What I did to Increase My Adsense Earnings

First of all, you can't expect success with Google Adsense immediately. I didn't start seeing any income until about a month into the program. But depending on your site/blog content, it could come faster or slower. Second of all, I can't completely describe my Adsense earnings because that would be against the program policies, but I can tell you what I did to increase my earnings. Oh yeah, here's my blog by the way...http://ordinary-stars.blogspot.com

Traffic
Traffic is the most important thing you need to earn money with Adsense. It's crucial to your earnings because without people coming to your site, how would you be able to generate clicks? Easy, you wouldn't. Not everyone who comes to your site is going to click on an ad. From my personal experience, every day is different than the other. And it changes because of content and will be different from site to site. So let's just in general, your site would receive 1 click per 300 visitors. If your site does not get 300 visitors, don't expect any clicks. If your site gets 900 visitors, there's a possibility you could get 3 clicks or more, or even less. Again, there's no way to predict but one thing that is key is the number of visitors. The more, the better.

How do I get traffic?
There's many different ways to get traffic. From submitting your blog to search engines, to posting a link on forums (without spamming of course!), to submitting your blog to various directories and services that ping for you. Of course, your site/blog must have content people are going to want to read. If it's not interesting, don't expect much in return. Also, don't worry if your content offends people. Bad publicity is always good publicity. How do you think South Park and Family Guy stay on the air? Why do you think so many people know who Osama Bin Laden is? Anyways, here are the services I use that got me a lot of traffic:

Most sites that say they submit to 200 search engines are usually scams. You really only need to submit your site/blog to these main search engines:
Google
Yahoo
MSN
Nobody really uses the other unheard of search engines. And if they do, those engines yield the same search results from Google or Yahoo.

A directly you can use to submit your link to is The Open Directory Project. All you do is find a category that describes your content, submit, and wait till they approve your site. The only downsize to this directory is that it only stays on the site for about a month or so. So, you need to keep submitting your link to stay on there. I only use this as a source when my blog was in its beginning stages to increase traffic. Once I started to get a good amount of traffic, I said screw it!

For the bloggers out there, here are the list of services I currently use for my Ordinary Stars Blog:
Feed Burner
Blog Directory
EatonWeb Blog Directory
Blog Flux Directory
Web Log Directory
Blog Mad
Technorati
Feed Nuts
Top Blog Area
Blog Rush
Blog Catalog

Social networking sites also work to promote your blog and get your content "out there." When I post something I think needs to get people's attention (I don't do this for everyone of my posts) I submit it to Digg or Reddit. I've come across some bloggers who use Stumbleupon but I've had none whatsoever. But I've received over 500 views a day with Digg and Reddit. Just make sure you don't spam those sites, because then people won't read your post.

All Right, So I got traffic...What do I do now?
Now, you need to Optimize your adsense ads. This means you need to consider ad size, type, placement, and color. People will tell you certain ad sizes get more clicks. While that may be true in some instances, don't reorganize your site to fit a certain ad size. It will waste your time and you will become paranoid...believe me. I went through almost 5 templates trying to fit in certain ads and lost tons of information and minutes of my life. Did it help me? Nope! On my blog, the most successful area is right below all of my posts, at the bottom of the page. I use a square (I forget the dimensions) and it's an image ad. That gives me the most clicks and most cost per click. Also consider putting one ad at the top of your page and on the sidebar if you have one. No more than 3 should be fine. Don't think that putting all your ads at the top of your page will help you. It won't. It just might scare away visitors. Also try to blend your ads into the color scheme of your site. You can do this in adsense in the color palettes menu by choosing a color they have there or using a color chart and inserting the code yourself. You'll have to know a little more about html codes and colors and all that good stuff to try to figure that out, but it's way to hard for me to explain. Also think about putting ads in between posts so it looks like part of the site. And if you have a banner at the top of the page, put a horizontal link banner ad right below it. The banner will draw attention to your ad.

Referrals
These are really a waste of time. I have one on my page which doesn't really help in my revenue at all yet. I haven't had it on there long enough for me to take down, but it really depends on your site content and your visitors. I believe just having the Google Pack as your Referral ad will be the best because some people might want to sign up for those programs and services and you get paid for it. So, it might be worth a try. If your site is selling stuff, try using their product feature with referrals.

What not to do
Like I said, don't put more than 3 ads on your page. It will lower your eCPM, and you get less money per click. Don't click on your own ads. That will just get you banned for life from Adsense. And, don't do anything that will encourage clicks like putting something next to an ad that says "click here."


That pretty much sums it up. That's what I did and everyday I get more revenue. I really encourage the social networking sites like Digg and Reddit. They really get your content across the net and maybe someone will like what you have and post it on their blog. That's what happened to me and guess what? I got 10,000 hits in one day. Just imagine what that did to my Adsense account??? You guessed it.