Internet Marketing Affiliate Programs Blog

By Jon Leger

In my experience with thousands of my AdSense Gold customers, I've noticed that new AdSense publishers tend to make the same mistakes. I made them too when I was new to AdSense.

I've decided to discuss 3 of the big mistakes with you so that you can have a head start and avoid these AdSense pitfalls. They are:

1. Selecting the wrong topics
2. Having too many topics on the same site
3. Trying to make a quick buck with bad traffic

Selecting The Wrong Topics

When I first started out with AdSense, I was one eager beaver. I wanted to create as many pages as I could, and I didn't care what topic they were about as long as it wasn't adult or gambling.

I put up a site on Old Time Radio Shows, and I was excited to see that I made a few dollars a month with it. What I didn't realize at the time is that my $0.10 clicks were the bottom of the proverbial AdSense barrel in terms of earnings.

I didn't know then that it paid to research the good, high paying topics. So I just put up sites on whatever I could think of that seemed easy to rank for in the search engines.

I was shooting myself in the foot! Once I realized that I could do a little keyword research and find out how much the keywords were worth, then I started focusing on the higher paying niches and started seeing the $1, $2, $5, $10 clicks and up. I don't get that much with every click, but often enough to keep me very happy!

So research your topics first using the AdWords Traffic Estimator Tool, or a good high paying keywords list such as Keyword Explosion.

Too Many Topics on One Site

Another mistake I see newbies make very often (and I made myself when I was a newbie) is having too many topics put on one website. I've seen sites that target everything from alphalpha to Zoro!

That's a bad idea for two main reasons:

1. It makes it hard to optimize your site.

You want your domain name to be targetted to the topic of the site (a great search engine optimization technique). If you have every manner of topic on the site, you can't do this and lose out on the power that a great domain name can have with the search engines.

2. Google's Smart Pricing doesn't like it.

If you're not familiar with it, SmartPricing is what Google uses to figure out how much your page is worth in relation to the ads showing on the page. The more Smart Pricing likes your pages, the more you will get paid per click.

One of the things I've seen with Smart Pricing is that it likes tightly focused, targetted sites. You might have a lot of pages on one site, but they need to be related to each other.

"But I can't afford more than one domain right now," you might protest.

If that's the case, the best thing you can do is to create subdomains for each of the categories that your site targets.

For example, if you have a site that targets "alphalpha" and "Zoro", have two subdomains:

http://alphalpha.mydomain.com/
http://zoro.mydomain.com/

Do not have the subdomains link to each other either. That way Google seems them as seperate "mini-sites".

Be Careful What Kind of Traffic You Send To Your Sites

Not all traffic sources are created equal. There are a lot of sites out there selling "one hundred thousand visitors to your site for $49.95!" and the like.

What most of these sites do is use software to "simulate" a visit to your site. They are not real people. I've tested this extensively with a couple of vendors who sell this kind of traffic, and not once have I ever gotten any "real" people.

The problem is that sometimes those bots goof and "click" the ads by following the links.

Google sometimes sees those clicks as fraudulent, and many a new AdSense publisher has lost his account because of it.

So beware of shady or "too good to be true" traffic promises, they will only hurt you!

Focus on search engine optimization and link trading, that's where you're going to get the most bang for your buck.

For more details on how to optimize the pages on your site so that the search engines just love them, read my free ebook, AdSense SEO Made Easy.

Jonathan Leger is a well known AdSense and Internet Marketing guru. Get $371 in free gifts by visiting his AdSense Articles blog.

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