Maximize Adsense Blog Earnings: 10 Reasons Most Bloggers Fail

One of the things I love about blogging is being able to share tips with others. I think bloggers all share a common interest, and we need to stick together to help one another succeed. In fact, I have learned so much from other bloggers along my journey (both new ones and older ones), that I thought I would share a brief experience, and also give a few tips.

Most bloggers using wordpress, blogger.com, or other platform will have many options to enter Adsense units in different locations. It is VITALLY important to make sure you have the right locations, the right colors, and a few other things. This is so important.

I’ve noticed as much as 100% increase in ad earnings by making a few changes. This may not seem like much if you are making $50 and go to $100, but imagine if you were making thousands or even tens of thousands. That makes a BIG difference then!

10 Tips to Maximize Adsense Earnings on Blogs

Here are 10 tips that many bloggers fail to implement. If you really want to boost your adsense earnings (sometimes you can even double or triple revenue from advertisements), then these tips may help you.  By the way, you absolutely MUST test ad formats at all times. Don’t neglect this very important aspect of boosting your income. Okay, are my 10 things most people neglect to do, that if done, will probably maximize your earnings.

10 Ways To Undermonetize Adsense:

1. No Adsense for Search–While it certainly won’t make you rich, I do earn a few dollars through the Adsense for Search feature each month. I’ve noticed that many bloggers neglect to integrate their wordpress search with Adsense. You can easily log into your Adsense account and create a custom search bar, and you can use widgets in wordpress to add this to your site in minutes. Again this is my smallest Adsense earner, but the few dollars add up over time.
2. No Link Units–This is a biggie: Adsense allows up to 3 link units per page (in addition to 3 regular ad units). While they may seem irrelevant or pointless, I can assure you they do pretty well. Many times I can get clicks that range from a few cents to a dollar or two. So I would highly recommend you ad at least 1 link unit in an area that will be visible to people. It should appear as a natural part of the website, yet be noticeable to visitors.
3. Not Enough Ad Units–Sadly, many bloggers only put a small square or two in an obscure loction that most people will never see, much less click. I would recommend using all 3 allowed by Google, and place them in a place that get’s your attention. In addition, the largest ones seem to work well (larger skyscraper, large squares). You will notice a big difference by using all 3, trust me. Experiment with colors too. Sometimes a bland color will do well, while sometimes very contrasting text links will do the trick. Try each for 2 weeks and compare the results.
4. Consider Changing Ad Locations–Every ad location most bloggers use, is the exact spot where I get the least clicks. If you make a switch to match what the heat map shows (which I have basically duplicated on my site), you should notice a nice jump in earnings. Put the ads that earn most where the heat map indicates (I would stick with skyscraper and large squares), and I would probably put all 3 link units where your current skyscraper is.
5. Consider Changing Color Schemes–As I scroll most blogs, I am almost completely blind to their ads. You may want to tweak the color scheme a bit to see if that helps too. For example, below most posts there is a have a large square. For example. On one blog I recently visited, the titles for the ads were a light yellowish/white color. Instead, it may be more effective to change this to match the color of your blog  links (the blue color). You want ads to blend in so that they look natural, yet you also want them to be noticeable. To me, those ads did a good job of blending in, but weren’t very noticeable. You may want to see if removing the white outline on your skyscraper will help too, and play with different colors for that as well. If that doesn’t work, you may even want to consider changing the entire color scheme of your theme, or parts of the theme (such as the text/sidebar area).
6. Set Ads to Show Both Image and Text–I would recommend you log into Adsense and check your ad unit settings to ensure they are set to both image and text adds, and see if that helps. Google uses an algorithm to show the most expensive ads (whether it is text or  image) so this could increase your earnings. They highly recommend you allow both.
7. Consider Tweaking Your Theme–You did a great job with your design, and your theme is pretty cool. But to match the heat map, you may consider adding a left sidebar. Here are my most popular ads units (from most popular to least popularly clicked): Top large square, left skyscraper, bottom large square, link units, search. So if you tweak your theme to distribute your ads in different places, it may increase your earnings.
8. Tweak Your Adsense Plugin–You may want to tweak the Adsense plugin to display those ads consistently. For example, I noticed on the bottom of many bloggers using a plugin, it alternates between a large square and a small banner in a certain location. You may want to just set it to the large square. Larger ads seem to perform better overall, and are more noticeable. I personally don’t use a plugin for Ads, I just insert the code directly into my theme files so they display that way on every page. If there is a page I don’t want to display ads, I either use a special template, or create a php switch code for my single.php template (which I recently implemented so that when I write a sponsored post, the ads wont display in the post area).
9. Keep Tweaking–Part of maximizing Adsense is to keep working and measure your results. If you don’t have channels, make sure to create channel for each site you run, and each ad unit. This way you can see what gets the most clicks. Then, if you move the units to a newer location, you can see if it increased or decreased your clicks. This helped out a lot for me in the beginning as I experimented with different blog designs. At this point, I honestly feel my Adsense placement is as maximized as it can possibly be.
10. Keep Blogging–Once you maximize your ad placement and color scheme, you should see a nice jump in earnings. Just keep blogging, and those earning should stay fairly consistent. The more traffic you get, the more ad impressions/clicks you will naturally receive from that traffic. It seems your blog is growing, so that is something to be happy about.

I hope those tips help any bloggers out there who need to maximize their Adsense. You don’t necessarily have to follow all of those tips. Some bloggers may not want to place ads in certain places, or may not like too many ads. That is perfectly fine. I just thought that I would throw those tips out there since they have worked well for me and my blogs/sites. Sometimes what seems obvious to one person is a completely new concept to another.

However, I feel pretty strongly that if any blogger implemented those basic tips, they will see their Adsense earnings double, triple, or even quadruple in no time. It is a really easy way to boost your income without having to increase your traffic. And it is all 100% safe, legal, and within Adsense’s terms and conditions.

Good luck everyone, and I hope those tips helped!

NOTE: The article above was written by a contributing author: