Now I must admit that I easily get caught up in hearing success stories of how people make thousands a month or even a DAY thru adsense. Realistically however, how much potential is there for an average joe like myself to create a number of content websites and actually hit those benchmarks? Is adsense a game for the few elites? or can the avg joes like me REALLY do that too?
Those few elites bagan as peons with no clue. The way top reach the top is one step at a time, but always moving forward, always learning. Set some long term goals and short term goals. Each short term goal you achieve will give you strenght in achieving your long term goals.
The reason why I ask is because I want to really devote time and energy to this cause because I feel that there's alot of potential, but what if I can't even hit my short term goal? without talking about the long term ones. Is this an easy or moderately easy opportunity to jump into?
If you put in a sincere effort in anything, let alone webmastering, it will pay you back. Its all about dedication and attitude.
Why should you set goals in the first place? Just get into it with the idea of, "Let's see how it goes", and take it from there. Don't give yourself ultimate goals that you need to meet here, then, and later. That's a sure way to doom yourself to failure -- trying to meet expectations that may be completely unreachable, or too easily reached. I say just give it a go; start some sites, give it a month or two, and see what happens. Hey, what do you have to lose? It costs me $8 to register a domain for a year plus a month of hosting. After that, it's $4 a month for hosting. If the site booms, I upgrade to a higher host, and if the site completely nets zero interest, I drop it, and I'm out $8 buck. Whoopie doo. I spend $4 a day on Red Bull! The potential drawbacks are so minor it's not even worth considering IMO. Meanwhile, the potential rewards are so major you'd be foolish not to give it a shot.
Just don't make the mistake 99% of the people make and think that the net is a miracle place where you will earn loads of money without any work. It is tough, and it takes some time, but believe me, it is possible if you don't quit. I started out without even knowing what HTML was. Heck, right now I am taking an HTML course so I can improve my design knowledge. I don't know PHP at all, and work on my sites using Frontpage. But I earn more than any of my friends, and that feels really nice
the best goal to set is not to make your website for making money, make it with unique content, content that will bring traffic to your site and update it constantly that will attract new traffic, expand more and more and once you have a decent amount of visiters (lets say 200+ unique per day) then you can worry about making money, since you can make money with visiters and you cant make visiters if your site has the same stuff as 1 million other websites.
I think building websites is much like putting money in a savings account. At first it doesn't seem like much, but if you keep adding to it the interest gradually increases and eventually it produces real income. Of course, compared to the rate of return on savings accounts, the website has a LOT more potential.
If you're doing it for the money only, chances are you won't make that much money as you'll get bored and frustrated easily.
I don't know many people that just build sites to have fun... everybody wants money, but as just-4-teens says, you can't expect to be earning anything in a few months... it took me over a year to start earning money with my sites.
Don't expect miracle. Expect hard work, a lot of reading and a lot of patience...and please, don't try to make easy, desperate money by making useless pages with nothing but spams. You'll get more by giving more. The more your site benefit others, the more visitors will flock, and the more money you'll make. It could take up months, or even years. Yes, there's money in the internet but you have to dig and dig ..
It has taken me about two years to become an overnight success with Adsense. If you commit to learning and working you can get there. This forum can provide you enough information on how to find topics, layout your page, get traffic, and keep out of trouble (hint don't be teenager clicking on your on ads "just a few times"). Look at the examples in Googles Adsense tours, the numbers they use are what they want to see you producing. There's always room for one more success.
Unless you try Gadood's tip of buying articles, you need to pick a topic you can write LOTS about. It took me over 3 months to even hit the dollar a day mark!
That's not necessarily true. When I started my main site about 5 years ago, I did it just to have some fun. I had too much time in-between classes, and decided to put up a site doing reviews. It wasn't until a year later that I learned you could make money off sites!
As with most things in life, I'd say certainly only for the 'few'. How many people run your average independant bakers, spend their life managing it with a standard profit, and die quite satisfied? Mmm. Lots! I know a few people who run their own bakery, for example. That's all they're interested in. Just running their bakery aslong as it provides for them and their family. Great. They aren't the 'few'. Now how many people who run those invididual bakers think ey up, this bakers works and would work practically anywhere.. what if I opened up another? And hey up, if that works.. surely I could open up another 50.. another 100... 1,000 even? And wouldn't my bank balance look tidy? Wouldn't that be nice? Well it's only for the few Do you have the right 'way' of thinking as 'the few'? Not many do! Develop your formula which is essentially your 'franchise', and roll it out far and wide. Most don't and aren't wired up to even contemplate the thought, which leaves rich pickings for those that are. Pete
I think the key is to let the stream flow you downwards, while you keep focusing on your work. Just try it and see where your work leads you.
I've been working on sites for a year and am just now beginning to see the beginning of a return. However, in that year I've learned CSS and how to get PHP to work. I've met some great people and, most importantly, I've had a lot of new ideas. Sure it is about money. But you have to think of that money in two ways. The first is the day to day did I make $1.00, did I make $50.00. It is a key question and one which lets you keep score on the changes and tweaks you are making. The second way is to work out what the value of your site or sites are and consider that as well when you are assessing the time you are putting in. The up front time building and promoting a site is, essentially the capital cost of that asset.If you value your time at $25.00 an hour and have put 100 hours into a particular site that site has cost you a notional $2500.00. Now, if you make $1.00 a day on that site your anual return on investment is 14.6% - way better than a bank account. Without getting obsessive about it, you can use much the same calculation when you are deciding whether to put in another ten hours promoting your site. At the end of the day you have your site up and running, new content going up every day or week, the spiders dropping by, PR and traffic which, in the nature of the net will increase as more people link to you. You have "web currency" in the sense that a link from your site is actually worth something. If you stop right there and spend the minimum amount of time needed to update your site, your revenues will continue to grow and the value of your investment will continue to rise. If you have a good niche making $10.00 a day is fairly straightforward, getting to a $100.00 a day is something I have not managed yet so I don't know. But I do know that the days I have been over $50.00 have paid for a lot of late nights at the keyboard. Bottom line: on the $25.00 an hour for the time I've put in and making a guess at the number of hours a week I spend and capitalizing those hours, I have entirely recouped my investment several times over and am well on my way to recouping it monthly. Plus, and here is the best part, I now have several more projects on the go which have taken a tenth the time to put together and are showing signs of making the same or better revenue. That would not have happened if I had not got in the game. Good luck.
I agree with that 100% gadoo, i'm in it for the money potential and the potential to roll out sites continuously. The benefit that users get from my sites is going to be second-hand. Just being bluntly honest, no sugar coat BS here.