Blending Adsense ads with content is actually not a new way to make money online. It’s simply an improvement of an old one. You’ve heard of Adsense, right? The online contextual advertising network that’s made Google billions? And billions? And yet more billions? Yeah, that one. Well, Adsense won’t really do squat for your long-term revenue without a semi-decent CTR (Click Through Rate for all of you newbies out there). Bear in mind that the average CTR is pretty low – less than 1%. Sad, but true. This is why I’m not a huge proponent of PPC campaigns in general – there are just way too many sites out there for all of the smaller individual sites to generate enough revenue from PPC. For example, I have a buddy who made a whopping $0.86 last month on Adsense. Certainly not enough to cover the $60/year it costs to host a basic website. You have to be a pretty big player out there to do anything with PPC. Becoming a big player generally implies an investment of some sort – say, a sizeable chunk of time and/or money.

Nevertheless, for those of you who have already hooked your sites up with Adsense…

You may want to give blending a shot. Blending means that you arrange your Adsense ad to look as though it is part of the context of your site/blog. It allows you to change the font of your ads (what Google calls the “font family”), the color of the text, and the color of the background of your ads.

So why does blending work? The answer is best demonstrated through what is known as the “Adsense Heatmap”. The Heatmap is Google’s delineation of a web page based on a user’s likelihood of clicking on a link. For example, users are far more likely to click on links that are located in the center of the page in what they call the “Primary Content” section. By that same token, users are far less likely to click on links on the upper right hand side of the page, the top of the page, and the lower left hand side of the page. Adsense ads that have been blended with the actual content in the center of your web page have a much higher likelihood of improving their CTRs.

Disclaimer: Obviously, this theory needs to be tweaked to each individual web page on which there are ads. You will need to take into account the design and layout of your web page as well. Ultimately, the only way to find out how you can maximize on your PPC ads is through experimentation.

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