For You! Start An AdSense Journal People who want to lose weight often keep a "food diary". Without a food diary, it's easy to forget that latenight snack or the extra sugar in your fourth cup of coffee. A food diary keeps you honest. It helps you figure out the real reasons behind those little ups and downs in your weight. I'm sure that after reading this book, you would be eager to try out many of the tweaks discussed in here including some of your own. Without an AdSense journal, it would be easy to undo your successes, or to repeat your failures. Remember the program that I mentioned earlier, AdSenseDesktop. This tool provides everything you need to keep an ongoing journal of your AdSense activity! Every little tweak counts, but don't try to do everything at once. Take the stepbystep approach. Write your own AdSense plan for the first week. Log into your AdSense account once a day, to track your click throughs and earnings.
Don't be rigid about your plan. Make room for inspiration. If you've got a great idea, write it down to implement it later. Don't implement your ideas all at once and DO give every idea some time to prove its mettle. You'll find out within a day if you have thousands of visitors hitting your web pages. If that is not the case, give it a few days. Preferably one week! Don't be discouraged by minor, daytoday fluctuations in your clickthroughs and earnings. It's normal and probably has nothing to do with your latest tweak. Join an AdSense forum, several if possible. Share your tips with other members. Discuss what works and what doesn't work for you. Every once in a while, a forum member might alert you to a possible violation of the AdSense TOS.
It could be just a false alarm, but I prefer to be safe than sorry! When in doubt, dash an email to AdSense support, at: adsense support@Google.com Most emails are answered quickly by a real person. They won't suspend your account for asking them, but they might if you don't ask! Read all you can and jot down every good idea. It will keep your interest levels high and give you something new to work on all the time. Every new 'tweak' is your stepping stone to AdSense success. Once you've reached a certain level, it's easy to say 'Cool! I've figured it all out!' But take it from me Internet Marketing keeps changing and the rules will change for you too. Don't be like the two lazy littlepeople in "Who moved my cheese?" Keep looking for new ways to make money with AdSense. Replace ideas that no longer seem to work with new ideas and inspiration. Some people I know are still rubbing their backsides after the dotcom bust. It's always easier when you see it coming, than when it takes you by surprise! Remember the story about 'The Emperor's New Clothes'? There's a lesson in it for all of us Internet Marketers, and it's this: It doesn't matter how much money you've made with AdSense or what the IQ tests say about you: It ain't working till your stats say so!
18.1 A Sample AdSense Journal For example, let’s say you have a website about Bonsai trees. You read this book and you decide to start implementing the strategies that I’ve been talking about. Your original stats might look something like this. You print these out and use them for comparison:
Clearly, your goal is going to be to lift up those CTRs, and by now you should have all sorts of ideas about how you’re going to do that. You write down your first three:
· 3Way Matching Text color, background and text size. · Layout Moving ads above the fold where they’ll be most prominent. · Targeting ads Changing titles to improve relevancy and improving keywords. You’re already using 336 x 280 ads so you decide to start with 3Way Matching and change all your ads so that they blend in with your page. You make the background color of the ads match the background color of your site and the size and color of the ad text the same as the size and color of your body text.
A week later, your stats look like this:
Already your weekly incomes have risen from $285.71 to $313.65 and your average CTR has gone up by a full percentage point. That’s a good start, but you’ve still got a fair way to go. You print out this week’s report and write next to it “3Way Matching” so that you know exactly what you did to create those changes. Now you know how much 3Way Matching is worth to your incomes. Next, you move the ads that you have at the bottom of your pages to the areas above the fold and place them in prominent positions. A week later, you print out the following stats:
Again, your CTR has risen by another percentage point and your weekly income has gone up to $341.40. Next to this set of stats, you write “Layout” and you place them in your journal after your second set. Now things are getting a little trickier. Your ads are blended onto the page and they’re in prominent positions. But you find that they aren’t always showing the most relevant ads. On your page on growing bonsai from cuttings for example, you find that you’re getting lots of ads about scrapbooking. A look at your server logs supports your hunch that these aren’t getting any clicks at all.
You create a channel for that page and follow your stats for a week. The original stats look like this:
That’s pretty weak but as few of your users are likely to be interested in scrapbooking, it’s not too surprising. So you change the title of the page from www.bonsai.com/cuttings.html to www.bonsai.com/tree_cuttings.html and turn the word “cuttings” into “treecuttings”, especially in the area beneath the ad box. You upload, wait for the robot to index your page again and check that you’re now getting ads from gardening and horticulture sites.
After a week, you find that your stats for that page look like this:
Again, you’d want to print out this page and place it in your journal. So far in the last three weeks, these simple tweaks would have already increased your weekly income by over $104. And there’s still plenty more you can do! You can make sure that every page is optimized, you can look for higher paying keywords and you can experiment with different colors and layouts, search boxes and multiple ads to increase your revenues. And of course, you can create more pages and more sites.
Note that only in the last example (when you changed the keywords, improving your position in the search engines) did any of the changes affect your impressions. These tweaks simply made the most of the traffic you already have! Of course, if you add more traffic, you’ll make more money. The important point to remember is that you should be recording everything you do and keeping a close eye on the results. Within a few weeks, you’ll have a complete record of all the changes you’ve made and what they’re worth to your bottom line.
Don't be rigid about your plan. Make room for inspiration. If you've got a great idea, write it down to implement it later. Don't implement your ideas all at once and DO give every idea some time to prove its mettle. You'll find out within a day if you have thousands of visitors hitting your web pages. If that is not the case, give it a few days. Preferably one week! Don't be discouraged by minor, daytoday fluctuations in your clickthroughs and earnings. It's normal and probably has nothing to do with your latest tweak. Join an AdSense forum, several if possible. Share your tips with other members. Discuss what works and what doesn't work for you. Every once in a while, a forum member might alert you to a possible violation of the AdSense TOS.
It could be just a false alarm, but I prefer to be safe than sorry! When in doubt, dash an email to AdSense support, at: adsense support@Google.com Most emails are answered quickly by a real person. They won't suspend your account for asking them, but they might if you don't ask! Read all you can and jot down every good idea. It will keep your interest levels high and give you something new to work on all the time. Every new 'tweak' is your stepping stone to AdSense success. Once you've reached a certain level, it's easy to say 'Cool! I've figured it all out!' But take it from me Internet Marketing keeps changing and the rules will change for you too. Don't be like the two lazy littlepeople in "Who moved my cheese?" Keep looking for new ways to make money with AdSense. Replace ideas that no longer seem to work with new ideas and inspiration. Some people I know are still rubbing their backsides after the dotcom bust. It's always easier when you see it coming, than when it takes you by surprise! Remember the story about 'The Emperor's New Clothes'? There's a lesson in it for all of us Internet Marketers, and it's this: It doesn't matter how much money you've made with AdSense or what the IQ tests say about you: It ain't working till your stats say so!
18.1 A Sample AdSense Journal For example, let’s say you have a website about Bonsai trees. You read this book and you decide to start implementing the strategies that I’ve been talking about. Your original stats might look something like this. You print these out and use them for comparison:
Clearly, your goal is going to be to lift up those CTRs, and by now you should have all sorts of ideas about how you’re going to do that. You write down your first three:· 3Way Matching Text color, background and text size. · Layout Moving ads above the fold where they’ll be most prominent. · Targeting ads Changing titles to improve relevancy and improving keywords. You’re already using 336 x 280 ads so you decide to start with 3Way Matching and change all your ads so that they blend in with your page. You make the background color of the ads match the background color of your site and the size and color of the ad text the same as the size and color of your body text.
A week later, your stats look like this:
Already your weekly incomes have risen from $285.71 to $313.65 and your average CTR has gone up by a full percentage point. That’s a good start, but you’ve still got a fair way to go. You print out this week’s report and write next to it “3Way Matching” so that you know exactly what you did to create those changes. Now you know how much 3Way Matching is worth to your incomes. Next, you move the ads that you have at the bottom of your pages to the areas above the fold and place them in prominent positions. A week later, you print out the following stats:
Again, your CTR has risen by another percentage point and your weekly income has gone up to $341.40. Next to this set of stats, you write “Layout” and you place them in your journal after your second set. Now things are getting a little trickier. Your ads are blended onto the page and they’re in prominent positions. But you find that they aren’t always showing the most relevant ads. On your page on growing bonsai from cuttings for example, you find that you’re getting lots of ads about scrapbooking. A look at your server logs supports your hunch that these aren’t getting any clicks at all.You create a channel for that page and follow your stats for a week. The original stats look like this:
That’s pretty weak but as few of your users are likely to be interested in scrapbooking, it’s not too surprising. So you change the title of the page from www.bonsai.com/cuttings.html to www.bonsai.com/tree_cuttings.html and turn the word “cuttings” into “treecuttings”, especially in the area beneath the ad box. You upload, wait for the robot to index your page again and check that you’re now getting ads from gardening and horticulture sites.After a week, you find that your stats for that page look like this:
Again, you’d want to print out this page and place it in your journal. So far in the last three weeks, these simple tweaks would have already increased your weekly income by over $104. And there’s still plenty more you can do! You can make sure that every page is optimized, you can look for higher paying keywords and you can experiment with different colors and layouts, search boxes and multiple ads to increase your revenues. And of course, you can create more pages and more sites.Note that only in the last example (when you changed the keywords, improving your position in the search engines) did any of the changes affect your impressions. These tweaks simply made the most of the traffic you already have! Of course, if you add more traffic, you’ll make more money. The important point to remember is that you should be recording everything you do and keeping a close eye on the results. Within a few weeks, you’ll have a complete record of all the changes you’ve made and what they’re worth to your bottom line.
