I got a question via PM yesterday in the forums yesterday where my answer was so long, I decided to cut and paste it and turn it into a post. I’m sure Bush Mackel won’t mind.

Hey Everton,

I had a question regarding your AdSense earnings. You seem to make a lot from them were others who have more “popular” sites do not (johnchow etc). Someone on my site said that this was because your site gets a lot of search engine traffic. I was wondering if this was the secret to your success and if you had any tips for me. No worries if you don’t feel like sharing.

Thanks in advance either way!
Bush (#)

I think Bush does have a point, as a higher proportion of my income does seem to come from Google Adsense. However, I don’t think I’m unique as my blogging partner Martin’s earnings are dominated by AdSense as well. I think that there are a number of factors why we seem to make on average more from Adsense than other blogs:

• Traffic From Search Engines: 70% of my monthly traffic comes from search engines, which is quite substantial. The search engine traffic definitely makes a difference as overall I get more traffic (around 400k PVs) than say John Chow (around 300k PVs), even though he has more loyal readers who leave comments and who read his feed. Search engine visitors are more likely to click on contextual ads than bloggers who probably don’t even see ads.
• Writing Posts That People Will Search For: Sometimes I think that because I can’t blog during the days when I’m doing my day job works to my advantage, as it means I don’t just write a post about the first thing that interests me. Because my posts tend to go live the next day, I have to find stories that people will still be searching for on search engines
• A Good Stats Package: If you don’t have a good stats package then you should get one ASAP, so that you can spot trends and new developments. For instance, I noticed that Dennis’ FIFA2008 posts were getting a lot of Google love, and 2-3 of his posts are always in my top 15 now. I thought this was strange, but immediately started thinking of ways to benefit from this. I contacted Dennis to let him know and not only suggested that he write more about FIFA2008, but that he should also register www.fifa2008news.com and use his FIFA posts on this site to drive traffic to the new site. It’s proven to be a very successful strategy, and already FIFA2008News is getting a lot of traffic and it is continuing to grow. In a few months it’ll be a very big site, so I hope Dennis remembers that I told him what to do
• Writing Timeless Posts: Similar to the point above is not writing posts that are only interesting for a few days. If you look at my top posts in a months time, the top 10 will be pretty much the same. In fact, some of those posts are over 18 months old, but yet they still account for around 10-15% of my traffic. gHacks does well with search engines for the same reasons as Martin constantly pumps out posts about the latest utilities, tweaks and hacks that are timeless and which are constantly getting him more Google love
• My Theme: I’ve spent a lot of time trying to make my theme and posts SEO friendly. I also made a conscious decision that the placement of my Adsense units were the priority for my theme, which definitely helps my CTR. When I hear people quoting 1-2% CTRs, I’m stunned. Basically, you have to decide if you really want to maximise Adsense income or not. For instance, JC has decided he doesn’t want to maximise Adsense income, because if he did he wouldn’t have a huge header that takes up a third of the page so that even at 1024×768 his ads and most of his content are almost below the fold, he wouldn’t have an affiliate banner above his Adsense unit creating more noise, the AdSense unit would be on the left not the right etc etc
• Writing Posts That Get Good Ads: If you want to increase your AdSense earnings then you need ads with good CPCs, and to do that you need to write posts that will attract those ads. Writing posts about blogging, themes, what you did last night etc are probably not going to get good ads as no-one is going to want to advertise on those posts, whereas posts about products will. That’s why even though probloggers like Darren Rowse don’t disclose their earnings, I can guarantee you that his digital photography blog makes disproportionately more money than his problogger site,which I bet relatively makes no money at all, even though it probably has a lot more traffic

If you’re looking for more ways to improve your Adsense earnings then try this post.

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