Many “Adsense gurus” would offer you to buy their eBooks, which they wrote based on their own personal results and experience; such books won’t give you much information, they give you basic tips which any publisher learns himself within a few months anyway, and telling you that you need 10,000 visitors a day in order to earn xxx$ daily, won’t help your earnings. Naturally, traffic is essential, but if the adverts implementation is smart, you can collect a few dollars daily with the smallest traffic and just imagine how much would it be when your site will get heavy and steady visitors stream?

The tip I am going to share is basic and obvious, yet they are free and I hope will help to triple your earings.
Read More from "Basic tip: Where and how to implement Adsense for best results?"

There is a lot of contradiction and difference in opinions between publishers and advertisers who chose to implement Pay Per Click networks and those site owners who are strongly against it. Sometimes the problem is just lack of knowledge and information about PPC and how it works. It’s pretty hard to explain all the advantages and disadvantages of the Pay-Per-Click management, so I decided to look up on the internet a find a good article I can share with my readers.

The best website that covers all the aspects is probably acsseo.com, who’s guidance for beginners who decide to use Pay Per Click discusses all the aspects of this techniques. I’d strongly recommend to read their article for better understanding of the subject.

Yes, you are saying ‘what the f…’ now, seeing this post nicely embedded in Google Adsense (biggest contextual ads network) from all sides and Kontera in between, yet I come and advice you not to use it? You got me wrong then, I will not advice you not to sign up with Adsense, Yahoo Publisher Network or MSN (I actually do advocate it in general) and most definitely I will not advice you to get rid of your existing account, but, I want to bring to your attention some down sides of monetizing your website with contextual ads.

First of all, what are contextual ads? These are just link to other websites on the body of your pages, related to site’s content, and since you get payed per click (PPC model) you have to place the ads on so-called prime positions of your website and spare a lot of space for them, otherwise they might not be noticed. And all this you are doing to… to make people leave your site. Did you think about it? You get paid for loosing visitors. If contextual ads are your only way to make money off the site, and you really don’t give a damn if your content will be read / viewed, - then it’s perfect. But what if you have other ways of income, such as affiliate sells, subscriptions, donations? Once your visitor left, the chance of him coming back and continue bring you revenue from other sources or clicking other ads is very slim, and I am sure you do realize it. So think about it, you get a few cents compensation for every visitor you wave good bye to.

Secondly, niche plays a significant factor. Some relevant keywords pay a few dollars per single click, while others (and actually many of them) pay a few cents for a click. This means, if your website is targeted to low paying keywords (or better said - created for the niche, where ads are paying low and the competition is small), you can’t possibly make much, unless you have really crazy traffic. This, however, does not mean your content is bad or not interesting or not worthy, it can still potentially make a lot of money (from donations, subscriptions, affiliate marketing, direct ads sales etc), but not from contextual ads.

Lastly, PageRank does not matter when it comes to contextual advertising. PR8 sites that choose to place PPC ads can still get 1 cents off each leaving visitor, while another PR0 websites can easily generate a few dollars per click… Having said that, contextual ads are better for beginners who can’t sell direct ads to advertisers yet (due to low traffic or lack / low PR), while the sharks out there, with high PR’s, are practically wasting space. Just imagine how many text links you can sell directly to advertisers in the place where your skycrapper is located, and how much can you earn monthly…and does your PPC network cover it..?

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While many business men and developers will tell you that the only way to make money is to think outside the box, this is not the case when it comes to AdSense.

Why? Because the “box” is exactly what makes the most money in PPC programs. When I say ‘box’, of course I refer to the Medium (300*250) and Large (336*280) Rectangle or Square (250*250) ad format. These ads format are considered to have the highest Click-Through-Rate, especially when they are placed at the top position, according to Google’s Heat map.

How true is it, or is it a myth? Well, I heard about this myself from another blogger who implements a medium rectangle AdSense ads in the beginning of each post and bragged about his high CTR. Since I’d not do it on a blog because I believe it ruins the reading experiences and distracts from main content, I choose to place a medium rectangle on my eCards service website, in the prime position. Here is a screenshot, with highlighted ads.

Yes, the ads are right in visitors face and this could not be the best idea if you want to maintain a more “clean” look for your website, but the result is, the CTR of rectangle ad in the center is above 12%! No, I am not exaggerating. I guess this is just the special charm the ‘box-shaped’ ads have, and you will hear a lot of publishers confirming that these 3 ads formats, together with Wide Skyscraper. Try these formats and I am sure you will see a difference in your CTR percentage.

Even if you were using AdSense for a few years now, you might still not be aware of the fact that the ads, which show first in your html’s code - have the highest bid. It’s important to emphasize that I refer to the code, and not to the actual position on the page as often CMS templates with a several files mislead the publisher. For example, let’s take a classical 2 columns WordPress theme, with navigation at the right, and say you placed one banner at the footer of your page and a big add at the beginning of your navigation column. Visually, the big ad at the beginning of the right-handed navigation menu is first, but, since the code is “read” from left to right, your footer ad will be the first one (and consequently with the top paying ads), while the apparently upper ad on the right side will be second and get a lower paying ads, click on which will result in lesser revenue. However, since it’s on the upper part of the page and likely to get viewed and clicked more often then the footer banner, your pay-per-click will just be unjustly lower than it could be.

Solution

Just go the other way around and make sure that the ads, which are located at the “prime” spots of your website (I strongly suggest to optimize the “prime” spots in according with Google AdSense heat map) and place the “first” adverts there. If you are unsure how the ads ended up, just view the code of your site, once the ads are places and see which ad slot comes first. If you work with channels or different colours / ads formats, you won’t have a difficulty identifying which code belongs to what ads spot. This will guarantee that the biggest amount of clicks will fall on the top paying Adsense ads, which will either increase your revenue, or won’t let it be reduced if the amount of clicks on your ad goes down (happens due to lack of traffic, normally).

It sounds simple, and indeed it is, so do not let your fancy and complicated layout steal your website’s material potential.

Well, there are quite a few ways to monetize your website; you can make money off AdSense, Adbrite, or any other contextual ads, you can implement the elegant looking text link ads, or go with affiliate marketing and sales. Whichever way you choose, you will find yourself freeing more and more space for “sponsored” links and banners, which take up a lot of “pixels”, and let’s face it - make the site look a bit ugly. Not all of them, but if you want to make good money off the adverts, you have to free enough space for placing them, and not only that, but also placing them right under visitor’s nose, otherwise they will not be clicked. That is, even without mentioning the most irritating (yet good paying) type of ads such as interstitial and pop ups.

So, what if you want a perfectly looking, clean site? A serious presentation of your work online (articles, essays, writing, literature, service, whatever), without been classed as a commercial site by the visitors? (who will judge the appearance of your website by the amount of adverts on it). There is very skillful way to do it - Sponsored Search. You just hit the spot by placing this useful function at the upper corner of your website. You will be surprised to see how many people use the search box every day. Don’t forget, visitors are lazy, and no matter how flawless your navigation is, any visitor will always prefer to shorten the process by typing the desired keyword in the search box and letting the cut edge technology do the work. It just saves time, navigating through the jungle of your content.
The “trick” with sponsored search is, you have to place it above your content, where anyone, upon opening your website, will see it. Placing it at the footer or at the bottom of left navigation menu won’t do you any good because the visitor will face the content and then will start browsing around. Search function just loses it’s basic function: to help one to find what he wants, fast.

How sponsored search works? Very simple. All you need to do, if you have not done already, is to sign up with Google Adsense (you can see their link at the top of this page in “We recommend” box). Once you signed up and got you account approved, you will have the option of making money by referrals (currently advocating FireFox, AdSense and Adwords), displaying contextual ads (which is what you see on the right column here, though they come in various formants, and, finally - sponsored search. Since this topic is concentrated on how you can make money without ads, we will choose the sponsored search function only.
I had a search box on one of my websites, which I sticked in a rather forsaken corner and used to think for many month that sponsored search is totally useless waste of space and I kept it there just for visitors to search the site, yet out of 500 unique visitors a day, I hardly got one search query. Then, I read on someone’s blog about the wonder’s of Search function, and how much that blogger was making with it additionally to the ads, so I looked closer at his layout and realized that the top position of the site - the top navigation bar, is a big search window with a nice and juicy “go” button, that I bet no one could refuse pressing on. Neither did it.

This blog, as you can see, have the Search box in a rather respectable position and the amount of queries is huge. Not all of them lead to clicks, but the leitmotif of this article is - if you place the search box under your visitors very nose they will use it. And if they already use it, why not to make money with it..?
Other advantages of sponsored search.

1. Get clicks on ads not related to your site subject. Through the search function, your visitors may come across an advert which is not relevant to your content. For instance, if they look for “WordPress themes” and you only offer “Blogger layouts”, with sponsored search they will most definitely find what they want and hopefully even click on the featured results to proceed further, while regular crawl of your website will just show zero results and make the visitor leave empty handed.
2. Customize the look. With Google AdSense search, you can fully customize the page on which the search results will be displayed, which means you can create a similar look to your website, even using your own logo (clickable, leading to wherever you want it to lead), which will complement your site’s design and in no way imply your are making money off your highly respectable site.

Hope this gives you yet another idea for monetizing your website wisely.

Ok, this post is yet again made due to continuous requests from people (uuhm like two or three in total) who are interested to know how much this blog earns and from what. First of all, it’s new, it was only launched in December 2006 and was not heavily monetized right from the start, as my main aim was to get it ranked good and have a high PageRank, so I actually started to work on the material side of it only 2 months ago. Hence, at present, this is how it works for me (I refer to toptut.com’s revenue only).

Google Adsense - my most beloved source, you can see I put it in “we use and recommend” box. With the present design the ads are allover the place (by the way, you can read the blog without ads through the feed, if you subscribe), so I am hoping for increasing the revenue (up until last week it was only a text banner at the end of each post). Roughly speaking, so far (this April) it was making about 1,10$ a day.

Text Link Ads - another money making program I strongly recommend to use. Unlike Adsense, it won’t take up much space as these are “just” text links. I made 22,50$ this month from 3 text links ads sold on this site and 50$ from 2 new publishers I referred, so let us say, compared to Adsense, TLA occupies little space and bring bigger revenue.

ReviewMe - this month one review was sponsored by an advertiser at ReviewMe and put 30$ in my little porcelain piggie.

Adbrite - I don’t use it “full time” on this blog, no interstitials ads, no inline ads, no banners. There is only one text link ad that has been sold here (I mean I only provide space for one text link advert) and it was sold with 0,10 $ CPM. Since I only put it here 2 days ago, and the ad was sold yesterday for 3 ad companies, I still have no clue how much will it bring me, so let’s leave it open for now.

BlogsVertise - As unbelievable as it sounds, they are one of my main revenue sources. They work on a basis of offering you to review sponsors or place text links. They either assign you a task or you can grab one every day (!), if you want. As been lazy I don’t track the tasks and only choose from offers they send me by email, naturally I decline most of them (low paying and irrelevant) so from the very few I did pick, I made 68,50$ this month.

Direct Ad Sales- I don’t do it often as I have no time and it’s a lot of hassle updating the website’s code. It’s far easier for me to sign up with network-based-ads that will do the job for me looking for advertisers and displaying ads though .xml or java file. However, some offers just came by to me and I did accept. This month ad space on this blog was sold for, if i am not mistaken, 20$, which is dramatically less than last month because like I just said, I do not look for it anymore.
How much do I spend on toptut.com?

Read More from "How does toptut.com make money?"

If you have been into marketing for some time now, you must have stumbled across Joel Comm and similar Internet … There are many “Adsense gurus” out there, though this name springs to mind first. What do we get when we enter his website? We see a so-so layout, website that is certainly targeted (not “optimized”) for Adsense, yet the guy showing off the screenshot of his earnings where every other every day he seems to get a three figures sum… Wanna know his secret? Sure, he is willing to share! In his adsense secrets website he even almost “guarantees” you your earnings will go rocket high, although if you ask me, no one on this planet can guarantee you that. Not even Google.
Maybe he gives some nice tips, but I personally doubt there are more valued advices than the information that Google Adsense already provides free on their optimizations tips pages. Modifying the code, unless you have Adsense Premium account (can automatically be obtained if you have over 2 million hits daily), is strictly prohibited, so whatever you do, you are still bound to the same ads structure, customizing it only as much as your account allows you to and the only significant factors in your revenue are ads placement and traffic. Put the ads in according to Heat Map, get 10k visitors a day and I (!) will guarantee your earnings will go rocket high, no need to pay Joel Comm for it.

Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against him, I honestly wish him well if he really makes that much though naturally all these success stories, that tells you need to pay only 25$ to earn 25,000$ tomorrow, always sound… suspicious. I personally have much more respect to Steve Pavlina or Darren Rowse, who also brag with their impressive revenue, yet they share their secrets free of charge, without trying to flog anything to their blog readers and rely on nothing but same ads revenue they collect from their faithful audience.

Maybe I am just stingy over the eBook fee, maybe I had seen to much fraud over the internet or maybe offers that appear “too good to be true” always make me cautious… This is just my view point on things. And no, this was NOT a sponsored post!