Ever wanted to go off to sleep at night dreaming about how much you will have earned by morning? Well, maybe not…..yet! To be honest, not me either… until today. Today I’m going to finally start to make money online with this blog. How? With Google Adsense of course!
Google Adsense is the first cab off the rank when making money from your blog. Why? It’s easy to do and costs nothing. To be honest, I doubt it’s going to contribute very much to my First Million, let alone my Second…BUT – it starts here, today, and I’ll post feedback on what money I make from it. That way, you will be able to judge it as a revenue raiser for yourselves, on your own blog.
What You Need if you Want to Put Adsense Ads on Your Blog
First, you need your own blog – you’ve at least chosen a Domain Name by now, haven’t you??? Then, you have to post at least 10 riveting articles that attract lots of traffic to your blog. I’ve already posted 20 articles on this blog, probably not all riveting, but my ‘Marketing Styles That I Hate’ post is currently at No 1 on Page 1 of a Google search for that phrase. There were more that 12 million possible search results for that term, and this humble little blog comes in at No 1! I find that hard to believe, but it’s true. So…. time to add some AdSense Ad blocks to my blog and start making some money!
Update: I wrote that paragraph above way back in March 2012. This blog was only 2 and a half months old at the time. Now (Dec 2012), I’m averaging over 1,000 visitors every day. The income from Google Adsense is…..modest, but increasing every month as my visitor numbers increase. This year, I’ve made enough from Adsense to cover the costs of all my Domain Registrations (6 Domain Names) and Hosting costs, plus a bit to spare. And all the ‘work’ was done in a couple of days back in March.
The income you make with Adsense depends mostly on how many visitors (how much traffic) you get. People say that about for most sites, only 0.05-0.08% of visitors click on an ad. That’s if you stick to the rules and don’t overload your site with dozens of ads that take up all of the screen area.
On sites like that, visitors find themselves clicking on ads by mistake. But….if you stack your blog with ads (against the Rules), you risk Google penalizing you (or blacklisting/blocking your whole website) and refusing to pay out any of your earnings.
The best thing about Google Adsense is that once you have set it up, you do not need to keep working on it – unless you want to tweak your Ad blurb or design at the Adsense website. It’s totally passive income – set and forget. Then… move on to getting lots of traffic, and learning about other ways to make money online, while Google Adsense ticks away in the background.
How Does Adsense Work?
Adsense is responsible for all those ads you see on the right hand side of Google Search results, or across the top of the page. It’s also responsible for all those ads you see on webpages and posts with the tagline AdChoices next to them. Adsense is a marketing tool that allows everyone involved to get a small slice of the advertising revenue raised when someone clicks on one of those ads. How?
How the Adsense System Works
1. Blog owners apply to Adsense so they can add Google Ads to their blog’s Pages and Posts and earn some passive income while they sleep – or dream about their early retirement……No! While they plan their next move!
2. Then the blog owner chooses and sets up some Ad Blocks by choosing the size of the block, it’s appearance, and the sorts of topics that prospective advertisers can see, and select, if they think their ads would find a target market on your blog.
3. Then, when your own blog page or post first opens, Google swings into action behind the scenes, and in a millisecond, highly targeted Ads are loaded up into that Ad Block space, and they appear on your blog.
4. Then, whenever anyone clicks on one of those ads, the blog owner gets a tiny payment for sending a potential customer to the advertiser, the advertiser gets a potential customer for their product…and Google makes a bundle – a wild guess, but I expect that’s why they do it.
Hopefully the person who clicked on the Ad in the first place, can find the product they are looking for as well. That’s the AdSense system anyway.
I expect you’ve spotted the fly in the ointment for the blog owner? It’s that “tiny payment’ phrase. All my research tells me that I will never make a fortune with this marketing strategy, but the whole point of Adsense is that it’s easy to do, it costs nothing, and with half an hour’s time spent adding some code to your site, the money just rolls (trickles?) in, and you have to do nothing more. It’s a totally passive income earner, so why not try it, and see if you can be lucky?
How much you earn depends almost entirely on how much traffic you are attracting to your site. If you have lots of visitors, more people are likely to click on one of your Ads, and the pennies will keep mounting up.
I asked a friend the other day how much she earns from Adsense on her very popular website, and she said, “Only $30 -$80 a day”. I know! But then she added, that most of that came from one page only, and all the other posts and pages earned much less. But that still sounded OK to me!
How to Add AdSense to Your Blog
1. Go to the Google Adsense website and read up on how AdSense works. They have a good Newbie Central section and a good Help section. There is also an AdSense blog.
2. Open a free Google Adsense account.
3. You will receive emails explaining to you what to do next.
4. Submit your blog site to Adsense for review, and they will review it to make sure it’s a ‘suitable’ site for their products.
5. AdSense will tell you within a couple of days if you are an ‘approved’ site, and give you more instructions to follow.
Then:
- Log in to your Adsense Account
- Click on the ‘My Ads’ tab
- Follow the instructions that explain how to select your preferred size and style of Ad block
- You save your settings in Adsense, and you immediately receive your personalized code for that Ad Block.
- Then you can copy/paste that Code into any page, post, or widget area in your blog. Not sure how to do that? Check out How to Add Banner Ads to Your Blog
- Check your site to make sure it looks ok, and Publish!
- Then have fun seeing which advertisers thought you were a good potential source of customers for their products.
- Never, ever, click on one of the ads yourself, even to test it – Google will catch you, and that will be the end of your online marketing career – I’m not sure about that, but whatever Google decided to do with you, it wouldn’t be good.
- And don’t get anyone in your family to click on your ads either – the long arm of Google will spot them too, and it will be you who gets into trouble.
10. Last, but not least…start making money with your online Content. It’s passive income, so there is no reason why you wouldn’t want to be using Adsense on all your websites.
Cue Motto!………