How to Blend Adsense Ads with Your Website

Adsense is a wonderful opportunity for you to generate additional income for your website. It doesn’t cost you anything is the best part! Adsense is also very simple. You have to complete an application with Google and be accepted to host advertisements for other businesses.

Then you simply add lines of code to the html on the pages of the website where you are willing to have advertisements. With that all in place, how do you blend the Adsense Ads into your website so they don’t stick out like a sore thumb? You don’t want them to distract the consumer from what you are offering on your website.

You may not be aware of it, but you have a lot of say in how the advertisements are placed on your website including the placement, format, color, and style. There are many places on a website to put Adsense Ads.

Some prefer to place it on the top of the page and others like the bottom of the page. Along either side of the text for your website is convenient too. Since we read from left to right, the right side is more common as it will attract attention as the eyes move across the page.

According to Google Adsense, the most effective location is at the top of the page because the entire ad can be seen. Often parts of it are hidden when on the sides unless the mouse is used to scroll over the information.

This can be distracting to the consumer and lose the effectiveness of the advertisement. They also recommend using different colors for the ads to differentiate it from your website materials, but to use colors that compliment each other.

The format can be modified to make it different or the same as your website. Some advertisement hosts like everything to be in the same style and size to give a symmetrical look to the pages. Others like to have their information completely distinct from the advertisements.

Both are effective so it is only a matter of personal preference as to how you want your website to appear. Colors including the background can be changed to make everything work together well. You might have to experience a little to come up with the right design you are happy with.

You want to blend the Adsense ads enough that they look natural appearing on your website rather than appearing to be out of place. If they don’t look natural they can be distracting to the consumer. They also won’t be effective because consumers don’t trust what doesn’t look professional when it comes to the internet.

This could be damaging to your own sales on your website so pay close attention to this issue. It is a good idea to ask some others for feedback on how the information appears to them on your website. You should avoid placing ads to where they appear to be banners.

Adsense offers you some useful tools as well to get everything to blend. The Google Adsense Preview tools allows you to test the layout of your website with the ads in place. This gives you the opportunity to change anything that is ineffective before your consumers view in over the internet. You can also contact their customer support 24/7 for questions or concerns you may have.

Adsense is a great way for your website to generate additional income by offering to host advertisements for other businesses with similar products and services to offer consumers. You are still in control of the layout and design of your website.

What makes the idea of participating in Adsense more appealing is the fact you have the ability to change the color, format, and style of the ads placed on your website.

source: how-to-make-money-online.info

If you had big dreams of making a mint with AdSense on your very popular forum, you were probably weeping after looking at the actual bottom line once you did so.

The fact is, AdSense doesn’t work so well on forums. In fact, none of the AdSense Case Studies are about forums.

Why do forums do so badly? There are 3 main reasons.

Visitors in the Wrong Frame of Mind

If someone is doing research for a particular product or service, and they land on your article regarding that product or service, they are likely buy minded. They are actually looking to buy.

With forums, however, most people are interaction minded. They’re not looking to buy something. Rather, they are looking to discuss something.

Those two frames of mind are very different. In the first case the visitor may click on an AdSense ad because they are shopping around and want to explore the options. In the second case the visitor isn’t paying attention to anything on the page but what people are saying. They might follow a recommended product link posted by a user, but they are far less likely to click on an AdSense ad.

Repeat Visitors Make For Low CTR

Another reason why CTR on forums is low is because most of the visitors to a forum have been there dozens of times before. They’ve either already seen and visited the ads they were interested in, or they’re so used to seeing them that they start to ignore them (read: "ad blindness").

Besides, you may show 500,000 page views on a forum for the month, but if the average repeat visitor views 10 pages a day reading threads, then your actually number of visitors is far lower. So your stats themselves may be deceiving.

Ad-Targeting is Tough on Forums

Finally, it’s tough to target ads on forums, because discussions tend to wander around and around, touching on this and that as the main topic is discussed. Any human could tell you the basic topic of a discussion like that, but it’s a lot harder for computers to figure out–even if it is Google’s computers.

So you often get mis-targeted ads on forums, and that, too, brings down your click-through rate.

What Can Be Done?

Google offers a number of forum optimization techniques for AdSense on their adsense blog. They will help, but don’t expect miracles.

Also, AdSense guru Joel Comm’s AdSense Secrets ebook has an outstanding chapter on how to make AdSense work with forums and Internet communities. If you haven’t read his ebook yet, I recommend you do so.

Here’s another method you may want to try. Remember that your forum visitors are usually very interested in the subject matter–interested enough to go through the registration process for your forum and discuss it!

What you can do is leverage those visitors by adding a place to your site for articles and product reviews related to the forum subject. When you post a new article or review, let the forum members know about it: post a thread requesting feedback on the article, or better yet, email your member list requesting that they read and review the article.

This accomplishes two things:

1) It reminds people who haven’t been to your forum in a while that it exists (see this related post about email list building). It’s easy to register for a forum and forget about it. But a friendly request for an article review can reactivate some inactive members, which creates more content on your forum when they post and can generate more revenue from clicks.

2) It gets your members out of "interaction" mode by pulling them away from a discussion and into an article, which increases the likelihood that they will click on the related ads.

Summing it all Up

There’s no reasons why forums can’t be profitable with AdSense, though their click-through rates almost never achieve the double-digits. Most forum owners would be happy to have a low single-digit CTR. But following the techniques above can help you improve that bottom line and find new ways of leveraging your user-base.

Remember, too, that all of the forum content is created for you for free by your members, so it’s really all free money anyway.

Three reasons why AdSense doesn’t work well on forums. : Jonathan Leger.