10 Alternatives to Checking Your AdSense Earnings

It's a common problem among AdSense publishers, especially those with the AdSense Notifier installed in their browsers: the frequent and compulsive checking of AdSense earnings throughout the day. It can be a big time waster. But constant checking won't lead to more earnings — in fact, it could lead to the opposite! Here are ten things you could be doing instead to increase those earnings over the long term:

1. Write more content.

If you make time to check your earnings, you can make time to write some content. A blog posting, an article fragment, whatever you can do. It doesn't have to be immediately publishable — use your blog's draft mode, for example, to prepare some content ahead of time for later publication.

2. Read the AdSense Terms and Conditions.

It always surprises me how many people haven't read the AdSense Terms and Conditions and the accompanying Program Policies. (Note that the Program Policies are considered to be part of the Terms and Conditions.) This is where you discover important information like:

• No encouragements to click.
• Only label ads as “Sponsored Links” or “Advertisements”.
• No more than 3 ad units, 2 search boxes and 1 link unit per page. (As of this posting.)
• When Google says “Jump!” you say “How high?”

It's well worth the time to read it thoroughly.

3. Visit an AdSense forum.

My favorite AdSense forum is the Digital Point AdSense forum, which is heavy on the signal and less so on the noise. It's a great way to learn from other publishers' experiences.

4. Study the AdSense heat maps.

The AdSense heat maps (there are two: one for regular content pages and one for forum pages) give you great advice on where to position ads for maximum clickability. Are your ads in the right spot? If not, try moving them into the hot spots on a few pages and see what happens.

5. Research keywords.

Have you been wondering how hot a topic is? Some quick tests with Google Suggest, the Overture Keyword Selector Tool and the AdWords Keyword Tool (all free) can let you know fairly quickly if it's something you can pursue. If you have a bit longer to spare, you can also fire up a tool like Keyword Elite for more in-depth research. (Subscribe to my free profitable niche discovery course for more tips on keyword research.)

6. Create some channels.

Although tedious to manage, AdSense channels, particularly the custom channels, can provide some interesting and useful data. Combine these with an ad tracking script to really find out what ads are making you money and what you can do in terms of ad formats and ad placements to increase your earnings.

7. Create systems.

Serious AdSense publishers have multiple sites and/or blogs on the go at any given time. Creating and managing your sites and blogs is much simpler and more effective if you have systems in place to help you with different things. Like customizing WordPress for AdSense or using a templating framework for creating new sites.

8. Optimize your pages.

So much traffic depends on how well your pages rank in the search engines that it makes a lot of sense to devote some time to search engine optimization tasks. Most search engine optimization tasks have the beneficial side effect of improving the ad targeting.

9. Think like an advertiser.

That money you're making ultimately comes from the advertisers who are advertising with Google's AdWords program. Do you understand how AdWords works? Do you know how ads are chosen for display? You can get a lot of insight into AdSense by studying its “flip side”.

10. Spend time doing other things.

Go talk with your spouse. Play with your children. Read a good book. Watch a movie. Take some time off from AdSense by doing other things. Give your poor brain a break from all those thoughts about high-paying keywords, traffic strategies, search engine optimization, and related topics.