Tips on Blog Adsensification

Here are some tips to consider when you feel you’re serious about adsensifying your blog. Take note that these tips apply to blogs that have been active for a certain length of time and have some fair amount of traffic. Usually, these are the ones who started blogging out of pure passion and only recently realized that they could also generate some income off of it.
So here are some points to consider:

• Ask yourself if you are willing to compromise your blog’s layout and over-all feel by adding ads in them. It’s usually a function of how much you can potentially earn against how much ads you’re displaying. From me numerous discussions with bloggers who are new to monetization, covering for the annual hosting and domain is the barrier to entry. Usually $100 a month is an ideal target income.
• Look at your traffic and see if it’s enough to draw the crowd. Look at how much of your traffic are coming from organic searches as this is the traffic where we base your potential Adsense income. My personal computation is this — Total Pageviews per Day x 3% CTR x $0.10 per click x 30 days in a month. Say you have 500 pageviews, you’d probably earn about $1.5 per day or $45 per month. Of course, the cost per click may vary widely depending on your niche. The 3% CTR is actually a good number for a regular blog. This could go down to 0.05% for poorly placed ads.
• Experiment on varying ad layouts and color scheme. There are 3 ways to layout your ads — first is on top of the fold just before the title — the perfect ad size for this is the 728×90; second is on the sidebar, you use the 160×600 ad here; then 3rd is just below the post where you use the 336×280 ad. The color schemes may also vary but there are two ways to go about this — blending colors to the current palette of your theme OR using very contrasting colors. So if you have a light colored theme, use hard and dark ad colors or the reverse if you have a dark theme.
• Make good use of the Ad Channels. This will give you valuable information which channels or ad formats are performing well. That way, you can fine tune the scheme and layout for the most optimal results, i.e. higher CTR or eCPM.
• Give it time. Don’t change your layouts everyday or so. My usual time frame is around a week if you have enough traffic or a month if you’re just under 500 uniques a day. In statistics, it’s called a sample size — the more sample size you take, the lower the margin of error, so you can be really sure that the results you get are more or less accurate.

Once you’ve done the considerations stated above, you can move forward and do additional optimizations such as fine-tuning ad relevancy, reducing number of displayed ads to achieve higher eCPM or ad targeting and filtering.