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.

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.

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’ve been doing some testing lately and also analyzing different sites for which AdSense sizes perform the best.

In all, it turns out verticals and horizontals perform the worst.

The best performing ad sizes are the rectangles.

I also did a test with which rectangles perform the best.

The bigger your rectanges, the better they perform.

336×280 pixel rectangles outperformed every other sizes by 3-5 times.

I told you before to put the ads on top of your content. Now, if you are not using rectangle sizes, you are not taking advantage.

The rectangles can be a little bit annoying for your readers but heck, you need to make money blogging.  If you have great content, you really need to take advantage, readers will still come if you have a lot of ads.

Try the rectangles, especially the big ones, I bet you will make 2-3 times more if you have not been using them.

Of course, there can be variations, but with the 10 blogs I tested, results always came out the same.

(Comparison of Zedomax.com and Mattresszine.com, Click to enlarge)

In a recent network study I did with Adsense ads all my blogs over in Zedomax Network, I found out that the most optimal position for your AdSense ads are to the top and left. Now above is a Screenshot of Mattresszine.com overlapped on Zedomax.com.

Why do I show you this?

Because the Adsense ads on Zedomax.com used to be at the way bottom. I started slowly changing the theme and moving the ads towards the top and to the left.

After the change, I did increase my CTR and CPM by 2-3 fold. (I am even thinking about moving it further to the top and left)

Also of the two Adsense ads, the left one performs better by 2-3 fold, weird isn’t it? (I am planning to even test out putting the sidebar on the left and put the ads there…)

I used to put my Adsense ads on the bottom of the post and on the sidebar. Uh oh, that is the worst place to put it unless you are experiencing some high CTRs. You might as well not put adsense. You need to put the ads where people would normally be reading the content, otherwise people will simply ignore the ads and you will make zilch.

You need to also think about the general population, over 50% of people still user 1024×768 pixel monitors in the world. That means anything outside that will not get many impressions.

After optimizing Adsense ads, I went from making just enough money to pay for server fees to being able to make a living on the internet.

That slight change can be costly, especially if you don’t know about how much money it can make you. It did cost me last 6 months of “how much could I have made”.

Now, depending on your niche blog topic, the ad placement perfomance could differ, but do try my advice if you ain’t making it right now. I am sure it will help.

Okay, here’s a simple way to get more traffic to your site by making friends on StumbleUpon.com.

Here’s how to do it:

1) Make friends on StumbleUpon.com with people who have similar interests as you do.

2) Once you have a good number of friends, use the “Send to” button and send your friends the site you want to bring more traffic to.

3) Next, send them an honest message of what you want them to do such as, “Can you stumble this?”.

4) Watch as your friends stumble your sites and your traffic spikes to extra 300 to 500 people per day.

5) Your friends will probably ask you to stumble their sites too.  Make sure to return favors.

This is a great way since you can make lots of friends and network with other stumblers to promote your website and their websites.

Basically, you scratch their back and they scratch yours.

You’ve probably seen bunch of sites that you can sign up for to sell text link ads on your site. I’ve personally tried Text-Link-Ads.com. Although I have made money through their system, I probably only made $200 a month at the most. The problem with these sites is that they take 50% of your sales! That’s a lot of money to give away if you ask me. Plus, they only sell on monthly basis, so you are not guaranteed a steady income.

The solution? Sell you text link ads on your blog as “lifetime” links or get your advertisers to commit to at least one year. That way, you get a large sum of money beforehand. Even if you sell one text link for $1000, you are better off putting that cash in your bank and not worrying about it rather than having to check every month how much you are making.

In other words, SELL your text link ads on your blog. Have a link to a simple explanation how advertisers can buy text link ads on your site. This keeps your life simpler since you only have to place the link once. Set it and forget it.

Here’s a guideline for selling links on your blog:

1. Offer any text links for $20 to $25 a pop. That’s very low for industrial average but you set it and forget it.

2. Offer “site-wide” text links for $1000 a pop. This site-wide link would be placed either on your sidebar or your footer. By offering a permanent links, you offer the advertiser a feature above all the other text link ad sites.

With this method, I’ve made more money within a week than all the money I made through Text-Link-Ads.com. I am not trying to bag on their policies but with the recent penalizations by Google, the best way to sell your links is to sell them directly to your customers and gain 100% profit.

Take control of your blog and monetize those text links that many many SEO companies are after. If you make money, make sure to ping this post by writing about it.

To sum up, think of how much money you can make if you sold 100 lifetime links for $1000. That’s $100,000 in your pocket and you can re-invest that money into advertising for your blog so you get more traffic and raise your PageRanking.

Don’t become a slave to one of those Text Link Ad companies that rip your money. (50%!!! Fu*k that. I will just sell my own links.) TAKE CONTROL of your blog today and MAKE MONEY ONLINE selling direct to your customers, readers, whatever.

P.S. I apologize for those text link ad companies, but I am telling the truth and you guys are selling text links off innocent bloggers who don’t know better.

Think about it? A text link ad company sells YOUR LINKS, not theirs. All they are did is setup a system to make 50% off your links. YES, again, YOUR LINKS!