Blogging for AdSense is it really profitable?

I am a fond user of AdSense and i personally believe that you can make a reasonable income from blogs if it is done correctly and is of high interest.
However i have come across alot of people who say that it is a waste of time and there is no money to be made. My AdSense account says different since i get a reasonable portion of my monthly income from my blogs. I'm just wondering what others on DP think on the subject?

 

I personally don't like adsense, but then again, I don't blog for high paying keywords so adsense means nothing to me. Any niche is high paying with the right program and targeted traffic.

I do better using a little creativity and affiliate programs...anything that pays good in adsense is saturated by other bloggers trying to rank for the same keywords and phrases and that makes too many blogs that are just alike, about the same thing.

I also think adsense ads are ugly and take away from a good theme, and people are numb to them now. Banners are just as dead, especially when people see them all the time. My banners draw clicks because I make them myself, for my other sites....you won't see them anywhere else on the web, so at least it is something new.

I also make my own banners for my affiliate links so that they are original to my sites only, while everyone else marketing the same program are using the exact same tools.

No matter the payout, the amount of time and energy it takes to sustain enough traffic for adsense is not worth the payout when there are better ways to make more money with that real estate without sending readers to a competing site.

I have a hard time using the exact same thing as someone else..same theme, same ads, same niche.

I think anyone who makes what ever good money is to them, with adsense, can do more money with affiliate programs since it doesn't take as much traffic and it is better targeted with better payouts.


JMO of course.

 

Just blog about what you like and are passionate about. Blogs require good traffic, blog design and content. If you've got that, money will automatically start rolling in.

 

Exactly my point don, thanks. It makes me wonder if its the way these people go about it that is the problem. Its a great shame more people dont do there grunt work before using AdSense.

 

Would you agree that not every blog is a good match for adsense ? I mean you are never going to make a mortgage payment on "free ring tone" or "music download" ads without a few thousand UV's a day.

But with a few thousand UV's day, you could make so much more actually selling something.

 

i agree with hmansfield. the roi is better with affiliate work when you look at it from the time that you invest

 

Adsensen earning from my blog is good, not very big money but reasonable.
Many people expect too much from adsense, some even just copy and paste the code without work on it, and they complaint adsense not make money.
No work no gain, that' the game's rule

 

Correct. Just to include, try to include some "paying keywords" so that your ads will have something to be shown.

 

I think any kind of making money online strategy is profitable, as long as you studied it carefully, has good tools and resources, and put focus on to it.

However, I think it's not advisable to use them simultaneously. Not unless you're already successful in one of them, and you just add one strategy at a time.

 

The main difficulty comes from having too many blogs to update properly, theres lots of middle ground niches that pay ok and dont require a battle with heavy competition.

Thought needs to be placed on can i update this many blogs often enough, can i make my blog a little bit better than the others, theres also the promotion time involved.

Time spent on posting.
Time spent building backlinks.
Time spent on maintenance and updates.

If you have to do the above across many blogs then it can become a bit too much.

 

Again i am in total agreement, but i do think some can pull off multiple blogs better than others, i know from experience that it is very hard to keep a lot of blogs constantly updated!

 

Profitable?? Sure you will be able to pay for all of cost of running the site. If you want a full-time income you better have one kick ass site!

 

..and that's what it all comes down to today. No matter the program, on today's web a 12 year old can build a site to pay hosting fees, but if you want to make a living you need to have a great looking site with great original content.

Average blog makes average money. Many people spend all their time building links instead of content and design. The name of the game is traffic, not Page Rank.

If you are building multiple blogs under the strategy of each one making a little bit of money a day, that means that you have a bunch of mediocre blogs that will not sustain anything for long...it then becomes a constant battle to keep getting fresh traffic, because you have no return visitors, or subscribers.. which after while becomes an exercise in futility.

One great blog is less work than multiple blogs, and the earning potential, and resale value can be unlimited.

So it really doesn't matter if it's Adsense, Amazon, ebay or what ever...if you don't attract people, and keep them coming back with content and design, you won't make money on any of them.

 

Sorry i didn't see this question directed straoght to me!

Yes i totally agree, some blog topics are never going to be money earners, and when you first start out it may take a little trial and error before you find one that does.

Also when i say profitable i didn't mean quit your day job and start doing it for a living, but adding maybe a $200 extra to your monthly wage packet.

I really wish i could retire and do this for a living!

 

hmansfield,

I thought if my site has higher page rank site will get better position in search results for targeted key words & then site will get more traffic. Am I wrong? Please let me know.

 

maybe it would be effective only to those sites that are recieving lots of traffic.

 

Google Page Rank will generally give you a bigger boost up the search engines than a site with little to no PR, but it won't guarantee that a lot of people will search up that term that you are ranked high on, and still get a lot of traffic. It is different in a lot of scenarios. Traffic is money when it comes to monetizing a blog.

 

Yeah , what he said.

Here's the way I look at it. I of course want to rank on the first page for a few different search terms, not just one...and using short phrases is even better since people don't search with one word anymore.

Once I get ranking for something, I'm pretty much done with PR. It doesn't mean that I will stop applying links when ever possible, but I am more interested in links that will bring me traffic, than links that will give me PR.

Pr does not mean the you will get traffic, and it certainly doesn't mean that any traffic that you get will convert into sales...you do that with where your links are, and great content and targeting your readers, and the overall marketing of your blog.

I rank high for a few different terms from articles that I posted months ago, and never tried to rank for. You can't blog about the same keyword everyday, your blog will be boring, you want to get traffic for the little niche traffic inside the niche.

I blog about "dance music", people don't come to my site for the first time because they searched for "Dance Music", they come because they searched for an event, or a DJ, or tour dates, a certain festival and so on.

So even after all that work to rank for a keyword or phrase, its not going to be the main source of your referred traffic, your articles will be, and how informative they are will keep people coming back, and when they trust you, they buy from you.

Google doesn't associate Armin van Buuren with dance music, even though he is a Trance Music artist, but that is one of my most referred search terms from Google because I update his info a lot.

So yes PR will help to an extent, the main one being that you know that you are indexed, and not in the back of the bus, and when someone searches for that term, they will find you, but what about the other 10,000 things that you have written ?

People who do PPC marketing could care less about PR...the content on the page is what is gold...and above everything else, content is what is going to make you money.

You can get a suck assed blog to rank for something, you can even make it a PR 4 or 5 if all you do is SEO...will it make any money?...No..because it sucks.

So yes, you want something, but don't be so obsessed with it, that when you attain some, what ever traffic you get bounces out because your design, or content is substandard.

There are many websites and blogs with PR, that have little or no traffic, because they figured PR was the key to all the riches on the internet. It is not. A kick ass site and good marketing is. If you have those 2 things, you can do minimal SEO because people will link to you naturally and do your SEO for you.

The best way to attain that is to be the best. Be a source that others go to for information, not the other way around. Have the best designed site in your niche...and yes sometimes that means spending money for a theme to surpass your competition, as well as other marketing tools.

You can't do this with all free stuff, at some point to get to the next level, you will have to spend money..you know your competition does, that is why they are beating you...they look better, they market better, or they have better information.

Be the best, and people will link to you.

 

hmansfield,
Thank you very much for your long & very useful explanation. Now I understood it better.