A simple way to monetize your blog is to use Google Adsense. It’s easy and quick to set up an Adsense account.

You might be wondering: what kind of blog can make money with Adsense? There are three prerequisites:

• You need a certain amount of organic traffic from search engines.
• You need to know how to choose, position and optimise Adsense Units.
• You need a Privacy Policy on your site.

Let’s explore these in more depth.

Organic Traffic

Search engine traffic is the best kind of traffic for contextual ads, because people coming from search engines are looking for solutions to their question. If they see an ad that matches what they are looking for, they will click on it.

Question-based searches (e.g. ‘how to stop snoring’) and product-based searches (e.g. ‘yamaha electronic pianos’) tend to result in more clicks and higher advertising earnings. So it makes sense to work your ads accordingly.

How much traffic is enough? A rule of thumb is that you need at least 400 to 500 visitors a day from search engines. If you are not at that level yet, I suggest that you build up your content and optimize your SEO until you have that kind of traffic.

Choosing Ad Units

A simple rule is: the bigger the units, the better.

According to Google, the top performing Adsense units are:

• the 336×280 large rectangle;
• the 300×250 medium rectangle;
• the 160×600 wide skyscraper.

How to format the units

The more you can blend the units with the design of your website, the better. Otherwise your readers can suffer from what is called ‘ad-blindness’. Use the headline and link colors you have on your blog.

Here is what this can look like (This is a screenshot of Dailyblogtips.com):

Positioning the units correctly

In order to get a decent click-through rate, you need to place your units ‘above the fold’. This means readers should be able to see the ads without scrolling down.

The middle, followed by the left side of your website, produces the highest click-through rate.

Another good spot is directly beneath your posts. There are two free plugins that make it easy to place your ad units. They are called MaxBannerAds and AdInjection.

Below you can see a heat-map produced by Google that shows which areas are most likely to attract clicks. (The darker the area, the more clicks it attracts.)

The Champion Combo

The best performing Adsense strategy – which I call the Champion Combo – is to use the 336×280 large rectangle and place it directly underneath the headline.

The Privacy Policy

Google requires Adsense publishers to have a privacy policy on their site. Click here to download a privacy policy template. Create a page with your privacy policy and place a link into the footer of your blog. That’s all you need to do in order to be compliant with Google’s privacy policy.

Testing your Ads

You can integrate Adsense with Google Analytics, and then you can test your ads. Before you can check out your Google Ad performance alongside your traffic data, you need to connect Adsense and Analytics. This can be done with a single click. When you are logged into Adsense and are viewing your report overview, click the link to integrate Adsense with your Analytics account.

Useful Tools

You can preview what ads would show on your web page with Adsense Sandbox.

Find out how many people are searching for a keyword and how much advertisers are willing to pay for an ad click with the Google keyword tool.

If you use Google Chrome for a browser, you can also quickly and easily check how your ads are performing and how much you’re earning by using this link.

As you can see, earning money with Google Adsense is possible if you go about it in right way. However, if your blog hasn’t got enough search engine traffic yet, it’s not really worth the effort. In that case, affiliate marketing or selling services and products would be a much better option.

Author:  Daniel Scocco and A-List Team