The AdSense Crapshoot
Yesterday, ericgiguere.com was offline for 24 hours because of some severe network outage at CIHost, which is where the server is co-located. All my mail gets filtered there, so I was unable to send or receive anything except through my backup GMail account. What an odd feeling to be cut off like that. Luckily it only affected a couple of my sites, and had no effect at all on the pre-launch festivities for PLRSiteBuilder.
One of the questions I get every so often goes something like this: “I heard AdSense is dying and isn’t viable anymore. What do you think?”
AdSense isn’t dying by any means. It’s a very viable source of online income. However, I will say this about it: making real money with AdSense is a crapshoot, and don’t let anyone else tell you otherwise.
Am I contradicting myself? Of course not! Every online venture is a crapshoot. Nobody’s come up with a foolproof, 100% guaranteed way to make lots of money using Internet marketing. Or offline marketing, for that matter. Working hard isn’t enough. Even working smart isn’t enough. There’s always an element of luck involved. You have to be in the right place at the right time. Just ask Bill Gates.
Based on my experience, there are two ways to make serious money with AdSense:
- Develop a single high-traffic site/blog in a well-paying niche. This is a non-trivial, long-term approach. You have to make your site into an authority site with good search engine rankings. The niche is key, however. A lot of traffic won’t make you a lot of money from AdSense if you’re only getting a penny per click.
- Create a network or sites/blogs. This is the short-term approach. It’s non-trivial, too, but in many ways simpler than the single-site approach. Here the focus is on building a network of (carefully and topically interlinked) sites on a variety of topics. Most sites will be duds, earning maybe $1 a day, but a few will be stars, outshining the rest by a wide margin. Once you find a few stars, you expand your network around those stars, either by developing related sites or by transforming the stars into true authority sites.
If you’re serious about making a full-time income with AdSense, then, you must be prepared to do some upfront work to get there. Once things are established you can ease off, which is the great thing about AdSense, but getting there is not easy. (As I write this, I see that the big-name IM gurus are busy promoting the free report The IM-Myth, which to be honest is a way for Russell Brunson to build up a list of potential customers for the new product he’s launching next week. The report, however, is very instructive if you want to see how much work is involved in running a successful full-time Internet business.)
That’s if you want to make thousands per month in AdSense earnings. If you’re only looking to supplement your income then there is a lot less work required on your part. Making $10 a day or less may not sound like much, but it’s still money coming in to support your hobby/passion and you get the added benefit of tax deductibility (details vary, of course) for things you’re spending money on anyhow (i.e. hosting, domains, books, hardware, software). The great thing is you don’t really have to spend any time chasing down advertisers, you let Google’s patented ad targeting show the best ads for you. All you do is spend a bit of time at the beginning to make sure you’re doing all the right things from an ad targeting viewpoint — things that you’ll want to do anyhow for search engine optimization (SEO). After that, you focus on content and attracting traffic.
AdSense is not a magic bullet. If you’re interested in the serious money-making side of AdSense then you need to choose one of the two strategies above and work hard for a few months. Nobody’s going to hand you money on a silver platter.
If the multi-site approach is what interests you, you’ll need to automate or outsource parts of your operation, otherwise you’ll be spending all your time on administrative stuff instead of on content and traffic. That’s how PLRSiteBuilder came about — I needed a tool that would quickly build a site for me from content. I wrote the tool for me and only recently decided to make it usable by non-geeks and sell it. We’ll be seeing it in action in the next installment of my AdWords case study, since adding content to your landing pages is an easy way to reduce your AdWords advertising costs.
If PLRSiteBuilder interests you, by the way, I’m now giving non-subscribers access to special pre-launch pricing for the tool, which should officially launch next week. The reviews are very favorable so far. Drop me a note and I’ll send you the link to a page that has all the details. Note that PLRSiteBuilder can now automatically convert Microsoft Word documents into text files, which makes the initial site setup even simpler.
Sponsored Link: Check out the Simple Cash Blog for some simple online money-making techniques that anyone can implement.
Eric Giguere is the author of Uncommon AdSense and the award-nominated (that just means it lost!) blog Make Easy Money with Google and AdSense. Subscribe to the blog and get free stuff!
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AdSense, advertising, AdWords, authority site, Google, Internet marketing, PLRSiteBuilder, search engine optimization, SEO
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10 Responses to “The AdSense Crapshoot”
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Google Adsense is taking over as far as online advertising. If you run a site that recieves a decent amount of hits, you cannot go wrong by incorporatiing Adsense into your business model. There are a few things however that you need to be aware of when running an adsense equipped site. First and foremost, Google is very strict with what type of content they will allow you to use their service on. Adult content and gambling is prohibited. They have many other guidlines and you should familiarize yourself with their Terms and Conditions before attempting to add them to your site.
There’s no question that AdSense is a crapshoot. Among other things, it’s completely unpredictable. I realize it’s a pipe dream, but in my view, Google owes us publishers a reasonable floor for ads. Penny and 2 cents clicks are obscene. That being said, it’s nice to be entering back into a season where AdSense is showing signs of life once again. I’ve seen my daily AdSense income jump significantly over the last month…and due to the nature of some of my sites, things will get a lot better in the next 90 days. But I still feel AdSense should lead the way in some level of protection for publishers. It’s obscene to offer a penny or two for clicks that take visitors away from my site. And if they can’t offer protection, there should be a way of allowing me, as a publisher to SET a price floor of my own below which I am not willing to display ads.
Happily, because of AdSense’s success, there are dozens of new ad products which publishers can take advantage of. Further, because of the nature of online publishing, I can try different channels and revenue options and see what works best.
So far, AdSense makes the most “sense” for the site which I have less commitment to.
However, for high traffic sites, I try several different revenue channels for maximum affect.
One caveat, don’t fall for each ad product which comes along. Some blogs for instance, make great money writing Review-Me ads all day long. For some of my sites, that would be goofy.
Chuck, I understand where you’re coming from and I agree it would be great for publishers to have a minimum floor price. I just don’t see it happening, though, as it would remove too many publishers from the auction, hurting Google’s profits…
Jack, I think AdSense’s rise to the top has definitely opened up more avenues for everyone. With AdSense Google proved you could make lots of money going after the long tail, providing you automate things enough!
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