AdSense Obsession

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I’ve seen it happen far too often…

A new publisher comes online — often a blogger — and puts up a few ad units. He makes a few bucks, enough to pay for his morning low-fat soy frappuccino and feels pretty good about himself. He then becomes interested in what AdSense can do and discovers that when used correctly, it can buy him a lot more than the occasional cup of coffee.

So he changes his ad units and blends them onto the page. He plays with keywords and gets better ads. And when he checks his stats, he starts to see his profits rising by several hundred percent.

At that point everything changes. Suddenly he wants to know everything there is to know about AdSense… and he wants to work on it all the time, tweaking and adjusting until he has the sort of site that generates massive incomes.

There’s nothing wrong that. Enthusiasm is a good thing and when it comes to AdSense I’ve got heaps of it too. But sometimes you can be too enthusiastic and when that over-enthusiasm turns to obsession, you can start tripping yourself up.

You can check your stats every day — or every hour — if you want, but if you act on what you see more than once a week, you’re going to make bad decisions.

You can put other types of ads on your site like Chitika’s eMiniMalls or Kontera’s word links but if you stuff so many ads onto your site that you make the ads look obtrusive instead of recommended, you’re going to hit your profits.

You can update your site as often as you want to keep users coming back, but if you swap quality of content for quantity of content, you’re going to get fewer readers and damage your Smart Pricing.

You can build content around ads — and target ads that pay the most — but if you don’t deliver information your readers want, they won’t come back and they won’t click the ads.

And you can spend all your time in front of the computer playing with HTML and printing stats graphs, but if you don’t take the time to cash the check and enjoy spending it… well, what’s the point?

You should be enthusiastic about AdSense; it has the power to deliver a fantastic lifestyle. But as you’re optimizing your site and building your publishing business, it’s also important to keep things in perspective and take your time to do it properly. You’ll earn more and have more fun too!