January 2008 has turned out to be a record month for my income from Google Adsense and I hope the trend will continue for the rest of the year. I have not done any work on my Adsense empire and it is pretty much running itself. Many bloggers complained about how they lost income from Adsense when Google reduced the clickable area of the Adsense ads a short few months ago. Many forum members at Digitalpoint.com have been whining how unfair Google is to them and how their “hard earned” Adsense payments go lower and lower. For whatever reason that change Google made does not seem to have affected me at all (knock on wood). I think this really only affected those people who were trying to lure visitors to click on something that was blended so well into the page design that the ads were not recognized as such. In one way I think that if that was/is your business model you are setup for failure anyway. Using the sneaky way to make money from Adsense is short-term and ill-advised. You are not providing value and your goal is to fool visitors and make them click ads. My approach is rather to provide value and eventually make profit from when a targeted ad shows up that provides value to a customer (one reason why I dumped YPN from all but one site, because their ad targeting sucks). Sure, I think nicely positioned ads well blended into the page design are a good way to put Adsense on a website, but how much blending is too much?! I think a visitor needs to be able to make a decision without being fooled into making a click onto something she thinks is part of your website. If you take away the ability to make the decision for a website visitor, that moment you take away the trust your website has eventually earned. Let visitors decide if they want to click an ad or not. Don’t fool them into clicking just so that your Adsense income goes up. If your website shows laser-targeted ads your website visitors receive value. If you run a pregnancy website and the ads are about pregnancy related products, it complements your content and a great offer shown in an ad provides value to visitors.

Why do you think Google made these changes to Adsense? Think “value” again. Google has pointed out several times that they put a lot of emphasis onto value for their customers. If there is no value, Google does not like it. So, for long-term business success with Google Adsense you really need to reconsider what you are doing. If you are one of those complaining about how your Google Adsense incomes goes down all the time, it might be time to revisit how you have it implemented and what value are you providing to your website visitors. The solution is not to put up more cheesy websites, but to build better design implementations and then drive traffic to it. Google Adsense is a great way to make money - if done right. It is an even better way to make money if it runs on auto-pilot while you can work on other things. This only works if you think long-term. What is your approach on Adsense?