I Only Make $X – Please Help!
By: John Elder posted in Adsense
Hello good people!
Well I woke up today to a bitter cold morning here in downtown Chicago. I guess it’s time for me to accept the fact that winter’s here to stay. Had a great dinner last night at the Rock Bottom Brewery near my place, they’ve got some amazing beers, and the food was awesome. Great company didn’t hurt either!
Had another solid earnings day yesterday. Pulled in a combined $126 from both Adsense ($117) and Amazon ($9). The Holiday earnings boost just keeps rolling along!!
Today I want to talk about something a little bit different. Every day I get a ton of questions from the readers of my blog here. Almost every day I get a variation of the same question:
I only make $9 a month with Adsense, what can I do to make more money?
The numbers are always different but the sentiment is always the same. People seem to often have this problem with Adsense, they try it out, see that it earns them pennies, and then quit using it because they don’t think you can make real money.
Basically when I see a situation like this, one of three things is happening:
- Their website layout is not optimized to get people to click the Adsense Ads
- They aren’t getting enough traffic to their site to make any real money
- They’re focused on too narrow a niche
So today I thought I’d take a quick stroll through these three problems and touch on what you can do if you find yourself in this same situation.
Problem one…site layout
The first one is pretty easy to fix. When it comes to adsense site layout, simple is better. Remove all the graphics and clutter on your site.
The most prominent thing should be the Adsense Ad. It should automatically draw the eye of the site visitor by being the only thing worth looking at. That means removing header graphics too if they detract from the ad in any way.
Here’s the basic site layout that I use for all my Adsense sites:
That’s not exactly how my sites look…I use some colors for instance, but that’s the gist of things. You can see how incredibly basic and simple it looks.
Problem two…Traffic
You can’t make money with Adsense if people don’t come to your websites. There are basically two strategies here, you can either build one gigantic website and focus on promoting the heck out of it, doing lots of seo work, backlinking, etc etc etc and building up a ton of traffic to that one site. Or you can build thousands of little sites that all get just a few visitors a day.
I do the second method. My hundreds of sites might only get 5-50 visitors a day each, but when you add the traffic numbers up across all 300 of my sites, it comes to three to four thousand visitors a day.
Problem three…narrow niches
If you’ve got a website that focuses on just one little thing, its going to be very hard to drive the traffic needed to your site to make lots of money. So I guess this one also relates to problem two.
Narrow niches are fine…if you build thousands of sites that each focus on a narrow niche. But very often I see someone who has just a handful of sites, or even just one site, and it’s focused on one very small niche.
You need to broaden your niches so that they can pull in enough long tail searches to get enough traffic to pull in the ad revenue.
That’s It!
That’s really all there is. First redesign your site so that it’s very simple looking and features the adsense ad block prominently. Make it really jump out to your reader. Remember, the only purpose of your website is to get a person to click that ad. It’s NOT to give them good content about whatever your site is about.
After you’ve redesigned your site to prominently display your Adsense Ads, the next thing to do is get the traffic, and I do this by churning out hundreds of sites that are SEO optimized for long tail keyword searches at Google.
More on my specific SEO methods in a future article. In the mean time…
Keep on building!
-John
The Marketing Fool!
Rian
30. Nov, 2011
Hi John
I found your website link on warrior and your site absolutely amazing. it makes my motivation fired again, I was losing my motivation since Panda update that makes most of my site no where to be found, from $70 a day to $5, really big hit. One thing that I like in your website is you are repeating say “keep building” and today I buy 4 info domain because of your short and powerful quote for internet marketer, Thanks John.
One more reason people failed in Adsense business is they are not choosing keyword with relevant ads. When I pick keyword I always make sure ads that will appear in my site will relevant. With relevant ads, visitor will interested to click and make good conversion for advertiser.
To check whether the ads relevant or not for keyword I use Adsense sandbox from Labnol, here is the link and hope will help http://www.labnol.org/google-adsense-sandbox/
Cheers
Rian
Marketingfool Fan from Indonesia
John
30. Nov, 2011
Hey Rian,
Thanks for the comment, and thanks for reading!
That’s a great link you’ve shared, I highly recommend everyone check that out, in fact I’ll probably write an article about it in the next couple of days.
Another site I use to verify relevant ads is spyfu.com there you can see how many advertisers are bidding on a particular keyword. Generally speaking, if I see 10-20 advertisers bidding on keywords, I know the keyword is solid. Any less than that and I might move on to another niche.
Audrey
01. Dec, 2011
Hi John,
I have read quite a few of your posts and I have to say that I’m inspired to try out your business model.
Judging by what you have written here that you have hundreds of sites, I presume that you don’t do any backlinking to any of them. Am I right? Otherwise, it would be a nightmare creating backlinks to so many pages.
If that is so, then you will only be relying on keyword research and on-page SEO to get you to the front page of the serps. As such, I’m curious to learn about your keyword selection because there is no way you can get onto page 1 of google with even a 1,000-exact- search-volume keyword without backlinking these days.
Hope you can enlighten me on how to choose the right keywords for your business model. Thanks!
The Marketing Fool
01. Dec, 2011
Hi Audrey, thanks for the comment!
You’re right, I don’t do any backlinking whatsoever. (and not just on my adsense sites…fake backlinking doesn’t really work long term, backlinks are only really worthwhile if they are legitimate links from other real website owners who linked to your site simply because they want to).
I do just rely on keyword research and on-page seo…but I don’t expect to get front page rankings ever for major search terms.. But I do get it for long tail keywords (keywords with a hundred or less searches per month) that are so much easier to rank under…often with no work at all. The secret is to target thousands or even millions of them…and the only way to do that is through automation. You can dig around my blog and read some of my methods for research and automation.
Thanks again for reading!