All About Web Hosting, AdSense, Marketing & Design: google adsense

AdSense is a great way to make money with your websites. It’s very easy to implement and with enough practice (or the right tips) and enough good traffic you can do pretty well. With the right placement and keywords, even minimal traffic can do well.

The absolute number one key to making money with AdSense is DRIVING TRAFFIC to your website. This is where the big AdSense money comes in. BUT, you have to build a GREAT site first.

Of course there’s a few guidelines to follow before even beginning to build your web site, first being Googles AdSense Policies - this is a must.

ADSENSE TIP #1
Make sure that your adblocks blend with your site.
Very Important. The internet is full of junk and advertising. When surfers are looking for information they instinctively look away, skipping over advertisements to find what they came for. It’s actually been termed “Banner Blindness”. Flashing, blinking, blinding websites are a thing of the past as marketers learn that virtual shouting doesnt work, as people are covering their ears (or eyes in this case). Basically, your visitors will skip right over the ads if done incorrectly.

Adblocks that work the best for me are 336×280, or one of the square blocks inserted near a few other links and close to your main text.

Here’s the page layout that continually works best for me:

I put my navigation down the left side, put my h1 header above the adblock and a general image to the right of the adblock, and put this smack dab under the header of my site, in plain view.

Fonts on your site should be similar in size and color.
Important in helping adblocks blend with your site. I make css styles that match the ads to use for all other content and links on my site. They will never always perfectly match, as google expiriments by serving 2 or 3 ads in a 4 block, the text of the ads get bigger. So its not perfect, but it does well. Since we have no control over what google does, we make due.

Match the border color and background color
Matching adsense to the background color on your web page is extremely important. I try to’hide’ the border by matching colors.

You may also want to experiment with text ads and image ads. You can choose on or the other, or both.

COMMON MISCONCEPTION:

Match also the title, text and url colors to the ones you are using on your page.
If your logo and headlines are green, make your title the same green. If your text is gray, match this gray, and if your links are blue, match the same blue.

No Way!!! I changed my ads to adhere to this tip. I made all of my ad titles blue because everyone says to use blue. My initial reaction was, EEW! but I left it for a few days to see if they were right. When I tried this, my clickthroughs plummeted!!!!

Here’s the color scheme I use on ALL of my adblocks, and my clickthroughs went right back to where they were before, EVEN THOUGH my navigation links are blue.

Border: White (ffffff) (as most of my pages have a white background
Title: Gray (7f7f7f)
Background: White (ffffff)
Text: Black (000000)
URL: Blue (003399)

I save this in a custom palette called ‘plain’ and its easily accessible every time I need to insert my code. I use channels and php includes to test quickly.

ADSENSE TIP #2
Keep your adblocks “Above the Fold”.
By above the fold, I mean visible on your website without having to scroll down. Your ads should be in a place where people will look. When I started out I was just playing with one of my sites, I had adsense at the bottom of my page. When I moved it to the top, I started to see some action. This definitely works.

Tower ads outdated?
We tend to scan a page top to bottom, from left to right, unless something interesting catches our eye. It would make common sense that the tower placement off to the right side of your text would work well. As a viewer reaches the end of a line, it’s a good place for their eye to rest. If an ad is close by, it’s more likely to catch a viewers eye.

A lot of other people have had luck with this layout. I never have. I think people are getting used to this type of ad placement and are trained to completely ignore it. You may have a site it works well on. Try it and see if it works for you. Leave a comment if you think that Im completely wrong.

Google allows you up to 3 adblocks, and 1 linkblock on a page. I believe its better to keep it simple and just use 1 adblock above the fold.

I’ve completely abandoned linkblocks (horizontal and vertical) because even though they get clicked, in my experience they barely pay. I also think they’re kinda sneaky, even for google. They LOOK like navigation. A visitor who doesnt know about adsense, thinks theyre going to another page of your site and end up off of your site with pages of other options. I dont see the sense in that. Keep them on your site, clicking YOUR ads.

If you want to make sites with an adsense income potential, you’ll need more than one. Preferably MANY more. As many as you can think of.

If this is your goal, find a web host that offers alot of space and unlimited add on domains. If you build 100 sites each with different domain names, you don't want to host with 100 different web hosts. That could get quite expensive.

Heres the web host I use that offers unlimited add on domains. You can purchase a cheap domain names and direct them to your published sites. It’s a MUST HAVE when creating many sites.

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Adsense Tip: The best little snippet of code I’ve discovered for to build better pages. BEGINNERS GUIDE TO PHP INCLUDES

Have you drudgingly designed a large site, published it and sat back with a sigh of relief that it’s finally done? Then later that day or week realized, oh no, it’s gotta change and had to go back through EVERY PAGE of your website to change it? I think as beginning designers, we’ve all gone through this. open copy paste save close. Its Mindnumbing, and we only have ourselves to blame because we know there’s a RIGHT way to design the site in the first place.

That right way is with PHP includes.

<?php include ('file.html'); ?>

Thats it folks! Thats all it takes to make global changes to an entire website with just one file.

ANYTHING that you think may change, ESPECIALLY your adsense code should be written in html and brought onto your page with the code above.

Navigation systems are especially important to bring in with php.
Footers with stat code is important to include with php.

You can include as much or as little as you want with php, and its REALLY easy.

There are some things you need to know to get it working correctly.

Start out by designing one page in html exactly how you want your site to look.

Get your layout, optimization, cascading style sheets, images and navigation in order. Then, save the file with the extension as .php instead of .html Go back in and copy the elements you think you may eventually need to change. Paste them into a new html file. Make sure to leave out the html, title, head and body tags OUT of this html file. you only need straight code.

When the pieces are put back together in your browser, it looks like one straight page of html code. It will read the external html code where it is on the page. If you’ve designed that portion with styles, you dont even have to include the link to the styles, it will read it from your original .php header code.

Now go back to where you copied the html from and put this php include code in its place.

<?php include ('file.html'); ?>

Make sure to use the right filename. So if you’re adding your navigation bar, you can use something like <?php include ('navbar.html'); ?> If you’re site will include subfolders, you might want to use absolute urls for your include code. so it will look like this:

<?php include ('http://yoursite.com/navbar.html'); ?>

All of your pages will be .php - and all of your code that you will want to make quick changes to will be .html

This is so handy for testing adsense colors, placement, sizes and styles.

If the includes dont show up, or you get lines of code on your page showing a mysql error, something with your php code is incorrect. If you’ve done this all correctly and find that it’s not working when published, you may want to try one last thing before contacting your web host.

Create a file called php.ini with the following code only:
register_globals = On

Upload this file to your server and see if it works now.