yes, Max Powers, share some more what you mean, I am not in adsense atm, but plan to go into it, but if after 1 year it will not bring me $100 / day - it will mean I wasted my time!
$560 highest day, avg ~$400/day Started earning that almost immediately after adding AdSense. In the past, there was not much spent on advertising, nor SEO. However, the site has been running in one form or another for about ten years. In addition, while we have not done a lot in advertising, our users definately do a lot of advertising for us. We also have essentially a lock on the market that we are trying to reach.
November was my first month using adsense (started Oct. 31st) Site has been up for four months prior. My goal was to hit $100 for the month. I hit that goal on the 28th and I'm slowly starting to make more and more per day. Next months goal is $200.
Okay heres my post, I'm trying to outline some of my methods and principles while responding to the other posts. The truth is you can make money in any way online, its easy but I'm talking about making large amounts of cash. Can anyone say ," SHOW ME THE MONEY!!!!" Treating websites like a business, not a hobby A miscalibrated noobie will come into the game with no money wanting to make $$$. He searches the forum and gets advice, "Content is king, build a niche, get some inbound links, and work on your SEO, write the content about your passion". The noobie's passions include, american football, home loans, and Fender Stratocasters. Realising american football and home loans will have very high competition the noobie decides to base his site around fender strats. He buys a domain for $10 and hosting at 7$ a month. So he pays upfront $94 for the year. Hey, he only has to make $94 to get a 100% return on investment right? The noobie learns basic website design and adsense integreation. He spends the next week furiously writing "content" so he can launch his website, he comes up with 15 quality articles on all aspects of the fender strat. The website goes online, with the adsense put on from the start a huge mistake. He shows the website to many of his online friends and in the first week he gets a click, 8cents. Obviously he needs more traffic. So for the next month he pours hours a day (working for less than minimum wage) working on bringing traffic. He decides to do directory submissions, link exchanges, article submission. Within a month he manages 250 uniques, and 13 clicks. The noobie is unsure of what to do now so he comes back to the forum, asking how to get traffic. Content is king, content will get you traffic. So he spends another month, many hours a day, writing articles and placing other articles from ezines and such on his website. He now has around 60 articles on his website. Traffic does increase, but only slightly and for so much work. The noobie from this point will spend countless hours working on his SEO, webdesign, and article writing to improve the site. This goes on for the whole year, and the noobie is lucky to get over $500. Repeat visitors are few, not much traffic comes from the search engine as its hard to rank well in such a short time, most if not all of his traffic comes from article exchanges. The businessman comes into this game with money. His time is worth more than spending hours writing articles, building links, and working on SEO. The business man manages the cashflow, resources, and the developement/direction of the website. He knows it will be very hard to start a business in real life with $94 so he comes into the game with money to accelerate his income. He will take two roads from here: 1) Exploit an opertunity to make money in the market I'm not going to go fully into this but in its simplist form, when demand is larger than supply the businessman finds it, rides the "money wave", until the market is in equilibrium again then he gets out. 2) Create something unique, original, viral, without devoting hours of his time To start this process he thinks, what is out there already? ---> How can I do it better what isn't out there yet----> How can I create it He does not spend all his time creating the website himself, he pays people who are better than him at this aspect of creationg . He has other things to manage, such as marketing and cashflow management etc.. There are different types of content, and they are not king if you have to make it all yourself: Before I go into this we need a clear definition of content 1. Something contained, as in a receptacle. Often used in the plural: the contents of my desk drawer; the contents of an aerosol can. 2. The subject matter of a written work, such as a book or magazine. Often used in the plural. 3. a. The substantive or meaningful part: "The brain is hungry not for method but for content, especially content which contains generalizations that are powerful, precise, and explicit" Frederick Turner. b. The meaning or significance of a literary or artistic work. 4. The proportion of a specified substance: Eggs have a high protein content. So I think from this we can decide content is simple, what it is made of. We have to also ask ourselves the question, which is better 1000 pages of quality articles or 5 pages which are unique and continually draw people back. Also is it wise to spend all your time creating the content because you consider yourself an "authority" on it, or have a system in place where content is created for you. An example off the top of my head is myspace where content is a huge component of the site ( not number 1 though). Did the guy who created call everyone up saying, "O hi I'm starting a social networking site can I plz have your details to create a site about you". Lol, obviously not the site basically created itself. Thats how people should be looking to make websites.
Reading my post will give you a better understanding of my philosophy. You sorta missed the boat on a few points
around $550 from adsense $700 direct deposit from companies per day. Minus direct costs, overheads, and tax takes it to about $450per day.
Yes but generally to make big dollars requires big dollars, with a touch of creativity and smarts, which it sounds like you have . I totally agree with you on this one, but I didn't always subscribe to this until I made it somewhat of my livelihood. If you are online to make money and do business; then treat it as a business. If you are just online to share your thoughts, make some friends, plus cover some hosting costs along the way, then it makes no sense to be crying when you see others making $XXX/day and wondering why you can't replicate the same results by integrating your AdSense like the "pros" tell you to do it. When you come into this game with no money the advice that most people give at these forums is the only way that you can feasibly do it - "Read the forum and get advice. Content is king so build a quality niche site, get some inbound links, work on your SEO and write the content about your passions". Now I totally agree with you with that fact that there are better ways to make money online, or in many aspects of life for that matter, but that is when you have the money to invest. I would argue most people that come into this "game" are less that 100% confident about the true earning potential that it does have, and to be honest for the complete rookie that has a steep learning curve to climb to get somewhere even near the top of this competitive game requires a bit of experience. So I can totally appreciate that most aren't going out there and putting thousands of dollars on the line when they can't even work out which way on the internet is is up let alone what they should be investing their time and money into. That said and considering where I'm at right now I must admit I do reinvest a lot money into my online ventures, but that is coming from someone who has the good experiences to date, and to a large degree has made enough stuff to know what definitely doesn't work and have worked out a few of the things that do, and I definitely agree with you on the whole outsourcing of portions of work to better and more equipped people in addition to the menial tasks that are best done by someone else. I'm going to beg to differ on this one, I think not having ads on a site from the start can be just as negative as having no ads. I mean there is nothing like creating a new site with your users believing you are an anti-ads sorta webmaster and then when the site does take of having to start squeezing ads into the site whilst maintain you're not a sellout. I personally think that at least some ads should be present to start, sure you don't want to flood the site but a small amount shouldn't have adverse effects, but I guess it also depends on the site you have. If after a year you are still running the same site having put a few hours in each week and apply some solid SEO techniques I find it hard to believe that they wouldn't be ranking in the search engines. Sure they not be pulling #1 rankings for all their major keywords but I'm sure they could have made some progress, especially if they are a part of DP. Again even a business man needs to find his feet on the net before he throws his money away, and if I'm being completely honest unless you know where and how to find GOOD people to contract your work to you will no doubt just burn a hole in your pocket. How do I know this, my own father came to me asked me to design and run his business' for a couple of hundreds dollars, to which I had to politely turn him down because my many days of my time are worth a LOT more than a couple of hundred dollars, not that it was just a money issue mind you either , but he recently went and contracted someone to design his site for $3000 who claimed they would optimise the site for search engines, but when I went over the site for him the guy hadn't even put title tags in let alone optimised for keyword phrases or even developed a solid linking structure not to mention even explained to my father that unless you develop backlinks to really start moving up in the search engines. Now my father was a businessman and he had some money to throw around but he didn't know the first thing about online marketing and he hired someone who has a whole profolio of site's he's design - yet still doesn't seem to know much about online marketing... It's unfortunate that the net is growing at such a fast pace that people that really aren't providing good services are still making a killing. So money isn't everything in this game, you need to know where to put it and who to give it to, and like a lot of things in life it makes sense for someone to start out by digging the trenches before they start calling the shots - just so they know how things work. It sorta reminds me of that movie that I forgot the name of... it involved Karate... and it also had a Kid... he had to put wax on cars for awhile... before some Mister Miyagi would teach him how to fight... ... "Wax on, Wax off" it helps to do a bit of manual labour first in my honest opinion . With a good grounding and some shrewd investments money can definitely accelerate any budding online entrepreneur's income. I love this notion because it is what a lot of my idea spawn from. I look at all the services that in my industry and think "now if this was combined with this and that with that all grouped together by doing this better I could definitely grab a big section of this market share." This is definitely a good way of thinking - though often to do this you either need a great deal of experience and time or you need to be able to pay people for their experience and their time - and again whilst this is a great way of getting things done isn't that practical for the average rookie, but I agree that finding gaps in the market is what money making is about, or "finding problems and then selling solutions". As for you content discussion I completely agree that content doesn't necessarily have to be pages of written content, it is what your site "contains" and how it goes about bringing people to your site, because let's face it the real money maker is the fact that you essentially have a "virtual billboard" and the more eyes that see it the more advertisers want to place things on it. I definitely agree with you on a lot of counts but at the same time I think most people aren't in a position where you are, that being where you can throw lots of money investments and then reap the returns, so then they have to start from the bottom. That noted there are also just a lot of people out there that are too scared of losing their hard earned money on shady online ventures, they'd much prefer it in a bank earning 5% interest BUT with that compounded monthly and with gradual additions to it by the time they are 65 they will have enough to retired!
My highest day ever was $1,768.31 on Thursday, October 6, 2005. I will probably never beat that again. I had 9,485 ad clicks that day.
Ah burta very very good post. I see what you mean on most of your points. Yes it is hard for a noobie to be confident in big amounts of money on his website if he does not know much. You have to build up your knowledge before you make the big calls. I also know that contracting work online with out ever meeting the people involved can be absolute bs! Any time I can get someone to do something for me that I have talked to face to face I will take their service even if it costs more. The reason why I say don't put your ads on from the start is two reasons: 1) It may look less credible/cheap. Which can be especially bad if directory submission is your thing (dmoz) 2) It may turn off some of your visitors if it looks too tacky. What I'm getting at with the content thing, is that its the type of content, the way its created, and the value of the content which are the key aspects of creating good content. A good example I like to use is youtube. The creators did not spend all their time filming videos to put them on their site ( equivilant to writing content) they created a viral marketing, well set up service, which had a system in place where they had to do nothing for the valuable content. With that said I think you have a very very sound insight in how to make money online, hit me up with a PM if you ever want to chat or discuss points of view on something. Best of luck