Make Money With Adsense? A Wake-up Call

Short post as I am two days from closing on our new house (old house but new to us) and then next week, I will be laying new floors so needless to say, I will be a bit busy. If you have looked at making money online then you have no doubt been familiar with the idea that you could make money with adsense. And you may have tried it or you may have simply read in the forums about how “making money with adsense is dead and not worth your time”. These folks most likely are amateurs looking for a quick fix. Adsense is anything but.

So, what does it take to make money with contextual ads? You need two things coming out of the gate:

1. Targeted Traffic
2. Traffic Volume

Most people get one of the two wrong or simply underestimate how much traffic they need. Most people worry about CTR since this is the easiest number to figure out. The second easiest number is to simply compare your earnings. This is where most people get disheartened.

I am only making a buck a day… OR It will take me four months to make a payout

This is really the wrong way to look at it. Instead, you should focus on the CPM or in layman’s terms, cost per thousand (impressions). This will give you an inkling of a clue of what you are making but more importantly, a way to measure how long it is going to take you to make the money you want to make with adsense.

How is this?

Well, let’s say that you are currently making $1 a day with your adsense sites and your CPM is $10. Your goal is to eventually hit the seemingly insurmountable $100 a day figure.

In this case, you would need to get roughly 10,000 impressions per day to hit those numbers with a CPM of $10. Now, obviously, you will need to create more content to reach that number or branch off into other niches if there isn’t enough traffic to feasibly get 10k.

And while it doesn’t take a genius to figure it out, if you are getting 100 uniques a day, I can say with a reasonable assurance that you ain’t making money with adsense.

First Problem- You will need a lot of traffic for adsense to work

You need a lot of traffic either over many niches or in your authority site to make money using contextual ads. That is just a fact. A lot of folks think that this is as easy as “tweeting” your way to success or blasting the social media platforms. The problem with this is the social media folks are there for entertainment and in most cases aren’t willing to buy (but you already know this). And here is the first problem. Folks think that traffic is traffic and it simply isn’t the case.

It has been well documented at this point that social traffic is less likely to buy from you (sorry Perry…you are wrong). Yet social traffic is the easiest type of traffic to come by. Because it is so easy, some adsense publishers think that working social media will somehow pay off….they get the traffic but no one is interested in the ads….as a result, they don’t get the clicks, and their CPM plummets.

Oh, man….yet more fuel for the fire for those adsense haters, right?

You need TARGETED TRAFFIC to make money with adsense….

People don’t like doing what they need to do. But the reality is the best “clicks” come from search engine traffic.

• And to get search engine traffic, you need to know a little about SEO.
• And to understand the potential of keywords and their viability in the scheme of things, you need to know keyword research.
• And for the search engines to recognize your page as relevant, you need to produce relevant content.
• And to get in the rankings race, you need to get links….

(Mock Scenario to illustrate point)

Let’s pretend that you took the hubpage challenge a few months back. You have 100 hubs that are underperforming but that are making you money. Your cpm for the month is $8.00 (after a couple months, you will be able to get a round about average, assuming you aren’t testing). Last month you made $85 or you are averaging a little under $3 a day.

You want to eventually get to $100 buckaroos a day.

Remember…targeted traffic is everything. According to this figure, for every 1,000 impressions, you are going to make $8.00. Therefore, it is only logical that in order to make $100 a day, you are going to need to get roughly 12,500 impressions a day Or over 300,000 impressions per month with a $8.00 CPM.

If you have a CTR of 3.5%, then with 1,000 impressions, you are averaging roughly .20 cents a click….not great. In other words, if you are getting 100 uniques a day, then chances are you are getting 3-4 clicks a day at .20 a pop.

Smart marketers learn how to make more money with adsense….

It is at this point where all the grief comes from that you read in the forums. People take a look at their daily revenue and write off Adsense. After all, how on earth can you possibly make money with it if you need to have that many impressions to make a reasonable income?

Smart adsense marketers think differently though. They learn from their lessons. They figure out they are going to need to do one of two things….

1. Get more targeted traffic
2. Raise their CPM either by optimizing for better keywords OR getting a higher CTR

In both cases, raise your CPM.

What happens when you are able to raise your CPM by $2.00 to $10.00?

A little raise in CPM even just by a couple bucks (which in no way is a leap) will do wonders for your $100 a day goal. Let’s take a look….

To make a hundred dollars with a $10 CPM, you will need 10,000 impressions. Sure, it is still a big number but you have effectively shaved 2,500 impressions off a day.

What is a good CPM for adsense?

The average CPM is typically anywhere between $5-8. This is average which happens to include the majority of folks who are seriously underperforming because they are either targeting the wrong keywords or are in an unresponsive niche…or both. So, while you may be thinking that an $8 CPM is at the top end of average, understand that the masses simply don’t make money with adsense because they don’t understand how to. So, the average is $5-8. This predominately depends on the niche and what advertisers are willing to pay. Remember, ad space is very much dependent on supply and demand. (which is the main reason why most of the hub writers and marketing forums bitch and moan about how little money they are making…they unwittingly target these long tail keywords that the advertisers don’t deem as valuable… OR, just as bad, the keywords that are profitable, they can’t rank for) The bottom line is that if you target high paying keywords, your CPM will be higher.

So, your have 100 hubs in our mock scenario. You are making $3 a day currently with all your hubs combined. Because you know your CPM is $8.00 and your CTR is 3.5%, a smart marketer can figure his daily traffic at around 300-400 unique views a day after hubpages takes their cut.

A smart marketer normally at this point starts to figure out that in order to make $100 bucks a day doing what they are currently doing, they will need to create way too many hubs to make it worthwhile. So, instead they start to optimize the hubs they have….

• Watch their analytics and then add new content to their old content- Chances are good that you will find little nuggets that could be worth either another page or a highlight on your existing page
• Optimize their page- Once again, the more targeted your page is, the more optimized your ads and the more likely someone visiting the page will click on an ad.
• Get a higher ranking- This is done by building backlinks and link authority. It never ceases to amaze me how people will be content to be on the first page without gunning for the #1 slot. If you make the #1 slot, you can expect a huge increase in impressions

There are other ways to bring in more targeted traffic volume but I think that you get the point. The more targeted traffic you bring in, the more money you will make.

Simply by optimizing your articles, you could increase your traffic by as much 40%. In other words, if your article on “colon cleansing solutions” is #10 and gets 40 uniques a day, then you should add another 30 uniques simply by moving up nine spots. 30 uniques a day will add 1-2 extra clicks a day or 30-60 extra clicks a month.

Imagine now for a second, if you did that with all 100 articles and how that would increase your bottom line….

So, if your current traffic is around 400 uniques a day (or 12,000 a month) and you manage to rank for every one of your articles, then a 40% increase would equate to an extra 160 uniques a day (or an extra 4,800) from content that you have already written. Supposing that you didn’t do a thing different and were averaging .20 clicks at a 3.5% CTR, you would effectively add $34 a month extra income (or $400 and change a year) to your total.

You have effectively knocked down that seemingly impossible number down by 160..which will take a chunk out of the 12,500 impressions you need a day.

A smart marketer will also think about stemming keywords to get more bang for their buck….

So you want to rank for whitening creams. A smart marketer will go after long tail keywords as well by grabbing common modifiers that are used in search such as “best”, “top”, “review”, “good”…ect…ect… This way, they could potentially rank for similar long tails in their niche that will improve their traffic.

Additionally, they reduce their keyword choices down to the ones that are most profitable with the least amount of competition. (I actually use Micro Niche Finder and then do a search on Ezine Articles to see what ads are showing up). This will lower the amount of work all the while making their choices more profitable. Just by choosing the right keywords to rank for, you can easily increase your CPM which will have a profound effect on your bottom line.

Some Niches aren’t as responsive as others

This is just a fact. Typically, niches that involve computer savvy people will almost always have lower CTR’s (which will lower your CPM) than those in which the most people do with their computers is check their email and facebook page. A programming keyword simply won’t be as responsive adsense wise as a keyword in which the person is looking for a DUI attorney. I can say this is true first hand as my wife unwittingly click an ad while we were searching for a montessori school in our area for our daughter.

Problem-solution type articles work the best because the chances are someone is researching something or wants to find the answer to whatever it is they are looking for (hence, once again, my wife clicking on an ad that stated that they had a list of montessori schools in our area that they had reviewed).

So, the smart marketer will simply build problem solution pages in markets that are most responsive. To ease the burden of researching content, they may find the niches that are bringing in the lion share of the adsense (think 80/20 rule) and add more keywords in the niche as well as test verticals. As a result, the next 100 pages that they create should raise their CPM and put more money in their pocket than the previous 100.

What is a reasonable goal to reach for if you want to be a successful Adsense Publisher?

Some people look at performance from a daily viewpoint. This can be disconcerting given the fact that typically adsense earnings will fluctuate wildly from day to day. Instead, look at it from a business standpoint. Most offline businesses are looking for positive percentages at the end of the month. I think that a 10% increase per month is a good goal to have. So, if you are currently making $100 this month, it is reasonable to look for a $10 gain the next month and so on and so forth. The first few months should be easy. You should write your goal and post it somewhere where you can see it daily. While this number looks low, understand that the challenges grow exponentially….if you are making $3,000 a month, your goal should be $3,300 and so on until you start to get into the law of diminishing returns.

While these numbers look lower than what you are hoping, I think that any growth above and beyond 10% a month is good growth. The end result is that you are going to get what you put into it though.

If you are are an adsense publisher, remember that Google is watching you….

This is for all you paranoid freaks out there. Yeah, google is watching and if you are doing shady things, it is better NOT to add adsense to these sites as you could get banned….or buried….

…and they should….

Google is a business which relies on advertisers. If you are doing shady stuff and the advertisers don’t make money, then google suffers and their stock investors aren’t happy. Google does need sites to publish their content on just as much as you want the income. But Google wants responsible publishers that are just as concerned about user experience as they are. If the advertisers don’t make money with Google adwords, they simply will stop advertising with Google and take their business elsewhere. Just something to think about if you are considering cutting corners.

Making Money with Adsense is an ongoing learning experience

The more you do it, the better you get. It really is as simple as that. Most adsense publishers want to get better but don’t want to put in the work learning how to get better. I am sure that anyone who makes real money with adsense would agree with this statement.

It takes more than simply reading the book by Joel Comm to get a clue. Ad placement is important, sure…but understanding what it is going to take to reach your goal is just as important. And it is something that you won’t read about in a get rich quick book because frankly, it doesn’t exist.

You need volume from targeted traffic. You do this from either targeting a niche that gets a lot of traffic (harder because of the competition you face, but possibly more lucrative if you don’t mind filling your days building links), or by writing and optimizing volumes of content that gets the same amount of traffic because of the amount of content you have scattered throughout the web.

That is it. So, you are making $1 a day with adsense and are unhappy with where you are at. You can either bitch and moan about what a crock adsense is OR you can get to work and build pages that can get ranked that get traffic and build a lot of them.

(so much for a short post)……

Adios, amigos…the next rant you read from me will have me sitting nice and pretty in a new (and bigger) house…..

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