Adding Adsense And Making Money When & How?

A common mistake beginners make is adding Adsense to a brand new blog. I have talked about this before but a refresher is in order as well as an update on how I monetize with Adsense.

Most new blogs have no traffic at first so there is little point in having Adsense on it. Doing so can send out flags that the site is a made for Adsense blog and this is a no no with Google. You are not allowed to create a site for the sole purpose of making money with Adsense. By not adding Adsense in the beginning you appear to be a legit site and will find that you will rank faster and avoid the sandbox. (Getting a few authority links from others appears to be the best way to avoid the sandbox coupled with not monetizing a new site.)

You will also avoid smart pricing your whole account. A new site needs to build up targeted search traffic first. If the traffic to your site is mostly social visitors and you run Adsense and some of the un-targeted traffic clicks your ads you will likely see poor conversions for the advertiser and Google will discount your clicks and pay you pennies. At the same time all your other blogs will see their earnings discounted as well.

Remember - Adsense should only be used on sites that get the majority of their traffic from the search engines. This is targeted traffic that will convert for the advertisers.

So...

The new blog averages about 300 unique visitors a day. Normally I would have added Adsense a while ago as 300 visitors is enough to start making a little Adsense income. The problem in this case is that 7 out of 8 visitors are coming from social sources - bookmarks, referrals from other blogs, stumbleupon etc. Only 1 in 8 are coming from the search engines. In other words the majority of the traffic is not targeted for my keywords and won't be targeted for the Adsense ads. This means that Adsense could be smart priced pretty quick if the social traffic decides to click the ads.