One of the things I love most about blogging is interacting with real people through comments. So, if you read my blog, Thank You.
I had a really good comment on an old post that I wrote about making $5000 a month using AdSense. I thought the comment was worth its own post. The comment author is challenging some of the assumptions in my article based on his own experiences, and asks some good questions. He starts off by saying that all of this “make money online” stuff is a lot easier to talk about than to actually do. Boy, that is definately true.
Here is his full comment:
I’m doing the same from last 1 yr 2 months. It’s easy to say than doing all this. Here I prove:
1. In order to bring traffic from articles, you need to write them (time consuming activity).
2. One hr. per month is really not enough in order to promote your site for regular 100 visits traffic (link promotion, writing fresh content, publish it, ping it, social book mark it etc.)
3. On content network, adsense is paying very less money like 0.01 or 0.05 etc. so how you can make 6$ per day.Waiting for logical answers…
I love comments like this. This person understands that they have an issue, and they want to find the solution. They are working through the issues. From my point of view, the question was very intelligent. Here is my response.
These are all EXCELLENT points. Let me take them 1 by 1.
1. This is absolutely correct. Not only do they take time, your time is worth money. When you get to the point of having some success, or when you have some money to spend, I would definately recommend outsourcing writing. You can get a 300 word article written for between $1 and $15 depending on the size of your order and the quality you want. If you have a site that will make $100/month once mature, it is easy to justify investing $100 in articles to get it started.
2. Again, your time is worth money. You can outsource. But, once a site is making money, you can often leave it alone. I have a good friend that has a 5 page site that he built 2 years ago. He has not touched it in a year. It has 6 pages and make $200/month in AdSense revenue. He spends zero hours per month promoting that site.
3. You have to select niches with high paying keywords. Examples are weight loss, travel, acne, legal advice, etc. You must not build sites with low CPC — like “sports socks” or “free cheese”. (I am being silly, but you get the idea.)
You can screen your niche ideas for CPC using a tool like the one at SpyFu.com. To see how crazy the CPC can get, check out this list of high paying keywords. http://www.spyfu.com/TopList.aspx?listId=3
Now, you are correct that you will not get paid the AdWords CPC. When estimating AdSense earnings, I assume that Google will keep 50% and the content network will result in a 60% reduction from that. So, I assume that I can get a CPC of 20% of the AdWords cost. That is a rough estimate. It means that if someone is paying $5 for a click, I will get to keep a dollar.
If you are getting $0.01 for clicks, you are either targeting a low-paying niche or your account is “smart priced” due to low conversions or low CTR.
Hope that helps.
This last point is critical.
See, if you are trying to make money from AdSense, you need to understand some basic economics. The AdSense ad is on your site in the first place only because some business person is paying Google to get a click that will convert into a sale. Google's gross profit is the amount that Google get's paid for the click minus the cost that takes them to get the click.
What is Google's cost to get the click? Well, fundamentally, they need to pay for the people and machines that run AdSense, and they need to pay you for the click. That is why they care about CTR (Click Thru Rate). It costs them money to show the ad (computer time, bandwidth, etc). If they have to show an ad 100 times to get one click, they are bummed. That is why the penalize advertisers and publishers for low CTR.
So, the money they pay you is the amount they got for the click minus their cost and profit (basically). This means that if you want to get good money from your niche site using AdSense, you need to target high-paying keywords.
What do you think about AdSense? Are you having any luck making money with it?
Photo: photo credit: purpleslog
Everyone like to have >$1.00 clicks, who is going for the $.30 – .40 clicks? I promise You, I’ll take them all, everyday 🙂
Thanks Josh — I should have mentioned that this information is also covered very well in your excellent free eBook — 5dollarformula.com
Everyone like to have these $1 clicks and it is a bit more competitive now (after Josh free report). All “make a living on adsense”-webmasters are only checking and making websites for those keywords, wich make it a lot easier to target a little less payed per click.
I always take 2 $0.30 clicks than ZERO $1 clicks, any day of the week (learn a new english phrase, thx Josh)
btw, for the swedish market it is really hard to find any competitor paying >$1/click
@Patrik — I have heard others mention issues with other markets (non-US). I have very little experience with that.
I get mostly low clicks and often wondered if i am smart priced. However every now and then a big click and it gives me hope!!
Also I am seeing that my new sites take an age to get indexed, even if they have links and social media submissions…. Like everyone, I think Google is out to get me 🙂
Anyway great post.
@Forest — I have not seen any problems with indexing since I started using 1WayLinks to deep link into my new sites. I am getting sites indexed the same day.
Let me know next time you launch a site and we can run a test.
Regards,
Mark
I’ve been seeing penny’s from adsense ever since I started using adsense. but I DO target small niches and these usually have really low adsense clicks. I honestly never really paid much attention to adsense as I was always focusing on affiliate product sales. But its a trade off right… Today I have sites that are designed to be more adsense driven and others that are more product driven (ebay affiliate, etc). From the sites where adsense doesnt pay, it is usually compensated by affiliate sales and vice versa.
But it wasnt until I read Josh’s $5 formula ebook that things started to make a bit more sense and I really started going after the higher paying keywords. I stll dont have enough content on these sites to entice the traffic but I’m building it slowly. One article at a time.
Thanks Mark for the post!
LOL — exactly, Patrik. Never once have a refunded a click to Google because it was too low.
Excellent post, Mark. When I first realized that a couple years ago is when I started to see some of my biggest adsense checks!
It’s all about the market you’re targeting. Many people are targeting low-paying niches and wondering why they aren’t making much money with Adsense.
I’ll take a site that gets 5 $1 clicks equaling $5 over a site that gets 5 $0.20 clicks equaling $1 any day of the week.
I tend to agree with Forest. I’m pretty good at kw research and writing, but the clicks never really amount to much regardless — to be honest. I haven’t gotten quite so paranoid yet – lol.
@Kent — What niche (are are you making a statement across all niches)?
I have a question for you – what if my blog is about free cheese but for whatever reason I started writing about lawyers and dui. Now I am seeing adwords that are for lawyers and not for free cheese. Is there a way to set what I want the adsense to display??? Please look past the examples.
If I understand your question, the answer is “section targeting.” AdSense has a feature called “Section Targeting” which allows you to pick sections of your text and HTML content that you’d like them to “emphasize or downplay” when they match ads.
Google is not really clear on exactly what that means. They claim that by providing Google with your “suggestions,” you can assist with improving your ad targeting. They recommend that only those familiar with HTML attempt to implement section targeting — which means you need to edit your HTML to add the tags.
All you do is add a set of special HTML comment tags to your code. These tags will mark the beginning and end of whichever section(s) you’d like to emphasize or de-emphasize for ad targeting.
You can read more about it here:
https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=23168
I can’t imagine ever making enough clicks to earn money with Adsense. It’s a mystery to me in some ways, and I suspect I’m in it more for fun that money (going online and playing with blogs). Any clues to kick start me onto a money making path?
@Carolyn — I completely understand, and I do have two suggestions.
For inspiration regarding what is possible read this post from Garry Conn. Garry is a normal guy that I know personally. He is not super-human, and he is not using any “tricks” to make money with AdSense. He makes thousands of dollars a month with AdSense.
For a free guide to getting started on the right track, download the free $5 Formula Report. If you follow that report, you could be making $5/day on AdSense from a single site after only a week or two. Build 10 or 20 sites like that, and all of the sudden you are talking about a house payment….
Good luck.
I learned useful points from this post and would like to contribute a little more:
I agree with you on the fact that some niches are paying more, but I have some experience with a travel niche. It depends on which travel destination you select. If it’s not a destination with lots of competition over its keywords, you’ll again fall into the same trap of insufficient upfront study. So, I’ve learned that hot travel destinations generate more in Google Adsense checks.
@Rahman — Thanks! You are exactly right. You can use the google adwords tool to make sure that there is advertiser competition.
Hi, I cant understand how to add your site in my rss reader. Can you Help me, please 🙂
Sure — happy to help. The URL for the feed is http://feeds.feedburner.com/MasonWorld When you click on that, or add it to your reader, you should get an option to subscribe. Are you not seeing that option? Thanks!