Basic Google AdSense Tips

I just gave some advice to someone on 43Things who had a goal to make $50 a day with Adsense. It's worth repeating here for anyone who's also trying to make a success of it:

1. Use the Google Heat Map to your advantage. When I first started out I could average perhaps $5-$10 per day, but it jumped up to $30 per day when I paid attention to the heat map. Google for “adsense heat map” and you’ll see what I mean.

2. “Blend in” your ads with content. Make sure your ads have no distinctive background color and no border (you can mix it in with your page’s background).

3. Come up with ways to get lots of (legit) incoming links to your site. Some people do this by blogging or writing useful articles that get picked up by Digg.com, etc. This will increase your PageRank over time which is important for step four..

4. Write about things which will get you high on the search engine AND will get people clicking through. Use inventory.overture.com to work out what people are searching for so you can optimize your article / post titles.

I’d give too much away if I went any further, but it all comes with time. Another tip is to read the Adsense forums at WebMasterWorld.com regularly as you get tons of great tips there!

With the above there’s not really any need to spend $$$ on e-books about how to make money with Adsense, since they mostly cover the same ground (I have a few, and none are that good).