Well, as it turns out for me, Adsense has turned out to be a real profit maker for me personally in 2010. Now, by some peoples standards, what I earn might be laughable. But, I can tell you that my Adsense earnings were really terrible when I started placing ads in 2008. In 2010, I am receiving a check from Google each month now between $100-$200. Again, I know by some peoples standards that is peanuts, but for me, I'm hoping it's the beginning of ever increasing profits. I tried to figure it out in 2008 and 2009, but my ad revenue was terrible. I tried every gimick out there but my clicks were dismal. I was ready to give up but I couldn't after reading about other people's successes. What was I doing wrong? Well, what I have learned this. The simple secret to having good adsense revenue is to have a website(s) that people genuinely want to visit. You have to have content that people want to consume. You have to forget all the gimicks, and about 90% of what is offered for sale on DP is garbage. Believe me, I know, I have bought alot of stuff on DP and then ended up selling it soon after because it is not enough to simply have the site, you have to do something with it. Also, traffic matters. I know you can buy a ton of traffic from DP members and they will send it to your site. But to what end? Many times if the traffic is from another country, the click value is 0 or 1 cent. It's not worth it. The other thing I have learned is that facebook really is your friend. Facebook can drive quality traffic to your website. But I have also learned that the content must be entertaining and good. My new rule is after someone visits my site, would they ever want to come back again? If I can answer that question with an honest 'NO', then the site is not worth doing. I have asked myself what do all the most popular sites have in common (ie facebook, google, ebay, craigslist, plentyoffish, yahoo, youtube, blogger, wikipedia, etc..) What I discovered is the following: • They provide a real purpose to the user • They use ads for income (except craigslist which charges for job ads in 3 cities) • They allow people to connect to other people in some way • The content is free to users (or to either a buyer or seller) • They have distinct, clear models of doing business • The product reaches large audiences, appeals to many • The users create the content itself in many cases • The site design is basic and not flashy These are some of the methods that I am going to try and use going forward.
Heartily agree, and its nice to see someone say it without mentioning "keyword research" and "build backlinks".
I believe that there is a business model around always worrying about keywords and backlinking, but my opinion is that model is simply for those who are trying to attract "customers" through the search engine. I think it means get the person to your site and hopefully they will click something. But the real question in my mind is will they ever return and do you care if they ever return? Maybe you don't. My goal for 2010 is to create sites that compel repeat visits and hopefully other people will be "told" about my site via facebook and backlinking where the "customer" does the backlinking by saying "hey check out this great site I ran across". If that happens, I think the quality of the click will be much better.
Yeah it took me a long time to learn a lot of that, too. I'll admit I'm still playing with the "autoblogging" methods as I know people who are making good money doing it.
You did mentioned the key point - Unfortunately many people dont understand, they want to get rich with adsense without work on it, they are asking how to get click without spend time on their content
I heartily agree. I don't think I could've said it better. This is definitely some of the best advice that folks that are new to all this could get. There's only a few things I'd like to add to the list: - Organize your site so any site section could be reached in maximum two clicks. - Update OFTEN with ORIGINAL, RELEVANT and EASY TO READ content in order to retain current readers/visitors. - DO NOT pay too much attention to off-page SEO, links building, etc... CONTENT is the king, and if you have good content you'll automatically get backlinks and as such off-page SEO. - Make accounts on and hook up your site's feed to popular social media tools (Facebook, Twitter) in order to gain access to a new stream of visitors. - Closely monitor your competition. Do you see some features on their sites that could be useful on yours? Borrow them then! - And, most importantly PUT YOURSELF IN YOUR SITE READER'S SHOES. Would you PERSONALLY want to visit your own site if it belonged to someone else? If not, improve it until you could confidently say that you'd add this site to bookmarks and visit it regularly even if it wasn't yours. Apart of this I don't think I have anything to add. Cheers tom11011, and I am sure you will do great in 2011.
Congratulations and I hope in 2011 you'll do even better once you'll abandon those gaming sites you have, don't waste time on those.
Why abandon? Anything that makes you money and requires no effort to maintain (like his arcade sites which clearly need no maintenance) is worth keeping in my eyes. The trick is to keep them and keep adding new sites
Yes I mean abandon this niche altogether, because I see he has two sites, does he plan on making more in 2011? If so it would be better to spend his time on more profitable niches. Yes, games attract traffic, which is what we want, but the cpc is unfortunately too low, not even correct. We need a popular niche with correct cpc, not high paying, but correct, to me it's around $0.1 Of course he can keep his gaming sites, but don't spend too much time on them anymore, and certainly don't open new ones.
Ah, I see... I misunderstood you, my bad mate I thought you're suggesting to drop/sell them altogether so I checked the sites in signature and noticed that they need no regular updates and was like "why abandon a site that makes you money?". I totally agree that flash games sites don't make any decent CPC, but they're useful since they usually require one-time setup and no additional work afterwards... Basically a good dormant niche as opposed to sites that require several updates a day (blogs/forums). Cheers!
You have researched it well.I think you have given some serious tips here for the people working with adsense and I also found your tips really useful.Thanks for sharing.Keep it up!!
It's been about 9-10 months since I posted this. I thought I would let everyone know (ya like you really care lol ) that my adsense revenue continues to increase, little by little. Things are looking well for my sites. Today, I am bringing in about 7-8 dollars per day, about $240 per month, quite a bit higher than when I first made this post. I know that is peanuts compared to what some people here are commanding. It's great because I am starting to see that technically there is no limit so long as Google continues to do things the way they are. Also, I sometimes wonder what may or may not happen when the economy improves and businesses start spending more on advertising budgets. All in all, what really excites me is the potential for this to turn into an added retirement plan in the future.
Hey tom, I didnt see this post first time round so it made for a intresting read,in the last month I have started my own website but this time round I have got a " game plan " so to speak and set my self goals to aim for which I belive will only help me to earn money from google. Like you said if and when the global economy picks up things can only get better for adsense. I hope I am in your postion in 12-18 months writing my own threads on the matter. Hope to read more threads on your sucess in the future.
Now imagine if your site had mass appeal potential? That would speed up things a lot. From one month to the next you can be earning $240 and then $2400, the increase doesn't need to be slow and progressive..
Hi, In my research for marketing strategies, I came across a statement that Google will reject your site for adding Google AdSense if there are too many affiliate links and banners. It went on to recommend waiting till Google accepts your site before adding affiliate links. Do any of the experts on this forum agree with this statement? What's your view on this? Thanks
Hi Group, I know this is an old post, almost 2 years now. But, I thought I would give anyone interested an update without having to re-hash the whole post into a new one. My reason for posting today is something really great happened. Today I opened my mailbox and received a check from Google in the amount of $450.38. I was really excited to get it as this is the most money I have ever made with Google in a month. I should mention though that this amount is not typical for me. My earnings have continued to increase since my last update to the tune of about $300-$310 per month on average. But, for whatever reason (only Google knows) last month, I have had a few clicks that were pretty high value in in the neighborhood of $10 each. I know by some other peoples standards here on DP, $450 is not that much. I know for sure there are those here who are making much much more. So you might be interested in what I'm up to. I don't want to reveal all the details as some of what I have I think is special. But, for those interested, I will tell you that all my Google income is generated with less than 10 websites. The 2 websites in my signature are two of them, but truthfully, they only represent a small percentage of the income. That's why they are in my signature, I'm trying to promote them a little. I really, really like websites that I don't have to do anything with, they just kind of exist and make money. I'm always experimenting though, sometimes trying out new sites, buying and selling them. Most of them fail. But through it all, there have been some winners. I continue to just, little by little, keep trying to slowly but surely make the income climb in whatever way I can. Here is a pic of my check for motivation for anyone who needs some.