How You Can Learn and Benefit From My AdSense Mistakes

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How You Can Learn From My AdSense Mistakes

Maybe you can relate to this, but my old Google AdSense pages were getting viewed but that was about it... And I didn't know why. But after doing a lot of redesign and testing, I identified some problems. Maybe what I discovered can help you:

'Ad placement' a problem for me early on, as it often is for many
ad newbies...

Either it looked like I was an 'ad site' with other content being 
secondary (while still following Google's terms), or I put the 
advertisements almost out of view after my content and almost as 
a second thought.  The ads would end up in the right margin
or at the bottom of the page.

And most of my content was one-dimensional and non-interactive
which really didn't encourage many visitor clicks.

Ad design and colors also a problem in relation to my web page 
design scheme...  Maybe too much central focus on my design 
distracted eyes from the ads.

Even the font size of my content might have been an issue, some 
of it larger than the ad text which didn't help position visitor 
eyes like I wanted.

Matching any visitor why-here interest with the appropriate ads 
also an issue.  Some of it not in my control, but early on I 
could have done better.

Another design flaw was giving visitors little reason to return.

Also, I used too few heavy content pages which might possibly 
have affected my overall page rankings.

Another issue was the headline grabber that appeared on search
engines for my site was not what I wanted it to be.  Too much of 
the inconsequential text was from farther down the page crawled.  
Not all under my control however.

I figured out later that blocking unrelated ad sites didn't help 
my page clicks, but also I inadvertently added an html document 
with AdSense links to my robots.txt 'Disallow' section, which 
excluded the AdSense crawler.  You can check the AdSense
Site Diagnostics to see if you have this problem also.

And finally, my most important mistake was spending time
developing a low traffic or low interest topic web site...

So, I learned from these experiences and hopefully I have helped you also. I still maintain this site, mostly because I enjoy doing it and helping others. And I present this content with few ads and little design for that reason, too. But as to creating a high traffic site beneficial to a successful campaign, I would do things differently next time.