As we discussed in our previous article, public service ads can be a serious waste of effort for real businesses that leverage high quality content to generate revenue. Of course, you can eliminate public service ads by using your own banner instead (sophisticated users can even show advertisements from Google competitors). However, the best thing to have is never to have the situation that you need to deal with public service ads.
While we have not yet perfected the system to have minimum possible public service ads, here are the learnings from our experience with our network of websites:
- Always do some research before you even create any content. If a quick Google search does not show a lot of ads on the right hand side, chances are that your article is unlikely to show any ads either. While you might still need to write an article because it will be of interest to your readers, but you can do other things with advertising space on that page.
- Ask the question that, based on your article, is it possible for a reader to buy a product or service. In other words, unless there is a product or service (that a business will likely sell), there is no advertising. So always pick topics that include some product or service, preferably something that is sold online or surfers are likely to find information about it online.
- Some topics attract more advertisers than others. Business (check out our sister website iProceed that always attracts ads), cooking (our cooking channel), beauty, health, and fitness (our beauty channel), dating, romance and relationships (our romance channel). So as you decide what business you want to be in, these are good questions to ask.
- There are many tools on the Internet (including on Google's website) that show you how to find out what the related terms are and what terms are more commonly used by surfers to search a specific subject. Once you know the most popular terms, you can use these as keywords even though your overall content might not change much.
- Make your article long enough so that you can use the keyword about a dozen or so times without driving the reader nuts with too much repetition. Of course, as you might already know, the keyword should definitely be in the file name, title, and in the first paragraph.
- When you first publish your content, you might or might not see any ads. Not to worry. As Google points out, sometimes it may take a while. We have had cases that the ads did not appear for days even though our website is crawled by Google at least twice each day.
- Check repeatedly for a couple of days and if you still do not see any ads, you might want to edit the article and see if you can add a paragraph or two to increase the keyword count.
- Finally, stay away from any offensive words at all (particularly mention of any body parts, intimate activities, four-letter words, and anything else that is not G-rated).
Related article: How to develop high quality content to attract good advertisers?