It’s been almost seven years since Google acquired the system that we now know as AdSense. You may wonder if the Google AdSense program is still the best way to monetize your blog, or whether it’s even still a viable option.

There’s a famous photo on the web of one AdSense publisher and the $132,000 check he received from AdSense. But that was five years ago. Is it possible to still earn money like that?

To figure that out, let’s look at some of the dynamics that make the game different now.

#1 – There are more AdSense publishers than there used to be.

This is partly due to the fact that it’s easier to blog and easier to incorporate AdSense into a blog. If your blog is hosted on Google’s Blogger/BlogSpot platform, it’s as easy as clicking the “Monetize” link. Fill out the application, get approved, and the platform automatically inserts the ads. You don’t even have to generate the ad code, copy or paste. Having more fish in the pond, but not necessarily more revenue to share, means that everyone takes a bit of a loss, right? Perhaps.

#2 – The economy has suffered, leading to fewer advertising dollars are in the market.

While this may be true, have you seen any less commercials while watching television lately? Didn’t think so. I would argue that while there may be fewer advertisers, there aren’t necessarily fewer advertising dollars. Some companies are aggressively marketing amidst the economic fluctuations that have taken place the past year. They’re trying to ride out the wave of the recession to emerge on top when the markets stabilize. They’re advertising now for where they want to be a couple of years from now.

#3 – The quality of the competition is improving.

This sounds bad, like you’re going to have a harder time competing, right? But this is actually a good thing for you. Here’s what I mean: Some of the more “predatory” fish are being weeded out. Google continues to fine-tune its fraud detection systems, and if you publish legitimate content, that’s good news. The days of unscrupulous publishers creating dummy websites stuffed with keywords to steal all the traffic (and all of the clicks) are coming to an end. In years past, those sites were able to hog quite a bit of the ads in the program, leaving the rest of us with bottom-of-the-barrel ads that no one would ever click. It’s more likely now than before that you will get higher-quality ads, ads that are more directly related to your content, and as a result you’re likely to see better click-through ratios.

#4 – Google Ads are more recognizable.

There are two angles to this. One of those is the perspective that readers become increasingly “immune” to ads, that they have trained themselves to ignore the ads and focus solely on the content. This may be true to an extent, but I think this is where the other perspective comes into play: AdSense ads in particular have become widely accepted in terms of their safety and relevance. If I click a website that shows up in my search results, I have no idea what’s waiting on the other side of that click. And too often, I find either a junk website that was a waste of my time, or worse, a malicious software installer. If I click a Google ad, I know at the very least that someone has paid actual money for me to visit that site, and that the ad itself has passed Google’s review. I might even go so far as to say that I’m more likely to click an ad that I know will take me where I want to go than I am to click a link that might or might not take me where I want to go.

The Bottom Line

If there was no money to be made, no one would still be running AdSense ads on their websites. I suspect that for the vast majority of people who would once have been pulling in tens of thousands of dollars monthly, they’ve seen their returns drop, and I base that on the fact that most of them are trying to make money now by selling their own book or program on how to replicate their success. But there is still money to be made, even if the returns are perhaps a bit more modest.

Although it’s fun to think of getting a $132,000 check from Google, that’s probably on par with winning the lottery these days. On the other hand, earning a decent living wage that allows you to write about something you love, without having to kill yourself trying to outsneak the next guy, is probably more possible now than it was before.

Yesterday, we looked at What Doesn’t Work for AdSense in 2010. Today, let’s look at what does. Some of these may be things you know already, but if you’re like me, you could often use a good reminder. Others are tips that perhaps you haven’t tried before. Either way, these are the things you should be doing to maximize your AdSense revenue.

What Works for AdSense #1
Publishing Quality Content

This sounds really obvious, but there’s a reason this comes first on my list. It’s impossible to overemphasize the fact that the best way to make money with AdSense is to publish quality content.

Whatever it is that you happen to know about and have chosen to blog about, write it in such a way that it is highly informative and highly engaging. Write frequently and consistently. This will help you develop a consistent readership with a certain level of mutual trust, and in the long run, that relationship will bring you the most amount of profit from AdSense.

The reason for this is simple: People don’t go to the internet looking for advertisements. They go to the internet looking for information. When the information is good, it stands to reason that the advertised product or service might be good as well. It’s strictly an “If, Then” relationship. IF the content is useful, THEN they might click an ad. IF your site has poor content, THEN whatever is being advertised is probably poor as well.

A friend of mine asked me this morning over coffee, “Does anyone actually click on ads? Do you ever click on ads?” The answer is yes, but usually only ads that look both legitimate and interesting, and especially only ads on sites I trust because they consistently bring me useful content. I would bet that this holds true for most web surfers. It’s based on a blogger-reader relationship, and that relationship is built by content.

Let’s say, just for grins, that you write a blog with tips on how to groom your small dog at home. Sally logs on to your site looking for this information. Specifically, she’s wanting to know whether it’s better to brush the dog’s coat before you use electric clippers. If Sally logs on to your site and finds a very informative article on this exact topic, she mentally assigns a high degree of “usefulness value” to your site, and that’s something priceless that can only be purchased with good content.

Because of that high perceived value to Sally, let’s say she stops by once a week and reads two or three articles. Over the course of the year, Sally equals an extra 100-150 page views per year for you. And what’s more, when she sees an AdSense ad on your site offering an at-home grooming kit especially for small dogs, she finds that particularly interesting and clicks it. When she sees an article with some especially useful tips on grooming toy poodles, she forwards the link to her friend who is a toy poodle enthusiast. The traffic begins to replicate itself.

But if Sally had first logged on to your site only to find keyword stuffing, lots of ads and no real content, she would have left immediately. She wouldn’t have clicked a single ad and she would never have returned. You wouldn’t have received 150 page views from Sally. You would have received no click-throughs. You would have received no referrals. You would have received one page impression, one lonely impression that tells you only that Sally didn’t like your site at all.

A site without quality content is like a fishing net that allows fish to swim out as easily as they swam in. A site with quality content is like a magic hook that always catches just the right kind of fish, again and again and again. I’ll explore this topic more in the weeks to come.

What Works for AdSense #2
Putting your Past Articles to Work

I once worked in a bookstore, and I once owned and operated a restaurant. Having experienced both business models up close, I am convinced that too many of us think of our blog as a restaurant instead of a bookstore.

Here’s what I mean by that. At a restaurant, the product must be started anew every single day. People want to buy food that is freshly made. At the end of the day, what’s unsold will probably never be sold. It has a very brief window to make its money, and then it’s gone. The next day, if new food isn’t made, new profits won’t materialize.

At a bookstore, new products are constantly introduced, but many of the items on the shelves are books that were written decades or even centuries ago. They retain their usefulness and their ability to generate income. As long as the material is still relevant and useful, there is a potential market for that book.

Are you viewing your blog posts as books in a bookstore or food in a restaurant? Are you writing something that will be just as relevant and useful next month as it was today? Or is each article forgotten once it drops off your “front page radar?” (Or worse, are you making the amateur blogger mistake of deleting your old posts or moving them to an offline archive?)

Put your past articles to work. Reference your old posts in your new posts. Go back and read everything you’ve written, and know your own content inside and out. As you’re writing new entries, link to the old posts that will make for excellent further reading. (One quick example is at the top of this article, where we referenced yesterday’s article about What Doesn’t Work in AdSense in 2010. See, we just did it again!)

This translates into better AdSense performance, because each past article view equals another page impression. If you can take the people who read your daily post and get them to click two previous articles in addition, you’ve tripled your pageview count.

One quick sidenote — don’t try to disguise your old articles as new articles. Make sure that your readers realize that your link is referencing a past article or they’ll quickly get frustrated trying to distinguish what’s new and what they may have read already.

What Works #3
Engaging your Readers

When I take the time to comment on someone’s blog, I usually also check the box that asks me if I want to be notified of additional comments on that post. Why? I’ll give you a hint — it’s usually not because I want to know what other people are going to say. It’s because I want to know if the blog author writes back. I want to know if the author feels like I’m worth the time to acknowledge me as a reader. If so, chances are good that I’ll become a permanent reader. If not, it’s easy for me to decide that perhaps this particular author isn’t worth my time, either.

Engaging your readers on a personal level is what deepens the relationship that was initially forged by good content. Readers will come to your blog the first time because they’re curious. They’ll come the second and third time because the content was good. But they’ll come back every single day when they feel like they matter to the blog as much as the blog matters to them.

This improved relationship will be the most recognizable in AdSense in terms of your Click-Thru Ratio (CTR). It’s a simple fact that readers who have a great relationship with your blog are more likely to pay attention to your ads, and the more they pay attention, the better their chances of seeing an ad that’s relevant to their interests.

The Bottom Line

Maybe you’re surprised that all of these tips are focused primarily on improving your relationship with your readers. You were expecting, perhaps, a more technical AdSense strategy. I can already hear the questions. “But what about blending your ads into the page?” “What about positional placement?” “What about search engine optimization?” To which I reply, “Dude, that is SOOO 2007.”

In 2010, more than any year before, web surfers have finely tuned what I like to call their “personal junk filter.” I’m not talking about software. I’m talking about the way that you decide in about two seconds whether a website is worth your time. Without quality content, without utilizing your old content as well as the new, without engaging your readers — the rest of your AdSense strategy is absolutely worthless.

This is a new day, folks. Even my 80-year old grandpa can finally tell the difference now between an ad and content. The days of tricking, coaxing or goading people into clicking your ads have passed. A successful AdSense strategy begins and ends with content and relationship. Tweak the other variables all you like and see what seems to work best for you. But make your goal, first and foremost, serving up to your readers exactly what they’re looking for, and in the long run, you’ll reap the benefits in your AdSense numbers.

There was a time when the following list of “old and busted” tricks for AdSense could yield higher payouts, but in these instances, the train has already left the station. Here are some tired tactics to avoid at all costs when implementing AdSense into your blog.

What Doesn’t Work #1
Clicking your own Ads

Almost every blogger, within a week of incorporating AdSense into their blog, gives into temptation and clicks an ad that appears on their blog. This is usually followed by a trip over to AdSense to see if the click registered. You’re excited to see if your daily earnings jumped up from the paltry $0.02/day you’ve been earning to something more reasonable, perhaps something in the $2-3 range.

There’s a major problem with this, however. Google aggressively monitors click fraud, and they will ban you if you do it. When you registered for AdSense, there was a checkbox that essentially made you promise, in no uncertain terms, that you would not click on ads on your own site. And don’t think you’re slick by using a proxy server to fool Google into thinking you’re someone else. Everyone else already thought of that, and Google can detect that, too. Even if you’re interested in the ad itself as a potential customer, it doesn’t matter. Don’t click it.

It all comes down to this: Preserving the integrity of the system is paramount to making sure the AdSense business model can continue. If Google were susceptible to click fraud, advertisers wouldn’t advertise. And without advertising dollars, AdSense publishers wouldn’t get paid. The system would rapidly collapse. As such, one of Google’s primary concerns is maintaining the integrity of the system. They work around the clock, day after day, month after month, year after year, to keep the system functioning correctly.

I can’t stress this enough here. If you click your own ads, Google will know it. In a best case scenario, they simply won’t pay you for the ads you clicked. In a worst case scenario, they will ban you from AdSense. Trust us, folks. It doesn’t work anymore, and it’s not worth it.

What Doesn’t Work #2
Mesothelioma and other “High-Paying Keywords”

About six years ago, someone discovered that certain keywords carried extremely high click values and that adding them to your blog could make you serious amounts of money with just a few clicks. The prime example was mesothelioma (a form of cancer usually caused by asbestos exposure), a keyword which by some reports was earning north of $35 per click. (Yes, that’s thirty-five dollars, not thirty-five cents.) Miraculously, a bunch of blogs suddenly started mentioning mesothelioma. Grandma’s Recipes, Bobby’s Movie Reviews and Cindy’s Celebrity Gossip all suddenly had a weekly feature about mesothelioma.

It’s true that mesothelioma still continues to be a high-dollar keyword. (The reason, incidentally, is that law firms specializing in mesothelioma lawsuits compete with each other for top billing on that family of keywords. It’s worth their money to spend $35 per click when they stand to make thousands.) But just because a click can pay big bucks doesn’t mean you’ll make any money from it. Just as those lawyers are competing with each other for genuine mesothelioma traffic, you’re now competing with all those other people who really have no information to offer on the disease and instead are just looking to cash in on the keyword. If your blog is about Persian kittens, chances are good that your incidental posts on mesothelioma are only going to yield a decrease in revenue when your readers get confused by the change in topic and make their visits less frequent.

Those of you who are considering learning all there is to know about mesothelioma and creating an entire, legitimate website about the disease, by all means go for it. But keep this in mind. With about 2,500 cases diagnosed in the US annually, that translates to about 7 legitimate potential clicks per day and you’ve got lots of competition.

The bottom line is to stick to your blog topic, whatever that might be. Earning money from AdSense isn’t a matter of choosing the highest-paying topics. Any topic can be a profitable topic if your content is well-written, interesting and informative. Make content your top priority and you’ll ultimately see your ad revenues increase as a direct result.

What Doesn’t Work #3
Tons of Ads

Google allows you to have up to three different ad blocks on each page. This limit somehow seems to gives the false notion that more is better, when the reverse may actually be true.

First off, Google doesn’t give you triple credit for having three ads on your page as opposed to just one. Your impressions count increases by one when someone loads a page that contains AdSense regardless of whether or not multiple ads appear on that page. The only reason to include more than one ad on a page is to try to make it more likely for a visitor to notice and become interested in an ad.

Second, having multiple ads on the same page is likely to drive down your eCPM. You’ll probably get better results with one well-placed ad than you will with three ads spread out around the page. Quality is more important than quantity, and a quality ad from Google’s perspective has to do with the ad’s location. Google likes ads to be prominently displayed right in the center of your main content, and it helps to have it displayed “above the fold,” meaning that it’s visible without having to scroll.

Third, having too many ads turns off your readers. If it’s hard to see the forest for the trees, you have too much advertising and not enough content. Throwing more ads onto the page isn’t going to make a visitor more likely to click one of your ads. It’s going to make them leave your website, and they probably won’t come back. The key to increased clicks is having ads that actually interest your readers, and the way to do this is with quality content. The better the content, the more relevant the ad.

What Doesn’t Work #4
Begging for Clicks or Offering Incentives

A final, common rookie mistake that no longer flies is asking people to click your ads. This is a bad idea because it expressly violates the AdSense terms of service. It’s just as much of a no-no as clicking your own ads, and is just as capable of getting you banned.

Back in the day, bloggers would have click contests or incentives to encourage visitors to click their ads. This one simply doesn’t work any more. Google evaluates click quality, not just click quantity. Advertisers themselves often implement tools as well to help them track their conversion rates. It helps no one for you to generate click waves that will never translate into sales. In the long run, it’s in everyone’s best interest (advertisers, customers, publishers and Google alike) to make sure that the people clicking on ads are people genuinely interested in the ad itself who are likely to consider making a purchase because of it.

Similarly, don’t include text on your site that asks for people to click your ads, and don’t use any text to label your ad space other than the Google-approved labels, “Sponsored” or “Advertisement.”

And avoid the temptation to call up or email your friends and relatives to ask them to hit up your site and click all of your ads. Google knows this trick, too. While you might think you’re being sly, Google finds it a bit odd when 30 different IP addresses from the same city log on in the same hour, and remarkably, each of those computers go straight to the ads without spending any time reading your content. Hmm, suspicious much?

The Bottom Line

The amount of time you’re going to spend trying to outsmart Google is detracting from the time you could be spending writing quality content for your blog. Play fair and honest. Write a good blog and promote it via legitimate channels. Don’t stuff your page too full of ads, and place your ads strategically and wisely.

The biggest difference with AdSense in 2010 as opposed to previous years is that Google continues to tighten up the system. You know if you’re playing dirty, and this year more than ever, Google knows it, too.

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Today’s an exciting day for Blogger Pros. It’s the official site launch!

Proudly kicking things off is a five-part article series called “Making Sense of AdSense in 2010.” Today’s article, the in this series, explains “What Doesn’t Work for AdSense in 2010.”

You can help to make Blogger Pros a better resource for yourself by sharing it with others. The more that this community grows, the more opportunities it will have to improve and expand to bring you the best resources to help your blog take flight.

Here are some quick and easy ways:

1. Follow Blogger Pros on Twitter.

2. Retweet the articles. At the top of this article (and every Blogger Pros article) you’ll see a button that helps you quickly retweet the story to your Twitter followers. With this page, for example, you’ll be tweeting that “Blogger Pros officially launches today!” This encourages your followers to come see what this site is doing and why you like it.

3. Comment. When you finish an article, leave a comment — even if it’s just a brief one to say that you did or didn’t like an article. Feedback is one of the best ways you can improve this site.

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