adsense

Daniel Scocco

 
When bloggers and webmasters start monetizing their websites they usually turn to Google AdSense. Why? Because it is one of the easiest ad networks to get accepted into, the implementation is straight forward, and the earnings are decent.

Over time, however, most people drop AdSense in favor of other monetization methods. Some start selling ad space directly to advertisers, others resort to affiliate marketing, others yet launch their own products. Many also use a combination of these three methods.

This is the route I followed too, and while I think it can be the right one, I found that completely removing AdSense from your monetization strategy can be a mistake. Below you’ll find why.

My Story

As most people, I also started monetizing my sites with Google AdSense. I still remember that first month (November 2005 if I am not wrong), when I made a whooping $15! It wasn’t much, but definitely enough to get me excited.

The earnings kept growing month after month, but once my sites reached a critical mass I changed the monetization strategy. I started selling my ads directly, and affiliate marketing became another important income source. As a result I removed Adsense from most of my sites.

Two years passed by.

Then one day one of my sponsors canceled a banner, and I decided to give AdSense one more chance. The eCPM I got was very high, so I figured that I should try to integrate AdSense into my websites again, along with the existing monetization methods.

Long story short after a couple of months and a lot of tweaking around I started making over $3,000 monthly from AdSense, and that was on top of what I was already making with the other income streams (e.g., selling ads directly, affiliate marketing and selling my own products).

That is why I think removing AdSense completely from the equation is a mistake. Even if you are already making a lot of money with other monetization methods you could still use AdSense as a complementary source.

My Blog World 2010 Presetantion

Obviously you need to know how to optimize Adsense if you want to make decent money with it. Simply dropping units here and there won’t work.

That is what my Blog World 2010 presentation is about. I’ll share the tips and tricks I learned optimizing AdSense on my websites over the years. The presentation will take place Friday, October 15, at 12:15pm.

If you want a quick tip to get started, here we go: Focus on the big AdSense units. Google itself confirmed a while ago that the top performing units are the 336×280 large rectangle, the 300×250 medium rectangle and the 160×600 wide skyscraper. If you want to make decent money with AdSense, you need to be able to use one of more of these units in your website.

I’ll see you in Vegas.

Daniel Scocco started developing blogs and websites in 2005. He is owner of DailyBlogTips.com , which is currently ranked among the top 500 blogs in the world according to Technorati, and among the top 100 marketing blogs in the world according to AdAge.