Simple tricks to increase Adsense CPC/CPM/earnings/revenue

If you are a HubPages user, chances are you're using Google Adsense? Why? Cuz Adsense is the biggest, highest-CPC program out there today.

What does CPC mean? Cost per click. CPM? Cost per 1000 hits (whatever the M means, I have no clue, but that's what it is.)

Anyway, I have a few small strategies to increase your Adsense CPC, thus allowing you to make much more money than you already were without doing much different than you are doing now.

1: KEYWORDS. Figure out which keywords have the highest CPC and search traffic, using the Adwords tool. Search, search and search more, and find keywords that have high CPC. Then, center your pages or HubPages articles around such keywords. Don't bother with keywords that pay 1 cent, 30 cents, etc per click/CPM. Go for, ideally, the $2.50+ keywords - and ESPECIALLY go after the over $10.00 keywords.

This is THE SINGLE MOST IMPORTANT part of your mission. You don't want a page that makes 1 dollar out of 6 ad unit clicks - you want a page that pulls 6 dollars out of 2 ad-unit clicks, or 60 dollars out of 8 clicks, or even better. Even if you already have a lot of traffic, you WILL NOT make a nice amount of change unless you are smart with your keywords. Even if you are not an internet marketer, you should still use this.

2: LIMIT THE AD UNITS. If you can help it, don't go having 12-15 different ad units on your page. Why? Cuz there is less competition for advertisers to get ads onto your page. That means advertisers can pay less, meaning Google pays you less. If you have, say, 6 ads on your page, you knock off the 6 lowest paying ads, because advertisers are fighting for just 6 spaces instead of 12 spaces. (This mostly applies on your own sites, not on HubPages)

And if you are one of those tinker-happy jackasses, like me, quit tinkering, set your page to a certain ad-unit setup, and leave it. I've noticed my clicks AND my cpc go down if I'm always tinkering with the type and positioning of the ad units.

That said, if your keywords check out with the adwords tool as being both high-CPC and high-traffic, and high-advertiser-competition, you can probably get away with more ad units

3: MAKE YOUR HIGHEST-CTR UNIT YOUR HIGHEST CPC UNIT. You can't do this for HubPages, but you can do this for your own websites. Use your channel tracker to figure out WHAT your ad unit is that has the highest CTR (click through ratio). That means what are most of your viewers clicking on? Then, make sure that that particular ad unit comes FIRST in the HTML. Whether or not it's at the top of the page is irrelevant - MAKE SURE it comes first in the code. Change your lower-CTR units into link units or move them, or delete them.

I don't make any riches off of Adsense, but just doing half of this so far has more than tripled my income (from about 13 dollars a month to over 40 a month). Hey, at least I'm honest, not lying to try to get you to believe that I make 1000 a month off of this garbage without putting in a HUGE amount of work. For me, Adsense is good beer and gym-membership money. My goal is to make it car-payment money. Will it?