Yesterday, I was checking out the new posts on Third Tribe and saw someone claiming that you can’t make money with Adsense. I want to dispel that myth.
Over the last three years, I have made over $100,000 with Adsense – around $12,000 in 2008, $35,000 in 2009 and $60,000 in 2010. While I don’t think my Adsense income will double in 2011, it will be solid.
Since 2007, I have been building this online business, and over that time I have learned a lot about making money with Adsense. Today, I want to focus on the two key things you need to know to make money with Adsense.
How To Make Money with Adsense
Making money with Adsense comes down to two things – having a high paying niche and ranking in the search engines for buying keywords. I have about 40 websites that I run Adsense on. But, it is important to know that not all of my websites have been successful. In my experience, success with Adsense is all about niche and ranking for buying keywords.
Let me go a little more in depth here.
Picking a Good Niche
When picking a niche, you need to pick a niche where advertisers make lots of money per sale. If you are blogging about blogging, there is not much money in the niche for advertisers. However, if you are talking about real estate, insurance or injury law, these advertisers can make huge amounts of money per sale.
Let me give you an example. My financial websites do very well with Adsense. The banks and other financial providers pay a lot of money for online advertising because they make a ton of money signing new people up for accounts.
On the other hand, I have a video game blog that has twice as much traffic as my financial sites, but makes 5% the money per click on Adsense.
Let’s compare Darren Rowse’s two most popular sites – Problogger and Digital Photography School. Darren makes a ton of money with Adsense on his Digital Photography School, but doesn’t even both with Adsense on Problogger.net. This makes sense. Camera equipment is expensive. The advertisers can afford to pay a lot per click because the average order size for camera equipment retailers is high. However, there is not much money to be made from Adsense in the blogging niche because the dollars per sale is small.
Buying Keywords
The most important tip for making money with Adsense is to focus on ranking for buying keywords.
The first lesson here is that you make more money with Adsense from search engine traffic. If your site does not get a majority of its traffic from the search engines, you will not make a lot of money with Adsense.
The second lesson is that you need to rank for buying keywords. Buying keywords are keywords that web searchers use when they are looking to buy something.
When you are doing keyword research, you might see that the keyword “Free Health Insurance” gets a lot of traffic per month. But, if someone is looking for something for free, they are not interested in buying health insurance. You will get a ton of traffic if you rank for this term, but the click through rate on your Adsense ads will be low because these searchers are not looking to buy. In fact, very few of these searchers will even look at your Adsense ads.
Darren’s photography site ranks well for specific camera models and accessories. If a web searcher is searching for a specific camera, chances are they are looking to buy one. That is a great buying keyword.
I hope that this Adsense advice helps some of you. If you have any Adsense questions, I would be happy to answer them for you.
Photo by Trey Ratcliff at www.stuckincustoms.com
Hi Fred,
You make EXCELLENT points.
If you’re not writing in a niche where readers are actively looking for something to buy, there’s little chance that you’ll make a high Adsense revenue.
And, in these cases, you’re better off selling information.
So, if you’re blogging about blogging, earning an income online, freelance writing, or any other subject that involves bettering a skill or learning something new, you’ll make a much higher profit creating your own informational products to sell – because readers in these niches are looking for information, not physical products. Infoproducts can include ebooks, online courses, membership forums (where users have to pay to access the forum on a monthly basis), consulting, and so on.
Ads generally promote physical products (not always, but most of the time), so you can see why such sites won’t make good ad revenue – no one will be interested in the ads.
If you do want to go the ad route, you can try affiliate marking (selling products – info or otherwise – from other people and then getting a cut in every sale). However, if you do go this route, you need to pay careful attention to relevancy. Because, again, if what you’re selling isn’t relevant or somewhat connected to the niche you’re writing about, there’s a slim chance that anyone will be interested.
And, as always, value plays an important role here. You should always strive to provide your readers with valuable content, services, and products.
Great read, and something every business owner (or website creator) should keep in mind!
Christina
Thanks Christina, and you make some great points too. Thanks for contributing.
Why is it that I have read a million posts on Adsense and how to make money with it but it took your post to finally put the SENSE in it.
Seriously Fred, brilliant post that takes the intricacies of making money with contextual advertising and breaks it down into the building blocks or fundamentals of it.
No matter how many tricks and tips you employ, if you are in the wrong niche or promoting the wrong keyword then you are shooting yourself in the contextual foot.
Brilliant post for anyone looking to ad adsense to their income streams
(came over from DiTesco’s speedlink week … a bit later)
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Thanks for the compliments Alex. I, like you, have been frustrated by the “How to Make Money with Adsense” posts. I hope that my post helps others make more money.
Hi Fred,
Solid post and the strong arguments. I’m not making thousands of dollars per month from Adsense but still whatever I collect is enough to make me happy.
There was lot of things to learn from your post and I need to improve in certain aspects if I wish to make more money from Adsense. I won’t be targetting for more traffic but for better traffic – those who are willing to buy something.
Great tips man, you rock!
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Hi Fred
You really make some great points in this post. By the way I found it via Google+
I have my own little Tech Blog that has not even been up for a year yet. About 4 months ago I started to put on some AdSense Ads. The first couple of months I only got a couple of clicks, but the last month or so I have seen a big increase which is great. My blog is only a part time project, but it is fun to see if I can increase the income for AdSense each months. I think a blog about Tech stuff has much bigger potentials with AdSense than a blog about Blogging.
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