make Money Ebook’ and they see an ad for ‘Make Money Online’ they are quite likely to click it, but if they arrived from the StumbleUpon toolbar and see an ad for ‘Make Money Online’ they will likely ignore it. Ads are usually targeted to the keywords on your page and so are search terms people arrive by, so ad relevance is perfect for search engine visitors. I for one focus heavily on SEO for this very reason.
4. Write about higher paying topics.
If for example you have a blog about cars, to find out the higher paying ‘cars’ related keywords you search for ‘cars’ in Adwords Keyword Tool and click ‘Show Estimated Avg. CPC’ on the report. After looking at this list you will see that ‘car wallpapers’ costs an advertiser $0.57 CPC but ‘Cadillac cars’ costs the advertiser $5.71 CPC. If you have the choice of writing a page about ‘Cadillac cars’ or ‘car wallpapers’ go with ‘Cadillac cars’ since those ads pay 10x as much as ‘car wallpapers’ ads.
5. Don’t overdo it.
Stick to one or two high earning ad programs, rather than 5+. If you use many ad programs on the same page you will have two problems; some visitors will click-through the low earning programs when they could have clicked-through a higher earning one, and 5+ separate and external javascript files loading on the same page can drastically increase page load times. Certainly you should test multiple programs (or read some reviews), but test them one or two per page and stick with the best ones. This tip is particularly important if you offer a product or service since you don’t want to sell your visitors to your competition for a small amount of money.
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