Yesterday I met a real entrepreneur, a guy who was currently had three separate companies and had already sold companies he'd created. He doesn't do anything related to contextual advertising, but I thought his mindset and his attitudes were very important things to keep in mind if you're trying to make real money with AdSense. You really do have to think like an entrepreneur — or an “AdSensepreneur” if you want. Here are some characteristics of an AdSensepreneur:
- Willingly risks the business. For AdSense publishers, this sometimes means pushing the limits of the terms and conditions while trying new things. Remember all the fuss and excitement when some publishers discovered that placing images near ads caused clickthroughs on those ads to skyrocket? Some of the publishers got quite creative. Eventually Google was forced to respond and clarify how images could be placed (see here for an example) but they didn't forbid the practice entirely. The AdSensepreneur expects to get his or her hands slapped occasionally by Google.
- Leads the herd. Most successful entrepreneurs are not visionaries who seek to introduce new products or services to an unsuspecting world. Rather, they take an existing product/service and either take it to the next step or else provide a different or interesting spin on it. They simply try to do better than anyone else. So don't avoid highly-competitive areas like credit and debt, but instead build super-targeted and different sites within that space.
- Works hard. Fool that I am, I willingly subscribe to many of the mailing lists that Internet marketers supply, so almost every day I get an email telling me about a “foolproof” plan for making money “without working at it”. I never believe these. Because it takes work to make money. It just takes a lot less work to read about making money. Sure, you can buy or build “turnkey” AdSense sites, but how are you going to get traffic to them? No traffic, no money… There are definitely tools you can buy to help you be more efficient at what you do, and I've argued before that the really successful AdSense publishers develop systems and tools to help them get new sites off the ground. But you're still got work to do at some point.
- Focuses his or her efforts. Focus and determination to succeed are very important. When you're creating a new site, you really need to devote a lot of attention to it. It's better not to be distracted by other things, such as keeping your various blogs up-to-date. No joke here! The best long-term plan for AdSense wealth is to build sites that are self-sufficient and require little or no updating. Because this lets you focus on other things as you move forward. Don't get me wrong, I love blogs, but they're a double-edged sword. If you're not generating content automatically for your blogs, don't run too many blogs or you'll go crazy keeping them up-to-date.
- Learns from mistakes. A lot of my best learning with AdSense has been from the mistakes I made. And from reading about the mistakes that others made.
This isn't meant to be a comprehensive list, of course. But if you really want to take your AdSense earnings up to the next level, think carefully about these characteristics and see if they fit you or not. Perhaps the best thing you can do to jumpstart yourself is to create a plan for increasing your earnings and adjust everything you do to work towards and in support of that plan. Just don't expect it to happen overnight!
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Eric Giguere is the contextual advertising expert who wrote Make Easy Money with Google and Uncommon AdSense. You can read this blog by mail if it's more convenient for you, just send a blank email to memwg-blog@aweber.com to subscribe.