As per my personal experience Google’s Adsense is one of the most powerful weapons in a website publisher’s hands. It enables you to monetize your sites easily and when used properly can generate a steady and a very healthy income. However, if used improperly you miss out on the opportunities leaving money on the table – something we all hate doing.

The good news is boosting your returns from Adsense can be done very easily and quickly, and you’ll be amazed by the results.

Having encountered Adsense some years back and through experience on my sites for over a year before I discovered these techniques, and like many people, I though I was doing pretty well. My clickthrough rates and CPM figures were healthy, and I didn’t honestly think that they could be improved a great deal. It now turns out how wrong I was. Immediately after implementation of a few quick changes my clickthrough rate more than doubled, and by doing some fine tuning I managed to get nearly three times as many people to click on the ads as had been previously possible.

First and foremost, try and forget about using banners or skyscrapers. These ad formats are almost universally ignored by surfers. Why? Simply because we’ve all been conditioned to recognise a skyscraper or a banner as an advert and as these adverts are rarely of any interest, we ignore them. What’s needed is a way of integrating Adsense ads into the editorial on your site as seamlessly as possible. To do this you need to do three things:

1. Use the 250 x 250 rectangle format
2. Make the background color of the ad the same as the background color of your site, or as close to it as possible.
3. Make the ads borderless by setting the border color to be the same as the background color of the advert.

All these alterations can be made on the fly by logging into your Adsense account and creating a custom format. Just select the 250 x 250 ad format, and create a custom color palette. Use the handy colour picker tool to pick the colour you want. The corresponding code is automatically generated at the end of the page, ready for you to copy and paste into the pages on your site.

Next, you need to consider repositioning your ads where surfers are most likely to click on them. Latest research using retina scanning technology has shown that the place surfers tend to look at first and most often is the top left. I am not a medical doctor so I don’t know the reasons for this, perhaps it’s because that’s where we’re used to seeing the most useful search engine results (at the top of the rankings) and search engines are the sites we most often visit, so we automatically look at the same place on other sites.

Whatever the reason I want you to realize that as soon as I made the above changes to my Adsense ads, the clickthrough rates doubled, with immediate effect! Now, does this give some sort of inspiration to you guys?

The third technique is a bit newer and which is based on my personal experience. Google has added a new type of Adsense format, called Adlinks. This displays a series of links on your page in the same style as that of an Ad unit as regular Adsense ads. When a user clicks a link they are taken to a page of adverts that resembles regular Google search results. As a publisher, you are paid every time a user clicks one of those ads. Your site visitors are much more likely to click on these category based ads than anything else on the planet!

With these impressive results I jumped in fully and started to trial Adlinks on my most visited pages as soon as it was launched. Sticking to the four links in a square box format, positioned top left of my page content. Only after a few weeks of running Adlinks alongside regular Adsense ads, it was crystal clear that the return on Adlinks was about a quarter higher than regular ads. There’s no obvious reason for this but one explanation may be that clicking on an Adlink takes the user to page of ‘results’. When a user clicks on one of these, you are paid for the click. If the user finds what they want, good enough, if not, it seems that they hit the Back button on their browser and try again, just as you would for normal search engine results. Then they click on another result, and you get paid again. So it’s kind of milking the cow again and again and getting paid more than once from the same Adlink click. Now, this reasoning is speculative, but to me it does make perfect sense in the light of my Adlinks results.

Lastly, Adsense provides some excellent tracking statistics that allow you to track your results across an array of sites on a site by site, page by page, or just about any other basis you choose. This is a very powerful tool and you should use it to find out which ads are performing best for you and fine tune your Adsense and Adlink ads accordingly, also getting rid of under-performing ones.

All in all, just by spending an hour or so of your time making a few adjustments to the Adsense ads on your sites, you can very quickly double or even treble your Adsense income. Honestly, give it a go, its no magic wand but surely you’ll be amazed by the results.

About the author:
Bob Ratiyal is a successful entrepreneur with over 15 years home based business experience in Internet Information Marketing, Blogs, Software & IT. Visit his website www.bestonlinefinds.com for the best money making opportunities on the net.