Your Adsense Earnings Does Not Need to Be Peanuts

Adsense is a favorite of mine, because it is such an easy business model and Google does all the work for you.

Let me take a moment to tell you what prompted this post

I read and watch every adsense tutorial I come across. Simply because adsense is one of the main methods I use to monetize some of my sites. It's therefore important to keep abreast of new deveopments in adsense.

I was reading an e book that said something like 'With adsense you should be making a minimum of $5 a MONTH by the end of the first year'

WHAT!!!

One year for $60 dollars. In some countries there are laws against such low income.
Even $5 a day would mean £150 a month which again is just peanuts if you have been slogging hard at it for a whole year

If you are in that bracket you need to settle down and read this post

If you have a website up for more than one year and your main source of income from the site is adsense, you really should be making more than $5 a day

If you are not, you are doing something wrong. The question is what are the possibilities.

We'll deal with the obvious ones first

Insufficient traffic

Like I said it's pretty basic. You need traffic to make money with adsense. People need to be visiting your website if they are going to click on your ads. If you think about it, the CTR a lot of webmasters declare in the forums is 2 to 5%. So if you are getting a hundred visitors a day... that's 2 adsense clicks. An average keyword optimized page could attract adsense ads that pay you 50 cents a click. Let's be generous and say $2 a click. $4 a day from your 2 clicks is not going to take you on the road to quitting the day job. Nuff said on amount of Traffic

Insufficient Content

This could be an insufficient number of pages or an insufficient amount of content on each page. Lets talk about the number of pages aspect of things. You'll never come across someone who is 'caning it' with a two page website or blog. You need lots of pages that are optimized for a lot of different keywords. That's a lot of pages on each of your websites. Think about it. The guy who set up the article directory is privy to this concept. You create the content for him/her and he monetizes it with adsense. All those pages with all that content focused on that wide variety of keywords. There is a lesson in there for those with their eyes open

And the content on each page. Agreed there are those who seem to be able to manipulate the adsense code and manage to get adsense to display relevant ads on low content sites. But for the majority of us, we need to present the adsense code with content that tells it what ads to display on our pages. It is within this content that your keywords appear often telling the code what your page is about. Personally, I had some pages that really did not do well. The adsense ads were not relevant. I wrote more content on some of these sites and ... relevant ads.

Ignoring Search Engine Optimization

The best traffic for adsense income is search engine traffic. This is one fact that has not changed for a few years now. Conversions are better when your visitors come looking for you and your content. It's basic stuff. People will tell you that social bookmarking and other things are great for adsense. I say in my experience not. Social networking traffic is pretty good for affiliate sales. But when it comes to adsense, it has got to be search engine traffic. So pay attention to your SEO. If you do not have an SEO approach to creating content for your sites and blogs, start now.

Less Obvious Reasons for Low Adsense Income

Wrong type of traffic

Getting traffic is easy. Just stick your site on a traffic exchange site and surf all day.
You'll get hits, loads of hits. Each will stay on your site for the obligatory 10 seconds and off they go to another site.
This sort of traffic will earn you next to nothing with your adsense monetized sites.

As I mentioned earlier, you need people who come to you looking for the content on your pages. And because you have made the effort on the content front to ensure that your adsense ads are relevant, your visitors will be interested in those also. Not to overstate things, search engine traffic best fulfills this. Optimize your pages for keywords that are relevant to your content and you will get the right type of traffic... the type that converts

Click Exchange

We have all come across them on forums and on blog networking sites. They send you private messages on the blogcatalog and facebook asking you to click their adsense ads and they will click yours in return.

The logic behind these peoples' thinking is just beyond me. Risk losing your adsense income for life [A Google ban usually is for life] for a single click from someone that is never going to come back to your site!!! Does that sound like a bad idea to you or is it just me?.
You want to invest the time in building your content, your backlinks, improving your on page SEO. These are the things that translate to long term earnings on your site


Believing The Gurus

This one was my big mistake when I first got involved with making money online with adsense and with affiliate marketing. Blindly following what that cool ebook taught you is not the way to go. All the guy is telling you is what worked on HIS SITES!!

It does not necessarily mean that they will work on yours.

With adsense you have got to TEST things.

There is no perfect position or banner size or colour scheme that is perfect for all sites or even across different pages on the same site. You have got to do some testing.

The gurus are there to give you a guide, an introduction to adsense and help you lay the foundations. The rest is up to you.

Before I finish this I realize that it sounds like a lot of hard work is involved with making money with adsense.

But if you look at things objectively, it takes a lot of work in the bricks and mortar world to make an income....So why are we expecting short cuts when it comes to making money with adsense?