When you first enter the niche site world, there are generally two ways people will monetize their sites: Affiliate Products or AdSense. Of course, you can always create your own products or build a membership community but then we'd be talking about something much bigger than a niche site.
At least at the very beginning.
Download our Checklist for Promoting Affiliate Products
What You Will Learn Today
What AdSense is
What To Be Aware Of
Types of Ads
AdSense's Reach
Who Benefits From AdSense
What Is AdSense?
AdSense is an advertising network run by Google. The ads arrive in different forms: text, images, and video. The support tools that come with AdSense can be slightly customized and feature various font colors, backgrounds, and font sizes.
There’s also the benefit of being free to join and all you have to do is place an HTML code on your web page and you’re good to go. There are plenty of videos online to show you how to set AdSense up but it’s also not as easy as it sounds either.
What To Be Aware Of
Even though AdSense is free to join, you will still need to be approved. Plenty of people have been denied by Google but once you are approved for one site, the rest of your sites are good to go.
The guys from Empire Flippers actually used to be the Adsense Flippers and they were one of the original cats to start talking about building niche Adsense sites at scale. But after a few Google updates, they soon realized that the model wasn't as stable as they would like and now have moved onto the broker side of the business.
Suggested Readings:
Why Is AdSense Useful
AdSense works in a few ways but generally you'll make money every time someone clicks on an ad and there can even be ad revenue based on impressions. Which means the advertiser will pay for every thousandth visitor. But for most sites, AdSense's largest portion of revenue would be from Cost-Per-Click (CPC).
One quick tip we can give you is that if you are going to allow ads based on impressions, put them on your sidebar. Rather than within your content. You will make the most out of those views because people just naturally don't click on Sidebar ads as much. They will subscribe to your mailing list, but an ad is just out of sight for most.
We also need to consider click-through-rates (CTR) and not just the ones on our own web page but also within the search engine page as well. People are more likely to click on links at the top of Google, then at the bottom. In fact, this isn't just applicable to the first page but even pages thereafter. Top results always have higher CTR's than the rest of the page.
There are two types of ads: Contextual Ads and Cookie Ads.
Contextual ads are based on the content you have on your site. This is where paying attention to the Suggested Advertiser Bid and High Advertiser Competition would be important.
The second method is for Cookie ads. In simplest terms, these are retargeted ads. If you've ever been bouncing around on a forum and a few days ago you were cruising Amazon - you might see an Amazon ad pop up within the forum threads. That's retargeting! AKA remarketing as well.
Some people think retargeting is creepy, but in our cases - it's actually better because as publishers we can take advantage of those higher CTR's based on what people have already been searching.
Another thing to keep in mind is that although AdSense is very passive - it's actually just one source of income and as internet entrepreneurs, we never like relying on a single stream of income right? Make sure to reach your audience through many different channels and realize that Ads just shouldn't be placed in certain parts of your site where you have the potential to make more per visitor, then from CPC's.
For example, placing an ad on your highest traffic affiliate page would certainly be terrible for conversion rates.
Suggested Readings:
Simple Things You Can Do To Increase AdSense Clicks
How Far is the Google Ad Network’s Reach?
Desktop
Mobile
In Content
In Search Results
RSS Feeds
Unused Domains
Unused Domains
In-Browser Games
When we mention 'In search results', it means either within Google’s SERP or if you install a custom search bar within your own site.
Suggested Readings:
Difference Between AdSense for Search and Custom Search
Who Benefits from AdSense?
Websites that have a lot of traffic, indexed pages, and plenty of useful 'how-to' articles will benefit the most. If your website doesn't have enough traffic - there's no point in putting up ads because you
can't monetize traffic if you have none
. You would be better off with Affiliate Marketing at the beginning, plus no one wants to link out to a small website with Google Ads everywhere. Imagine how hard outreach would be!
Advertising
will
however, provide every page the opportunity to be monetized and it's especially useful for websites that have no specific product to sell and are largely informational.
Where AdSense
is
not be
good, would be company websites that are selling a service or product. Could you imagine going to a plumbers website and it was full of ads?
Avoid this especially if you are in a business-to-business segment.
Download our Checklist for Promoting Affiliate Products
In any case, AdSense
is however
the best ad network to join because of its high advertiser bids and fill rates. The last thing you want is empty ad space. Sometimes with smaller networks, they won't have enough people looking to advertise in your niche and you'll end up having a blank ad and that's valuable real estate we can't afford to waste.
Check out our Ready Made Sites today and let us do the heavy lifting. We'll start you off with an Amazon affiliate site or a Clickbank offer that's got a proven record of converting traffic.
The post What is Adsense and Who Benefit’s the Most from it? appeared first on Human Proof Designs.