My Adsense Journey

As a blogger, I started creating websites that I found personally interesting to me. I found articles that were fun and interesting and posted them for people to read. After all.. people create blogs so they can share their feelings and aspirations. But when you create that blog you also feel that you are putting a large amount of time into the projects and wish to see if you are able to generate income from your work. This is where Google Adsense comes into play. I discovered Google Adsense mostly by accident and was intrigued by the concept of Contextual Advertising. I felt if Google could deliver the ads, all I had to do was get the traffic. I could sit back and collect the money. I applied adsense to my site and waited. Well...I waited a "long time" for little to nothing. Not being one to give up easily, I used small and large ad formats and applied them to the top half of my website, to the right side and also to the bottom. I waited a period of time to see the results and "surprise, surprise". I did get an increase in clicks. The only problem was, the clicks were still small and didn't amount to much. By this time most people would have given up and would have just moved along to other advertisers. I seriously started to look at "Blogads" and "crispads" but I finally came back to Google. After a period of reflection, I decided that I was missing some critical pieces of information and decided the best route to take was to learn by example. I looked long and hard at people who were successful at adsense. I looked at thier sites. I made mental notes of what they were doing and what kind of content they had. I read thier own stories of success and then compared what they did against each other. What I found intrigued me. I found out that successful people in the adsense program have relavent content and they use human behavior to thier advantage. Now relavent content is a given, but what I mean by "using human behavior" is a little bit more complex. Evidently people arrive at your site and make up thier minds up in a flash. Instantly they choose to stay on your site or leave it. They look for something that catches thier interests and if it does, they stay there to read your information or end up buying a product. Internet users are "trained" to look in certain locations and ignore things that are outside of thier narrow scope of vision. People can look to the sides for information, but the propensity for them to click your ads becomes significantly lower. By putting ads directly "in thier face", you have a greater chance they will click it. Now, I am not an adsense expert by any stretch of the imagination and still learn new things everyday. I am like "you", a person who wants to generate an income and hopefully have more incentive to keep going. But...I know what works for me and what doesn't. Now, there were only several things that I did to increase my adsense clickthroughs and after experimentation, I am convinced these are the winning ticket. These are things I did: I use a white background instead of a color background. I remove the border on adsense so it does not look like an ad and make sure it matches the background I keep the Title and the Hyperlink "Blue". I keep Adsense "above the fold", so they are the "FIRST" things that people see when they arrive at the site. I use these formats only. The 338X280. This one is primarily used because it is large and it does not look like an ad. The small Google "ad links", (180x90) or others similar, because they are not targeted tightly and give people options to see other things that relavent to THIER interest and I blend the ad to make it look like the rest of the titles. I try to keep the ads "left" aligned. I use the 160X600 vertical for people to see when they move vertically down the website page. I try to place images near the google ads. Images draw the eyes near the ads. I keep the site concise, clean and focused. By using these tactics I was able to increase my adsense clickthrough rate significantly depending on traffic level and people's interest. Take my advice and give it try. I believe you will see a change and hopefully make adsense a more pleasurable experience.