Blogging - Making Money With Google Adsense

OK, so this is part 2 to my travel jobs - blogging post. In the previous post, I listed 3 ways that you could make money while posting a blog, which is a great travel job. Once again, the three ways are via Pay Per Post, Advertising and Affiliate Programs. In this post, we will discuss Advertising. Specifically, Google Ads.

There are many ways to make money via advertising programs with your website other than Google, such as Widget Bucks, Adify, Feedburner, etc. but since I only have experience with Google Adsense, I will only dicuss that in this post.

In a nutshell, Google Adsense is a ad program that places strategic ads on your website based on the content of your site and or page. The idea is that Google scans your web page, and places ads based on the content of that page, via your keywords, that will hopefully attract your traffic to click through to one of the ads. There are 2 requirements in order for you to get paid via Google Adsense: Traffic and Clicks.

First of all, if your website doesn't have traffic, you are not going to get clicks. It's a general rule of thumb that people have to visit your site, before they can click an ad. There are many ways to drive traffic to your site, but they won't be covered in the scope of this post.

On each page, you can place as many as 3 Google Adsense ads, to maximize the amount of views on each page. I place 3 google ads on each page, which ends up being about 8 - 10 different links, or ad views. In addition, you can place 3 Link Units on each page, like the one located on the top of this post. This will then give you up to 6 total units per page/post. In order to make a couple dollars a day, you need to have between 100 - 300 ad views each day. On average about 1-2% of your traffic will click a link on your website.

That leads to the second part of the equation, which is clicks. If 1000 people visit your site in one day, and none of them click, you make $0 dollars (well, you might make like $0.10). People need to click on your ads in order for you to get paid. The best way to get people to click on your ads is through strategic placement of the ads. The best places to place your ads are on the right hand side of each page, the top of each post.

To give you an idea, in the last week (at the time of this post) I have had a little over 4500 ad views, and only 48 click throughs, which is a little over 1%, which equates to just about $2 a day on average. Now, let's look at the math of it. As I stated above, I place about 8 ads on each page. That means if 1 person views 1 post on my blog, that 8 ads are viewed. If you take my total of 4500 ad views and divide it by 8 ads per page, that means I have only had about 563 visitors in the last week. That may seem like a lot, but compared to a site such as www.today.com who gets over 10,000,000 ad views a day, it's not a lot at all. Ad remember, only 48 of those page views resulted in a click through, which means that about 1 out of every 12 people who visit my site actually click on an ad. Once again, that doesn't seem like a lot, does it?

So remember, if you take the time to develop a site (hopefully with a niche), build content, place ads, promote it, drive traffic to the site, and get clicks you may actually be able to make as much as $20 a week. This isn't enough to live off of, however if you are living in a country like Thailand, that's about 600 baht, which could be enough to pay for meals for a week. Not bad. :)

When I originally wrote this post, I was only making about $8 bucks a week, but in a matter of 1 months time, I am up to making over $30 a week. It took a lot of hard work and promotion, as well as having a lot of content on my site to allow people to click through my pages and stay there for a while.

This is not a get rich quick make money over night scheme, but if you continue to build content and gain a following with your site, eventually you can actually see dividends, and hopefully some cash. Top earners claim to make $5000 a week, but I think $100 a week is more reasonable for the average person after 6 months to a year of working at it.