Google recently held a webinar for AdSense publishers. They gave out some adsense optimization tips that they have gathered over the past few years. The transcript is pretty lengthy, so here's the summary:

• Ad Location - "the middle, above the fold location perform best." Also "if you have an article page with a long body of text, the bottom of that article is actually pretty successful"
• Ad Formats - "the top three formats are the 336x280 that you see on the page; the 300x250 medium rectangle; and then the 160x600 wide skyscraper." Additionally "the wider ad formats are doing better than the other ones and the reason is that they actually take up fewer lines. And so with every additional line, you have a chance of losing that interested user."
• Ad Colors - Pick colors that blend well with the site. Matches the background color, and compliments the site. Make them feel like a part of the site. They give an example where a customer went from blended background to yellow, and clicks dropped 65%
• Ad Blindness - if the colors stick out too much, readers may immediatly identify them as ads and not even look at them. Also frequent readers may stop reading ads so you could alternate positioning and colors to get their attention. "The more you blend in with the site, the less chance that ad blindness will occur."
• Experiment - this was a big theme in the webinar echoed by all experts. Use channels to test different colors, positioning, and formats to find out what works best. They show that you can more than double your revenue just by finding the right color, position, format combo.
• Image Ads - If you want to maximize revenue they recommend turning them on. I personally disable them in my account, because I find them too distracting/annoying to the user. Yes you may increase your CPC, but you will probably decrease impressions over time.
• Link Units - Don't take up much space, and also "allows the user to refine what they're interested in. So if they may not be interested in specific ads on your page, they might be interested in a particular topic, and by clicking on a link unit and a link in the link unit, they'll be able to specify that they're interested in that specific topic and get a lot more options and variety on the ads that might appear." I also bet google remembers what they click on and then tries to generate better ads for the page... just my speculation.
• AdSense For Search - You can use this for your site search, and you get a percentage of ad clicks.
• Focus on Content - Duh!
• Don't click on your own ads - One of the callers asked the question "I was just noticing that someone asked about clicking on their own ads and it says you're not supposed to. And I don't remember reading that. And I occasionally do click on the ads... So is that detrimental in some way?" - I can't believe they said that to google. Google's response was: "Yes, that's sort of chief among the terms and conditions".
• Impression Counter - Google confirmed that Page Impressions are counted when a public service ad (or alternate ad url or color) is displayed.
• Your site is unique - all these things may not matter, the best location, format, and color is different for every site. So again, go experiment.

Source: http://www.petefreitag.com

Tip #1: Don't put ads on empty pages.

When I reworked my site, I built a skeleton set of pages that had no content, just titles and some meta tags. I displayed ads on those pages, however. Although all you see are public service ads at first, the very act of displaying ads on a page causes the AdSense web crawler to quickly fetch that page for analysis. A page with good content will thus begin showing relevant paying ads fairly quickly.

If you don't have any content, then, Google will have to guess as what your page is about. It may guess wrong, and so the ads that it displays may not be relevant. You'll have to wait until Google re-crawls the site for the ads to correct themselves. Here is what Google had to say when I asked them about how often the AdSense crawler updates a site:

Thank you for taking the time to update your site. New ads will start appearing on your site the next time our crawler re-indexes your site. Unfortunately at this time, we are unable to control how often our crawlers index the content on your site. Crawling is done automatically by our bots. When new pages are added to your website or introduced to the AdSense program, our crawlers will usually get to them within 30 minutes. If you make changes to a page, however, it may take up to 2 or 3 weeks before the changes are reflected in our index. Until we are able to crawl your web pages, you may notice public service ads, for which you will not receive any earnings.

It's better to flesh out the page before you start displaying ads on it.

Tip #2: Don't be afraid to ask questions

If you're wondering about something, don't be afraid to ask Google. So far, they've always responded to my questions within a working day. There are two email addresses to use, depending on the type of question:

Please feel free to email us at adsense-tech@google.com if you have additional technical questions or concerns. For general program or account questions, please email adsense-support@google.com.

Their responses are always very polite, and they appreciate getting problem reports and suggestions.

Tip #3: Avoid non-English characters on English pages

This one is a bug, to be honest. My surname is French, and I prefer to write it out correctly with the accent grave on the first "e". Every page on my site would then include at least two accented letters, because my name shows up twice in the footer. On some pages my name shows up two or three more times.

Normally, this wouldn't be an issue. But on some pages the presence of the accented characters is enough to cause AdSense to display non-relevant ads in French. This happens whether the browser indicates a preference for French or not. When I reported this to Google, this is the answer they gave me:

Hello Eric, Thank you for bringing this issue to our attention. We are currently working as quickly as we can to address this problem. As soon as we have more information for you, we will email you again. We appreciate your patience. Sincerely, The Google Team

Until this is resolved, I've decided to strip out all accents except on the pages that are actually in French.

Tip #4: Check your keyword density

Although Google doesn't release exact details as to how they determine the ads to serve on a given page, they do tell us that it's the text content of the page that matters, not the meta tags. Before serving ads on a page, then, you might want to check its keyword density. A good, free tool for doing this is found here:

http://www.ranks.nl/tools/spider.html 

This lets you fine-tune the page before exposing it to the AdSense crawler.

Source: Google Adsense Tips

Many Internet marketers like to use e-courses or email courses to help market their products or services. Online courses or email courses usually provide educational content and information on a specific niche topic. These e-courses typically offer in several, short segments so that the students can pick up and understand what the courses are teaching in a step-by step manner. The marketers will recommend their own or affiliate products or services that are relevant to the content in their courses. This technique is called 'teach and sell'.

For example, doing SEO work is time consuming and involving lot of hard effort. But using SEO software can save time and work. So people who sell SEO software will create free e-courses about how to do SEO the right way to effectively get a website ranked top in search engines. The SEO software sellers will take the opportunity to recommend their SEO software in several sections of their courses to encourage the students to buy the software. The students learned everything about how to do SEO properly and found a software that can cut down their own effort and time when working on SEO. So some of them will want to buy the software to make their SEO work easier and faster.

You Need a Good Idea for Your Online Course
To create an e-course or an email course, you need to have a solid idea for a series of informative articles which are related to your online business and will be of interest to your targeted buyers. You will use your online course as a marketing tool for your business. The course should be free of charge to your target prospects and anyone interested to participate so that you can get as many potential customers to sign up your course as possible and entice them to purchase your products or services.

Make Sure Your Target Prospects are Interested to Your Topic
The topic you decided to use for your e-course has to be directly relevant to your business or the products or services you are offering. Just like the example mentioned above, the SEO software sellers will create courses to help their target prospects to learn how to do SEO work and tell their students the can save their work and time using SEO software. Likewise, people who have weight problem would be interested to sign up courses such as how to reduce weight in short time period or the best ways to reduce weight. So the subject for your course must be of interest to your potential customers.

Create Content for Your E-Course
After determining the topic for your online or email course, it is time to write the content for your course. You can write the content by yourself. The content doesn’t have to be well written but they do need to be clear and easy to understand. Also review and check your content to make sure there is no grammar and spelling error. Alternatively, you may spend some money hiring a writer to create content for your e-course. Tell the writer exactly what you want and the writer will create a series of professional and well written content for you.

Once your content are ready, you can turn your e-course into a PDF e-book and let people download it on your website. Or you can break the e-course down into several segments or sections and send each section to your students every day until the course ends. This will help make learning easier and keep your student interested to your topic.

Distribute Your Online Course
create a sign up a form on your site and the form should be in the location of your site where it is easily noticed by your visitors. Any visitor that attracted by your e-course will sign up.

Other ways you can use to distribute your e-course are forum posting, participate in give way events and article marketing. Apply as many distributing methods you possibly can to get the maximum potential buyers to sign up for your e-course.

Source: moneymakerinfo.blogspot.com