How to Make Money with Adsense

This post is in response to a number of emails I have received regarding Adsense. Specifically "How to Make Money with Adsense". I know most of you are familiar with the concept of adding Adsense to your blogs and are equally familiar with not making any money with it - or paltry sums at best.

This post is an overview of what I do and regular readers may want to skip this.

I have been absent for the past two weeks working on some other projects but I noticed my RSS readers have grown by another 100 or so which tells me that there are a lot of new faces on here and most of you are not familiar with me or what I do online. I am not an A Lister or a guru of any kind. I am a niche marketer who until now has been making money quietly on the net - this blog was developed as just "another" niche I wanted to dominate in order to make money with Adsense and Affiliate sales. Unlike my other niches this blog has developed a readership and this has curtailed a lot of my usual activities regarding affiliate sales but I have kept the Adsense.

I dominate niches by using SEO techniques that I have been refining for a long time. I am not familiar with other systems as everything I do has been learned by trial and error - I experiment constantly.

My methods can be reduced to one simple strategy - I pick a niche that gets lots of search engine traffic and has a lot of corresponding advertisers and then optimize my blog and posts for every term that is in any way related to the main topic and sometimes no relation what so ever. My goal is always the same - I want to rank on page 1 on Google for every single term I target. By doing this I receive thousands upon thousands of visitors to my sites everyday and a percentage of these visitors click my ads or buy products through my links. Making money online can be reduced to one simple equation - the more search traffic you receive the more money you make. You will not make decent income until you start drawing thousands of visitors daily - it is a simple numbers game.

I don't want to rehash topics I have covered before so please read my posts on Keywords and Search Engine Optimization if you are not familiar with the topics. To make money with Adsense you will have to grasp these concepts first.

In spite of what most of you think - you can make a good living with Adsense sites. I do and I can honestly say that it is the easiest method for making money online - but - it does require work and some patience before you start seeing any meaningful results. I realize that screenshots are meaningless as anything can be faked but I will show you my Adsense income from last month and remind you that I am not selling you anything here - I just want you to realize that this is a viable source of income if you want to buckle down and work for it. It has taken me the better part of two years to reach this stage so don't get ahead of yourselves - this takes time.

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This blog is in the "Make Money Online" niche and isn't one of the better searched niches in spite of it's popularity in blogging circles. The table below shows a sample of some of the related keywords for the "make money online" niche. None of the keywords provide a great deal of traffic on their own compared to niches like "music downloads" but when you add up all the different terms you can create a good flow of traffic if you rank well for all the keywords. This is what I do in every niche and it works.



Ranking well for one term in Google boosts your rankings for other terms - ranking well for lots of terms boosts your rankings for lots of other terms and so on - a giant snowball effect if you will.

Here are some keywords that I have targeted...

How to Get Money Rank 1



How to Make Money Rank 3



How to Make Money Online Rank 2



Making Money Online Rank 4



Make Money Online Rank 8



MAKE MONEY ONLINE Rank 5 - yes you rank differently for the same term if it's capitalized.



Making Money Rank 10



These are all on page 1 on Google. I rank on page 1 for dozens of other related terms as well but these bring in the bulk of my traffic for this blog and add about $1500 a month to my total Adsense earnings. These earnings will increase over time as I am still working on page 1 rankings for lots of other terms - one in particular that will add a considerable amount of traffic. I am currently in 12th spot on page 2 for the most competitive term of all in this niche...

Make Money Rank 12



This term has 147 million competing pages - no easy task right? Well actually it's not as hard as you might think.

Those of you who are new here may have noticed that this blog isn't pretty. In fact it's just a plain old free Blogger blog hosted on Blogspot. I have no fancy graphics and don't do a dam thing to encourage people to stop and read my content. This is by design and for one simple reason - I am not after readers - I am after clicks.

The layout of this blog goes against all the conventional wisdom of how you should set up a blog. Keep this in mind - all that wisdom is about attracting readers - not making money. People don't click if you get them reading. About 7% of the people who find this site through Google click my Ads. The uglier I make the site the higher this percentage gets.

If you are brave enough start reading my old posts - they explain how I have optimized this blog for search traffic. My techniques work in a highly competitive niche like this but more importantly they really kick ass in less competitive niches that have a lot more searches to cash in on.

Getting search visitors is only step one however - getting them to click or buy is the hard part. My next post will cover all my little tips for converting traffic into Adsense revenue.

Till then,

Griz

see also Optimization Tips for Adsense and How to Increase Your Adsense CTR and Adsense for Feeds

See how smart pricing can effect your earnings.