Savvy Affiliate

Day 29 of The 100 Days To Building A Great Website Guide

There are several important parts of making money online.  You have to get people to your site.  You have to display ads that interest them.  Finally, you have to get people to click on your ads.

There are many sites which will help you optimize your ads, especially AdSense ads.  Here are a few links for AdSense optimization - I have written about it several times, and a quick Google search turns up several links on Optimizing AdSense.

However, while it is important to optimize your advertising to make the most of out the traffic you are getting, you also need to consider how valuable that traffic is in the first place.   What many sites do not get into is the connection between the traffic you are driving to your site, and the click through rate that will be on your ads.

Not all traffic is created equal

In general, the more web savvy your traffic is, the less likely they will be to click on your ads.  You will need to keep that in mind when you are targeting your traffic.  If you write posts and have a site which is dedicated to blogging, and whose primary traffic is other webmasters, chances are you won’t get too many clickthroughs.

In fact, all other things being equal, if I had to choose between ranking well in these keywords

• Make Money Blogging
• Make Money Online
• Make Money From Home
• Make Easy Money

The one that I would want to rank well in the least is “Make Money Blogging.”   After all, who is searching for that?  Other bloggers.    What I would most like to rank well in is “Make Money From Home”  People searching for that probably don’t know too well exactly what they are looking for, and are more likely to click on a well written advertisement.

Additionally, FireFox blocks ads

In general terms, you can probably guess how well your advertising will do from who visits your site.   If most of the people visiting are using AOL’s integrated browser, I would like my chances for high click through rates.  If most of the people visiting are using FireFox, the chances of an individual ad doing well are not very good.

I do love FireFox.  I use it myself all the time, and it has some wonderful extensions.  However the FireFox extension which blocks Advertisements can really do a number on your click through rates.   Now if only there was a way I could use it, but make sure no one else did

This may be more helpful in choosing your niche

Advice on who clicks on ads may be more helpful when choosing your niche then when you are working on an existing site.   Choosing a great niche can mean all the difference between a profitable site and one that never makes any money.  But it is still something to consider while running your site.  If you find that you tend to write posts targeted at a web-savvy audience, try and rethink.  In general I think Savvy Affiliate readers are pretty web-savvy.   While it does make this blog fun to write, and interesting to interact with the readers, I’m not expecting exceptional click through rates.   That could be a reason why John Chow is now targeting key words like “Make Money From Home”, and not just “Make Money Online”