AdSense has a weakness.
It's not very good at handling images.
Fill your blog or your website with pictures of your cat, your family or your vacation in Yosemite and you might please your readers, but Google won't know what to make of it. Unless you have a sizeable amount of text on your Web page, its robots won't be able to decide what you're talking about. You'll get Public Service Ads that don't earn you a dime instead of nice, profitable AdSense ads that give you big checks.
That's a shame because almost everyone these days has a digital camera. And almost every hard drive is stuffed with pictures that would look great on a blog.
So what can you do to turn those images into AdSense earners?
The first thing you can do is talk about the subject. Instead of putting up a gallery, place one picture on each page to give you lots of ad opportunities. Link each page with "next" and "previous" buttons and describe what each photo is about.
So if you put up a view of a waterfall in Yosemite, describe where you saw it, how long it took you to find it and what you did when you got there. Try to toss in a few keywords to generate targeted ads and you should be able to earn revenue.
You can also describe how you took the photo. If you're a hobbyist with a sackful of expensive equipment then you can go on about which lens you used, what focal length you chose and the challenges that came with shooting the picture. You'd be aiming at other photography enthusiasts, but there are enough of those to give you a good clickthrough rate.
And finally, whenever you talk about anything to do with photography, you can cash in with all of the product-related ad programs that work so well. So you can place affiliate links on the page or you could sign up for eMiniMalls and offer links to the camera you used to take the picture -- or even the shoes you used when hiking to the waterfall.
You can earn from images with AdSense... but you have to talk about them first.
It's Del.icio.us!
Furl It!
December 26, 2008 08:32 AM
Well picture that bit of advice. Thanks Joel for a very practical adsense secret. My sites are quite empty of graphics and photos.
Since I have content already in place, I will add keyword focused photos.
Chaplain Paul Slater
December 26, 2008 09:15 AM
Thanks for your info about make money with adsense I will try it
December 26, 2008 04:28 PM
My Adsense income is a bit slow, thanks for the picture advice. I'll put into practise straight away.
December 26, 2008 09:23 PM
I'm one of those people who Google pays every month and can attribute a portion of my EFT deposits coming from my use of pictures throughout my web site. It of course helps if you rename each image file so it is both descriptive and specific. Using Joel's hiking boots example above, name that picture nike_hiking_boots.jpg then set its "img alt" tag to "Nike Hiking Boots". Third repetition, located in the text beneath the image where you talk about your experience, adds additional reinforcement and should be well received by the search engines.
Tip: Talk about "insurance" and watch your AdSense earnings increase... after a little effort spent creating backlinks from third party sites where there is conversation involving "insurance". People and the search engines need to know where to find your content laden pages, right? Basically, talk about things with a high profit margin. A vendor selling something which yields them substantial profit margin (eg. insurance companies, mortgage companies, prescription drug manufacturers, etc.) is more likely justified in paying more per click than say a footwear company. Some advertisers (insurance and drug companies to name just two) pay $60 - $80 a click. Yes, a click.
December 27, 2008 02:04 AM
Good idea Mr. Joel Comm. Thanks for this information.
I've follow your blog info.
December 28, 2008 12:30 PM
Thanks for the tip about the keyword "insurance" - I needed to make an adjustment on my blog as this word is so relevant to my situation now.
What about the image filename itself? Does adsense crawl this too? I renamed my disaster picture to something else but I'm not sure how uploaded picture filenames are handled by wordpress - if they leave the filename intact or?
January 14, 2009 07:00 AM
Hi there...
This is interesting information to be applied. I'll try it.
Many thanks,
January 14, 2009 07:05 AM
Very good points there and well made. Our site is mainly a gallery of anime screen grabs and I can only confirm what you've written - payout is bigger on pages with descriptions. Those with just a screen grab pay out peanuts. A lot of peanuts, mind. The album pages with more relevant ads pay quite well.
July 28, 2009 01:16 AM
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