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lthough I decided not to use Adsense on this blog, for most of us blogging means use of Adsense, and this is why more WordPress themes now come as “Adsense-ready”. So, here are a few small add-ons that will make your contextual monetizing process easier and faster.

Adsense Deluxe – Currently the most popular and widely-spread AdSense plug-in, that allows you to automatically insert ads’ code into your posts. Very simple to use, easy to install, runs smoothly and I am using it successfully on all my other blogs.

AdSense Widget for WordPress Sidebar – This plug-in adds AdSense to your WordPress sidebar in the form of a widget. Especially recommended to those who often switch themes and use widgets to play around with sidebar’s content position.

Shylock AdSense – Easy integration of AdSense ads into your WordPress. Basically it’s a simple addition to WP that has one pretty good feature — you can set particular ads into blog posts which are more than X days old.

AdMan – Integrates ads directly inside your posts. If you ask me, this plug-in is nothing special, however it’s compatible with Adsense itself.
AdSense Manager – This plug-in’s name is well summed up by its title. Use the latest version only, as older versions had some issues with the AdSense terms and conditions.

AdRotator – This plug in is a perfect savior for blogs with a lot returning visitors / traffic. and solves the ad blindness problem. It rotates your AdSense ads, and combines them with other advertising programs, banners, Adbrite.

AdSense Attachment – Display extra content, like images, in a new page together with AdSense ads. I have not found any proof of it being compatible with Adsense TOS, if anyone knows otherwise, please advice.

Google Ad Wrap – This nice plug-in show Google spider — in other words, what content on your blog is really important. It may help with targeting for the right keywords and understanding Adsense’s inside mechanism better.

Adsense Inline – another plugin that makes inserting AdSense into your blog posts really easy. It makes no difference from Adsense Delux (in my opinion) however every developer deserves his glory.

Author Adsense – Often used on forums and joint communities — this plug-in splits revenue between several blog authors on the same blog, inserting different publishers’ code into same ads slots.

AdSense Sharing Revenue and Earnings System – Same as the plug-in mentioned above, only show, additionally to all, revenue in real time.
Adsense Earnings WordPress Plugin – Control Adsense from your WordPres panel. Suitable for those who are too lazy to log in to their Google Adsense page, yet not lazy enough to install this plug in.

There are lots of webmasters struggling hard to earn some good money a day through their sites and get $0.001 Adsense CPC. But then some of the brilliance of them are enjoying hundreds of dollars a day from Adsense ads on their websites. Here are 7 Adsense tips you can follow and put in place to help you increase your monthly online earnings from Google Adsense:

1. Unique Content – Fill your site with unique hand written content so that it ranks better in the search engines resulting in more traffic to your website and more dollars per month as a result of those visitors from organic listings. We all know search engines love content, well more to the point they love unique content and they love NEW unique content, meaning they will come back to your site again and again and again. The more they come back and read your unique content the better you will show up in related search results. There are a number of ways to get unique content on your site. Write valuable, unique content every week and add to your web pages say under a useful tips or news heading. Again, giving lots of value and build a resource for your potential customers to come to rely on as a great place for unique and valuable information

2. Ad Blocks – Use a 336 x 280 or 250 x 250 ad block – Use this Adsense ad block above the fold as this is an area of prime real estate on your website where the lions share of the money is to be found.

3. Blend Your Ads – Get rid of that green that screams out “I am an ad” and change the colours so the ads on your site look more natural to your visitors. This isn’t about deceiving your visitors, it’s about displaying ads within the TOS as outlined. Doing this will increase your overall CTR (Click Through Rate). To maximize CTR you should also wrap text around your ads. Many sites have tried placing ads above text or even before articles, but in my opinion this is a bad move, as all it does is encourage readers to ‘jump’ past your ads straight to the content.

4. Use Custom Color Palette – Create a custom palette for your ads. Choose a color that will go well with the background of your site. If your site has a blue background, try to use blue as the color of your ad border and background. The idea to patterning the colors is to make the Adsense look like it is part of the web pages. Again, This will result to more clicks and earning for your site. Remember the best Adsense background is your site background.

5. High Paying Niche – Target a high paying niche that contains a good number of competing advertisers that are willing to spend money. There’s little point in trying to monetize a site that targets a low paying niche with very little advertiser interest or filled with advertisers that aren’t spending very much.

6. Filtering Low Paying Advertisers from Made for Adsense Website and Parking Domain – There are some advertisers in Adwords , who own “Made for Adsense” website or Parking domain and promote them on other sites using Adsense. When a visitor visits the advertised “Made for Adsense” or parking domain site, the ads are so placed that 90% of the time visitor will click the ad and They easily make profit and earn the money back.

7. Place Adsense in your top page – Remove the Adsense from the footer pages of your site and put them at the top. Do not try to hide your Adsense. You will be surprised how the difference between Adsense positions can make when you see your earnings.

8. 2 Ad Blocks Maximum – Although you can use more than 2 ad blocks on your site we don’t recommend it. This is because it starts to make your site look spammy and it also means you will also be displaying some lower paying ads on your site. In our opinion, less is more when it comes to ad blocks.

9. Track Your Stats – Find out which pages are getting traffic and where that traffic is coming from. By doing this you can concentrate on doing more of what is working to make you even more money from your websites.

10. Writing Posts That Get Good Adsense Ads – If you want to increase your AdSense earnings then you need ads with good CPCs, and to do that you need to write posts that will attract those ads. Writing posts about blogging, themes, what you did last night etc are probably not going to get good ads as no-one is going to want to advertise on those posts, whereas posts about products will.

I hope you have enjoyed these Google Adsense tips. Even more importantly make sure you put them to work so you can increase your monthly pay check and make more money online. These are simple tips that have worked well for some who want to generate hundreds and even thousands earnings on their websites. It is important to know though that ads are displayed because it fits the interest of the people viewing them. Let’s check your Adsense earnings today and compare with tomorrow earning when you implement this simple technique.

Guest post by Dean James, the author of a free step-by-step ebook called Content Cash Secrets

4 days ago, Adsense publishers received a letter from Google, informing us that there are new great featured coming up. Enabling multiple ad networks in AdSense should allow you to maximize revenue.

You’ll soon be able to allow multiple ad networks to show on your pages, which means that advertisers from external Google-certified networks will be able to compete with AdWords advertisers for your ad space.

Also…

To ensure the quality of the ads appearing on your sites, we’re certifying all participating ad networks for adherence to our standards for user privacy, ad quality, and speed. You’ll also have control over which networks can show ads on your pages — you can choose to opt out of receiving ads from specific networks, or all networks completely. This means you can continue to show ads from only AdWords advertisers if you’d like.

This is quite innovative, if you remember, a few years ago Google disallowed displaying any other ads on the page, other than Adsense. We couldn’t use contextual ads from other networks, but eventually Google gave in and allowed contextual ads such as Adbrite and Chitika on same pages. Now we see that Google is taking one more step further and allows ads from other networks inside their own ad units. Did Google sense that they may lose out to other Ad-networks providers?

Right now, Publishers in North America and Europe can allow ads from Google-certified ad networks to appear on their pages, but once the service goes out of Beta, it will be available worldwide to ALL Adsense users. Let’s hope it won’t get stuck in “beta” like Gmail.

And who REALLY benefits from this change?

Obviously, Google itself, not the publishers and allow me to explain. If before that, Adwords advertisers would only compete against each other, this feature takes one step ahead and extends the competition, by tripling the market’s size. So, if previously there were only 5 people bidding on a certain keyword, now there will be 15 or more. Automatically, competition drags higher bid per click, if you want to keep your ads showing ads. As Adwords advertiser I can tell you that I am not going to love the idea of having a herd of new advertisers suddenly competing on my cheap keywords. As an Adsense publisher, I don’t believe “maximizing” the revenue will really take the Adsense earnings to a whole new level.

For now, thumbs up for Google, you came up with a great idea how to milk the crisis!

I know the title sounds rather spammy, but NO — I am not going to try and sell you any eBook with ground-breaking-success-tips and I am not going to try and talk you over into signing up with Adsense under my referral. This post is based on my personal experience with Adsense only, and after being their publisher since summer 2005, I came a long way — from $X a month to high $XXX a month and now I want to share my knowledge, hoping it will help you, the beginner,  and you’d not need to waste 2 years of trial and error. So, let’s get started — for the sake of the example I will use my own websites as a demonstration.

Tip 1: Target the NON-webmasters oriented traffic.

It took me over 2 years to realize this simple rule. The thing is, webmasters mainly maintain an Adsense account themselves, and therefore quickly develop “Adsense Blindness”. They detect the ads, regardless them being blended in or standing out and skip them. Those who are not familiar with Adsense all that closely, click much easier assuming its a part of the content. Good example would be my Free Ecards website, where the CTR on the front page varies between 15% to 25%. Apart from being placed exactly in according to Google Adsense heatmap, the other explanation to the high Click-Through-Rate is that visitors to that site are mainly NOT webmasters, and therefore believe the adverts are a part of the site.

Tip 2: Use Google Adsense heatmap.

What I have learnt from Steve Pavlana, is that you should either make money confidently (and this means prime positions are reserved to adverts) OR, not make money at all. A “shy” tiny banner at the footer is waste of time and space. If you don’t want your kids to inherit your inactive Adsense account, study the heat map and place ads on the red zone, in the middle. You might consider changing the entire design FOR Google Ads, to ensure the desired ads format fits exactly where you need it. This was yet another mistake I was making as a beginner. I used to chose designs I like and then trying to insert Google Ads into it, which mostly looked bad. Now, I choose the design that will make my Adsense stand on primarily positions and I design my sites this way. Another good example og Adsense-friendly design I made is my hosting guide (currently under development). They key is — Adsense should be the FIRST thing visitors sees upon landing on your website.

Tip 3: Size matters, use the High CTR Ads Formats

Unlike other networks, Google offers a huge variety of ads formats. Google Adsense help center confirms that the most effective formats are the 336×280 Large Rectangle, the 300×250 Medium Rectangle, and the 160×600 Wide Skyscraper. On my practice, Medium Rectangle and Wide Skyscraper worked best, along with (728x15_4) Link Unit at the top, where typically top navigation would be placed. I’d suggest the bigger links size, because they are slightly more visible. The biggest earners online such as Steve Pavlina and John Chow implement implemented the 300*250 format right in the middle of the (visible portition of the ) page, so I guess it’s safe to say they work well for many other publishers.

Tip 4: More Traffic — More Clicks. Simple.

While it’s impossible to make decent money with little traffic, the good news are — it’s also impossible to make little money with big traffic. The more visitors (especially first time visitors), the more people get to view relevant Ads, the bigger are the chances to collect clicks. They key to success lies in traffic, in massive daily traffic, but then again, no traffic on earth will help you if the ads are not in prime position.
Tip 5: Traffic From Search Engines Brings More Clicks.

This is yet another simple trick. People who come from search engines, seeking for “something”, are NOT looking for this particular “something” on YOUR site. They don’t really care where to get what they want, so once they landed on your website from, let’s say — Google, there is a big chance that the ads displayed will be related to their search term, and if you were a good publishes and placed the adverts right in their face, the chance they will continue their quest further is quite big. It is actually very well known that SE (Search Engine) traffic is best for Conversion (i..e it converts to sales and clicks better).

Tip 6: Darker Layout “Hide” Adsense Better.

Based on the last 50,000 clicks, I an confidently say that my sites with dark layout cpnvert better. The avarage CTR on  Laurel Wreath and Digital Photography websites are much higher compared to sites with same structure but lighter background. I also learnt that mild pastel colors are better for CTR because pastel design appear less “commercial” to most visitors.

Following these 6 simple tips can already help you with doubling  the income in a matter of weeks, if not days. Just remember that in order to make Adsense perform best you need to have unique, quality, interesting content first. You need a LOT of content, because when you have a lot of written text on each page where Adsense is placed, your Ads don’t appear as if they dominate the page and moreover Adsense has more keywords to chose from. Good luck and hope it will help the beginners to get started!

Starting from April 8th 2009, toptut.com is proud to announce new Premium Freebies section. (it was initially scheduled to April 1st, but I was afraid you won’t believe me!).

Every Wednesday subscribed readers of toptut.com will receive exclusive freebies and extras in their weekly scheduled newsletters. These extras will include one or more of the following, each week:

• WordPress themes (that has never been released anywhere else),
• Stock photos (free for commercial use),
• Exclusive free PSD files,
• Coupon codes and deals (for free hosting, various discounts, and more!).
• Adsense optimization tips-of-the-week

Subscribe FREE

Only subscribed members will receive these newsletters, so in order to grab all the premium freebies, so you need to subscribe using your email address (i.e. not Google feedreader for example).

Registration is completely free, no other details are required and, of course, you can unsubscribe at any time. Once you verified your email address, you can expect an email from toptut.com next Wednesday! Existing subscribed readers need not subscribe again.

So don’t miss our first edition,  and subscribe now already!

The guys behind Google Adsense do not often pamper their publishers with new ad formats, but when t finally happens, we are all exited head over heals. Now, recent update took place yesterday, when Google announced “Expandable Ads”.

I probably wouldn’t want to test these ads myself, as I believe they will have same click-through-rate as link units, because it requires the visitors to take 2 actions for publisher to get paid. Main reason I gave up Kontera was because these types of ads irritated and didn’t pay out, so despite the temptation, I would probably pass on this feature. How about you? Also, the feature is only available for US and Europe residents, so not everyone will get to see it on their account page (yet?)

Expandable ads will be served as third-party ads and will be created by Google-certified rich media vendors for the top display advertisers in our network. And like other Google ads, you’ll earn based on whether the expandable ads on your site are priced on a cost-per-click (CPC) or cost-per-impression (CPM) basis. Keep in mind that you’ll generate earnings from CPC expandable ads when a user visits the advertiser’s landing page, and not when a user simply clicks to expand the ad.

Bear in mind that new ad formats still have some TOS to comply with, including:

• Ads will expand only after a user clicks and interacts with the ad. Mouseovers or rollovers won’t trigger the ad, in order to prevent accidental expansions.
• An expandable ad won’t expand more than double its width or height.
• Once expanded, the ad will appear as a layer over the page content so that your content will not be modified or shifted in any way.
• The user may close the expanded panel at any time.
• All expandable ads must comply with our standard AdWords image ad policies.

More details on the new feature can be found on Adsense Blog