Can You Really Make Money With AdSense?

In the Beginning
Like many other beginners, my initial thoughts about Internet Marketing were slightly naïve. I initially imagined people flocking to my websites to click on all my beautiful AdSense ads and money starting to continually roll in. It fit in perfectly at the time as my main line of business needed a web presence, I was writing information consistently on it, drawing new traffic and it was a hot topic and a hot market.

All I was doing was putting free ads up (free for anyone using AdSense), doing a bit of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and generating a small stream of revenue to cover costs. It was brilliant, it was easy and I was sure I could improve on it. And that's how it began!

By day, I am a Real Estate investor and my various sites were all related to buying, selling and educating people about Real Estate. Relevant topics generating relevant ads that matched what people were looking for. Did I mention the whole AdSense concept is brilliant? Now, I've done very well with Real Estate and it has made the life of our family very content, but I keep getting drawn back to Internet Marketing!


AdSense

If you currently own a website and are drawing traffic to your site, I highly recommend signing up for Google's Adsense program . Some web designers are opposed to it, but if you have a highly content driven web page with relevant information, the ads will be in line with your topics and may be an additional revenue stream for you.

A few words of caution at this point, the majority of web site owners will not retire from their AdSense revenue. If it covers your costs to run your web hosting, consider it a success. The other caution, don't blanket your site with the ads, the more tastefully they are added in, the more success you will have.

For the people new to this, a quick background explanation of the process. Google is the largest player in the PPC or Pay Per Click revenue market. Whenever a search on Google happens, along with the results on the left side of the page are included a list of sponsored links down the right side and often a couple highlighted links across the top of the list of returned sites. These sponsored links are triggered by the keywords you entered as part of your search.

The owners of these links pay Google every time one of their ads are clicked on by someone. The amount can vary from a few pennies to a few dollars depending on how popular the particular keyword or phrase is. This is an important point, more on it later!

Two other distinctions you will need to know, if you wish to proceed in the world on Internet Marketing (or if you are a geek like me), are impressions and clicks. Clicks are when people actually click on the advertisement. Impressions are how many times the ad appears, or is served up on a search.

The concept of PPC ads was incredibly successful for Google and while it generated plenty of cash for them from searches, AdSense allowed their ads to start appearing on anyone's websites, not just their own. Google's AdSense program allowed the website manager to design and place ads onto his or her own site, and in return they would get a portion of the money the advertiser paid Google. To ensure the ads were relevant, Google would do a search of each page on the site to determine what type of content was in place. Then the ads were matched to the content of each page that served the ads. The formula for what percentages are paid out and how it varies are a well kept secret inside Google, but it does work.

Now back to the important part about keywords. There are several tools available to determine what words or phrases are being searched most often and to approximate the Cost Per Click (CPC) each time someone clicks on the ad generated by the keyword. One of my initial forays to increase revenue from the AdSense ads was to target certain keywords and keyword phrases that I knew cost more to bid on and in turn paid out more for clicks.

As an example, on my Real Estate site, at one point I targeted mortgages as my main keyword. The word mortgages was a higher paying keyword at the time as there was significant competition and for every mortgage a broker or bank had approved they were paid quire handsomely. I would write a complete article explaining the process, or the difference between brokers and banks and be sure to write a very keyword rich article. By keyword rich, I meant the article would have the word mortgage used as often as possible.

By targeting better words and specific content, it did manage to increase my AdSense revenue minutely, but never anywhere near enough for me to contemplate giving up my full time business. While my websites generated steady traffic, they never drew the thousands of visitors each day that is required to truly start generating cash from programs like AdSense. Also at this time, my business was booming, so I didn't have enough time to truly focus on my side hobby. I still believe this can be a great method to generate small streams of cash and it can be a great method to get initiated to generating money online.

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