When Google introduced their AdSense program for webmasters, they revolutionized the entire online advertising industry by changing the way revenue building on websites works. Besides the typical pay per click revenue generating, they added the content factor, being the first ones to literally make the advertising match the content on a web page.

This in turn created incredible opportunities in terms of click through ratios, and in combination with their AdWords program, it became possible for the first time in Internet history, to specifically target high paying keywords, in order to maximize the results from the ads being shown on your website.

So how exactly should we go about it, in order to get the best results from the program, and create a passive revenue stream on our sites?

Content

As the saying goes, content is king on the web, and this was true back when the Internet started, and it is still true today. As stated, AdSense ads adapt to the content, that is on the page the ads are displayed on, so in order to get the best results, we need content and lots of it. For these purposes, a blog, would be perfect, as the posts, are perfectly suited to provide targeted content for the AdSense ads, as well as for search engine optimizing, in order to get visitors on the pages.

When starting from scratch, it may be best to write the content yourself, depending on whether or not you start out with a decent budget, or with no budget at all. Assuming there is no budget, it is recommended to start a blog on a subject you are knowledgeable about. This basically ensures good content and the AdSense ads to match.

Before deciding on a subject the blog will be about, do a few searches on the topic, using a tool like Word tracker, in order to find out what the popular keywords in your “niche” are. Targeting the top keywords in your market will not only provide you with high paying AdSense ads, they will also ensure that the content you publish on the blog will contain the proper keywords, so your posts will be found on the search engines, when searching for these keywords or key phrases. This classifies as basic Search Engine Optimizing(SEO), and while the art of SEO entails a lot more than just selecting keywords, that is another topic for another article. In this one we are looking at AdSense, and how to make the most of it. So now we have decided on the subject for the blog, start writing some initial posts to publish, start with 5 to 10 posts and after that, add one or two new posts daily, in order to increase the content on a regular basis. Make sure every page contains the AdSense ads, in order to make each of the content pages a valuable asset in terms of revenue from AdSense.

Ad Placement

Now we have a blog, content, and ads, so it is time to decide where to place them on the pages. This may sound simple enough, and technically speaking it is, but there is much more to it than simply slapping an ad on a web page. Using a blog, special AdSense add-ons may be downloadable,  that will insert your AdSense ads automatically, but just in case you are using blogging software that does not come with such extras, let’s take a look at ad placement:

First of all, we need to decide on the shape of the ad, and in order to get the best results, we need to make sure it stands out and attracts the eye of your readers. For that reason the default horizontal and vertical banners, are so common, that visitors, hardly notice them anymore, so to attract some views, we better come up with something else. For this AdSense has two excellent sizes available, the small and the large square. Depending on the design, your blog may perform best using one large square, or two small ones next to  each other. Try different set ups and stay with what performs best for your blog.

Next we need to determine where the ads should go, at the top of the post, bottom, in the middle, or all positions? Well, this is to a point a matter of taste, but in order to not make the content pages look like banner farms, there should be no more than two ads, or three in case of the double small squares, which is also the maximum amount of ads, Google AdSense will allow on one page.

Where to place them exactly is a matter of trial and error, but some facts are:

• Ads tend to get better click through ratios below an image.
• Text ads work best when they look like part of the content, so try to make them blend in
• Avoid the standard ad formats.

Using the above rules of thumb, we need to test some different setups, and once we determined what works best, we have a layout for the blog, and we are ready for traffic.

Traffic

Traffic is the lifeblood of any web site, and if content is king, traffic certainly is the queen! There are many ways to attract visitors to your site, but most are immediate traffic generating methods, designed to attract some fast traffic, that dies off soon after.

Traffic that lasts, is harder to come by, and to describe it all in detail, would be too much for this particular article, but for good measure, we should at least discuss the basic types.

There are two types of lasting traffic, which are bookmark traffic, and search engine traffic. Bookmark traffic is the most valuable of the two over the long run, and the actual goal for any type of promotion for your blog. When people arrive at your blog, a percentage of those visitors, will like what they see, and add your blog to their list of favorites, or subscribe to the RSS feed of the blog. Those are the visitors that are most likely to return to your blog, again and again, which makes them a considerable part of your steady traffic stream. On the other hand there is search engine traffic, and assuming you did tweak your blog to optimize it for search engine indexing, those are the visitors, that arrive through the search engines, like Google and Yahoo, searching for sites like yours, which makes them most likely to become bookmark traffic.

That is why every webmaster is after traffic from the search engines, because of the bookmark, and with it the return visitor potential.

A four year online study in surfer behavior, has shown that in order for a visitor to click on an ad, that he or she sees on your pages, he or she needs to see that ad 7 times on average before the ad gets clicked. Keeping this in mind, it should go without saying that return visitors, are more likely to see an ad multiple times, then first time visitors, so that may be a good explanation, why bookmark traffic has a much higher click through ratio, then any other type of traffic out there, and it should be equally obvious that from this behavior your AdSense revenue profits, and in turn brings in higher revenues.

Additional AdSense revenue streams

Besides using the regular text and banner ads Google AdSense provides, it is highly recommended, to compliment the ads by using AdSense for search, in order to power the search function on your blog, Use AdSense for feeds, to use on your blog’s RSS feed, in order to create a revenue stream from the RSS subscriptions and submissions also.

The above setup, provides you with a blueprint, to set up an AdSense powered blog, and profit from it. While this article assumes no budget to start with, the above could be outsourced, in case you do have a budget, or after you made your first real revenue from the ads.

In such a case, one could hire guest writers, or even professional blog writers to create more content on a regular basis, and as your content grows, so do the number of pages of your blog, with each content page being a potential cash machine. In case you have enough budget, or revenue to also outsource the promotional efforts for your blog, you will have created a truly passive income stream, for a long time to come.

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