by Steve Weber
The main ways of earning money online are:
• Selling your own product or service
• Selling others’ products and services (affiliate marketing)
• Selling advertising space on websites
The last method often involves employing Google AdSense.
Success with AdSense depends on two things:
• How much traffic the site gets
• What the content of the site is
Since Google AdSense income depends upon visitors clicking the AdSense ads, the more traffic to the site there is, the more clicks there will be. Publishers can employ any number of ways to increase traffic. SEO, search engine optimization, is one of the most effective methods. Free search engine listings are the number one way for driving traffic to websites.
Secondly, the content of the site determines the types of AdSense ads which show on the site. This method is called contextual advertising. Not all AdSense ads are as profitable as others. For example, content about growing tomatoes may produce ads about tomato seeds. Since tomato seeds do not cost very much, the bid price advertisers are willing pay for these ads are quite low. Thus, the publisher showing those AdSense ads on a page will not make much per click.
On the other hand, if your content is about nutritional products, it is quite likely that AdSense ads for a few high priced nutritional products may show up. Thus, the publisher will make more money with content like this.
If a beginner to Internet marketing wishes to enter the business with AdSense as the primary focus, great care should be taken in choosing the site’s topic. Not only should the value of AdSense ads be considered, but the difficulty of promoting the site should be considered. Too many beginning AdSense sites are about topics which are all but impossible to successfully market.
There is simply no way for a beginner to succeed with an AdSense site about “Internet marketing” or “business opportunities” or any other highly competitive area such as these. Yes, there is a huge market for these areas, but it is all but impossible for the young site to attract traffic; there is simply too much competition.
Beginners should focus their AdSense efforts on very niche areas. It is far better to have a small piece of a small slice of the pie than to have zero success from a large pie.
Lastly, there are too many sites out there which are “made for AdSense”. It could very well be that you are building the site just to earn income from AdSense. However, you can’t make that fact too obvious to Google. To prevent being labeled an MFA site (made for AdSense), one only needs to insure the site has plenty of great and ORIGINAL content. If the content is good, the AdSense site is safe and will not be labeled as MFA.
Additionally, the site needs to be of good quality in order to attract quality traffic. Just getting any traffic and any clicks are not enough. The clicks must result in sales for the advertisers at an acceptable rate. If your site is low quality, the clicks may very well be untargeted and low quality. Since many advertisers utilize Adwords conversion tools, Google has a pretty good idea which AdSense sites are producing well for the advertisers and which are not.
Google’s main concern with the AdSense program is to offer their AdWords advertisers another outlet for advertising their products. Google must insure the advertisers are successful or the advertisers will stop advertising! Google is not really that concerned with how well your AdSense site does.
For AdSense success, a quality site is an absolute must! Start your own AdSense "hobby" here!