Don't write about AdSense if you want to be rich

Over at feedbuzzard, Rick talks about how his blog discussing AdSense doesn't make him any money and so he's removed the ads from them. He was commenting on the ProBlogger entry Should Bloggers Forget AdSense? that deals more extensively with the topic.

The truth is, you won't get rich talking about AdSense. The payouts are too small. Use the Overture view bids tool (I still find it easier to refer to it as “Overture” instead of “Yahoo! Search Marketing”) to see what people are paying for the “adsense” keyword and you'll see that it currently maxes about at less than $0.40 per click, which means the average pay-per-click value on an AdSense will be the $0.03 to $0.10 range. (Remember, advertisers generally pay less to display ads in the Google content network as opposed to only on Google's result pages, and then you only get a percentage of that.) Based on what I'm seeing on MakeEasyMoneyWithGoogle.com, I'd say the payouts tend to the lower end of that range, too.

Now, I can't promise that anyone will get rich from AdSense (and I make this very clear in my book, which I did not title Make Oodles and Oodles of Money with Google even though that would have been a catchy title), but it seems to me that the obvious strategy is to apply AdSense and not just talk about it:

• Read The AdSense Formula to refresh yourself on the basics
• Read When AdSense Makes No Sense for reasons not to use AdSense on certain pages
• Write good content about a topic with higher-paying keywords (but avoid the really high-paying ones, they have too much competition)
• Keep a wary eye out for click fraud
• Above all, be patient!

As a topic, I'd say that AdSense fails the high-paying keyword test. In fact, it's probably even worse than that because the people looking for information about AdSense are less likely to click on ads themselves due to banner blindness.

But am I being a hypocrite for having AdSense ads in a blog about AdSense? Not really, because the blog (and the site that hosts it) are really meant to promote Make Easy Money with Google. In my mind, it would be hypocritical and a disservice to my readers not to have ads on the book's companion site. You gotta practice what you preach!

When I have some free time, though, I think I'll setup some kind of debt consolidation site and really rake in the bucks. Or better yet, move to the United States. After all, I'm already approved for multiple loans and mortgages which I can then legally abandon with no repercussions. I get all kinds of mail on this subject every day, so it must be true!

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