May 2, 2009

Adsense Landing Pages

Landing page simply refers to the page on which your visitor lands when he clicks on the listing that appears in Google for your site. Your goal is to have the highest possible percentage of visitors clicking on your ads since every click makes you money. Here is how to achieve that.

Content Generator Pages
No matter what content generator you are using, you must have the ability to modify the templates, which means the way the page looks and how the elements are distributed on it.

There are two very good reasons for this. First of all you need to be able to remove footprints. Next you need to be able to optimize for Adsense clicks when you are monetizing with Adsense.

When you use content generators, your visitor lands directly on the site itself. The pages of that site have content in them and links to other pages of the site, outside sites or at the very least your sitemap or sub sitemap.

That means distractions, aka, other things for the visitor to do than click on your Adsense ads. Not a good thing. On the other hand, your pages must contain some content and or links otherwise you risk having the nice folks at Google pull the trigger on your Adsense account.

When building grey or white hat Adsense sites or monetizing regular content sites with Adsense, you want to reach equilibrium between CTR and customer satisfaction. If your Adsense is too prominent, you will lose repeat visits from your visitors and your site’s long-term readership and word of mouth referrals will suffer.

In Black Hat, you don’t give a rat’s patooty and assume that the visitors will never come back because the quality of your site’s content is low.

In reality that’s fine because you’re not building to make friends, you’re building for Adsense clicks.

So what you’re going to do is push the actual content of the page a couple of lines under the fold. The fold is a journalistic term and basically means the part you can see without scrolling. In other words, the only thing your visitor will see is: a header, a title and Adsense Ads.

You can even add two of the large rectangle formats one after the other so even if your visitor scrolls down, he just sees more Adsense ads. If he scrolls down all the way, he sees more links and largely unreadable content, which leaves him with the option of hitting back, searching again by clicking one of your links (thus bringing him back to the full Adsense page top) or clicking out
on your Adsense ads.

End result: click throughs in the 15-25% range.

Affiliate Monetization
When people think of Black Hat SEO, the first thing that pops into their minds is Adsense scraper sites. While that’s certainly a valid and popular way of going about it, there is also tremendous money being made using affiliate programs.

Affiliate programs are also very simple to grasp. Essentially, there are thousands of companies selling products and services online. They want to reach a bigger audience. To do that, they put their offers up on affiliate networks.

As a website owner, you are also a publisher. You can sign up for any of these free affiliate networks and that allows you to grab the advertiser offers and put them on your site. You get paid every time a lead or sale is generated from the offers on your site. Simple and effective.