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.

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.

Here’s a warning this blogger got from Google for using StumbleUpon to drive traffic. Although I don’t see how that could be a big problem if StumbleUpon was sending you real traffic but I do see that it’s probably best not to use StumbleUpon for a site that runs AdSense.

This is the message the blogger got from Google for SU traffic:

It has come to our attention that invalid clicks or impressions have been generated on the Google ads on your site(s) through users of third-party programs paid or provided with other incentives to visit your site. Such programs include, but are not limited to auto-surf, pay-to-surf, pay-to-read, or pay-to-click sites. Please bear in mind that if we continue to detect invalid clicks or impressions from these services on your ads, we may disable your account to protect our advertisers.

Just be aware and stick to brick and mortal natural search traffic. That is my advice.

via eyadmix

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!