So how much money can you really make with AdSense? With all the hype that there has been recently, you could be forgiven for being a wee bit skeptical about some of the claims. Because, let's face it. Those e-books and courses that offer untold riches in AdSense for just $97 might sound like they're shooting themselves in the foot. After all, if I'm making $20,000 a month with my magic recipe, do I really want to let you into my secret for such a small one-time fee?
So where is the truth? Let's take a critical but positive view of the AdSense opportunity.
1. Can you make money with AdSense?
Yes. But not necessarily that much. AdSense, as you know, is the system where Google displays ads on your site or blog, and you get paid a share of the revenue when people click on them. Sometimes advertisers are prepared to pay a lot to get people to click on their ads, but more often than not they are savvy about costs and return on investment. The net result is that a click on an ad will get you cents rather than dollars.
2. So how can you make more money with AdSense?
Maybe, just maybe, by buying an ebook and applying the information inside. You may be best off by checking out the titles that have built a strong reputation and that over the past months have come down in price somewhat (significantly lower than the $97 mentioned above). But it's still no guarantee of success and you can also consult what Google has to advise on the matter for free. Otherwise, more money comes from more (legal) clicks. A word of warning before the next paragraph. Google has all sorts of ways to detect if people are clicking on their own ads, deliberately pointing visitors towards ads and so on. They can terminate your AdSense account in a blink if they think they have cause to do so.
3. Making content for AdSense
Pick a market that allows for a reasonable ad spend from the advertisers and good traffic to your site. Write your content to appeal to visitors and search engines. It's the quality of your content that impacts the click through rate on your site. Strong hint: find keywords that have high demand from users and low supply from other web pages. AdSense revenues per site tend to be low, so you may want to consider making a number of websites in this way. AdSense can be labor intensive because of this, as you keep on producing new websites, partially to replace other websites that performed for a while and then died.
4. Optimizing the content for AdSense
Once again, check out what Google says themselves about optimizing AdSense on your site or blog. It's simple, relevant advice and it's free from their site. Some of the basics so far include things like using the large block or the wide skyscraper format (you'll see how these are defined on Google's site) as well as sticking to classic colors for the link (blue) and the url (black). Don't get fancy, at least not at the beginning. When you have a few sites (think in terms of 20 pages of content per site) generating AdSense revenue, then you can make one or two more to experiment with.
