In order to get your web traffic to click on your banners, you need to understand how people think and how there bodies and minds work. This may seem like a pretty big task, but i’ll break it down for you. First of all, in western countries, people’s eyes will tend to scan a page from left to right and downwards. Furthermore, people tend to have an approximate 5 second time frame in which they decide whether or not to stay on your site or to move away. Additionally, most people only read the information above the fold (The part of your website that is first generated when you click in as opposed to below the fold which is the part of your page that is not visible until you scroll down). Then we get into areas of learned familiarity, that is, a learned association that people have developed through constant repetition.

The above is just a small sampling of the things that you need to be aware of regarding your site visitors. So let’s start with the first item:

• People’s eyes will tend to scan a page from left to right and downwards.

This means that you will want your ads on the top left of the page, usually right above your posts, if you can get it even more to the top left, the better chance that you will get a click.

Second:

• People tend to have an approximate 5 second time frame in which they decide whether or not to stay on your site or to move away.

This is absolutely fundamental to your success as an Internet Marketer. In essence, you need to make sure that your visitors will decide to click an ad if they decide to leave your site. I’m not talking about using any black-hat methods because if Google finds out, they may close your account. That means that you should make things looks as normal as possible, and let human nature run its course as it relates to Clicking on Your Banner. What this means is that your site should be jam packed with useful information and should be as plain looking as possible without it being scary (Remember, no scary sites, you know the ones I’m talking about. They are full of ads all over the place and take 5 minutes to load – avoid setting up a scary site)

Third:

• most people only read the information above the fold

This not always written in stone, but generally, you will want to have a large Google Adsense Block above the fold and perhaps a tower on the side. This will ensure that people deciding to leave your site have an option to Pay Per Click. That said, I also like adding a large rectangle banner to the end of my posts, this will help get those people out there who like to scroll down the page.

Fourth:

• Learned association that people have developed through constant repetition.

As an example, most people have associated the color blue with a hypertext link, and will more often choose to click on the color blue over other colors. This isn’t a preference of the color blue, but a learned association with the color blue and a hypertext link. I’m currently going against the grain on this site and incorporating red links, for my own testing purposes. We can also talk about sizes of ads, generally, the larger the ad the more likely that someone will click it. That also means that your ads font size is of particular importance, generally, most people are accustomed to seeing a font size of 8 – 10, because this is generally the default font size on most word processing software like Microsoft Word. I’m sure at this point, some of you are thinking about the possibilities of increasing a pay per click using human nature and learned familiarity. You must remember though that you may be breaking the Google TOS by doing things like making your post font a size 6 in order to increase the visibility of the Google Adsense Ads. I personally am not condoning this practice and you do so at your own risk, on the contrary, you need to be aware that things like Large sized titles will distract your web traffic from clicking on your ads, but since titles are an important part of your Site’s SEO, consider a Wordpress theme that isn’t too top heavy, that is, make sure that there isn’t too much going on on the image header. In fact, don’t choose a wordpress theme that requires an header image at all.

That’s it for today, we’ll talk more about Pay Per Click and banner placement later.

I’m referring to Themed wordpress installs that look great and feel great and make you ‘NO’ money. There are many reasons why seasoned Internet  Marketers love boring ugly wordpress sites, and that’s because they make a lot of money with boring ugly wordpress sites.

Again, it’s your choice and your website and time, but remember, if your site has too much eye candy and  is too user friendly, you risk getting people enjoying your site instead of doing what you wanted them to do in the first place, clicking your Adsense ad as soon as they arrive.

This is an important point, and I cannot stress this enough, and much of this is Google’s own fault. That means that Google has created a system that in order to work needs users to click out of your site after the initial page they visit, let me elaborate. Let’s say, for example, that you are looking for information on How To Make Money Online – You type in your query and do a Google search – You enter the first site that catches your eye. Let’s assume that the website is optimized for a specific keyword, in this case the long tail keyword would be ‘How To Make Money Online’ or ‘How To Make More Money On Your Adsense Clicks’ . If you click on a Google Ad who’s advertisers have bid for the keyword ‘How To Make Money Online’ or ‘How ‘To Make More Money On Your Adsense Clicks’, your pay per click will be pretty high, as a general rule most people would agree that you would get approximately %25 of what the advertiser paid for that ad. Now, let’s suppose that instead of clicking on the Ad that was optimized for your search query ‘How To Make Money Online’, you instead viewed another post on that site that was totally unrelated to ‘How To Make Money Online’ keyword, but instead was targeted to, let’s say, ‘How To Yodel’. Adsense will be feeding ads related to ‘How To Yodel’, and not ‘How To Make Money Online’, meaning that if you click on the Ad that is targeted to ‘How To Yodel’, you miss out on the great paying ad for ‘How To Make Money Online’.

But not only do you miss out on getting your site visitor to click on your ads that were optimized for ‘How To Make Money Online’, a second thing happens that will reduce your pay per click. In essence, Google knows that you were searching for ‘How To Make Money Online’, and not ‘How To Yodel’, and therefore Google will not charge the advertiser  full price for the ‘How To Yodel’ click because it was clearly not what you were looking for. In essence, Google will charge the advertiser a fraction of what the Advertiser paid for the ‘How To Yodel’ ad, and you get paid roughly %25 percent of that amount, which often translates into pennies.

It’s this aspect that leads many people into believing that they’ve been smart priced, but is just an example of poorly targeted site posting and planning.

Can I prove that the above is in fact happening? The answer is no, I can’t prove it, but my experience has shown this to be true. Regardless of my own personal experience, let’s look at this from Google’s perspective. Google charges advertisers for ads placed on sites in order to generate traffic, often with the hope of selling a product. Their ads are placed on specific sites based on the site’s content and positioning in a Google Search Query. Google prides itself on being able to send the advertiser highly targeted clicks to advertisers looking to capitalize on users search queries and interests. But Google needs to prove to the advertiser that it can deliver in highly targeted traffic. So how can Google distinguish between highly targeted traffic from meandering pedestrian traffic? The answer is the Google Search Query, in fact, it is the only way that Google can prove to the advertiser the level of interest distinguishing a users desire, excluding the new interest-based advertising.  In essence, the search query is the holy grail of the Adsense payout, and that is why companies and people pay top dollar for important keywords like ‘Credit Cards’ and  ‘Money’ etc. etc.

As you can see, if Google only method of proving a users interest is his or her search query, then it would stand to reason that it is the only basis that it has to charge and advertiser full price for a click. In essence, if you ended up on a site that was either poorly optimized for a keyword, or just happened to meander through the site reading unrelated posts  and clicked on an ad that was unrelated to your search query, Google has no way of proving to the advertiser that you intended on learning ‘How To Yodel’, when your search query was in fact ‘How To Make Money Online’ or ‘To Make More Money On Your Adsense Clicks’.

If we can accept the above information as true, then it’s obvious that we need to change or enhance how our websites are presented and written. This takes us back to our first point and that is that you need to concentrate on getting people to click off your website as soon as they enter it, otherwise you will not be making the maximum amount on each click. And the second point is that your posts need to be written intelligently in order for Adsense to generate the desired ads. This leads us into a third point regarding related content and Niche Keyword targeted sites, meaning that your sites should be related to a specific theme or Niche, and you should avoid writing about anything and everything that comes to mind.

The choice is yours, if you are serious about making money online, you need to think about the above information. Let it sink in, and remember that in the end, if you want to make money with Adsense, you need to make Google happy. Making Google happy means making Google money, and if you make them money, they’ll make you money with Adsense.

There are reasons why a one or two word keyword selection may have low competition, for example, it may not have a large search volume per month. That means that, it has 1000 – 3000 monthly searches on Google. For most Internet Marketers, they don’t usually bother with low search volume unless there’s a reason to do so, that reason is a high priced keyword which is $20.00 or more. In cases like these, you can bet that the Internet Marketers will be trying to achieve Google rank for that specific keyword. But if the keyword itself has only 1000 – 3000 searches per month, and the average Pay Per Click is $1.00 – $2.00, then it’s a safe bet that most Internet Marketers will avoid it. That leaves you with a semi decent keyword to rank, that can add to your monthly Adsense earnings.

Google offers a vital tool to help you in selecting the right keywords. It’s called the Google Keyword Tool and you need to become familiar with it if you are going to get into Internet Marketing.  I will talk more about the Google Keyword Tool in later posts, but feel free to follow the link and play around with the settings for a while to get comfortable with it.

Getting back to the topic of long tail keywords, as you can probably tell, I don’t often recommend you trying to rank for a non-long tail unless you know what you’re doing. In which case, what I’m telling you is old news to you. But for those of you just starting out, it’s vital that you choose your battles and wars and make sure that you choose how the battle will be fought and what the chances of success will be. In essence, if you don’t think that you have a snow balls chance in hell in ranking for a keyword in the next one – three years, and you can’t wait that long, then the selected keyword is not for you.

I hope that I’ve fully expressed my thoughts on choosing the length of your keyword and hope that you see reason in it. Now, once you’ve decided which type of keyword to battle for, you need to choose the Niche to blog about. There’s a lot of dispute regarding how to tackle keyword selection as it relates to Niches, but the following are a few simple rules that I use and that work for me.

1. Choose a Niche That is not over-competitive if you are just starting out.
2. Choose a Niche that can give you multiple Long Tail Keywords to Rank On Google.
3. Choose a Niche that has a payout of at least $1.00 or more. I prefer $2.00 and up but the higher the keyword is priced, the more competition you’ll find.
4. Don’t choose a Niche Just because you know something about the topic, be adventurous and dare to talk about things that you may not be completely familiar with. Hint: most people are like sheep and often know a predictable number of facts, dare to think outside that box and be an expert in a Niche that isn’t well know. Make sure that Niche follows the above first 3 Steps.
5. Lastly, don’t get stuck on a Niche or Keyword selection, if it doesn’t work for you, move on to the next one.

The above steps are just some of the things you should be doing to select your keyword, but you need to remember a few things. Regardless of how well you rank for a word, if your posts are not optimized for Google, your Adsense Pay Per Click will suffer for it. That means that you need to write intelligent posts that help Google feed the right Ads to your site.

There’s a lot more Keyword related information that you need to know, but that’s it for today, my fingers are tired. We’ll talk more about the Google Keyword Tool later and see how it can help you with your keyword Selection.