Many bloggers us Adsense ad units to generate their blogging income. Some do very well, others struggle to make a few cents per day. There are however several traps when running Adsense ad units.

What many bloggers fail to understand is how Google handle their advertising and their advertisers. Google of course wants to make money. They want you to make money as well since their income is, to a certain extent, based on yours.  At the same time, they want to be able to deliver to advertisers ads in situations that will deliver not just clicks, but clicks that convert to sales.

It’s basic common sense. If the advertiser is able to increase sales by advertising with Goolge, they will come back. If they run a campaign that chews up their dollars yet produces zero sales, chances are they will stop the advertising. No advertising  – no income for Google.

With this in mine, Google tend to like sites that have a reasonably click-through-rate (CTR). Between 5-10% is considered to be a good CTR. If your CTR drops to below 5% for an extended period of time, your site will lose favor with Google.  As a response, your Adsense ad units will earn a reduced per click rate. I have seen sites where their click rate is below 2c per click. There is not a lot of blogging income to come in that sort of scenario.

The real downside is that if one ad unit is performing poorly, all your ad units across all your sites will be reduced to a low per click payment. You can restore your sites income potential by making a few changes.

Each ad unit you run should have a separte channel. This enables you to measure how well they are performing. If you have poorly performing ad units, remove them or make changes to their size, color and placement.

Google Adsense ad units can be a big problem on home pages. The home page often has the highest bounce rate so this alone can affect your overall CTR.  if this is the case, remove the Adsense unit from your home/landing pages. Instead, use the ads on dedicated pages only.

By removing those ads, you are removing from the stats a high impression rate with a low CTR. The impressions are made on dedicated pages with traffic either clicking through from the home page, coming from a search engine or from another link source. The impressions are lower and the CTR rate highe.  This will be reflected in a higher blogging income share.

There is a growing trend to building blogs so they rank well then selling them. Some call it blog flipping, some describe it as legitimate form of blogging income and others, well they just get plain lucky.

Being able to find a good domain name and developing to the point that it becomes valuable is not easy. It does take work and it will take time. However, the following report shows just how lucky some people can be.

Problogger has reported that one blog has, or is, being sold for $15 million – that’s a lot of zero’s. The name of the blog is Bankaholic – an appropriate name given our current financial situation. Whether or not it has been sold for such a huge sum is not an issue, however it does show how selecting an appropriate name and building the blog can generate a long term profit.

Many bloggers look to the daily income they can make from their blogs. A concentration on the income side will eventually prove to be the undoing of any blog. Content is important along with good linking strategies. Bankaholic has an average of 20 comments per post – that indicates a high level of content quality.

With many blogs struggling to gain even a single comment on a post, there is little doubt their strategies are not working. For many the reason is that fascination with money rather than quality content. Bankaholic may have struck it rich – however, the owner has worked hard to develop the site and develop a strong readership. Perhaps there is a lesson to be learned there?

Some bloggers make the mistake of diluting their income opportunities by running too many conflicting ad units on the one page. This can be a huge mistake and often cost you money rather than making any.

A good example is affiliate advertising. You go to great lengths to write a good piece of affiliate promotion. It is keyword rich and will hopefully rank highly in the search result pages. However, if you mix in some non-affiliate advertising such as Adsense, you may earn 0.50 or perhaps a $1.00 for the Adsense click, but cost yourself $10 due to the missed affiliate click.

Adsense is a good example. The ads that run on that page are likely to be for related products that compete directly with your affiliate. Users are clicking through to that site instead of your affiliate.

Blogging income, just like any other part of your web site, needs careful planning and implementation. If you don’t plan carefully, your income opportunities may become limited. Don’t confuse the visitor. Have everything in plain sight.

Many blog owners, and website owners for that matter, spend a lot of time trying to increase their traffic volume. Some blog owners dream of that front page on Digg, or getting a post that goes viral on StumbleUpon. The problem is, if your blog has been created for the purpose of generating some blogging income, this viral traffic will rarely generate much income at all.

You best blogging income resource is already there. Your current visitors. This is where you are more likely to generate incomes, particularly those coming to your blog from the search engines. What you should be doing is considering ways to leverage that existing traffic into an income stream.

There are several paths you can take at the same time. The first is to determine how searches are finding your pages. What search phrase or keywords are being used? From this information you can rework your content to increase it’s value to the reader. More importantly, placing your income generating model in the most the appropriate place along with a good call to action can increase your conversions.

You have the traffic. You have your blogging income stream. It is a matter of bringing the two together. As you refine your content you will find these visitors staying a little longer. They may then follow links to other pages of interest. Leverage your existing traffic whilst working on standard SEO principles to increase your search engine rankings. That traffic is far more valuable than most of the social bookmarking traffic.

Inside Adsense has published a post that should be of interest to anyone publishing Adwords units as part of their blogging income.

If the content is good quality and brings in a good supply of traffic, your click through rate is going to improve. If your click through rate improves the chances are your traffic that moves onto an advertisers site will convert at a higher rate. The end result – advertisers will be willing to pay more to advertise on your site. As the post states:

Overall, you’re likely to earn more revenue with your site if advertisers are generating conversions and receiving quality leads from your site.

The opposite is also true. If the conversion rate from your site is low, advertisers will not want to advertise. The end result is less competition for the ads you do publish.

On the other hand, if your website performs poorly for advertisers, they may be less inclined to display on your site.

This is fairly straightforward and a double edged sword. If your content leads to increased conversions for publishers, they will pay more. You will receive a per-click return. Add to that an increase in the number of clicks due to the better targeting of ads and you’re a long way in front.

Blogging income – more clicks and a higher rate per click sounds like a win win situation to me – and it is you who is winning!