Adsense Only For Website Monetization

Can adsense be the sole method of making an income from your website?

I wish the answer was a simple yes or no but it is more complicated than that

Most of you who are into making money online are not looking to be the next millionaire. Just a regular reliable source of income that frees you from the chains of a JOB

So the question about adsense is a valid one

Say you aim to make $3000 a month. Can you achieve this level of income consistently with adsense

And more crucially, can you rely on this income

To the first part of the qquestion, it is possible to make a significant income with adsense. Without resorting to black hat methods or spamming or click fraud

But this takes a lot of time and effort and won't happen overnight

To achieve this you will need

Webpages

A lot of webpages. Each optimized for a different traffic pulling keyword. and each with a decent amount of content on the page. The five page website on Acne for example is just not going to do. You need hundreds of pages and each page should be keyword targeted so that you get ads that are relevant to your content

Visitors [Traffic]

We are talking about truckloads of traffic. Thousands everyday. Oh and to make things a little more tricky, it's search engine traffic you are really after

So if you think that you can command a decent amount of traffic and build lots of keyword targeted pages, then you can make a significant income from adsense alone

The second question 'Can you rely on your adsense income for a living?' Now that's a little more tricky

Variation

The first problem is your income will vary from on month to the next. So you can get yourself into the position where you get the coveted adsense check every month. But some months will be great and others.... well just making the $100 pay out trigger. SO as your sole source of income, may not be a good idea

Adsense Ban

This is dreaded by all webmasters who monetize their sites with adsense. Especially if you are making a decent monthly income with it. The theory is if you stay within the terms of service of adsense and remain strictly white hat, then you have no worries. But we have all seeen those posts in the forums about sudden adsense ban where the webmaster just cannot figure out why

So to round things up, I certainly am an adsense enthusiast but I would advice that you have other forms of monetization on your pages or at least in mind

Using Torrents To Guide Affiliate Product Selection

For many of you reading this, torrent sites do not feature in your day to day activities. Torrent sites are file sharing sites and to my surprise are quite numerous on the web

In the UK and US sharing copyrighted content that is not yours is illegal and lets face it grossly unethical

But these sites are useful when you are trying to decide whether or not to promote a product as an affiliate marketer

A little background

I bought an affiliate marketing ebook and was pretty excited about it. The content was great and the tips when I applied them resulted in increased income to me

So of course I joined the affiliate program and promoted it on one of my sites and to my affiliate marketing email list

And I got a ton of clicks but very few conversion

Hmmm! What gives?

So I did a web search for the product name plus words like 'scam', 'problems' etc

I thought perhaps the product had got some bad press or something

On one of these searches, I think it was the problems search, I came across a torrent site where the ebook was being shared

And the penny dropped

Why would anyone buy a product from my affiliate link when they can get it for free??

So now before promoting a product as an affiliate, be it marketing tutorials or a movie, I do a Google search for the product name + torrent to see what comes up.

If there's a ton of torrent sites "sharing" the product, I tend to avoid putting too much effort into promoting it.

Not because of a lack of faith in the product but because I probably will not get great conversions

Multiple Sources Of Visitors

Andy asked an important question on getting backlinks and visitors in a previous post of mine and I think it needs to be addressed

Andy has been using easysubmits to try to get backlinks to his site and although he has garnered some do follow links, things are not moving along quickly

Directories are okay
I am a little luke warm on directory submissions but in the absence of any other backlinks, they are an easy method of getting backlinks that is not time consuming....especially if you are using a semi-automated product like easy submits

You must have noticed "luke warm"

A lot of the free directories use no follow attribute on their outbound links. This is an established fact.
Also even the ones that do follow, the majority are low PR pages.
I would only use directory submissions in my downtime. Not as a major backlinking strategy. And certainly not as a source of visitors. DMOZ is great, if you have 1.5 years to wait for that one link

You need multiple methods of creating backlinks, preferably do follow backlinks and you need multiple sources of visitor

Better methods of generating backlinks include

Linkbait. Write pillar articles. Articles that are so through and informative that others in your niche will link to it

Build your own network of blogs. These do not have to be blogs on accounts hosted by you. There are loads of free blogging platforms on the Internet that allow you to build your own little blog on their platform. This means you can build content on those sites and put links anywhere within the body of your article

Guest Blogging. Kim Roach is pretty keen on this one. I personally like to keep my content on my pages, but guest blogging is one way of syndicating your content and getting backlinks and visitors to your sites.

Forum participation. It may be an old and often abused method but forum participation is one of those things that will be around for ages because it works. Even if the forums are no follow, if your contributions to the forums are useful, visitors will click on your link or profile to see your site

Social Bookmarking. Again a great source of visitors to your sites if done right. The links are often no follow or redirects but if you have the right type of friends and followers. traffic from these social networking sites can be ginormous

I cannot overemphasize it. You need multiple methods of building backlinks and multiple sources of visitors to your sites to make this work

Direct Link Or Redirect

Just something for you guys to watch out for when you are busy building backlinks to your websites.

There are a lot of media where you can easily submit your backlinks. With forums and blogs and RSS feeds and social bookmarking sites all around us

As a webmaster you are are that a lot of these sites have opted to use the no follow attribute in the links pointing out of their pages, i.e. your backlinks, to reduce the amount of spam and probably to keep as much of their PR juice on their pages as possible

But the disadvantage of this is these sites that use the no follow attribute in links do this at the risk of reducing the volume of comments they get, in the case of blogs or participation in the case of forums.

And we all know that user participation is a significant part of generating fresh content and also retaining a loyal following

But some webmasters have another way around this.
They leave the do follow attribute on the links so you think that you are getting juicy do follow backlinks to your sites when you participate in these sites.

You can easily find what links are do follow and which are not using the tips I outlined on a previous post on how to find do follow links

But these webmasters convert all links to a redirects. So instead of the link pointing to your domain dot com. It points to their domain/ your domain dot com

This link has no SEO benefit for you!!!

So when you are going around the web, dropping those useful bits of information on blogs and participating actively in forums, just make sure that the link in your signature which may have a do follow attribute is actually linking directly to your site

How can you do this?

Status Bar

In the tool bar of your browser, click on view. In the drop down menu, the status bar should have a tick to the left of it. If it doesn't click on it. This will bring up a status bar at the bottom of your browser. When you hover your mouse over any link on the page, it will show the exact URL the link is pointing to in the status bar

Copy URL Location

The other option is to right click on the link and copy link location. Paste it on a notepad document to see exactly what URL the link is pointing to.

Have fun building those links