It’s organic traffic (i.e. traffic from Google and other search engines).

Here’s a simple example to illustrate the point. Suppose you have an online forum which receives 500,000 unique visitors per month, but 100% of those are coming directly to the forum, either by a bookmark or by typing the URL on their browsers, because they are already regular members. The second website is a niche site that receives only 250,000 unique visitors per month, but 80% of those are coming from search engines, while the remaining 20% are coming from referring sites. Despite the huge different in traffic levels, if both sites started using Google AdSense the niche, one would earn a lot more (I wouldn’t be surprised if it would be five or even ten times more).

How come?

That’s because visitors coming from search engines are already looking for something in specific (i.e. they are looking whatever they searched on Google) and when they end up on your site they are very likely to click on your AdSense units should they see something that is related to what they’re looking for. Other types tend to click on ads much less often (the ones that visit your site regularly even stop seeing your ads—it’s called ad blindness).

The bottom line is that if you want to increase your AdSense earnings, one of the best things you can do is to increase your organic traffic. That’s easier said than done, I know, but it’s totally possible, and below I want to to share a strategy you can use for this.

The long tail

The central idea of this strategy is to use the long tail to increase your organic traffic.

If you are not familiar with the term, the long tail refers to the tail-shaped curve that is produced when you consider the distribution of certain things. For example, consider the books sold on Amazon.com. There are some books that end up selling millions of copies. Those are the best-sellers, and they are responsible for a big part of Amazon’s revenues. Nothing new here. What about the more obscure books that sell a much fewer number of copies (e.g., from 100 up to 1000). One could think they are negligible to Amazon’s business model, but quite the opposite! The sales volume from each of those books individually might be insignificant, but there are hundreds of thousands of such books, so if you combine their sales the result is quite significant (and some people argued that this is a key advantage for Amazon).

This method uses four online marketing channels to maximize your search ranking:

• PPC Marketing (AdWords)
• Article Marketing (posting articles to eZine and on your blog)
• Link or Banner marketing
• SEO

1. PPC Marketing
I’m sure you have used Google AdWords to buy traffic, but if you know how to use it correctly you can receive something more valuable: Data.
Example: Your business is focused in the Mortgage Industry. When you are doing your Adwords campaign, go ahead and grab on of the most expensive keywords for your niche, like “Home Loan Refinance”. Don’t expect good ROI, but expect great data. Once you run the campaign for a short time, Google will tell you what people have searched in order to find your ad. So if someone searches for “San Diego Home Loan Counseling” he will find your Ad, because you grabbed the keyword “Home Loan Refinance”. And you will know that he was searching for “Loan Refinance”. That means: AUTOMATED KEYWORD RESEARCH!
But Google tells you more than just the keywords. Because Google places your ads on Publisher Sites from Google AdSense you will see which sites are relevant to your niche.
So now you have 2 things: keywords and related sites.

2. Article Marketing
Start writing posts for the keywords you got from your PPC campaign and post them on your blog. Write similar articles for the same keywords (in this case “San Diego Home Loan Counseling” and post them on eZine for example and place a link to that specific article on your blog (aka deep links). Those deeplinks will be backlinks from related content and Google loves that and your SEO is now increasing.
Article marketing is great. People coming to your website via articles are more willed to buy or take action more so than other visitors because they have already seen your image or name, thus building some sort of trust.

3. Link and Banner Marketing
Google is placing your paid ads from your PPC campaign on publisher sites via AdSense. Now you can look on which sites Google is placing your ads and contact those webmasters directly. Ask the owners to place your banner or link to your site. Those are direct backlinks (links to your landing page). This will boosts your SEO because you get backlinks from the sites in which Google already knows as “related to your content” and “trusted”.

4. Link and Banner Marketing
If you have created all the articles go back to your PPC campaign and change it. Now you don’t need the main keyword “Home Loan Refinance” anymore but you can use more of the long tail keywords such as “San Diego Home Lean Counseling” you wrote articles for. And don’t link those ads to your landing page but to articles or products on your blog/website you want the visitor to take action on.