Forum Moderators: martinibuster
You don't make money by keeping people on your site!
Even in cases where adsense is the main revenue earner stickiness can be good. If users find your site useful, and are interested in the topic, they will find the ads useful too in all likeihood and click them not just today but when they return to your useful site tomorrow... and next week .. and next month.
If you look at the hotspots for Adsense positions, one is at the bottom of the page, after the content. If your content is good, and people stick around to read it, then when they reach that spot they are ready to click - and click they will.
This is the adsense forum.
The more visitors the more chance someone will post a link to your site somewhere => more inbound links. More inbound links => higher SE rankings => more traffic.
And more traffic will basically mean more revenue.
I've been working at this for several months and as a result my AdSense check has increased from $2k to $5k. I Quit My Job For AdSense this month, about nine months ahead of the earliest I ever dreamed that I could achieve.
How can this be?
What's it worth to me when someone clicks an ad? Certainly I want someone to click my ads, or I make no money at all. But how much is one click worth? A nickel? A quarter now and then. Never more than that. Everybody's chasing the twenty-dollar keywords, in fact there are tons of people offerring to tell you what they are (for a price!) yet I've yet to hear of anyone having actually received a twenty dollar click.
Riddle me this, Batman:
What does it cost me when someone clicks an ad?
It costs me a Hell of a lot. Ad clicks are very expensive. While I need ad clicks, I want to be very careful about who clicks them. I'll tell you who they are:
People who are going to leave my site anyway and aren't likely to come back.
Might as well charge them a toll at the exit gate.
Now, what's it worth to retain a visitor? To actually get a devoted fan?
This isn't the case for everyone who likes to hang at my site, but I'm easily able to see its true for some of them, and enough of them that I work hard to retain every visitor I can:
Some of my visitors have already been worth from one hundred to one thousand dollars to me.
Why?
Because they gave me links.
When I use google to check my backlinks on my top performing pages, I find they have at most a couple hundred inbound links. I've earned, I don't know, twenty-five grand since I joined AdSense last September. $2,500 / 200 = $125.
The value of links grows with each AdSense check. I said a hundred bucks because I first did this calculation a couple months ago.
The thousand dollar figure comes from leads that my website generated that led to paying contracts. About half my clients have found me through my website over a period of seven years. I got one single contract that paid a hundred grand back in the boom days because I was the top hit for an unusual keyword that they figured would lead to the best one to do their work.
Now, I had to do lots of other work for that thousand bucks a link, but then we all have to work like slaves to earn a hundred bucks a link from AdSense, now don't we?
Here's my advice to you:
Improve your site design and navigation in such a way as to retain as much traffic as possible.
Use AdSense's Channels to identify pages that don't generate revenue. Remove all the advertisements from them. The reason is that too many ads turn people off. These pages could still be of value to you if your visitors link them.
If you must have ads, have them blend in with the page design. Tasteful ads won't stop someone from linking, but garish, in-your-face ads will.
Don't advertise in such a way as to capture traffic that will click your ads. This is very costly and difficult, and very unlikely to break even. Instead:
Advertise in such a way that those who respond to the ads will be likely to link to your content.
I'll send you my bill in the mail.
I used to wonder, I really did, how I could be so lucky as to earn three grand during my first month in AdSense, when so many here report that they earn only pennies. But it's no accident:
My website was around for over six years before I published my first AdSense ad. Instead, I used it to attract clients. It worked well, but it was a lot of work. Why?
Because I realized very early on that I had to generate about a hundred thousand hits to my website for each signed contract. This helped me to understand that I wasn't going to get clients by spamming them with "Hire Me! Don't Delay!" all over my site, but instead giving them...
Quality Content. Easy Site Navigation. Tasteful Design.
Well, I can't really claim that my old design was tasteful. It's a lot better now than it used to be, because my artist wife was so appalled with it that she redesigned it for me. But the fact is that I labored constantly for years to improve my site's design, both as I learned better web design skills and as better design technologies became supported in browsers.
I started my first website back in the HTML 2.0 days. Do you remember NCSA Mosaic? I targeted it with my first site's design. I avoided JPEGs because Mosaic had to launch a helper application to view them. Netscape Navigator 1.0 was expensive but all the rage because it was multithreaded and didn't freeze while it downloaded a page.
My final piece of advice is to do what I have done:
Learn from experience.
Experiment. If something works, do it some more. If something doesn't, then don't do it anymore.
"Experiment" is the key word. You have to actually try stuff out to see if it will work for you and your individual site. Don't just go by advice you hear here or anywhere else. Put it to the test.
Later.
You don't make money by keeping people on your site!
...charge them a toll at the exit gate.
My feelings exactly..
my theory on this is that a site with no content may get visitors to click on one ad but a site with good quality content may get visitors to click on more than one ad if the ads are relevant.
Plus, with the new "site-targeted CPM ads," publishers get paid for impressions, not just for clicks. So it makes sense to have a site that's sticky--at least if you have the kind of site that will attract and retain advertisers.
Good luck!
