I’ve seen it, not once, not twice, not hundreds but thousands of times. Everyone asks questions how can they monetize their blogs because either their Google Adsense account was closed or it’s not bringing enough cash.

When should you use Adsense?

There is no general answer for that, other than try it and see if it brings anything back. It’s all about the content you are writing, about the niche of your blog. Take “diabetes” for example, high payouts, ads are blending in (content related) extremely well and your click through (CTR) is higher than the general because the visitors are violently asking for more and more information. It’s a win-win situation to add Adsense, rather than trying to find your advertisers directly.

Another example is tech related websites. Let’s look at Gizmodo or Engadget. I am sure at their amounts of traffic (average of 1.38mil daily unique visitors for Gizmodo) they have special deals with Google but still I can bet Adsense is 25% of their income. That is because a lot of people advertise GPS, speedometers, robots, Apple products, PS3 and other things to sell them. So the ads are blending in really well, again.

I am aware that not all of you have websites related to diabetes or get millions of unique visitors daily but Adsense can be for you, too. Adsense is great for those that don’t have great experience with monetizing pages, because you set it up easy, you get guidelines from Google how to blend them in and you don’t have to seek your advertisers because they already have them for you.

When shouldn’t you use Adsense?

My friend Bobby Voicu is a good marketer. He has the needed skills to take a site to the next level, to create great communities, in other words he knows how to get traffic to a website. Recently we had a discussion related to one of his websites in the automotive niche which got him 200-300 clicks a day in Adsense and paid out only $10 or $12. After many tweaks the results were the same. Adsense delivered a value of 3 to 7 cents per click which for such a website is unacceptable.

This is the case, when I don’t advise people to use it anymore and that is because using other money makers would be paying much better. You can use adBrite where you set the click value, Kontera to match the words with ads, and so on. When Adsense is paying very low or when you do not get any conversions because something is up with their algorithms and the ads won’t cover what your site is about, you can take it off for a while and try something else.