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Keyword Research and Adsense

Adsense is one of the best ways to make money online for someone who is new to online marketing. What could be any easier then putting some code on your website and getting paid everytime someone clicks on an ad? If you have a website(s) which generate a significant amounts of traffic, you can earn a decent income online with Google's Adsense. The best thing about the Google Adsense program is that because you are displaying contextual ads, the advertisements displayed are very relevant to the content on the page, so it doesn’t have to be a distraction to the visitor and they will keep coming back if you have a good website, so you still have your visitors best interests in mind.

As part of working online, I am always brainstorming different website ideas, otherwise known as niche marketing. I reckon I spend at least 25% of my working week just on analysing what niche markets I could possibly develop a site on. It would probably be a better idea to just concentrate on one project and see it through to the end, but I have always had a tendency to get distracted on other stuff all the time

When researching different niche markets, keyword research is one of the first things I look into. Whilst I always hope to make use of different streams of income for each website, adsense is usually always the foundation to begin with. When it comes to adsense, and doing well with earning with adsense, I find there are two important things to consider, which are basically no brainers. You can increase adsense revenues by generating more traffic to the site (probably the hardest part) or strive to increase click through rates, which in turn will also increase adsense revenues. Think about the figures for just one moment. Say you are currently getting a 5% CTR on your site currently (which is very reasonable). If you could only increase CTR to 10% (which I always strive to achieve) you are effectively doubling your adsense, because you are getting twice the amounts of clicks, thus twice the amount of ad revenue.

Furthermore, CTR can be increased by a number of ways. Adsense optimisation being one (which I am not going to get too much into detail in this article) namely doing stuff like blending ads, changing colors, ad positioning, and the like. Another way, is to try and target keywords in your web copy which will display relevant advertisements. This can be achieved using one of the many free Digitalpoint SEO tools called the Adsense Sandbox. What this tool will do is allow you to identify what adsense ads will be displayed for specific keywords. This is a monster of a tool if used creatively. What you want to try and shoot for are keywords which display highly relevant ads. If you can manage this, you can then go onto create web copy which will target these specific keywords. It is a very simple concept, and something that really doesn’t need further explanation. Think about it, if you can display highly relevant advertisements to your visitors, you have a huge chance of getting that click.

Overcoming Low CTR With Forum Websites

Most online marketers will experiment with trying to start a forum website because it can be a great sense of achievement when you create an active community. The problem with forum websites is that most of the visitors are there to chat and not to click on ads, so if you are wanting to monetize the website it makes it more difficult, but not impossible. Whatever the reason is, it's just harder to monetize forums. Don't get me wrong though, they can still make a lot of money.

You are required to get the ad placement right when monetizing a forum website. If you are aggressive and bold with ad placement, your visitors will start using another forum because the bold ads will become an annoyance pretty quickly. On the flipside, if you are not aggressive enough with ad placement, then nobody will be clicking on the ads, and so the forum website will be making next to nothing, if anything at all! Hey, even if you originally started the website because it’s a passion of yours, there isn't anything wrong with trying to make some money with the website to pay for expenses like web hosting and maintenance.

It is fairly common knowledge in the webmaster world that monetizing a forum website can be difficult as they usually attract very low click through rates with Adsense, YPN and other PPC companies. This makes sense as most of your forum visitors would be regulars who visit the site daily and become ad blind as they are there to discuss stuff instead of wanting to buy something.

So what can you do to overcome the problem of low CTR and revenues?

Instead of sacraficing the user experience of my forum visitors, this led me to thinking outside the box a little bit as I didn’t want the ads to be too in your face and give the members a bad experience.

One thing which has really performed well on my forums since I implemented it was adding adsense to the forum archives. I am typically experiencing much higher CTR levels on my archives as opposed to on the forum. I think this just comes down to being able to be a bit more aggressive with showing advertisements on the archive as it is not the main part of the forum. On the main forum I typically only use two of the normal adsense blocks on any one forum page, however with the archives I am a little more aggressive and show the full 3 adsense units. The archive pages are also very plain so the ads are very in your face, which probably has something to do with the higher click throughs as well. Anyway, instead of me trying to make sense of why the archive pages experience better CTR, who really cares, they do and that’s all that matters

The other change which has also worked really well for me was adding a photo gallery to the forum. Again, this has allowed me to be a bit more aggressive with ad placement. Another reason why I feel this has a positive effect on CTR is because the gallery pages tend to be comprise of only a few images on each page, so there is very little up and down page scrolling, so in most cases all of the ad blocks are above the fold.

I am sure that if you applied one or both of these suggestions you should hopefully see a positive effect on CTR and PPC revenues. The main thing to keep in mind though is the experience of your forum visitors. I guess the same thing can be said about any type of website.