How to make a fortune with AdSense

Occasionally, the folks on the DigitalPoint AdSense forum come up with some interesting discussions. One of the latest is a thread about how spam sites generate traffic and money quickly. What it all comes down to, of course, is traffic.

As I wrote a while back in my article The AdSense Formula, everything comes down to a simple formula:

earnings = number of clicks * average price per click

This is the “Fundamental AdSense Formula”. Yes, it's simplistic, but it's accurate. See the article for the details.

Ultimately, of course, there's a limit to how high you can raise the average price per click you get on your sites. Various factors — Google's “smart pricing”, advertisers not spending lots of money on the content network, the dynamics of the ad marketplace itself — will combine to make sure that you can only get so much per click. So what's left? Traffic!

If you want to make a fortune with AdSense, you need overall traffic volume. Note that this doesn't mean you need a single, high-traffic site: you can do this with many, lower-traffic sites.

Think of it this way: if you have one site that's making you $5 in pure profit per month, that's not a lot of money. But 20 such sites gets you $100 a month, the breakeven point for getting a cheque from Google. And 1000 sites gets you $5000 a month. And if you can increase the average per-site profit you'll see numbers way above those values.

But how do you build 1000 profitable sites? It takes time and it takes money. Hosting the sites is the easiest problem to solve: you get what's called a reseller account from a reputable hosting company. These accounts are designed to be branded by you and resold to others at a higher cost. (I talk about this in my book, how the actual number of true hosting companies is much smaller than the number of companies offering hosting plans because so many of them are just resellers.)

Buying the domains costs you real money. You can reduce your costs substantially by signing up to resell a domain registrar's services and using those services to get a lower price. And registrars will sell domains for less when you buy in volume, too. But even $5 a domain adds up if you were to do it all at once. But you don't, of course, you do it incrementally.

Do it right, and your monthly costs for each site should be less than $1. Anything above $1 in terms of AdSense revenue would therefore be profit.

Really, the problem is generating content. This is where many spammy sites fall down, because they use questionable content generation techniques. They use programs to “autogenerate” directory pages. They steal content from others. They make pages from RSS feeds and from Google Alerts.

The best way is to write your own content, of course. Just having a huge number of sites out there is no good if the sites aren't ranking well in the search engines: you need the search engine listings to get the traffic. So you write good content and use proper search engine optimization techniques to make sure the right keywords are emphasized. This takes time. Yes, you'll have various templates created to get a site up and running quickly, but writing that content yourself takes time — those few pages of the Invisible Fence Guide took me a couple of hours to write.

It's funny, but earning money always seems to come down to the same thing: how much time and effort you're willing to devote to the endeavour. I do think it's fairly easy to get one or two sites up and running and more than paying their costs with AdSense. Taking the next step isn't something most website owners are going to do. But it is possible.

Eric Giguere is the author of Make Easy Money with Google, a real (printed!) introductory AdSense book for non-technical people, available at all fine bookstores. Be sure to download the free sample chapter for more information about the book. Or add it directly to your Amazon shopping cart!

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