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Recently, The Blog Tyrant did a guest post here on Daily Blog Tips titled Why I Will Never Use AdSense On A Blog Again. He explained how using AdSense can cause you to lose readers.
Daniel commented on the post saying:
AdSense is still a very efficient method on some niches/types of sites, so I wouldn’t exclude it forehand or forever.
I agree with Daniel here. While AdSense is not a a good choice for some blogs, it can be extremely useful for most of the blogs out there. In fact, it is the main revenue source for 45% of DBT readers.
In this post, I will discuss how AdSense can be best revenue source for blogs.
Contents
Why AdSense Is Better
- Less Time: Implementing AdSense on a blog does not take more than 5 minutes. You need to paste the code into the sidebar widget or an appropriate plugin and Google will handle the rest. Affiliate Marketing, in contrast, can take several hours per post and Email Marketing requires extra effort.
- Low Traffic Requirements: AdSense does not need loads of traffic. Small amount of traffic(around 5K visitors per month) can easily make you $10-20 per month. Affiliate Marketing and most of other monetization methods, however, need much more traffic.
- No Buying Involved: Other monetization methods require people to buy products. Now, chances of someone clicking an ad are much higher than buying a product because he is not spending money. This makes generating revenue easier as opposed to methods requiring sales.
- Targeted And “Safe” Ads: AdSense is better than other ad networks because the ads are targeted according to content and reader and there are almost no “unsafe” ads like other networks.
How To Maximize AdSense Revenue Without Losing Readers
One great point that The Blog tyrant made was that you lose readers because of AdSense. He said:
I was losing money. Each Adsense click of between 10 cents and $5 represented a loss to my blog.
That is one thing to consider when using AdSense. Most of the visitors who click ads do not come back and you lose them. But this does not mean that you should go and remove all the ads from your blog.
The key is to target right people.
Let’s take a break from all these stuff. Can you please do one small thing for me?
Follow following steps:
- Open a new tab.
- Open Google Analytics or the tracking software you use.
- Go to “Search Engines” under traffic sources.
- Compare the bounce rate with other traffic sources.
Search Engine visitors have higher bounce rate, right?
This is because search engine visitors come for quick info and leave as soon as they find it. No subscriptions, no purchases!
Just remember the forum you visited when you needed tech help last time. Did you visit it again?
No?
The same goes with majority of search engine visitors when they visit your blog.
All this exercise was just to show that you can show AdSense to search engine visitors.
Search Engine visitors also tend to click ads more often(how do you think Google makes so much with ads in search results?) than regular readers.
Now, they are not subscribing and are bouncing anyway, what is the use of trying to retain them?
It is a win win strategy to shows ads to search engine visitors.
Another good strategy is to show Adsense on older posts. Most of the regular readers check newer posts only and showing ads on older posts won’t hurt. In fact, Daniel himself shows ads on older posts.
You can use following WordPress Plugins to show AdSense ads only to search engine/old traffic:
- Who Sees Ads: Who Sees Ads is the most powerful advertising plugin for WordPress. It lets you choose variety of conditions about when to display. And interface is simple drag and drop. Just give a name to ad block, drag rules, paste code and then add the template tag to your theme. The only drawback is that it does not automatically add ads inside content. But with all the features offered, you can’t complain!
- Ads For Old Posts: Ads For Old Posts is a simple plugin that will let you display ads only on posts older than x days. Just paste the code, choose alignment and you are done.
I have used both plugins and they are very good and work well with WordPress 3.0.2(latest version as of writing this post).
Using the above methods, you can get best of both worlds. You can generate good revenue and at the same time, get readers.
Over To You
- How has AdSense worked for you?
- Have you considered displaying ads to search engine visitors only?
- Do you have any other advice for fellow bloggers using AdSense?
About Daniel
Daniel Scocco is a programmer and entrepreneur located in São Paulo, Brazil. His first company, Online Profits, builds and manages websites in different niches. His second company, Kubic, specializes in developing mobile apps for the iOS and Android platforms.
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