Common AdSense Mistakes
August 14, 2006
In my experience with thousands of my AdSense Gold customers, I've noticed that new AdSense publishers tend to make the same mistakes. I made them too when I was new to AdSense.
I've decided to discuss 3 of the big mistakes with you so that you can have a head start and avoid these AdSense pitfalls. They are:
- Selecting the wrong topics
- Having too many topics on the same site
- Trying to make a quick buck with bad traffic
Selecting The Wrong Topics
When I first started out with AdSense, I was one eager beaver. I wanted to create as many pages as I could, and I didn't care what topic they were about as long as it wasn't adult or
gambling.
I put up a site on Old Time Radio Shows, and I was excited to see that I made a few dollars a month with it. What I didn't realize at the time is that my $0.10 clicks were the bottom of the proverbial AdSense barrel in terms of earnings.
I didn't know then that it paid to research the good, high paying topics. So I just put up sites on whatever I could think of that seemed easy to rank for in the search engines.
I was shooting myself in the foot! Once I realized that I could do a little keyword research and find out how much the keywords were worth, then I started focusing on the higher paying niches and started seeing the $1, $2, $5, $10 clicks and up. I don't get that much with every click, but often enough to keep me very happy!
So research your topics first using the AdWords Traffic Estimator Tool, or a good high paying keywords list such as Keyword Explosion.
Too Many Topics on One Site
Another mistake I see newbies make very often (and I made myself when I was a newbie) is having too many topics put on one website. I've seen sites that target everything from alphalpha to Zoro!
That's a bad idea for two main reasons:
- It makes it hard to optimize your site.
You want your domain name to be targetted to the topic of the site (a great search engine optimization technique). If you have every manner of topic on the site, you can't do this and lose out on the power that a great domain name can have with the search engines.
- Google's Smart Pricing doesn't like it.
If you're not familiar with it, SmartPricing is what Google uses to figure out how much your page is worth in relation to the ads showing on the page. The more Smart Pricing likes your pages, the more you will get paid per click.
One of the things I've seen with Smart Pricing is that it likes tightly focused, targetted sites. You might have a lot of pages on one site, but they need to be related to each other.
"But I can't afford more than one domain right now," you might protest.
If that's the case, the best thing you can do is to create subdomains for each of the categories that your site targets.
For example, if you have a site that targets "alphalpha" and "Zoro", have two subdomains:
http://alphalpha.mydomain.com/
http://zoro.mydomain.com/
Do not have the subdomains link to each other either. That way Google seems them as seperate "mini-sites".
For more details on how to optimize the pages on your site so that the search engines just love them, read my free ebook, AdSense SEO Made Easy.
Be Careful What Kind of Traffic You Send To Your Sites
Not all traffic sources are created equal. There are a lot of sites out there selling "one hundred thousand visitors to your site for $49.95!" and the like.
What most of these sites do is use software to "simulate" a visit to your site. They are not real people. I've tested this extensively with a couple of vendors who sell this kind of traffic, and not once have I ever gotten any "real" people.
The problem is that sometimes those bots goof and "click" the ads by following the links.
Google sometimes sees those clicks as fraudulent, and many a new AdSense publisher has lost his account because of it.
So beware of shady or "too good to be true" traffic promises, they will only hurt you!
Focus on search engine optimization and link trading, that's where you're going to get the most bang for your buck.
Get motivated to create new AdSense content.
August 13, 2006
If you're new to AdSense, getting motivated to write original content can be difficult. Writing content takes time, and it also takes time to get the content advertised and get links into each page. If you still have a day job, it can be tough to make the time.
One way to motivate yourself to create the content and get the links is to calculate how much you are earning per page per year. Multiply that times any number of pages and you will have a good idea of how much money you are missing out on by NOT creating content and getting links.
Let's take an example. Let's say that you have 100 pages of content that are earning you $100 a month.
That means that each page is making you, on average, $1 per month, or $12 per year.
$12 per year may not sound like much, but let's say that you created one unique article every 3 days and got a few links to that article with link exchanges, etc. 365 days in a year means that in one year you will have added and linked about 122 additional pages
of content.
122 pages of content times $12 per year is $1,464 that you are missing out on every year because you are not creating new content.
Now, let's say that you can write and link one page per day. That's 365 pages per year, or $4,380 per year.
Of course, if you focus on the high paying keywords, you are much more likely to generate more than $12 per year per page. If you focus on the right keywords, you could make as much as $100 per page per year or more!
Do the math with that number, and you'll see that adding and linking one page ever 3 days will earn you an extra $12,200 per year. Writing one page per day will earn you an extra $36,500 per year!
And keep in mind that every year you will add additional content, which means that your earnings will grow and grow as time goes on.
The truth is, once you start creating a lot of quality content and getting just a few links to each page, the initial traffic you get will start to spread the word about your site. Next thing you know your site is getting hundreds of links from all over the place, and you didn't have to ask for them!
Traffic will start to build, your search engine rankings will improve, and in time you will be earning sums of money that you didn't dream of before–all because you took a few hours a week to devote to creating quality content and getting a few links.
So adopt a long-term AdSense vision, and in time you will reap the rewards.
Use internal links to help your ranking
August 12, 2006
My AdSense SEO ebook really
focuses on the importance of in-bound links. Really, links are the number one most important factor for getting good rankings in the search engine these days.
But in-bound links aren't the only links you should focus on. It's also important that you focus on your own internal links. While not as powerful as in-bound links from other sites, they are counted by the search engines.
A common mistake that is made in website navigation is to have every link to the home page use the anchor text "Home" or "Homepage" or something like that. Search engines use the
anchor text of internal pages to rank your site, too, so using "Home" won't help you rank for anything but the term "Home"!
If you're trying to rank your site for the keywords "Green Widgets", for example, use the anchor text "Green Widgets" to point to your home page.
If your site is broken up into categories, make sure in the navigation of each page you have a link to each category of your site that uses its keywords. So if my site is about "Widgets", and I have the categories "Red Widgets", "Green Widgets" and "Blue Widgets", then I want my navigation to look like this:
Widgets -> Points to home page
Red Widgets -> Points to red widgets section
Green Widgets -> Points to green widgets section
Blue Widgets -> Points to blue widgets section
Don't make the mistake of not using every link you have on your site to help get that little extra ranking boost. It may mean the difference between you ranking number one or
number two for your term. That little edge always helps.
P.S. After getting your internal linking structure down, it's time to start getting external links and really rank your site. For that I recommend SEO Elite and Jack Humphrey's Power Linking methods.
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Jonathan Leger has been earning his living online full-time since the fall of 2004. He regularly posts advice about search engine optimization (his current passion), AdSense and Internet Marketing. 
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