Good Content

[sunshine]

I’m always yammering on about optimizing the way your ad units look so that they fit onto the page. I’m forever talking about putting the ad blocks in the right place and in the right format so that users can see them and click on them easily. I’ve probably spent hours in front of the keyboard writing about finding keywords and bringing up the highest-paying ads.

All of those things are important.

But they all take for granted what is probably the number one most important factor in generating consistent, high revenues.

Know what I’m talking about? Right… consistent, high quality content.

Now, if you’re thinking, “Well sure Joel, that goes without saying!” just head over to Google, type in a keyword related to your site’s content and see how far it goes without saying.

You’ll probably find that about 95 percent of the sites that that keyword pulls up are garbage. Maybe two sites on the first page will be worth reading. The rest will be stuffed with dull information that’s taken almost word-for-word from some other site long forgotten. Or they’ll barely touch on the subject and contain nothing of any interest to anyone. Or they’ll be filled with pages that contain little more than ads.

Lots of people have become pretty skilled at pushing their sites up the search engine rankings. They’re much less skilled at producing the sort of content that gets users to come back regularly without a search — the sort of content that people actually want to read.

But having good content isn’t only important because it increases your traffic. It’s important because it increases your trust.

And it’s trust that gets people to click.

The reason that high-earning AdSense publishers get plenty of clicks isn’t just that they know what to do with their ads (although that certainly helps). It’s that their users trust them to deliver the content they want to read. And that includes the content that they reach through the ad links.

That’s why I’ll always turn down a high-paying keyword if I’ve got nothing new or interesting to say about it. Sure, I might get a few clicks but I’m not going to get consistent clicks, and I’m not going to get them for long.

That doesn’t mean I’m going to ignore keywords. That would be crazy. But I’m always going to be much better off with a good Web page using a medium-paying keyword than a dull page with a high-paying keyword. It just pays more… in the short-term and the long run.