Because I came into the mainstream area of making money online from the adult niche, I tend to look at things rather differently in some ways, so I’ll discuss those first:

Comparing Adsense Blogs to Adult Blogs:

Writing to make money with Adsense is, in some ways, like writing adult blogs. The main impetus is to get the reader to click off of your blog as soon as possible, but, in leaving your blog, you want them to click on an ad. In the adult case, you want them to go through your affiliate link to your sponsors and sign up to join a sex site. With Adsense, you want them to click on one of those ad links so that you get paid for the click.

With adult, you have already established how much you will get if the ‘clicker’ signs up. However, with Adsense, you do not know, but you can try to make the CPC as high as possible by optimising your blog so that it attracts the highest paying advertisers. But this takes time and you would be much better reading how to do this by following the guidelines offered by people like Vic and Griz, whose tutorials I have mentioned here before.

In the case of both adult and adsense blogs, you do not want the surfer to hang around on your blog too long. While they are there and not clicking your links, they are not making you any money. In both cases, your concern is not to make this a social blog, but a springboard to earn you some cash.

But to do that you have to produce the correct copy for your blog.

As I said when writing a little about adsense and adult before, good ‘adult copy’ has to stimulate the reader (although you hope the picture you have above the writing has started that process anyway…) and get them to click. With good Adsense copy too, you want to stimulate the reader’s interest. But in neither case are you giving the reader what they want. You are trying to engage their interest and encourage that interest to develop further, so that they feel they have to know something you are not offering them on your blog, and the only way they may find the answer to that ’stimulated interest’ is to click on a link!

So, how do you stimulate that interest which will make you money without producing ‘the goods’ on your blog? How do you balance this with getting your readers to click a link as soon as possible?

The Adult Way: (for those who want to know…)

Each blog entry contains a picture (sometimes more than one). The best pictures are either graphic and promising ‘a conclusion’ to what is depicted in the image if the person clicks the link; or tantalising in that the surfer ‘can’t quite see what is happening here…’ (depends on the niche). Along with this picture, you have some text. It will of course contain ‘adult’ keywords and synonyms (there is a whole language genre in adult which surfers recognise) and, in a couple of paragraphs, you will talk about the picture and what is going on there and what they can expect to find when they click on that link…

The Adsense way:

I may be wrong here, but personally I do not think stimulating pictures help that much. You cannot really have a picture of a product, because you will not know for sure which advertiser’s links are going to appear in the adsense blocks on your blog.

By homing in on certain keywords and synonyms for that keyword, you should, with practice and research of the keywords appearing in your stats, have a pretty good idea of the type of adverts which will appear, but you can never be 100% sure which product will be advertised in that adsense block.

Because Adsense adverts displayed will not only be different by the country the reader is surfing from, but could also be influenced by their previous search preferences, you have to navigate a fine path.(see Is Google Getting Too Personal for more on this as regards personal searches - it is not too far removed from a speculative question of whether our adsense results are also achieved this way…).

Whatever you think about the way our adsense results are achieved, you have to conclude that you cannot write totally specific adsense copy. Specific to your chosen niche yes (and of course it should be), but not specific to a particular brand. Therefore, although niche specific, your adsense copy has to also be general in terms of advertisers within that niche, and that can be a fine line to navigate when you are trying to make money this way.

I’m going to give you an example, but before I do, if you haven’t checked it out already, I would recommend the article Introduction to Keyword Sniping which you can find at Court’s Internet Marketing School, as an excellent way to learn how to make money online by targetting specific keywords.

Ok, I’m going to give you a keyword I have literally grabbed out of mid air. ‘Buying a House in France’. You have done your research and think you can do well with this keyword - you are not in competition with too many others, but there are enough searches a day to make this worthwhile. There are also many synonyms you can use to enhance your ability to be found by the search engines and, importantly, there are enough Adwords advertisers for this keyword, so, if you optimise right, you will get good links on your Adsense blocks.

So, you have the keyword ‘Buying a House in France’. Once your blog is indexed and you have stats running, you can check the search terms people have found you with and focus on keywords accordingly. You are blogging about buying a house in France and all the aspects about moving there and living there and anything else you can work on with those keywords.

At this stage, you have probably learned an awful lot about buying a house in France and loads about France itself and you will be very tempted to pass on that knowledge to your readers. It is human nature; we like to show people our knowledge on a subject and that we know what we are talking about.

Don’t do it! Do not ‘demonstrate your knowledge’ on a blog monetised with Adsense. This is not the place to demonstrate your ability to do research. This is where you make money from adsense, and that’s a whole different place. In fact, if you do want to share all you have learned (and why not, when you have worked hard to achieve this?), you will need to find:

Ways to make money using advertising other than Adsense:

You could, of course, build yourself a blog about buying a house in France where you share your knowledge, but it will not have Adsense running on it. You will have adverts for, and articles leading to, sponsors to whom you are affiliated. You could well speak with authority there, so that people trust your recommendations.

You could (and should) try out the recommended ‘products’ if you are making an ‘authority’ blog (and France in the summer is lovely…), but in this particular case that may not be possible. However, there would be no reason why you could not investigate some of the products offered (estate agents for example), if only to cover your back in case some of those you are recommending turn out to be scams. And this is where this type of blog does give you more ability to control the products you promote, whereas Adsense does not. You can only control your adsense adverts to a certain extent, but with a blog where you choose what is advertised there, you have much more control.

An ‘authority blog’ will also give you a way to write individual posts recommending the products you have chosen to advertise and, if your have done your research and are impartial in your writings, then this should gain you regular readers who trust your opinions and it could well make you some justifiable earnings online.

But please do not put Adsense on this type of blog, because (a) you will be talking about products which are probably not the ones advertised in the adsense block (or which may even oppose them and confuse your readers) and (b) by talking ‘with authority’ you are offering your readers the answers to their queries, so why should they bother to click on your Adsense ads?

Adsense - what does seem to work:

The only way that has worked for me so far with Adsense posts is to literally force myself not to give too much away. So, if I were, in the example above, talking about buying a house in France, I would talk about different things you have to do to achieve this (like looking at estate agents and house insurance and stuff), but give no links to places where people would go to get these things. If I have been successful and each separate post has been devoted to a particular theme (house insurance in France for example), I should find that those are the adverts which come up in the adsense block. And voila! The only place the reader can look is through those links.

As far as I can tell (and have learned so far) the best way to make money from Adsense is to have a blog designed specifically for it (or, as happened in my case, have a blog already ‘out there’, which you can alter in structure to turn it into an adsense blog if you do it correctly). You then need to set the blog up without the adverts, put quite a few keyword targetted posts on it, get it indexed and appearing in the search engines and then, and only then, stick your adsense blocks on the blog.

Once you have done all that, you then have to start blogging away some more, producing reasonably wordy posts which target but do not overdo your main keywords and synonyms. And most importantly, all of your posts stimulate interest but do not answer any questions.

And that is what has worked for me with Adsense so far. I was lucky in that I discovered I had a head start. I had an old blog on Blogger, just sitting there at PR2, getting quite a few clicks, and receiving the odd long post (as is my habit…) and I hadn’t done anything to monetise it until a couple of weeks ago. With a bit of tweaking of the template, altering the earlier posts to fit specific keywords and some new keyword specific posts, the blog was ready to go as an adsense blog and, no kidding, it made me some money! And the reason that blog worked for me was because it was meandering; it spoke of the subject in question, but it never got around to giving the answers. Perhaps you have a blog like that? I’ve got loads…

But, as I said in my previous post, I am not making big bucks (or anything like it) with Adsense yet because, apart from that lucky strike with an old blog, my adsense blogs are all new. I made the mistake of monetising a couple of them too early and that hasn’t helped (instant and probably long term sandbox), but I’m learning quickly on that one too!

I’m sure, however, that I will make money with Adsense over time and that it will be good enough to make me that ‘nice little earner’. All I need is to find the way to control my desire to tell people too much - to ‘demonstrate my knowledge’ on whatever I have found out .

And an adsense blog is not the place to do that, which is why I come in here ;)

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