Make Money Online from Adsense

Making money from Adsense is probably the most widespread way of making money online - this is an old post but is probably still relevant.




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If you ever wander over to the Google Adsense forum one of the questions that comes up time and time again is 'How can I get/increase my revenue using Adsense ?' And one of the most popular searches on Google is 'how can I make money online ?'



Well hopefully I can provide you with some useful information that will allow you to increase your revenue !



[Note : If you want to cut to the chase you can scroll down 7 paragraphs (I got carried away!) - but you will miss my valuable insights into the blogging business and assorted bloggeratis !]



I have noticed that there seem to be two camps when it comes to making money from blogs - camp 'A' where people make no or very little money despite trying hard and spending a lot of time and effort (a couple of dollars a day maximum) (I am in this camp in case you were wondering) and camp 'B' where people make thousands/hundreds of thousands/millions every day/week/month (delete as appropriate), names in this category which spring to mind are Darren Rowse (Problogger), John Chow, Steve Pavlina, TechCrunch ($150,000 a month apparently) and a variety of people over at forums like earnersforum. As a cynical beginner I am slightly sceptical about some of the claims, but I assume there must be some truth in them. I am just confused, like many people I guess, as to why there should be such a large discrepancy between the haves and the have nots. The people who seem to know what they are doing and who make money in their sleep by merely moving their Adsense ads. from one corner of their screen to the other and the rest who seem befuddled and clueless and who are constantly trying to wheedle the secrets out of the 'cognoscenti'. Of course if people think that you know something that they don't then they may be tempted to visit your site in a desperate search for the 'secret knowledge' thus creating a sort of pyramid selling or multi-level marketing effect, i.e. people visit the site to find out how to make money from websites/blogs and while they are there they click on a few ads. or sign up for some affiliate program, or buy a book or two, thus making money for the guy who is supposedly telling you how to make money, but is in fact telling you to go off and create a website just like his so that people will come along looking for your 'secret' and click on your ads.. For example I have had a good look around Problogger to see how he 'did it', but I very much doubt that he has been checking out what I've been getting up to! Problogger does of course have some useful information, as he has a camera review site, but I suspect most people to his sites are looking for information on how to monetize their own sites.



When you read the blogs of 'succesful' bloggers to find out how they do it, you end up with a vague idea that you need 'high quality content' (although to tell the truth I see precious little of it around) or you need to work your 'ad placement' or SEO optimization (directories, swarms, communities, you scratch my back I'll scratch yours) and of course you need to build your traffic by writing 'quality content' so that people feel obliged to come back to your blog again and again or link to it, because you 'give good content'.



It should be noted however that you must not write stuff just to get people on your blog so they will then click on the ads and make you some dosh for your efforts, no sirreee! There is among some bloggers an almost religious zeal about serving the community, doing good, providing useful/useless/inaccurate or downright dangerous information etc... At the same time you are also advised to 'blend' the ads into the site so that they are barely noticeable. Lol - you gotta smile sometimes. Then any money that you make is just reward for all your good work/karma or whatever.



I can't help feeling that there is something wrong, or possibly even ever so slightly hypocritical, with this model. People trying to make money from blogs can't stick up a big notice saying 'click on these ads. before you enter!', as clearly people would be so disgusted they would just hit the back button. Yet they are not averse to letting people know they are making a small fortune just by writing a couple of articles a day (how many journalists make the sort of money some bloggers apparently make?).



It would seem to me that if bloggers are making vast amounts of money, journalists would be better off quitting their day jobs and joining them. They would probably get a wider audience on the Internet and make more money at the same time for a lot less work.



I digress, but you get the picture. There is a well-known businessman in the UK called Alan Sugar. He started off as a market trader then created a company called Amstrad and made his fortune selling consumer electronics (PCs, printers, faxes, videophones etc...) One day he said he was sick and tired of hearing company executives claiming all they wanted to do was serve the public by providing them with 'quality products', as if they were in business to be philanthropists. Sugar said "Our motto at Amstrad is 'We want your money!'"



This I suspect is the motivation for the vast majority of bloggers who put ads. and affiliate links on their sites. They want your money. Not 'your' money literally, because usually it's some advertiser's money. But in the end it is your money, of course, because companies merely put up the prices of the goods to include their advertising costs. Providing useful information is of course 'useful', but the purpose of this information is to attract readers and thereby make money, like TV programs which are there not to entertain or inform the audience, but to attract as many people as possible to see the ads. that are paid for by their sponsors. On some sites you do sometimes find some 'useful' information but 'useless' information often seems to serve the same purpose. You merely have to re-define 'useless' as 'useful'.



So if you're reading this you presumably want to know how to increase your Adsense revenue. Well here is some 'useful' information I have come across which like I said at the beginning will hopefully help you increase your revenue. The guy I got it from says that within 2 days he increased his revenue 4-fold, from 40 cents a day to $1.60 a day. He actually said 400% but his maths ain't too good ! It's really only 300% but I'll let him off that one, as the increase is nevertheless impressive even if the amounts are pretty paltry (not poultry as I read on one blog! [Lord give me strength]).



So I for one am going to follow his advice and see if I can increase my $1 a month to $4 !



This is how it is done :-





Put an embedded 728×60 link unit just under the header image,

Put a 120×600 link unit in the sidebar (he didnt' say which sidebar, but it is generally accepted that the left-hand sidebar is better) and

Embed a 250×250 link unit in every post.

Make the colours match the blog itself (so that cunningly the ads. look like part of the content you have created [hehehe])

Then worry about getting the traffic in.

So I am off to do it and I will keep you, and me, posted as to the results (or not) thereof.



[EDIT : Well after much fiddling I have managed to do it, almost. The 728 x 60 no longer seems to exist so I chose 468 x 60, the link unit in the sidebar was OK. The difficult part was getting the 250 x 250 in the body of the post automatically (without having to put it in manually for each and every posting), at the bottom of the post. Fortunately I found a post explaining how it can be done for the new blogger, congratulations to the guy who worked it out, I will be putting up another post later today or tomorrow with acknowledgement to him and also explaining how it is done and how I tweaked it a bit further. I may also try and tweak it a bit further still to see if I can move the ad. to a different spot in the body so check back later (it's 14:00 UK time on Saturday 24 March 2007 at the moment - EDIT : Check out my post 'How to Incorporate Adsense Ads. directly into your Text']