Today I want to look at another simple way to increase what AdSense (and other ad networks) can earn you. It’s the most simple and obvious thing to do – but it’s amazing how few bloggers actually do it.
Put more Ads on your Page!
It’s not rocket science – but one of the quickest ways to increase your blog’s earnings is to add more advertising to your blog. Of course it’s not just a matter of slapping as many ads as possible on your blog – but more on that later in this post.
Let me continue the story I started yesterday on my own journey to higher AdSense earnings.
Remember, yesterday I told the story of how I moved my ads from one position to another like this:
That move led to an increase in earnings of around 50%. Not bad for 10 minutes work.
A few days after making this change I had calmed down after the initial rush of excitement and decided to take things to the next level. I decided that if one ad unit on a page could earn as much as it did that more ad unit might increase the overall earnings.
Why I’d not considered it earlier I’m not sure (from memory there was a time where you were quite limited in how many AdSense units you could use per page – these days the limit is 3) – but I decided to see what impact it would have.
I moved from the above layout to this one with two additional ad units:
What I discovered is that on a blog the positions above comments (at the end of an article) and below them are good positions because they are places that readers ‘pause’.
A reader reads your post and then pauses while they decide what to do next. Web users are wired to ‘click’ in pauses so it’s a logical spot to put an advertisement that pays on a per click basis.
Adding two extra ad units didn’t triple my earnings (the ads were further down the page and got less attention than the top one) but they did significantly increase my earnings virtually immediately.
Try Link Units
Another way to add an AdSense unit on a page is to use the ‘link unit’. These ad units come in two varieties (although numerous sizes). You can see the full variety of units here but here’s how they look.
Here’s one in a horizontal configuration:
Here’s one in a vertical configuration:
Link Units tend to perform best when they are placed in and around navigational areas as they can quite look like ‘menus’. Here’s a couple of logical spots to put them (highlighted in green). You can currently put up to 3 link units on a page.
Link Units convert well on some blogs but not others. Some publishers swear by them others don’t like them at all – it’s worth testing to see if yours is one that they work on.
Mix and Match Ad Networks
The other way to add more ad units on a page is to look at other ad networks than AdSense. AdSense allows you to place other ad networks ads on the same page as theirs as long as the other ads don’t ‘mimic’ the AdSense units. This means you can’t use YPN on the same page but you can use Chitika (I use them very successfully with AdSense), ShoppingAds, WidgetBucks, Shopzilla and others.
A Word of Warning
Keep in mind that more ads might mean more earnings – BUT there comes a point where more ads makes your site look cheap and nasty and can begin to put off readers. It also can get to a point where the ads get in the way of your content. Some bloggers stuff so many ads on their blogs that the content ends up being below the fold on a page – something that might increase earnings per visitor but that doesn’t really encourage those visitors to keep coming back for more.
Different blogs will have a different threshold for how many ads are too many. It’s something to listen to your readers on and to keep a careful eye on.
The other problem with too many ads on a page is that the more ads you have per page the less likely your readers are of clicking any single one of them. More outbound links means the click through rate on any one of them will be lower. While you might increase the overall number of clicks on ads (which in a CPC program like Adsense can be good) if you also run private ad sales on your blog (ie you sell ads directly to advertisers) you’ll be providing those advertisers with less value.
The same thing goes with affiliate programs. If you’re running them on your blog the more ads you have the less CTR you’ll have on the affiliate links.
So do experiment with more ads on your blog as it will generally increase earnings – but keep in mind that sometimes less is more and it can be worth resisting the temptation to have too many!
