Is this true?
As you may know, I’ve been working on building my own web empire. These sites are filled with what I think is really good (and hopefully really well written) content that users would find very interesting. As these site mature, I am experimenting with monetizing them, primarily through Google’s AdSense product because it is pretty easy for freelancers to use and it won’t ruin your reputation. To paraphrase what they used to say in IT: No freelancer ever ruined his career by using Google AdSense on his sites.
While I’m not putting any real effort into further reading or research on Google Ads (I already have quite the stack to get through), I recently ran across this article posted a few months ago at advertisespace.com (good domain name, eh?) in which the author provides seven tips to increase your AdSense Revenue.
The Number 1 tip to increase AdSense revenue is to “Write Crappier.” Now, the author had posted a tongue in cheek item earlier in the article, so it is possible he is only half serious.
On the other hand, he quickly pointed out that he was only kidding on that other point, and his reasoning makes sense in a twisted kind of way.
If you write good content, his theory goes, readers will be more inclined to stick around and read more of your article/site when those readers who end up on junky, limited content sites, are much more likely to see an ad for something they are even remotely interested in and click it rather than spend more time on the original site.
I’m not sure how this stacks up in the real world, but you have to admit, a lot of the top ranking sites you end up going to via Google Search results aren’t exactly jammed packed with useful, non-obvious, information.
Considering the effort it takes to achieve some of those rankings, the payoff has to be at least pretty decent.
Why can’t it just be that the good are rewarded and the wicked are punished? It would make things a lot easier.
Makes you think.
Actually, that kinda makes sense. On Astroengine.com, I’m striving to create unique and well written articles, in the aim of becoming a “world leader” (if there can be such a thing in space science news and opinion!). However, the most well thought out articles (that often take many hours to research and write) fail horribly. In which case ad revenue is down drastically.
So, I started a category called “Snippets” so I could post short-fire news items that take 30 minutes to type (aiming for an article that would take 1-2 minutes to read). Often they are simple link posts or just a short commentary on an event or piece of research. Boom! I get flooded with traffic (mainly from social sites, but quite a few from Google) and often the ads are pretty high value.
I still think it’s important to generate unique, high quality content so people want to navigate around your site, but sometimes it’s good to throw in some short, popular articles. They are still unique, just not particularly thorough. You get a lot more ad revenue for the time spent on writing that way.
Anyhow, that’s my 2c 🙂
Cheers, Ian