Making money with Adsense and Blogger

A few months ago I read some posts on a random blog about Google's Adsense and while I admit that it all sounded too good to be true, I decided to try it out...so off I went to the Adsense site and created my account. Setup was really easy (seeing as I already had an account with Google's Gmail) and I managed to place my first adverts on a Freewebs website I already had. I thought that this would be enough to start earning cash with Adsense...I was dismally disappointed. So I started thinking of creating a better site where people are most likely to visit for information...a bit more research and I realized that the best informational sites are blogs which deal with one particular subject. Blogger.com is a free, easy to use, blog facility by Google. If you already have a Gmail account, setup is extra-easy. My first Blog was about dieting...more blogs followed (this being one of them). The following are some pointers that might help you earn some easy-cash with adsense:

1. Increase hits to your website. This is without doubt the most important thing to consider since the more visitors you get, the more clicks you receive. You get more visitors by promoting your blog and by exposing as many direct-links to your blog as possible. This will make it possible for search engines to rank your blog. I found that the best way to do this is to register yourself with a forum that is relevant to your blog, and include a direct link to your blog in the signature, so that each time you place a post on the forum, there will be a direct link to your blog.
   
2. Make people re-visit your blog. You do this by writing high-concept, well-written, relevant and interesting posts. Also you need to make your visitors understand that you are interested in them and in what they think, you can do this by replying to any comments that your visitors leave on your blog. You might also consider leaving comments on your visitors' blogs. By creating a good relationship with your visitors you will be able to exchange links which are then placed on either blog (another method of exposing your blog and to let search engines rank your blog).
3. Make interesting posts. As I have already mentioned, your posts need to be interesting so as to stop visitors from hitting the back-button on their browser and to encourage visitors to visit your blog again. Interesting posts must not have grammatical mistakes, should be concise, straight to the point, relevant and, if possible, include some humor. Also, posts which include relevant pictures and video clips are more interesting than posts which are only text-based. So make it a point to include at least one picture in each post.
4. After you start receiving huge amounts of visitors (5000 visitors a day can be considered as really good), you need to increase your CTR (click through rate), i.e. how many visitors click on the adverts. The higher the CTR, the more you earn. Once I earned $3 from just 2 clicks because the first 2 visitors to my blog clicked on an advert. On another occasion, I received less than $2 from about 50 clicks, simply because many of my visitors did not click on the adverts. To increase your CTR, you must include keywords in your posts that generate relevant ads. For example, if your blog is about dieting, make sure that you mention the word 'diet' as much as possible in all your posts. To increase your CTR you must also place your ads in the appropriate place on your blog. For example, adverts at the bottom of a page are known to result in a very low CTR simply because people do not see them.
5. Be patient. If you've never done this before don't expect to start earning from day one, in fact, don't expect to start earning unless your blog is about 2 months old. Make frequent (at least one every 2 days) relevant posts with relevant titles, include as many relevant keywords as possible, and expose the blog's link in as many online places as possible so that search engines will be able to find your blog.

I cannot really say how much I earn from my blog because Google AdSense does not allow it's members to divulge their earnings. Suffice it to say that for now I'm not complaining although there is still a lot of improvement to be expected. Also I'm still in the process of promoting my blogs so I'm expecting a lot more visitors than what I'm getting right now, which will obviosly mean in more income :)
That's it I guess, happy blogging and good luck!