Adsense Blindness - How To Beat It!

Adsense blindness is a topic that is becoming more relevant with each passing day based on the enormous success of Google's Adsense program. The amazing success of the Adsense program has led to what seems like universal adoption of Google's ad serving technology. The problem is that the ubiquity of Adsense is causing more and more people to unconciously filter Adsense ads as they view websites. Gone are the days when you could throw up some great content and cash in by throwing some Adsense panels above the fold integrated into your text. The mantra of the past couple of years has been blend - blend your Adsense panels into your content. 

Common wisdom and experience dictated that the closer your Adsense panels resembled your content, the better your click- through ratio. This strategy will suffer from lower and lower conversion rates on high-value content sites with a high returning visitor rate. You see, the more familiar a reader is with your site and its layout, the easier it is for her to identify your Adsense panels and filter them in favor of your content. First, Adsense has achieved world domination or something close to it. Adsense is everywhere and its format is static and unchanging. Sure, you can vary colors, borders, and link colors but that darn Google name is still tacked on to the corner of every panel. With less new users coming online each day the pool of Adsense neophytes is shrinking. Every day a larger percentage of users become desensitized to the presence of Adsense and that Google tag on the corner of each panel.

Don't be afraid to experiment with Adsense. While the panels remain relatively static you can vary colors and borders. The key with experimentation is to make subtle changes. Your Adsense panels should continue to blend with your content overall. Well blended content captures new readers every time. What you want to do is create a situation where the user, especially returning readers, stop and process your changes. You want her mind to note that the Adsense panel is different but only slightly. The same approach can be applied to text color and link color. Subtle changes can work wonders for improving click-throughs. The idea here is that we have trained the reader's mind to expect Adsense panels to be blended very deeply into our content. Every change you make to your site layout causes readers to work at processing the changes this requires attention. This simple act draws the reader's attention to the panels and hopefully creates a click event. My Adsense resources page listed below has some great pointers concerning how to effectively test changes to your Adsense panels.

Adsense isn't the only game in town. In fact, there are thousands of other fine affiliate programs that you can join and integrate into your content right along with Adsense. Adsense is so easy that we have become lazy in matters of monetization. Break the Google chains that bind you! Almost any piece of great content can be matched with a suitable affiliate offering. There are literally thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands of affiliate programs available.