I know everyone is busy marketing to each other here now but I thought there might be room on these forums for my small but honest adsense tale. From November 27, 2006 through to January 14, 2011 I have been using adsense and making a small amount of cash so I thought I’d share some advice and hopefully actually help some people (or at least get a good thread going) rather than sell them another ebook that will just get someone else rich. As you can see, I’m not a millionaire. Nor do I claim to be a pro, but I can tell you that extra $200 odd a month really makes a difference. So here was my model: Build a really great site – This needs to be something you love, something you can write about, think about and look at each day. The niche doesn’t matter so much, but obviously the more people that enjoy your niche also, the better. This is your primary site, don’t start another one for at least 6 months. Build up a solid site in the first 6 months. This is the hardest stage, you have to work like a dog and make your site look great, have unique content, lots of articles, images, pictures, mp3’s, something that doesn’t exist already. Be creative and add your own spin on the topic. You will want to do some simple SEO on this site in this period, tailor your content to some good keywords by using google’s adwords keyword tool. After this initial 6 month period you will want to do some more link building and promotion. If you haven’t already try and link up with some of your competitors to gain a little traffic and authority (in google’s eyes) on your topic. Write some articles and submit them to ezine articles (and other directories) and include backlinks to your site. Hopefully by about 9 months you should be seeing a good stream of traffic from back links and with any luck search engines. Don’t forget about this site, you should always add content to this site as often as you can, put it before your other sites later. A lot of people disagree with this I’m sure, but I’d add your google ads the moment you have a really nice design going and about 10 pages of content. The moment you start adding unique content and google indexes you you may start seeing some visitors, so why not? Build another site – this time it should be a specific smaller niche, if you have another hobby (gardening, listening to music, looking at furniture etc) that you enjoy write about that. This site can be as big or as small as you like but I personally went with a site with about 20 pages. Test yourself out, target the higher traffic keywords and write some articles or outsource them. Again you will have to go through your link exchanging process, backlink building (directory submissions, article submissions, social networking sites etc) and general promotion. Make sure you keep working on your ad placements with this, especially over time. I had a site that was running quite ok and then I moved the ads and the CTR went up 3% overnight Keep adding links to these smaller sites over time, don’t forget about them. This can be as simple as 1000 directory submissions every 3 months (which you can probably get for less than $20 here on DP quite easy) depending on the niche Next step: Rinse and repeat. Make another small site, and then another. By this stage you should be able to set up the sites pretty easily and you will be a bit more confident with your SEO. Keep trying new things and always keep adding content to your main big site, make it a high quality resource. Key to success: Patience and hard work. A lot of people give up after a few months because they aren’t a millionaire over night. These people were either in it for a quick buck or just chose the wrong niche. Making money off the internet is hard work, anyone that tells you otherwise is either trying to sell you something or they just got incredibly lucky with a great idea at a great time. You will have to put in the hours for minimal return for what it can do for you 2 or 3 years down the track where maybe you can drop down to part time at work and build up your sites at home!
Thanks for your post. I do have to admit, though, that seeing the words 'honest' and 'adsense' in the same title were shocking...
Haha well when I say honest I meant i'm not trying to sell anyone anything here, just an honest adsense experience.
rightly said by the OP, your site must provide some useful information to the visitors..... nowadays MFA sites don't really work.
Is it becouse of all the people claiming they make 20k on Adsense Monthly and try to sell you a 17$ E-book ?
Those do seem like good tips. Personally I just started using Adsense a couple of months ago and yes it is tiring seeing all the 'get rich quick' schemes using adsense. I hope to start a website soon, and I guess your tips would be useful
so how many site do you have now to be able to make 200$ a month ? Thanks for your article ... i think its great
So why do so many people here have them if they don't work? The MFA sites are the ones with high CTR. Visitors land on them, go "argh!" and click out on the first link they see. Oh, and 1 site is enough for $200 a month.
you should mention in your tips using google insights as well as adwords keyword tools, I find it useful. And yes having several websites (but not too many) is good in case something happens to one of them you won't get $0 earnings from one day to the next. I would suggest also that for your second site, instead of choosing another random niche, you should analyse your past traffic on your first site with google analytics (which should be linked to your adsense account for increased datas) and then work out what part of your site, what sub niche is working obviously well for you. Then create your second site totally focused on this sub niche of the topic you know best because you've been working on it for the past 6-9 months. You can then leverage your user/visitor base from the first site to speed up the SEO/traffic process of your second site.
Great advice! I agree 100% with you and especially the part about creating a site about what YOU like. Too often people create sites that they have no interest in and when the money don't come in, they give up!
Well the problem with this advice is when people don't like anything that has potential, for instance you can ask people what do they like, it will be animals, or other things like that. You have no ideas how many people have no passion in life whatsoever, they don't play any music instrument, they are not deeply interested in any topic, they don't do anything useful for earning online. Just eat, work, go out, things like that. They have a computer but only use it lightly, are not interested in how it works. Many people are like that you know. But even those people can succeed online, but they need to focus on the traffic, so they must be looking for topics which have mass appeal, using google insights. Then you write the keywords that are searched for together with the main topic and you create original content about that. You do it for several weeks/months, every day, and then success will come FOR SURE, that isn't a maybe. But how many people can really keep a motivation going for weeks when in their life they have no passion whatsoever and never invested time on long periods before, or maybe a long time ago when they were young, and after, work, the family, etc. got the best of them.. So it's possible but the hardest block is the people themselves and the difficulty they have in setting a clear plan and goal while keeping motivation high for more than a month
More times you try more chances you succeed. It is a basic principle of life. It works the same in any business including adsense. I don't actually agree about recommendation to create sites about what you like. Usually things that normal people like have pretty poor CTR, CPC . But if you have problems with motivation that's a good way to keep going.
See, I did this. The subniche on my first site (400 pages) still sits at 10k+ visitors a day and $10+ adsense a day. The spinoff site (3000 pages) sits at 5K visitors a day and $0.5 adsense a day. The second site gets 1-2k visitors a day straight from my first site. It doesn't rank high enough in the SERPs to get direct traffic despite being sooooo much better than my first one.
I don't have a problem with people making sites for mass appeal at all, especially if that niche can make you a lot of money or you have a plan to succeed. I'm just suggesting that you have a good solid, large website that you are interested in and keep working on that one always. Build it up to be the pinnacle of your niche. Then branch out, whether that be using your analytics data to start a sub site in that niche (hey, you already have a great foundation, may as well share the traffic/link juice), or branching out into health, relationships, internet marketing etc if you think you will make more money. I now run about 5-10 sites but many don't earn money or are in their infancy stage, most of my adsense revenue comes from 3 sites now. Great to see some really quality posts in this thread also, that's exactly what I was hoping for!