Top beginner adsense tips

I'm pretty new to using adsense. However, I've picked up a few things so far, and here are my top tips and advice:

1. There is a lot of advice out there on ad placement, size etc. There are no hard and fast rules but the consensus seems to be:

• Try to blend your ads with your site, use a color scheme that fits in.
• If possible, insert ads in your content e.g. wrap your text around them. Ads that appear just at the top, bottom or side are easily ignored or subconsciously filtered.
• If possible, use wide ads.
• Consider using adlinks. If placed correctly, they can look more like menu items than ads, and are highly targetted to your content. Note that you will only receive money if users click on the results of the adlinks page (i.e. two clicks required).

2. To begin with, adsense delivers only cost-per-click (CPC) ads. This means you only get revenue when a visitor clicks on an ad. To also receive cost-per-impression ads, an advertiser has to choose to advertise on your site. If you have only CPC ads, and a low clickthrough rate, you wont get much revenue even with good traffic. Interestingly, this very blog started receiving some cost-per-impression ads after only about 1 week of being up. My website squidsquid.com has received no cost-per-impression ads, despite having considerably more traffic. It seems a little unlikely that an advertiser chose to advertise on my relatively unknown blog, but maybe. The only other explanation is that some adwords advertisers have an automated system of delivering cost-per-impression ads, dependant on the content (i.e. the advertiser 'automatically chooses' to advertise cost-per-impressions on your site).

3. Depending on the type of site you have, it may be difficult to target your ads (e.g. I have a comedy site about giant squid - adsense ads for "giant squid on ebay" are unlikely to have high clickthrough rates)! However, if you cant or dont want to change your content overly (and I dont think you should), then other factors that have a strong influence on the content of the ads are alt tags, your page title and your page filename. These can all be used to target the ads more appropriately.

4. Further reading:

• Scan through this longish article for some tips (there are quite a few advertising plugs for products there also).
• Check out this reasonably good article about how to increase your blogger traffic and adsense revenue.