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
