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Adsense Tips for Bloggers 4 – Increasing Traffic

Posted By Darren Rowse 23rd of September 2004 Adsense 0 Comments

This is part 4 in a series of posts on maximizing adsense revenue for bloggers. The full series is Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7 and Part 8.

I have argued the case for our equation for increasing Adsense Revenue

Adsense Revenue = Traffic Levels + High Paying Ads + Relevant Ads + Optimally Positioned and Designed Ads

I now will turn my attention to each of the four elements of good Adsense revenue in turn and give some practical easy to implement tips to improve each from my experience.

Increasing Traffic Levels is a key component to increasing Adsense revenue. As I wrote previously, ‘The more people that see you Adsense Ads, the more likelihood there is that someone will click on them.’

Increasing the readership of your blog is not as simple as it sounds, it takes time, patience and hard work (and sometimes a bit of luck) Having said that there are many things you can do to get your blog in front of a wider audience and there exposing the adsense messages on your site to more potential ‘clickers’. Here are a few tips…

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  • Quality, Interesting, Useful and Original Content – What are the blogs that you read the most? If you’re anything like me they are blogs that have quality content that ‘scratches me where I itch’. This is essential to increasing your readership unless you have a pretty amazing ‘gimmick’ to bring readers in.
  • Good Blog Design is really important if you want your blog to create a good first impression. With millions of other blogs and sites out there its worth some effort to make yours stand out. Also worth a read is Good Weblog Design and Layout.
  • Link to others – be generous with your links to other bloggers big and small. You’ll be surprised how many links come back your way. This not only brings traffic from their sites but doesn’t hurt your ranking in Google.
  • Comment on others blogs – Some of my most loyal readers came to my blog because I genuinely interacted with them on their blogs through comments. Hear me now, I say genuinely because its easy to spam in comments, but this will have the opposite effect of generating readers to your blog.
  • Update Frequently – There is nothing that turns me off a blog faster than seeing that it hasn’t been updated for a month or more. Keep it rolling over with interesting content.
  • Interact with Readers – Having an interactive blog that invites the involvement of readers is one way of generating repeat visitors. I’ve written a tip on Interactive Blogging including a number of interactive tools that you can use on your blog. Also check out this tip on using comments effectively to increase interactivity on your blog.
  • Optimise for Search Engines – I can’t stress enough how important Search Engines are to increasing traffic, especially traffic that will click on your ads. I find that 95% of my traffic comes from Google and have found that anecdotal evidence suggests this traffic clicks through on Adsense ads at a higher rate than traffic from links on other blogs and sites. So work hard at getting listed and highly ranked on Search Engines.
  • Add a signature to your outgoing email – Learn a lesson from Hotmail who have used signatures on the bottom of their users emails for years to promote their home page and generate interest in their product. Be careful though if you don’t want your worlds to collide!
  • Web Rings – There are literally thousands of webrings that you can sign up for. I’m not sure how effective they are these days, but some people still swear by them.
  • Add an RSS feed to your blog – more and more people are reading blogs without ever visiting them through News Aggregators that pick up information using RSS. Whilst this does not guarantee those reading through aggregators will visit your blog (and therefore see your Adsense Ads) it certainly increases the chances of them dropping by, especially if you invite comments and have internal links on your posts.
  • List your site on Portals – There are a growing number of sites which exclusively list blogs. If you want people to find you its worth submitting your blog to be listed on them. Some focus on specific topics while others list blogs on a wide variety of topics (like Eaton Web and Globe of Blogs). Other portals like BlogShares and Blog Street also list a lot of blogs in different ways which might increase your blogs profile.
  • Blog Search Engines and Indexes – Get yourself registered on sites like Blogdex, Technorati, Popdex and Daypop (they require RSS I think). These sites have features that allow people to search for blog entries via topic and keywords. They also list the most popular recent topics and each have other interesting features which can enhance your blogging experience.
  • Start a Newsletter – Offer your readers a newsletter service to keep them up to date with your latest posts. I’ve found since adding a free weekly newsletter to my digicam blog that hundreds of readers have signed up for regular updates of my latest posts. Think about this – hundreds of people have given me permission to invite them to come back to my blog – every week!
  • Get Involved in Blog Projects and Memes – From time to time other bloggers will invite your participation in a blog project of theirs. Get involved, support their project and you might find it pays off. On the flip side start your own blogging project or meme. Do something that is of service to other bloggers. I tried something like this with Underblogs and Blogger Idol.
  • Get involved in other web forums – Genuinely participate in web forums and discussion pages on topics related to your blog. Many of these allow you to add a signature to your posts which raise your blogs profile.
  • Promote your Posts – If you think you’ve written something worthwhile spend a few minutes letting others know about it. I regularly shoot other bloggers to notify them of what I’ve written if I think it will interest them. Think about it before you send the email and don’t bombard the same people constantly with every topic you write on – be selective, concise, polite and helpful with your emails but don’t be afraid to promote yourself.
  • Add a ‘Email a Friend’ Option to your posts – make it easy for your readers to tell others about what you’ve written. I know this function gets used regularly on my blog and brings in new readers that I would never otherwise have been able to reach.

These are just some of the ideas that I’ve used and seen others use to increase the readership of a blog and thereby increase the exposure of Adsense ads to a wider audience.Many of the above tips were taken from my Blog Tips Series including the ‘Finding Readers’ Series.

What methods have your found to be effective at increasing the readership of your blog? What works for your and what doesn’t? What tips would you add to this collection?

Of course increasing traffic alone won’t greatly increase your Adsense revenue, but it can help! In our next Adsense Tip for Bloggers we will explore ways to generate High Paying Ads – the second component in our Adsense Revenue Equation.

The full series is at Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7 and Part 8.

About Darren Rowse
Darren Rowse is the founder and editor of ProBlogger Blog Tips and Digital Photography School. Learn more about him here and connect with him on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.
Comments
  1. thanks for the tips, i need all the help i can get.

  2. Thanks for the tips. I just posted a few of the changes to my site at http://www.fourhourworkweekdiary.com. However, Eaton now charges $35 to post links and some of the other Blog search engines / portal sites don’t seem to work. Any suggestions? It seems that the above info might be a bit dated.

  3. Hello,today i came accross your blog and learnt a lot and can not check myself communicating..you see i first created a blog when i first learnt about adsense as a residual income stream and promoted this blog in traffic exchanges..search engines etc applied to google for adsense account and got it.when i got one account i created a number of blogs with different topics and put adsense ads there and after sometime i was intimated that i was found to be doing invalid clicks even at the starting point of my adsense life..and subsequently my account was got disabled i appealed for several times and said that i am honest but it vain and now when i tried to start once again with another blog google says that i will not be able to participate forever i do not know what to say but i feel this is pure injustice to a honest worker like me and seer punishment to something i have not done..but i love to be associated with google as i feel adsense still is a good source of residual income if set correctly..but i feel i still lack some knowledge ..what i want is what next..at this point can i request google for an account from some other email address…is there any hope..please let me know…

    anjali

  4. Thanks for sharing. Earning money from adsense is really not easy. Driving traffic is one of the factor. And it’s still hard for me to get a lot of traffic.

  5. I have given up on adsense… It just doesn’t work… no clicks in a month and I have had over three thousand visitors… I guess I just write posts as a free service… I’ll keep reading these blogs…

  6. Nice tips,, fitting to try.. thanks Darren

  7. Thanks a lot for the tips on linking and the links to blog directories. Big help!

  8. Great info, i’ll definately puts these tips and tricks to good work!

  9. You have answer a lot question that I have had and I am going to use all the info you have wrote about.
    mo

  10. Great Stuff! Really like what you have here. However, I do believe that you can now put google ads in your RSS feeds as well. This might be a new option since the recent takeover of feedburner by google. I get quite a few clicks from my RSS everyday.

  11. I just started a blog which I wanted to monetize with adsense and other ads. I’m mainly relying on natural search engine traffic but your article has given me other ideas to get more traffic. Thanks for the great tips and awesome blog!

  12. Good information i’m trying to get my blog rolling and as I am very new to this it helping alot :) thanks mate

    http://philippineboldstar.info/

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