Three Wise Ways to Make Gold on Adsense and More
Three Wise Ways To Make Gold in Adsense and More!!
Yes, that cryptic title is a play on words with the Nativity story of Three Wise Men gifting Gold, Frankincense, and Myrrh, and I suppose when it is harnessed correctly, Adsense by Google is a real Treasure of a gift.
First I will supply a quote from Google themselves. “If you have a subject you know something about, write about it, find a like-minded audience on the Internet and we’ll take care of monetizing the content.”
You will probably hear that a lot (Monetising Your Site) when you read about Adsense.
…But what is Adsense exactly??
Well, you have seen the “Sponsored” results on the top and side of the Google Search results pages? Well Adsense is Pay-Per-Click advertising outside the boundaries of the Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).
So rather than these “Advertisements” appearing on the SERPs, they appear on your Website, and guess what…. YOU GET PAID when people click on them! You will get paid anything from (I will present this in Dollars, but GBP is about half at the current conversion rate) $0.01-$20.00, but most sites find their average is around the $0.50 point. So as a pretty brief example if you get on average 10 of your visitors clicking on your Adsense ads per day, you can expect to get something like $2000 (£1000) per year. And if you had 10 websites $20,000… so and so forth.
That isn’t to say this is all plain sailing… quite the contrary. A large majority webmasters find that the ads don’t convert well at all, and some feel that they are an unwanted distraction on their pages – so they remove them and curse Adsense for good.
It isn’t just the small bloggers and home business users that utilise these services… You will find HUGE companies deploying Adsense to make more revenue for their businesses, The New York Times and CNN are just two of the more high-profile “Adsensers”
In fact, only very recently Google announced to the stock exchange that they would be disabling ads on the Website of Incredimail Ltd… this seemingly trivial announcement led to a 41% drop in stock price in a day!
You need to realise however that it really does depend on your market when deciding to whether to attempt to monetise your site. If the aim of your business is to sell a £100,000 car, it is pointless trying to direct people to to a 25p click-through.
Likewise, on retail sites you will find that if you are showing Adsense ads, more often than not these will be your competitors, and as Adwords/Adsense ads normally try to include a compelling offer, you may be sacrificing a sale of a £500 TV for a £1 click-through.
For the purposes of this article, I am going to base it on the most common Adsense “Empire” model… a blogger/expert publishing exciting content online and monetising this content (basically earning a salary for his efforts) by strategically placing Adsense ads on their blog/resource page.
There are examples out there of people who work for a couple of hours a day updating the site, placing new offers, new articles and fresh content on there, monitoring traffic and trying to get more traffic – and coming away with a tidy salary of $100,000 or more.
These people could move to sunnier climbs, get a wireless internet and sunbathe while updating their content. This is the “dream” so to speak.
That is the hook, and what deep down we would all aspire to do, and that is why people often get lured into paying for information like this.
In reality though, you need to be aware that to really dominate Adsense you may need to shell out more than a few hours, and more than zero cash input to get the traffic – and it isn’t overnight.
The key is to GET IT RIGHT. Get the balance right between conversions and Investment (Be that time or monetary)
But How??
1. Content Content Content
Google Adsense is streets ahead of other similar services, and will only display ads that are relevant to your content.
You may think this sounds obvious, but some other competitors do not offer this.
Google uses its Search Engine Ranking technology to crawl sites, assess relevance and keywords, and place ads accordingly, so much in the same way as Search Engine Optimisation; your content is a major factor here.
Probably more-so than Optimisation in that the main goal of your Adsense exploits is to encourage visitors to STAY on the site, then ultimately either buy your product, or click through to your ads (Or Both)
So the key here is to make sure your words, and indeed the NICHE of your articles are encouraging good quality traffic, who in turn are being rewarded by good quality content, who eventually are seeing targeted ads, giving you a decent click through rate and decent revenue for your site.
This is isn’t to say you need to be William Shakespeare either!
There are thousands and thousands of free articles out there, which allow you (providing you give a link back and/or their name as a reference) to use their articles free of charge.
Likewise, you can select products from affiliate brokers such as Clickbank.com where you can select content and Ebooks to give information about online.
Then you can not only promote the product for affiliate revenue, but also get the Adsense clickthroughs. But more on Affliate Networks later.
Personally, I would try to write as much on the site as you can yourself – keeps it specific to you, and means there aren’t as many outbound links leaving your site.
Remember, these can do you more harm than good sometimes.
But yes… as I say Content is Key, you need good content before you even start with getting traffic to the site.
2. Traffic Traffic Traffic
If you are looking to make another stream of income from monetising a blog page – the key goal for you really should be to balance:
a) Having engaging content that your visitors will love, and:
b) Converting that traffic you receive into clickthroughs (£$£)
You may think this is a somewhat contradictory statement, (write well enough to make people stay vs desiring them leave via an ad link) however to get your head around it you need to look at it in terms of a freelance journalist.
They will write for their works to get published, which in return will give them money to live, and carry on working freelance. They need to make sure their content is the best they can make it, or they won’t get paid.
So the same applies to online blogging, which in effect is Freelance Journalism for the 21st Century!
There are several ways you can achieve traffic to your site, and I will delve a little deeper into that dark art in my next posts 
Liam
