Making money with Adsense - the realistic way

This section of my site is dedicated to my experiences with Google's Adsense program. I've started using Adsense only 2 months ago, but found that it works well. IF you take the necessary steps to optimize the traffic to your site, that is...

Why Adsense

I've been offering free hosting for non-profit organizations on my site since 4 years. Just as I believe that it doesn't make sense not to use all the leftover disk space and processing capacity of my servers... However, I still need to pay for the infrastructure. So I thought joining the adsense program might cover for the costs a little, and so, at the end of August 2007, I decided to join Adsense.

1. At first...

Many of you will have read the stories on the internet about making LOTS of money with Adsense. With a minimal investment in time and money. Most of you will also have noticed that the grass is not so green as you are made to believe. If you join the Adsense program, and have a site that (like mine) attracts about 500 visitors a day, you're not very likely to be rich soon. You'll probably make about one US dollar a month, depending on the number of visitors, the page rank of your site, and the number of clicks.
Most disappointing...

2. Optimize traffic - the tricks

After a while, you'll probably decide that you need to attract more traffic to your site. And you'll find some pages that supposedly have a whole bunch of magic tricks to do this. It may work a little at first, but in the end, the CPM for your site will drop, and the revenue will remain absent. So it's best to realize it soon: there is only one way...

3. The one way

There is no such thing as a magic trick to start Google's money rollin' in. However, it's still possible to earn quite a lot of money using Adsense. The one and only way is called 'good, original content'. This sounds easier than it is. After all, there are plenty of fish in the sea (a lot of sites on the internet), and they all want a piece of the cake. So you'll need to make sure that YOUR site stands out. Here is how you do just that:

Structure

You'll have to restructure your site. Make sure that the layout is clean, and that the content is well organized. Make sure that users don't need to click 3 links in order to reach the desired page. Attempt to offer links to almost all content from the starting page. A tree view (like the one on the left) often performs well.

Content

This is the hardest part. You need to provide plenty of good, original and useful information. Look at your site from someone else's point of view. See if you can find ALL the information you need. Harvest information from other sites, add structure, formatting and organize it.

Pagerank

You will need to get your Google PageRank up. The Google PageRank is an indicator of the relevancy and popularity of your site. The best way to improve your PageRank is to get linked by other high-ranking sites. There is one rule: don't pay for links. Links should be a result of others WANTING to refer to your page. Therefore, you can safely assume that PageRank , and more specifically the number of links to your site, are a good indicator of how well you are doing where it matters site content.
You can check your page rank on this page.

Speed

Get the performance of your site up. Even the speed of your site is one of the criteria used by Google when calculating the PageRank. So it's important that your site does not take seconds to load. Take into account, that nice visuals and effects do in general NOT improve your results at all. The Google searchbot doesn't even notice your fancy lay-out and flash animations, remember? It only indexes the textual content. So don't waste your time on this.
You can measure the speed of your site, and compare it to others here.

robots.txt and sitemap.xml

Make sure that your site offers a robots.txt file and a sitemap.xml file. These files offer information to the google searchbot about the pages that may not/should be indexed. It can well improve your page rank if you offer a sitemap, as it may improve the way your site is crawled by the search bot.

Conclusion

Although for most people, joining the Adsense program may be disappointing at first, it's still possible to have a nice revenue for it. But you will need to invest time into your site, on a close to daily basis. After a while, you will attract more visitors to your site, and it's not to difficult to get your Adsense income up to about 20 $ a month. In order to get a really high revenue however, you need a site that attracts a LOT of people. A lot, like in millions. And you should realize, that hosting such a site also costs you money, and that your Adsense-only revenue may not be able to cover for those.

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