Contextual Advertising – Google Adsense the Big Player
Contextual advertising with Google Adsense is an extremely simple way for you to monetize your site. There are a number of WordPress plugins that make it very easy to place Adsense ads on your WordPress site, which has probably made this the most commonly used method to make some money with your website.
How it works
1) Advertisers from all over the internet sign-up up with the Google Adwords system. They then design small contextual adverts (of 3 lines + 1 URL line), and make monetary bids on specific search terms.
2) Publishers (you) join up with the Google Adsense system, and specify certain places on your website where you wish to display the contextual adverts that the advertisers created.
3) Google spiders the content of your page/post and gets a very good idea of what your page/post is about. They then display RELEVANT contextual ads in the places that you have specified.
4) If a visitor to your site clicks on one (or more) of the adverts, then Google pays you a percentage of what the advertiser paid to them for that click.
That’s it in a nutshell.
What do these Google Contextual adverts look like ?
If you look at the top of all of the blog posts on this site you will see an example. In the top header section of all of our site pages you will see another example.
What are the benefits of Google Adsense adverts ?
1) They are a simple way to make some money from your site.
2) Google automatically makes sure that they are as relevant as possible to the content of your page (or post), and they therefore add value to your visitors experience. If your visitor cannot find exactly what they are looking for on your page, then they have the option of clicking on one of the adverts that takes them to another site (that may well contain the information). Yes, you may have lost that visitor to another site … but, you were probably going to lose that visitor anyway, so why not make a little money when they leave.
How much money can I make from Google Adsense ?
Ahhh .. the million dollar question. The correct answer is .. I don’t know. What I can give you though are the 2 most important factors that will govern your income.
1) Traffic – the more people that click on your Adsense ads, then the more money you will earn.
2) Niche – some niches pay way more (per click) than others. It all depends on what the Adwords advertisers are prepared to spend on their adverts .. and, the truth of the matter is that the guys in the forex, debt consolidation, car insurance, etc. niches are spending way more per click than the guys selling bird cages.
What sites are best suited for contextual advertising ?
The ease and speed that you can get Google Adsense on your site means that a lot of people install it without considering the implications.
If you are selling your own product then it may NOT be a good idea to add Google Adsense. The reason being that you are giving your visitors a method to easily click away from your site, instead of them purchasing your own items.
On the other hand, if your site is more of a “general” information site (like our site here) where we are not selling any specific products, then Google Adsense is an ideal fit.
How do I place Google Adsense on my WordPress site ?
There are PLENTY of great plugins to do this. Also, many of the better WordPress themes have Adsense capabilities built directly into them.
On our own site here, we use the built in capability of the theme to place the Adsense block in the header, and we use the “All In One Adsense and YPN” plugin to place the blocks in the posts and pages.
What is Google Arbitrage ?
Wikipedia defines “arbitrage” as, “the practice of taking advantage of a price differential between 2 or more markets”.
It is a complicated name for something that is actually very simple in principle. Basically, it means you get yourself cheap traffic from somewhere, and you send it to a site containing Adsense that has more expensive clicks.
The bottom-line profit from this method comes from the fact that you pay less for the traffic, than what you make in earnings.
As an example. Lets say that you decide on the Forex niche. You build a good site, with lots of decent content. If you have done it correctly then Google will place nice high paying Adsense contextual links on your site. You then go and buy yourself (or, even better if your traffic is all free organic from the search engines) some cheaper traffic by bidding on the longer tail forex related Adwords. The idea is to pay less for the traffic than what you make from the clicks.
A point of note.
Be very careful to read and understand Google’s terms and conditions. They specify very clearly what types of sites that you cannot use it on, and they also very clearly state how much you can put on any page/post.
Where do I go from here ?
The intention of this post is not to be a tutorial on Adsense. You can get a ton of more detailed information on Google’s Adsense site, and a quick search on any search engine will provide you thousands of links to additional information on how to use it.
What I do want to accomplish here is to just draw your attention to the very simple monetization technique that is contextual advertising with Google Adsense.
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Tagged with: contextual advertising • contextual advertising with google adsense • google adsense • google arbitrage
Filed under: General • Internet Marketing • WordPress
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I recently found out about a new cpa network called, Prosperent. It’s kind of like Adsense but instead of text ads, it displays targeted products to your visitors. I think you should definitely check it out.