While Adsense is great at getting your feet wet and earning money with Adsense or other advertisers online, I am finding that I am starting to earn even more money with some of the Affiliate programs I am a part of. You can see some of the many affiliate programs I am a part of in my Affiliate directory, where I will go into more detail on each program as a part of a review. For now, though let's jump into affiliate marketing with the Google Adsense program.
The basics of making money with Google Adsense
So you are probably here because you are interested in making money with Google Adsense, and like many other people just getting started with the program may feel a little overwhelmed or lost. Make sure to bookmark this page as your Making Money With Google Adsense guide, as I am going to go over the rules to having Google Adsense on your site as well as the tactics you can use within those rules in order to earn more money with Google Adsense. We will also go over why some accounts can get banned from earning money with Google Adsense and how to avoid getting your account banned so that you can focus on other things.
I am also going to go over themes and layouts that you should consider using for your blog and will talk about which layout and site design strategy I feel will earn the most money with Google Adsense as compared to the normal Blog themes that are around. You can go to a specific section in the Making Money with Google Adsense guide, by using the index on the right side of this page.
What is Google Adsense and What Google Adwords?
Google Adsense is a program by Google that allows Website publishers and creators the ability to earn advertisement revenue, the primary goal of Google Adsense is to monetize your website with advertisements bought and paid for through Google's Adwords program. The two programs have been the secret to Google's amazing rise and growth. You can also use Google Adsense to earn money on your blog, and it is not as terribly hard as many people think it is.
The biggest thing about making money with Google Adsense it to keep in mind that Google wants you to make money because it means that Google is selling advertisements and earning money as well. The percentages on how earning money with Google Adsense also helps Google at this point are not too terribly important to your business, especially if you are in a start-up situation just trying to make sure your Hosting is paid for.
Back to Adwords, which is a method for Google to sell advertising to Website developers. Adwords has become really popular, and as a part of that so has made money with Google Adsense. There have been more updates to the Google Adsense program so that you can place advertisements for Google Adsense on websites, in videos, and even in applications of video games. All of these elements can work together in order to help you earn more money through Google Adsense.
That is what makes earning money with Google Adsense so great, you practically will have an inexhaustible inventory for your efforts with blogging. While earning money with Google Adsense will take some effort on your part you should be used to the things required to start generating a consistent result if you are already writing blogs on a daily basis. Keep in mind that you should also employ inbound marketing techniques in order to earn more money through the Google Adsense program.
How Does Google Adsense Work?
Earning money with the Google Adsense program is probably one of the easiest things you can do to earn money online. It is a passive system that tracks how many pages views your site gets on pages you are displaying Google Adsense ads and how many clicks on those Ads happen. You can place up to 4 Google Adsense blocks on a website and a single Google Adsense block on mobile devices. That means with every time a visitor sees one of your pages you can get up to 4 impressions for Google Adsense, I talked a bit about this and created a earning money with Google Adsense Calculator in another post.
How Much can I earn with Google Adsense?
Like I mentioned you can use my Google Adsense Calculator to do some fuzzy math on how much money you can earn with Google Adsense, based on your current traffic. Most advertisers pay $0.02 to $15.00 per click (The average is below $1) and you will also earn a certain number of impressions as well. I typically say that on average if you should try and aim to get around 25-40k pageviews per day if you are looking to earn enough money with Google Adsense to live off of your efforts. This can seem like a huge number and at the beginning, it can be an extremely large target to try and hit for new bloggers. I equate this to having around 100 well-written articles about very targeted / niche topics that can help generate around 500 visits per day. This can be accomplished in about a month or two, with work being put in to adjust these articles to get them to the top of the google search results for the topics you are targeting. Once you get these articles written and start seeing traffic, repeat the process. I think in about 3 to 6 months on average is around the time you can expect to start earning more money from Google Adsense. This requires treating your blog writing as a job and as marketing material for your site.
Just keep in mind that a lot of this is fuzzy math when we are talking about earning money from Google Adsense. That is because each advertisement they display on your site is worth a different amount, but you can get a rough Idea on how your site is performing if you connect your Google Adsense account with Google Analytics, I will talk about this further down on this page as I feel like it is one of the things that beginning bloggers and website owners can overlook when starting to earn money from Google Adsense.
One of the big ways you can earn money from Google Adsense and optimize the time that you spend blogging is to do some research on topics. You can use Google Adsense and Search history tools in order to see what terms and topics are trending as well as how competitive the marketing for those topics are. This way you can write to a profitable topic (stick to ones you know well and can write substantial valuable content for). The more competitive a topic is the more money you should see in clicks and on impressions, thus helping those 500 pageviews maximize your income.
There are also other things you should do in order to maximize your income from Google Adsense. If you are writing on a large complex topic, then consider writing multiple articles on that topic and breaking them down into their respective subtopics. This gives your site more articles for readers interested in the topic to click and read, thus getting your site even more page views because you already have an engaged reader looking to learn more on that topic.
How to prepare a website to earn money with Google Adsense.
The first thing you need to do in order to get ready to earn money from Google Adsense online is to make sure you have a website that is capable of doing so. You need to register a domain name and have a host that will hold your website. If you are not sure how to set up a new website because you're used to using Blogger, Wordpress, or even Just Facebook, then reach out to me and I can provide you some resources that will get you started with a great site that can earn money with Google Adsense.
Once you have your site uploaded and created there are a couple of basic ways you can place your money making Google Adsense add on your site. You can manually copy and paste the advertisements you create on Google Adsense onto your website to start earning money from Google Adsense, but probably better is to find a plugin for Wordpress or Drupal that will allow you to manage the placement and layout of your site in a more programmatic structure. That way once you have the places set where you want the advertisements to appear you won't have to worry about placing them once you start writing articles.
While actually adding the Google Adsense code onto a page on your Wordpress or Blogger site is pretty simple, there is a little more to it than that. You need to look at your site and see how you can get the most visibility for these ads while not compromising the layout of your website so that you don't drive away current users and allow yourself the ability to grow future users.
How to optimize your website's layout to earn money with Google Adsense
Optimized layouts, I believe there is a way to optimize a blog's layout in order to make sure that you get the most possible clicks as well as the most opportunities to place Google Adsense blocks and other blocks on your site. Below you can see an example of one such layout. You will notice I have an advertisement on the right-side in the site header, as well as having two in the sidebar, and one in the middle of the content. That gives me 4 advertisements that will all be seen and could potentially lead to some clicks.
With the above layout, it accomplishes the objective of presenting content that is primary to the page to the user, while at the same time exposing them to the advertisement blocks we place using Google Adsense. The thing to keep in mind here is to find places in the flow of your site that seem natural for a break in the flow of content. Try not to force advertisements in just to get them in, and also try to make sure that a majority of your advertisements are viewed as the visitor scrolls down as this increases your revenue and chance for clicks.
How to apply for Google Adsense
I discussed this in another blog post about getting approved for Google Adsense, but you will want to have at least 25-50 pages of content on your site before you apply to join, http://adsense.google.com/, Google Adsense. You will also need to be prepared to place temporary ads on your website pages so that Google can review your ad placement in order to get the final approval to start earning money with Google Adsense.
These things are relatively easy to do and should only take you a day or so to accomplish. Once you have applied it usually just takes a couple days or a week to actually get approved. Once you are approved make sure to create new advertisements in Google Adsense and change out the temporary Advertisements to the live ones in order to actually start earning money with the Google Adsense program.
Earning Money from Your Traffic
So once you have been approved and have placed your ad blocks on Google Adsense on your blog, you need to make sure you are generating traffic. As I mentioned before if you want to start earning money with Google Adsense, then you need to have a target traffic of around 40,000 page views. This may be a long-term goal for you at the moment. In order to not get discouraged, set reasonable goals to first try and achieve. For example, look at generating 100 to 500 page views per day for a week. Then once you hit that goal look at trying to generate 500 to 1000 page views per day for a week. Keep working on ways to increase your traffic. Keep an eye on your bounce rate as well. The higher your bounce rate is the less likely you will have engaged users who will click on your ad blocks, which is the most profitable outcome for your blog.
There are quite a few ways to generate more traffic for your site, from guest writing on blogs, sharing links on facebook or other social networks, but I think one of the best methods to start generating the traffic you need is with what is called inbound marketing. The basics of it mean you are designing the content you write in order to get clicks. That is writing catchy titles, good introductory text, and placing those links in places where they will get the most interested viewers looking at them.
What are Google Adsense Channels?
Google Adsense channels are an important tool that you should use as a part of your strategy to earn money from Google Adsense. They will allow you to segregate and track the results of the different ad blocks you have placed on your site. This means you can see how well a position for an advertisement works, and if it is not performing as well as the others then you can evaluate whether you need to reposition the advertisement or adjust the layout of your page to ensure that it gets seen more and maybe also get more clicks. It all comes down to being able to learn how to analyze your traffic and make adjustments to how your site operates in order to optimize what is most profitable for your site.
You want to always keep the top performing ad units where they are, and change or remove the ones that are performing below the average of the rest of the site. This is how many of the larger sites operate across all of the pages in order to make sure they get the most out of their visitor traffic.
In addition to this, you can configure these channels to be targeted advertisements allowing businesses to place ads specifically on your site. This could mean an even better return on the money you earn from Google Adsense.
In conclusion, there are a lot of ways to start earning money from Google Adsense. I will continue to be updating this page often with new tips and strategies to maximize your site's income from Google Adsense. The important thing is getting to the point where you have consistent traffic every day so that you can have a reliable income from Google Adsense. Check back again and often for more tips on making money with Google Adsense and if you have specific questions, please post a comment below and I will respond to your question and hopefully be able to expand this post to make it even more informative for everyone.