The best niche market I have found for Adsense ads really are the local niche markets.

What do I mean by “local” niche markets?

These are regionalized, localized markets that have an audience of one city, one county, or in other words, a small audience.

Why would you benefit from such a small market?

Well, it’s really common sense.  Because the audience is so small, your click rate skyrockets.

What is a “local” niche market?

Well, the “best” Adsense performer blog that I have is SFOneOfAKind.com.  It’s a blog about luxury real estate in San Francisco.

I cannot tell you more details than it’s the best performer as far as CPC (Cost per Click) is concerned.

It’s actually one of my “dead” blogs that I’ve began to monetize and blog as of lately.

There are tons of other “local” niche markets you can find such as “New York City Automobile Blog” or “Los Angeles Best Restaurant Blog”.

These are niche blogs that cater to only a very small portion of the internet audience.

Because the audience is so small, there’s more competition among the advertisers so in return, you the publisher can expect higher CPC.

Of course, this isn’t the case for everything, it’s always best to rely on trial and error.

Do you have a “local” niche market?

These local, niche market maybe the undiscovered gems among niche blogs and you my friend, just been told of another Adsense secret.

Now, go take your medicine and make a couple local, niche blogs to try it out yourself.

Today, we will talk about adsense secrets that the professional bloggers don’t tell you. What is it?

Well, it first and foremost includes capturing a niche market and not telling anyone else about it.

Once your niche grows big enough and you capture a good share of that market, you won’t have to worry as much.

It’s really about finding a good niche that not many people are blogging about. It’s simple as that and you need to keep trying different things until your revenue stream starts rising a little.

The most important thing about making money with Adsense is the fact that amount of money you make “ramps” up with the level of web traffic you get.

For example:

If your blog gets around 0 to 1000 unique visitors, chances are likely that you make somewhere around $0 to $5 per day.

But then, if your blog gets around 1000 to 3000 unique visitors, chances are likely that you make somewhere around $5 to $100 per day, depending on your niche market.

Now, if you look at the big spectrum of things, you will notice that the there’s almost 20 times difference between $5 and $100.

That’s right.

At a certain point, the number of your web traffic + number of clicks + CTR “ramps” up.  I am not exactly sure how this happens but trust me, it does.

That’s what you should be targetting for, a steady growth of search engine traffic.  Now, once you reach that “ramp”, you will suddenly start making 3-10 times more money.

If you are still struggling below web traffic of 1,000 uniques per day, it’s going to look REAL HARD to make a lot of money on Adsense.  Once you get past 2,000 to 3,000 uniques, you might start actually making some decent money.

Well, that’s all for today folks.  If you got some facts to point out, please use the comments form.

If you have noticed, I’ve put on some Adsense ads finally on this blog.

Where is the best placement for the highest paying Adsense ad?

Well, it’s simple, it’s the 336×280 pixel size right on top of your post.

Although I’ve proved it to myself already, there’s also this blog post you can check out that shows which ad performs the best.

What are my goals?

Well, I will attempt to start making money on this blog, talking about how to optimize your ads to make more money from your blog.

Other things I’ve done to increase CTR

As you can see in the above screenshot, I took the motorcycle out.  It’s because it takes up WAY too much valuable advertising space, which is the top-left corner.

With those changes and Adsense ads on top/bottom of post plus a 160×600 sidebar ad, we will see how much money we can make over the next year or so.

Mind you, I probably won’t make that much money with this blog as there’s literally not enough traffic.

On the next post, I will explain further how to make more money with web traffic and show you how it correlates to everything.

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1. Analyze web pages.

2. Setup custom channels

3. Optimize your ad placement/unit.

4. Maximize revenue from multiple units.

5. Track and measure your results.

I can’t tell you how many times that ad optimization is the key to success.  If you cannot optimize your ads, you will never succeed or at least reach your full potential as an online businessman(businesswoman).

The optimization part might take you 3 days or 3 months, but once you’ve optimize, you can expect to make 3-5 times what you made before.

via adsense blog

A lot of people don’t know that fact about web traffic and the fact remains that you need a special “type” of web traffic to get the people to be interested in your advertisements whether that be Google Adsense or whatever.

Here’s are some facts about what kind of people are more likely to read and click on ads:

1. Blog subscribers are overrated, they are the worst type of traffic that’d click on your ads. Besides, most subscribers are subscribers because they see your blog through an RSS reader, thus they’d even rarely see the ad at all unless you had feed ads.

Blog subscribers are the worst for making money because they know your site layout already, they are “ad blind”, as they say.

2. Traffic coming from Digg, Stumbleupon, Reddit, and social networking are worthless. Most of the time, they will steal your bandwidth and you pretty much don’t make any money unless you can “consistently” make the front page, in which case you will gain a lot of SEO, which is good for making money online.

Most people coming from the social networking traffic are too smart to even read your ads, don’t waste your time building up traffic this way. You might end up with 1000 more uniques per day but if that doesn’t convert, you are the one who end up wasting time. (Whereas if you only had 100 uniques from search engines, you’d probably make more money in comparison)

3. Traffic from Google search terms are the best for making money. People who click through a search engine more than often click out through Google Adsense ads. This is where the money is. If you can somehow increase the number of people coming to your site through Google, Yahoo, or any other search engines, you have the best type of web traffic, the people who read and click on ads.

So what’s the point of this story?

You need to spend 90% of your time blogging, consistently about your niche topic. Do not waste your time with too many social networks as they don’t give you “money” results. The social networks might earn you more readers and traffic but they simply don’t convert to money.

Also, don’t try so hard to get a lot of subscribers. Your subscribers should be subscribing to your blog because they are REALLY interested in keeping up with your blog news.

If you use contests and other methods simply to increase the number of subscribers, it doesn’t really help you when you are counting money at the end of the day.

Subscribers = The worst traffic for CPC advertising

Social Network traffic = Also worst traffic for CPC advertising

Random People who find your site through a search engine = This is your goldmine, if you can get the number of visitors coming to your site up to about 90% of total traffic, that is ideal for making money online.

Other people including blog experts might tell you otherwise but in my experience, this is what has worked and what is working for me. If you have further suggestions, I am ears are always open and you are welcome to comment.

Well, a lot of people think you can simply insert your Google adsense code in the index.php file and get adsense ads on every post.

You need to add a little PHP code so your ad only shows up on your first post.

To do this, add the following:


<?php if($first!=1) { $first=1; ?>

…Your adsense code here…

<?php } ?>


This simple php code can work on a blog or any other webiste. Basically, it only allows the code to show up once. Now there’s Wordpress functions to do it to, but why bother when a simple PHP code can solve the problem?

Okay, Missy over at Groovyvegetarian is my friend and I am not picking on her but here’s what she’s doing wrong:

Now, as you can see, she has a 468×60 ad when you go to the homepage and she has a 336×380 ads on single pages like here:

Now, here’s two things she can do to make a lot more money with Adsense and optimize her ads.

1. She needs to put a 336×380 ad OR TWO 250×250 ads side-by-side for her homepage.

2. The ads are still in default Google colors, she need to change the colors so it blends into the mild red she uses for her AHREF colors.

With the two changes, I am sure that she will get 2-3 times more clicks.

With so many people used to being “ad-blind” as they call it, if you make your ads look like Google ads, no one will click and no one will be interested in it.

By blending your ad colors into your blog theme, you can expect 2-3 times more clicks, thus 2-3 times more revenue.

Sounds like a simple idea but it works.

So if you are still using default Google ad colors, I highly you change that. (that means you Missy!)

Here’s a great explanation of how Google’s Adsense and Adwords advertising/publishing program works.

Basically, there’s an internal auction of all keywords and advertisers get to bid on them. So the CPC is really determined by advertisers.

Now, it’s up to you to find out which Publisher’s program gives you the best CPC for your money.

But how do they actually work? There are several steps in the process.

1) Each advertiser enters a list of keywords, ads, and bids.

2) When a user enters a query, Google compiles a list of all the ads whose keywords match that query.

3) The list of ads is then ordered based on the bids and the Ad Quality Scores, which measure the relevance of the ad to the user.

4) The highest ranked ad is displayed in the most prominent position, the second highest ranked ad gets the second most prominent position, and so on.

5) If the user clicks on an ad, the advertiser is charged a price that depends on the bid and Quality Score of the advertiser below it. The price charged is the minimum necessary to retain the advertiser’s position in the list.

via Googleblog

Well, I admit that I have been testing out Yahoo Publishers program in the last couple days.

Yahoo Publishers Program is basically Adsense from Yahoo.  It launches about a year and half ago and it’s been steadily growing in number of advertisers and publishers.

Zack Johnson even made over $400K in just couple months.

But that’s not the point of this blog post.

The point is that I did a test with Zedomax.com and have found that:

1) Google Adsense provides better context-matched ads, meaning more people will click on your ads because they are more relevant.

2) Yahoo provides better payouts per click.  (This might vary but for tech, this proved to be true)

3) You need to try both and test out to see which program gives you a better payout at the end of the day.

In conclusion, I am making 2-3 times more money now with Yahoo Publisher Program for Zedomax.com.

Why?

Because certain niche topics get better payouts with the Yahoo Publisher Program.  For Zedomax.com, I actually get only 60-70% of clicks compared to Google Adsense, yet Cost-per-Click is about 3 times higher, so I end up making 2-3 times more money at the end of the day.

But I think this will only work if you are already getting a high number of clicks.  If you are getting less than 10 clicks per day, you might not see as a big differece.

If you do get more than 10 clicks per day, I highly suggest you try them out.

I haven’t tested all the blogs so I might start doing that one by one and see how well it does for my other blogs.

Remember not to put Google ads and Yahoo ads on the same page, that’s against the ToS.  However, you can put them in “different” pages and see how they perform.