Clearing Things Up

Before reading on I want to make it clear that I am selling nothing here. I am no AdSense Guru pawning my "secrets" or "system" or any such thing. Keep your wallet in your pocket. I'm simply passing on the good deed that someone did for me that has changed my whole outlook on Google Adsense and in turn, my life. I don't pretend to have all the answers either. I simply want to mark a path for you to follow. Once you learn what path to take, you will be able to dig deeper and find extensive and highly detailed information from numerous resources. If I had this simple guide to follow when I started I would be lightyears ahead of where I am now.

In The Beginning

I first started with Google Adsense several years ago. After several months I gave up because I was making only pennies a day. I was convinced that the only one making any money from Adsense was Google and publishers were getting scraps.

I then started writing and selling php scripts for a living. While the money is good, it is very time consuming and requires endless hours of customer support. So while I was making good money, I had no life. Then one day during a support call a customer told me he was using my script for one of his Adsense websites. I laughed and asked if he was making any money. I was blown away when he told me he was making about $800 a day total income from a variety of sites using only Google Adsense. Frankly, after my poor experience with Adsense I found it difficult to believe him. But he sent me the proof and actually offered to help me start making good money. Everything I learned from him plus my own experience I am sharing with you here.

A Dose of Adsense Reality

First off, everyone needs a good dose of reality to keep them grounded in life and put things into perspective. This is especially true for those who are trying to make a living with Adsense. For those who are about to give up on Adsense, I offer you encouragement to hang in there. For those who are high on claims of overnight riches and six figure incomes, I want to bring you back to earth... gently. The truth is, there is great money to be made with Google Adsense, but it doesn't come without investing a fair amount of time and effort. Will you ever make a six figure income? I have seen that it is truly possible with dedication and hard work. In fact, there are some making more than $1000 a day. The treat with Adsense is that your hard work can be done from anywhere with a laptop and an internet connection, and that includes a lounge chair on the beach, or in my case a lounge chair on my patio enjoying the fresh air and sunshine. How many people get to "work" that way?

Forget those robosites and other "systems" that promise quick income from Adsense. I can tell you that they don't work. I can also tell you that reall success won't happen overnight, in a week, or even a month, but you will start to see good things happening by then. That's when it becomes exciting and fun to watch your totals increase as you build traffic. By my fourth month I was making enough to cover my car payment and my totals have increased strongly and steadily each month thereafter. I am still aiming for that six figure income. I may never hit it, but I'll give it a good shot. Not everyone will. Some people just don't have what it takes to do really well. Some people will not take the time to learn the system, and others simply won't understand it. Some may simply decide to do it their way even if it isn't the most profitable way.

What if you don't make a six figure income? Is that really so bad? Wouldn't two or three thousand dollars extra each month make a huge difference in your life? I know it has for me. It started out paying for a tank of gas, then the utility bills, and now it's like having a rich uncle paying my mortgage and car payment each month. That has allowed me to aggressively pay off credit cards that have been eating me up every month. When I get those paid off I will start buying down my mortgage as quickly as I can. I am certainly not rich, but I do live without stressing over money anymore. The truth is, I haven't even scratched the surface. I haven't been able to dedicate a huge amount of time, and I don't have a huge amount of traffic. But I'm still happy, and I look forward to when I can free up time to really hit this hard.

Do I have you excited but well grounded now? Let's move on to how things work. I apologize for excessive simplicity, but I'm more interested in giving you a good road map to follow. There are endless resources on the web to feed from IF you know what you are looking for.

Google Ads Income

To understand how to make money with Google Ads, you must understand both sides of the Google advertising machine.

The Google advertising system basically has two sides - advertisers and publishers. AdWords is the front end where everything starts with the advertisers. This is where businesses place ads into the Google system. Their ads are displayed for matching a particular keyword or phrase that the advertiser is competing on. They compete for exposure by bidding on how much they are willing to pay if they get a click on their ad. The highest bidders get their ads displayed, with the higher bids getting better position. AdSense is where publishers like you and I display these ads for a share of Google's revenue from the ads that are clicked. There are essentially two avenues you can take in creating a revenue stream with Google ads.

Many web marketers use AdWords to push sales to affiliate programs. This is where many claim to make their millions, and perhaps they do, but it takes money and some risk to make money. You must buy the clicks that may or may not result in a sale of your affiliate product. The products they pawn are usually information products with huge profit margins. You really need to know what you are doing, and have the cash flow to kick it off to make this method a great success. Many are successful at doubling or tripling their AdWords investment. Not bad for any investment, however this method requires far too much work and risk for my liking.

I prefer making my money with no investment or risk. If I do good, I am rewarded. If I don't do good, I don't lose my money. This is where AdSense comes in. With AdSense you get paid for every ad click that takes place on your website. I find it much easier to make money with AdSense since the visitor doesn't need to buy anything, just click an ad. A click can be worth a few cents or several dollars, and sometimes over $100. Needless to say, the trick to making good money with AdSense is getting higher paying ads to show on your site.

Getting High Value Ads On Your Site

As I previously pointed out, ad clicks can vary greatly in value. Typically an ad can pay a few cents to several dollars. In extreme cases ads can pay $50 or over $100. It all depends on the keywords associated with that ad. Remember AdWords? The value of an ad is based on how much an advertiser is willing to pay per click for a particular keyword. So, to find the high value ads, we must go over to the AdWords side and do a little investigating to find the high dollar keywords.

As we talk about high value keywords, some of you will immediately want to find the highest paying keywords and try to develop a site around them, but this is not the way to go, at least not in the beginning. Here is why. You are likely to find a topic you know nothing about and you will end up with a site that is of little value to others. Little value means little traffic. You are far better of with a topic that you know well and can be an authority on. You will get more traffic volume and more relevant traffic. Then do your research to find the high value keywords for your topic. You will make money, but perhaps not as much as another topic that has higher value keywords available. Right now you are focused on learning about AdSense. Trying to do that while researching a new topic to write on is just too much to absorb at one time. In time you will be able to research topics with high value keywords and be able to construct a good website on the topic. For now, just focus on learning the process.

To find keyword values go to the Google keyword search tool at http://adwords.google.com/select/KeywordToolExternal . If you have an AdWords account you can use the tool there. Enter some keywords or phrases related to your site into the box and click search. Now, select the [Exact] box on the left and deselect the Broad box. Then in the upper right of the list select the "Views" button and click "Customize Columns" and make sure "Estimated Avg. CPC" is selected. Other than "Global Monthly Searches" the other items are not that important. Click "Save" and return to the list. Click  "Estimated Avg. CPC" in the header until you are sorting the results with the highest cost at the top. Make a note of that figure as it is your benchmark. Now click "Global Monthly Searches" until you are sorting with the highest number of searches at the top. What you are looking for is a search term highly relevant to your site topic with a high search count and a high keyword value. Sometimes you can stay very close your benchmark, sometimes you must compromise, but the dollar value is still usually very high. You also want to experiment with different keywords in the search box to see if you can get better results. Make a list of the five top picks. You now want to check for market competition.

You can check competition simply by doing a Google search on each keyword and noting the number of results displayed below the search box. You want to pick the one with the lowest number of competing results. It may be difficult for you to resist a $20 keyword, but if it has 10 million results you would be far better of with the one that has 100,000 results in the $12-$15 range. Also remember that these figures are what the advertiser is paying. You will get a substantial share of that amount, not the entire amount.

Your keyword pick is what you want to be in your website title, page title, and it's good to use in any link text pointing to your site. You also want to seed your site with this keyword without overdoing it. Just be sure to work it in and try to keep it natural looking. Now there is one more element that will help in getting relevant traffic for that keyword. Your domain name.

Finding Keyword Domain Names

Getting the right traffic and targeted ad hits starts with the domain name. You have already done the hard work finding a high volume keyword with as little competition as possible, and it is keyed to your ad target. Now you just need to work it into a domain name.

In a perfect world you would want to register only your exact keywords as the domain name, and depending on your topic it might very well be possible. Chances are, that name will be taken and you will have to do some creative variation on that keyword to find a workable domain that is available. Try to keep your keyword at the beginning of the domain name. Most important, keep the exact keyword or phrase together no matter where you end up putting it in the domain name. If you had a site on widgets and www.widgets.com was taken, then you might try www.widgets101.com, etc. until you find a domain that is available.

Now you have a great combination that should pull good in the search engines with some agressive search marketing. To produce good results in AdSense you will need some traffic and that doesn't just automatically happen. Yes, you have put everything possible in place to increase your chances, but you still need to do the search marketing as with any site.

The final step is actually putting the ad code on your web pages. They do no good just stuck anywhere on your pages.

AdSense Ads On Your Web Pages

An important part of how well your AdSense ads perform for you is positioning on your pages as well as colors. Google has a very good page map of the most effective ad positions. You should try to use the best positions that fit into your layout. Understand that the map is not an absolute science, but it is a starting point. Depending on your site layout, some positions may do much better than the prime positions shown on the map.  I think the most important factor in getting visitors to read the ads is color.

Over the years our minds have become conditioned to recognize and avoid web page advertisements. It's not so much that we don't want to read the ads, we are just more interested in the content of the site. Our minds see ads as barriers or boundaries that stop the eyes. It is our brain's asumption that the information within that area is not part of the content and therefore has no relevancy to what we are reading. Of course AdSense is very relevant to the content of the page and the ads may be very beneficial to the reader if we can get their eyes to go beyond the boundary. To do this we simply make the ads blend in with the site. I want to make it perfectly clear that we are not talking about deceiving the reader into thinking that the ads are part of the content. We just need to eliminate the visual barrier that stops the eyes from scanning that part of the page.

When building your AdSense ads you have control over the colors in the ad, including title, links, background and borders. You want to make these colors match your page so that visually it blends in with other elements on the page. That way the eyes scan the whole page and see everything, including the ads. This alone can greatly improve your AdSense response.

Increasing Your AdSense Income

You have learned the basics of making money with Google AdSense. Now that you know how things work you can continue to educate yourself on the various aspects of fine tuning your AdSense results. For the most part you will become better at doing keyword research and getting a feel for what a good keyword is. You will also get better at researching topics so that you can build quality sites around high paying keywords. You will get better at search engine marketing to drive more traffic to your sites. Most of all you will be excited, motivated, and have fun doing it because every little improvement you make will result in higher income.

Most important, keep ahead of the game. Your site will eventually reach its maximum potential and you want to have another ready to launch. You may be tempted to launch a bunch of sites at once, but try to stick to one at a time. When you know one site is well on its way you can launch another. Just avoid taking on too much at once because they all will suffer.

I decided that I was happy when a site reached just $10 a day, or $300 a month. Not a huge amount, but each site I built was better than the other and reached that mark with less effort and less traffic because my payouts per click were higher. I now have nine sites producing $300 a month each. That income will likely come in for years without any additional effort. If my sites never earn more than $300 each I only need 28 sites to hit the $100,000 a year mark. It will take time, but I'm confident it will happen. Several of my site are still young and will likely see a substantial increase in traffic over time, so I may very well exceed $100,000 without much additional effort. All I know is that my trusty laptop will always be at my side and I will always be taking some time each day to improve and build.

Hopefully I have encouraged you to give AdSense a good go. I know it has changed my life dramatically with just the income it is producing now, so I know that in a short amont of time it can start changing your life, too. I wish you great success!

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