Common Mistakes

Commons mistakes people make when trying to make money with Google Adsense sites include:

Post and hope

The first thing that normally happens when people learn about Google Adsense is that they rush out, make a blog, often a free one on blogger.com. They then write a whole heap of content about whatever interests them, then they chuck up Adsense ads, and wait for the cash to start rolling in. It doesn’t come.

Trying to make money from social traffic

The next thing that happens is that they realise that they need traffic to make cash. After all, you need plenty of visitors to click on your ads to make cash right? Figuring out how to get traffic for a new website can be hard work. This normally leads the newbie to investigating methods of getting traffic from social sites like Digg.com or stumbleupon.com. They figure if I get onto the homepage of either of these sites I will get thousands of visitors, and I will make heaps of cash. True, they will get thousands of visitors, but none of them will click ads.

Not researching keywords

At this point, if our brave newbie hasn’t quit, they have figured out that to make money from Google Adsense, you need to get targeted traffic from search engines, often referred to as organic search traffic. Our newbie understands that to get search engine traffic they need to build lots of backlinks. They go about their way building backlinks. But in many cases they haven’t researched what keywords they want to target, so all their content isn’t optimised for valuable keywords. And their backlinks have generic anchor text like the name of their site, or their own name. Sure these types of links have some value, and do improve the authority of your domain, but search engines are still playing a guessing game trying to figure out which keywords to rank your content for, so likely, our newbie will continue to have little success.

Attempting to rank for keywords that are too difficult

Our hero now returns. They have got to the point in their Adsense career, where they understand that to make money from Google Adsense they have to target those keywords which have a good amount of traffic, and pay a good amount for clicks. This is a good start, but what keywords do they target? This is the most costly mistake. Our hero now goes about their work, creating more content, that is optimised for keywords, and building backlinks that have their selected keyword as the anchor text for their backlinks. They wait for the traffic and cash to start coming in, but, still it does not come. They have selected keywords that have too much competition, and fail to rank for the term, or rank too low to make any money from it.

If you click on the diagram above, you can see this term is very hard to rank for. The sites ranking for this term are either very old and have a lot of authority, or they have thousands of backlinks.

So how do I go about improving my Adsense Income?

It is all about living on the fine line between selecting keywords that have a good amount of visitors and have a good price for each click, but that don’t have too much competition for the level of your site. If you have a new site you are not going to rank for a high competition keyword any time soon.

Keyword Research

If you have got to this point in the article I am sure you have figured out that keyword research is important. We need to figure out what keywords we want to target. The important factors in keyword selection are:

• How many hits will it bring you each month if you rank highly for it?
• How much competition is there for the term (i.e. how hard will it be to rank higher than the current sites)
• Roughly how much do clicks pay for that term?

Competition – What factors to look at in sites you will be competing against:

• What is the site’s Page Rank?
• How many backlinks does that site have?
• Does the site use the keyword term in the title of the site?
• How old is the domain that the site is using?

Ok, I have selected a handful of perfect keywords for the level of my site…now what?

You need unique content…not content that can be found else where. Search engines can detect duplicate content. At least 5 articles of 750 words or greater to start with.

You then need backlinks. The best backlink strategy for a starting site is to target one way links which you can control the anchor text for. Don’t even think about link exchanges until you have built some page rank for your site. Good sources of one way links are:

• Comments on Blogs
• Write articles for article sites or blogs.
• Submit your site to directories

After a few months you should get some page rank, at this point your site will become a more valuable as a link partner for other sites, and you can try getting some blog roll links and exchanging links with other sites.

You now have a basic framework to create profitable Adsense sites. I hope you have found this article informative.