For quite a few months now I’ve been receiving close to $500 per month just from being an Adsense affiliate.
$500 per month; can you believe that? That’s practically a car payment. And the best part is that it requires little to no effort on my part to earn it.
Though there are many factors that affect how much money you’ll earn from Google Adsense, one of the biggest things I’ve come to realize is that you need to start with a good strategy if you expect to get any revenue. Questions like “should I write a post about this or that” can make or break whether you’ll get a few bucks per click or just a few pennies.
If you’ve got a website (or several) and are looking to get more out of your Adsense income than what you’re currently making, then I’ve got a simple strategy that you may find to be helpful.
Step 1 – Research Low Competition Keywords:
As we’ve mentioned before, finding and writing posts around low competition long-tail keywords is really the BIG secret to getting lots of organic traffic from Google (i.e. the people most likely to click on your ads).
How does that work? Consider this example: It would be foolish to try to write a post where the main keyword is “personal finance” because you’ll never, ever rank in the Top 10 for that post due to too much competition with monster-sized authority websites.
However ranking for the keyword “personal financial management course” is going to be lot easier because not as many strong websites will be optimized for that term.
What to do: First things first, pick a few topics you’d like to write about and research the Top 10 results in Google to see if you have any chance at all of getting your post to rank. The software program Long Tail Pro Platinum makes this a breeze! All you do is type in your topics and it gives each term a keyword competitiveness (KC) score between 0-100 where lower is better. I’ll only use keywords with a KC score of 35 or less.
As you find more and more good keywords, export them into a single Excel spreadsheet for further analysis.
Step 2 – The MMD Potential Adsense Revenue Equation:
Now that you’ve got all these great, low-competition keywords, the next question is “which ones should I start with first”?
In this next step I’m going to share my own unique equation for quantifying that question.
Here’s what you do:
- Because you plan to make money from this post using Adsense, take the stated CPC and multiply it times the average number of local searches.
- Assuming we’ve done our job and our post is ranking in the Google Top 10 (very, very important), we still know that every person is going to click on our post. In fact looking though Google Webmaster Tools, I’ve actually found my most searched posts to be more in the 25% click through range. So to generalize things, let’s multiply our number by 0.25.
- We know that not every single visitor who actually reads our post will click on our ads. But odds are some of them will. You can comb through your Google Adsense to get a good idea of what your actual CTR is. But for our purposes, I’ll use 1%. So multiply your number by 0.01.
- Now remember Google doesn’t pay you all 100% of the CPC that they receive from the advertiser. They have publicly stated that what they really pay Adsense publishers is 68% of revenue collected. So let’s finish by multiplying our number by 0.68.
To summarize my equation, here it is again:
Potential monthly income = CPC x Local searches x 0.25 x 0.01 x 0.68
And there you have it. It’s extremely easy to pop that equation into a new column in your spreadsheet and crunch the results.
I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised to see just how large the range of some of the results actually are!
Step 3 – Write and Rank Your Post!
Now that you’ve got a good list of low competition keywords and the potential monthly income you could make from each one, the only thing left to do is write those posts and get them ranking in the Top 10.
I usually like to order my list from largest earning potential to smallest and then work my way down. That way I’m strategically focusing on my top potential income makers first.
It doesn’t matter whether I write the post or outsource it. Since I use freelance writers to write most of the content I use, I just simply send them the list of keywords I’d like them to write about so can cast as wide of a net as possible.
Remember! The cornerstone to this whole Adsense revenue strategy is that it assumes your post is ranking in the Top 10 Google search results. That means you’ll have to do all the right SEO stuff like on-page optimization (keyword density, headings, meta description, etc) as well as off-page optimization (links from other sources, anchor text diversification).
When To Pass Up This Equation:
When shouldn’t you use this equation? Easy: When you’re not counting on using Adsense for monetization.
If you do your keyword research and find a great term that gets 10,000 searches per month by has no CPC, should you pass it up? Absolutely not! Perhaps you’re using a different affiliate program (like Amazon or CJ). Chances are that if you could get 10,000 x 25% = 2,500 people to visit your post and see your other affiliate ad. Then you might still get 25-50 people to click on it and earn you some revenue.
Remember: It’s all relative to what your most wanted response is when people actually visit your blog.
Readers: What tricks do you use to increase your Google Adsense revenue? Does anyone else have a whacky algorithm they use help quantify their earnings potential?
Images courtesy of FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Thanks for the breakdown MMD! I’m still new at learning my way around using AdSense. I don’t use it over at Frugal Rules, but am with my other sites and most of this makes perfect sense. That said, $500/ month is nothing to sneeze at by any means. I’d easily take that. 🙂
Yes, $500 is certainly worth the effort.
Another thing to play around with is the ad placement. Believe it or not, where you place the ads can make a big difference in how often people click on them.
I’ve heard some people say that placing the ad in the body of the post makes a difference. But I feel like it looks a little weird and that it might turn off some readers. I don’t know. Maybe I’ll play around with that. Thanks for the tips. $500 a month is pretty damn awesome in my book.
On a few of my sites I’ve tried placing ads within the body (near the middle) and it just looks awful. Maybe you get a little better conversion, but I’m going to stick with keeping it on the top and bottom. That seems to be working very well so far!
Great tips – I started using Market Samurai a while back, but it is soooo slow that I kinda stopped worrying about optimizing for keywords and just focused on good content. Maybe it’s time to circle back and give that or LTP another look.
I can’t say much about Market Samurai since I have no experience with it. But yes LTP is certainly worth looking into closer. That KC score really makes it worthwhile.
I do pretty well with AdSense without a lot of effort on my part. It took a while though! Thanks for the tips!
I’m very curious to learn what you and Greg make from your Adsense each month. Do you think you’ll ever detail it out in your income reports?
This is actually a great equation. For some reason, even though now it makes all the sense in the world, I never thought about using it. This has just become the deciding factor for my next niche site, whenever I will build it.
Glad to be of service! I hope it proves to be very rewarding for your next project.
Do you have any experience with comparing google to other advertising companies? I’m sure the payout is different depending on who you decide to place ads with. I like the simple explanation to the equation. Can this strategy work on older posts, already published if you tweak it a bit based off the LTP info?
Yes, I tried Media.net on MMD before and was not impressed. I had heard very good things about them and they started off very strong. Then after a few days the revenue became only pennies and I was hardly making anything. The thing that really turned me off was that I tried to work with my agent to get my other websites approved and they would not let them in to the program (despite having stronger traffic numbers). It made no sense, so I just switched everything back to Adsense.
Thanks! I think I am going to check this website out. I have always wanted to learn more about getting more hits and tips like this are always useful
Glad to be of help! Exactly why I publish these kinds of posts.
Great info, MMD.
I have been playing recently with some color/location split testing around my adsense placement and have had some good results. Google has this available for free in your adsense account (Look for google experiments). Very neat.
That is one thing I don’t think I’ve done enough of. I’ve adjusted all the colors in my ads to what I think will work, but haven’t really tested them against other possibilities.
I get an awful lot of long tail traffic to my sites so while ranking well for high-traffic keyword phrases is a key part of the plan, at least for my sites, it’s a small proportion of my overall traffic. By writing longer content and building links to each new article I publish I find my content appearing for all sorts of phrases – meaning that overall my traffic for each article tends to be different than the formula above would suggest.
That aside, one technique I use to boost my Adsense income is Adsense’s own split testing tool. By setting up custom channels I can try out not just ads in different positions on my sites but also different designs and color schemes to see which ones convert best. You’d be surprised how simple the process can be to set up yet how much it’s possible to increase your Adsense revenue.
I have made the same observation and completely agree. By writing really long and good content with lots of synonyms of my topics, I’ve been able to rank for keywords that I had no idea I would rank for or was even targeting. It’s been something of a happy coincidence in many cases. However, it’s hard to know or even quantify that kind of phenomena ahead of time. So this strategy I’ve presented here is really nothing more than a planning tool. “Choose this word over that one because it could make $10 versus 10 cents” is really all that it suggests. Obviously the actual revenue figures and even other words that you rank for lies with the Google Gods.
I’ll have to try the split testing tool. I have not given that a go yet, but it sounds really useful. I’ve been surprised by how much just ad placement has made a difference in my revenue.
Good stuff MMD. You’ve given me a reminder to perhaps try and at around with my CPC revenue portion more.
I employ a hybrid model of media.net below my post titles and Adsense in the middle-lower body of my post. Media.net service has been fantastic for me and the ads have converted fine since 1999-2000. But maybe I should replace that block with an Adsense block and see how it goes. The media.net block makes 2x the Adsense block, which I think is the appropriate ratio. Maybe it should make a higher multiple more?
Good work getting what you can from both systems. I do think it would be worth it to experiment by seeing how much money you make from Adsense one month and then Media.net another using the same ad block. Perhaps that would be a good post for Yakezie?
I’ve tried both Adsense and Media.net on my blog here and found that Adsense performed better overall. However I do think the ads for Media.net are less intrusive looking and blend better with the content.