Writing Content

11.1 Writing Content

AdSense works better than just about every other type of online advertising for one simple reason: the ads are relevant to the content on your page. Users click on the ads because they find them interesting.

And they come back and click on them again because they find your content interesting.

If your site doesn’t have good content, you’re going to struggle to attract users and links, and you won’t be able to persuade anyone to come back to your site.

Having the right content then is crucial to having good revenues with AdSense. It’s also crucial to the relationship you have with Google’s indexing mechanism. Remember, Google is a search engine first and foremost. Their purpose is to provide the web user with the best search results for the terms they are seeking. If you are providing quality content, you have a greater chance of seeing your search results come up higher on the page.

Fortunately, it’s also easier than ever to fill your site with page after page of sticky content, each of which contains ad units and opportunities to earn revenue.

The most obvious way to create content is of course to write it yourself. Pick a subject you like and pour your heart out. If you know everything there is to know about video games, you could set up a site stuffed with reviews, news and walkthroughs, and write all the articles yourself. Your AdSense units will give you ads related to gaming and as long as they’re positioned properly and look right they should give you more than enough revenue to fund your video gaming habit and then some. You can do the same thing for any topic you wanted.

But remember, if you’ve created your site to make money, then writing the content yourself means that you’re working for that money. When you count your revenues, you have to factor in the time and effort it took you to make those revenues.

That’s one of the reasons that many people look for other, easier ways to get content around their ads. (The fact that they just don’t like writing is another good reason.) Fortunately, there are plenty of ways of creating effortless content and some of them are even free.