Why are my Adsense earnings so low?

Sandy has just started working with Adsense, and she's quickly noticed a couple of things:

1. Her Adsense earnings are really low
2. The Adsense ads link to bizarre pseudo search engines

What is going on?

Well first of all Sandy, don't give up on Adsense yet. In all honesty it isn't going to be bring in the big bucks for quite a while yet, but it really is one of the best programs out there, so you're well advised to take good care of that account.

To see what is going on, let's take a look at the situation from Google's point of view. Google earns its (billions of dollars in) revenue from advertisers, so it wants to take good care of them. Whenever an advertiser pays Google for a click-through, Google wants to be sure that they are delivering a viewer who is honestly interested in the advertiser's product or service - it's up to the advertiser to take it from there. In the ideal scenario, an Adsense ad attracts one of Sandy's long time loyal readers, and they click on the ad. Loyal readers together with perhaps more casual readers interested in the topic of Sandy's blog are thought of as "natural" traffic.

There is also unnatural traffic. As you can imagine, Google is concerned about traffic, bought to a particular place with the express purpose of clicking on the ad. Things like "click exchanges" (you click my ads, I'll click yours) and robot traffic (in which another computer simulates a human browsing your blog and clicking your ads) are outright fraud: "click fraud." But the line between natural and unnatural traffic is not a sharp, and this creates a problem for Google. Traffic from "paid to click" (PTC) sites is probably towards the unnatural end of the spectrum. Where does Entrecard traffic fall?

Entrecard is a topic all on its own but, depending on how someone chooses to participate, the traffic pattern can look a lot like PTC traffic. In particular, it can have a high "bounce rate." If someone clicks through to your site, looks for nothing else but your Entrecard widget, clicks to drop their card and, woosh, clicks on to the next site, that's a bounce. You didn't convince them to stop and read. Google is quite suspicious of such traffic and, to prevent their advertisers being harmed by torrents of non-buying customers, they "Smart Price" the Adsense account. That is, they severly limit the amount per click you, the publisher, can earn. When they do this, Google is telling you in no uncertain terms that they suspect you of buying cheap traffic from somewhere just to boost your Adsense earnings.

It isn't really personal. Google's traffic pattern analysis algorithms do this automatically. But, you should take steps to amend the situation. Adsense has been tightening its policies lately, and you don't want to be at the top of their "to be reviewed" list. In Sandy's case ...

Sandy, you should remove the Adsense boxes until you've dealt with the drop and run traffic. Does that mean you have to stop using Entrecard? Not at all. But it does mean that you can't include blogs with Adsense on them in the nightly drop-and-run free for all. (Note that if one blog is Smart Priced, then your entire Adsense account is Smart Priced until the situation is dealt with). Entrecard can also be used in a very gentle, natural way. You might even want to sign up with a second email address to pursue the more leisurely style of socialization that Entrecard facilitates. Obviously this isn't going to get you 6,000 uniques per month, but honestly, if it gets you 60 new loyal readers, you've done really well. Word of mouth really is the best advertising. Once you're back to 20-50 "natural" unique visitors per day, put the Adsense back up. Then you'll be delivering the kind of click-throughs that keep Google and its adverisers happy. (Not to mention that your earnings per click will increase 10 fold :)

What about the bizarre pseudo search engines? Actually, these guys are being a little bit naughty. Talk about an internet grey area. Since Sandy had been Smart Priced. Her clicks-throughs are very inexpensive. However, other ad networks are still paying premium prices for the click-throughs for those same Smart Priced keyphrases (e..g, "crocheted mittens" and "learn to knit"). Shopping.com, for example, is buying Sandy's click-throughs and presenting viewers with a very bland web site that encourages them to ... well ... keep clicking. In effect, they are buying cheap clicks from Google and selling them at a higher price to a competitor network. This is known as PPC Arbitrage, and is at least frowned upon by all major ad networks. Both Google and Yahoo have declared it to be a violation of their terms of service (to sell them cheap clicks, not necessarily to buy their cheap clicks), so it is definitely not a newbie friendly area. Tread carefully if you want to be earning those Adsense dollars a couple of years from now.

Sandy, when you're ready to put Adsense back up, drop me a line and we'll go searching for some suitable keyphrases for your blogs with high per click earnings. Get ready though, we'll be writing up a dozen or so 400-500 word articles about those keyphrases and asking all the net to link to them :)

Adsense Case Study

$100 per day from Adsense after 3 months from 1 blog

That's the challenge Steve Crooks set himself in the linked thread at www.warriorforum.com right at the end of December. He's obviously experienced in building this sort of site, so there's lots to learn for newbies. However, the thread itself has grown quite unwieldy, so I thought I'd extract out some the best bits and summarize them here. This should also serve to explain why I have the corresponding blog 100buckschallenge.com that Steve set up for this challenge on my blogroll.

You'll recall that Adsense is Google's PPC advertising program (otherwise see this post). Typical Adsense earnings are $20/month, so how is Steve going to go about raising that figure to $100/day!? There are three components to the equation:

1. 2000 unique visitors per day
2. 10% of whom click an ad (i.e., 10% click-through-rate or CTR)
3. $0.50 per click paid by Adsense.

These are not unreasonable goals, but the 2000 uniques per day is challenging to achieve from free search engine traffic in just 3 months. However, even if it took you 6 or 12 months to build such a site, a steady $3000/month thereafter with only maintenance level SEO (search engine optimization) is certainly a worth pursuing.

So what's the first step? Finding a niche that can support that level of interest, i.e., some substantial multiple of 2000 searches per day on Google, and that has low enough competition so that a new site has a chance of capturing those 2000 visitors. What sort of multiple are we talking about? Well that depends on your search engine results page (SERP) ranking. The figures break down like this:

• SERP 1, position 1: 45% of all clicks
• SERP 1, position 2: 12% of all clicks
• SERP 1, position 3: 8% of all clicks
  
• SERP 1, positions 4-10: 6% dropping to 3% of all clicks
• SERP 2, as a whole: less than 5% of all clicks
  
• SERP 3+: you might as well be invisible

So if competition is low enough for you to achieve SERP 1, position 1 with a brand new site in 3 months then the niche only needs 4500 searches per day or 135,000 searches per month. If you can't claw your way above the middle of SERP 1, then you'll need a niche with a search volume closer to 40,000 searches per day or 1.2 million searches per month.

The second step is finding a niche where Adwords advertisers are paying some substantial multiple of $0.50 per click (you only get a percentage of what advertisers pay, and it is practically a state secret what percentage you get). You're looking for good support at the $2 per click level.

Steve chose the European Cruises for the following reasons (quoting from his post):

1. It has a CPC of $6.51 associated with it.
2. It has approximately 6600 searches per month.
3. The search volume is reasonably consistent through the year.
4. The competition is 181,000 in google.
5. I can create content for this niche.

You might notice something amiss there given our search volume requirement calculations above. 6600 searches per month isn't going to provide Steve with 2000 uniques per day. And indeed he was later called on this in the thread. Steve admitted that he'd miscalculated. The solution? Instead of 70 articles (of 500-700 words each) on the blog, the new target is 300 targeting a galaxy of keyphrases around "European Cruises." 300 is a lot of articles. Steve is now budgeting $300 to outsource some of the content creation.

Right here is one of the problems for newbies. You're not going to invest hundreds of dollars and hundreds of hours in a scheme that you're not sure is going to work. That's what makes this case study so interesting. No matter what he achieves, it will give a good idea of what someone who is reasonably competent can actually achieve, and from there, plans can be made.

Okay, on to some of the details. There's some discussion over how important the domain name is. The general consensus is to go for a .com, even though the namespace is crowed. You want your keywords (e.g., european and cruises) in the domain name. In the proper order is preferred. If you can't get your keyphrase, try adding small words (e.g., myeuropeancruises.com, europeancruisesforyou.com). Use Wordpress. Use a fairly bland theme (in the end, you want the ads to stand out). Use the All in One SEO Pack plug-in for Wordpress. Do use article categories. Don't put the ads up until your traffic is reasonable (e.g., 100 uniques per day). When you do, place the ads in banners above and below each post and on the sidebar.

Now it's time to write the articles. You should think of each article as a traffic attractor. Each article will target a specific subset of the keyphrase galaxy. Ideally, each article will become SERP 1, position 1 for at least one of its target keyphrase subset, but of course your success will vary depending on your competitors. The nice thing about a 300 article site is that you are sure to achieve this for some articles, but it is also important to keep up the average traffic per article. You're hoping at least a few go viral (e.g., front page of digg.com, permanent link from a mainstream media site), not for the traffic surge, but for the residual. It is crucial to spend time on the keyphrase research. You are not the first to write about this, so check existing forums on the topic, Yahoo answers (what do clueless people ask about your topic?), and article directories for ideas.

Once you have articles in hand, about 40% of the battle is over. But now you need to get quality backlinks to each and every article. How to do that? Welcome to the world of SEO. Basically the answer is: however you can. Social bookmarking is all the rage (digg.com, mixx.com, reddit.com, stumbleupon.com, etc, etc). Just be careful you don't only bookmark your own sites or you will be labeled a self promoter (the shame!) and possibly banned. Writing guest posts (with embedded backlinks) for established sites. Links from older sites can help a lot. Link exchange with established sites (find out their email from the whois page and email them with an offer they can't resist). These are some of Steve's suggestions. However SEO is a large topic, and this post is already too long, so I'll go into more detail about getting backlinks in future posts.

Steve's challenge is a long way from over. By day 24, the basic site was up and he was getting about 75 uniques daily. Can he build it to 2000 uniques by day 90? I'll certainly be following along, and I'll let you know if I see anything interesting. If you're eager for more info, you can check out Steve's challenge blog. He's even put up a forum so that you can ask him detailed questions. This is a great opportunity to basically get free coaching in this area, so go ahead and take advantage of it!

The Red Stapler Chronicles

So why is The Red Stapler Chronicles on my blogroll? Kevin has been playing with IM techniques for a couple of years now, so he is basically a step ahead of me. In reading blogs like his, I'm basically looking for the gotchas - lessons that I wouldn't like to have to learn first hand. For example, there are, at last count, over 256 ways to get yourself banned from Google Adsense. Since Adsense can provide a really nice residual income after the initial investment, this is best avoided. Their terms of service aren't always common sense, and you can believe they have all the basic click fraud schemes covered by now (don't click on yourself, for god's sake - there's a great post in there about postmodern masturbatory taboos, but I'll resist the urge ... as it were :D ).

Back to RSC, this is not a high information blog. Like so many other make money online blogs, the information comes from the context. Install the SEOBook Firefox Plug-in, and check out his SEO stats (if you are not using Firefox, then ... I'm surprised. Why aren't you using it?). About 9 months worth of traffic, 10k views, 3k backlinks, PR 0. Hmmm, he should have better than PR 0 by now - probably monetized too early. And I wouldn't advise the "make money online" in the keyword meta tag. I'm convinced Google now only uses the keyword meta tag to penalize newer sites. Could also be the Cash Crate mention (obviously, I don't care about the PR of this blog :) ) .

What about those 3k backlinks? That's not too bad, although Atniz is only 3 months older and has 51k backlinks (and PR 3). Let's see ... lots of Entrecard and make money online blogs. Quite a few dofollow blog lists. One Digg (here's his profile so you can friend him on Digg - http://digg.com/users/rutgerskevin ). One myspace. One wikipedia (nice - bet it's his number one passive referrer). And a bunch of GPT stuff. Maybe that's why the PR 0? Nothing says "internet ghetto" like low end GPT. On top of that, GPT blogs tend to be link farms.

Now check out that monetization. I don't think there is a monetization option he isn't trying out. That's why I love RSC. Look at that. It's a smorgasboard. Adsense, of course. The mindless Cash Crate thing - he must have pulled a bunch of downline sign-ups, his earnings page lists $3k for Cash Crate. Well, good downline building skills will come in handy once he really goes after the prize. Hope he built an opt-in list. No, of course he didn't. Still doesn't have more than the standard Feedburner subscribe to posts by email button. Kevin, come on, you're supposed to be 2 years ahead of me here. Maybe it's the time he wasted on GPT. Must admit, even I wasted, oh ... an hour on it :rollseyes: He's an Amazon affiliate - which has more potential than I think most people admit, although Google has recently been downranking purpose-built Amazon and eBay affiliate sites - but the only product he has listed is the Swingline red stapler, which is pretty cute, actually (Office Space reference, of course).

He's a Bluehost affiliate. Now this is actually interesting. Hostgator has been offering these ridiculous commissions on new sign-ups. Like $100 per sign-up. No kidding. But, and here is the but, apparently they are using every excuse in the book not to pay out. Well of course, $100 per sign-up wipes out first year revenue, let alone first year profit. But, because Hostgator offered these ridiculously high sign-up commissions, their competitors like Bluehost were forced to offer something comparable. If Bluehost is really paying out, it is a goldmine. No need to be a hosting services reseller, just do whatever you can to get honest-to-god hosting prospects to sign-up for Bluehost, and you'll be pulling the big bucks in no time. If they are really paying out, you should sign-up with them right now and start a Google Adwords campaign ... if they are really paying out ... and there is the catch. Perhaps Kevin knows?

What else ... a bunch more GPT stuff, including outright scams. And, last but not least, the interesting Entrecard upsell http://www.oiopublisher.com/ . I've heard good things about it. I'd be interested to hear about your success stories with them.

All in all, a blog worth watching. Kevin is sure to move from strength to strength. He definitely has goals. It'll be worth watching how he achieves them.