Making Money Online with Adsense

Contrary to popular myth it can be done. You hear stories and complaints all the time from people making $1 a month. The reason is simple - they don’t know what they are doing. I like Adsense for one simple reason. It allows a complete computer illiterate like me to make money online. No skills required other than a half functioning brain and a determination to succeed. Well okay - it helps if you understand SEO and you should if you have been reading my blog. That is what I do and that is the secret to making money online. SEO is what drives traffic and traffic is all that is important. All modesty aside - I am really good at getting traffic and it has nothing to do with my good looks or computer savvy. It has everything to do with - write this down - Getting Backlinks. A little on-site tweaking and a lot of backlink building equals traffic.

I wanted to add the ever popular screenshots to this post but they are so small as to be unreadable so I will list my earnings using text as well. If any of my computer savvy friends feel the urge to tell me how to make a screenshot larger by clicking on it (like blogger does) please fill me in as I haven’t the patience to figure this out. (I told you I was mentally challenged when it comes to computers)

Monthly Adsense Revenue = Currently averaging $3000-$3500 on beginners blog (Best month = $5200). The top 7 blogs across all my networks bring in roughly 20K a month in Adsense. The shot below is for November and I added it to explain the slow start concept to you. Without getting into all the reasons (I’ll save it for the book) it is normal to see low earnings at the start and end of each month and higher earnings mid month. This month started out with a $60 day and is climbing back up to the $100 mark ($96 yesterday). It was at $23 bucks early this morning which tells me today will end around $110 or so. Mid month usually sees days of $150 - $200 per day and then trails off again at the end of the month.

The shot below shows my all time earnings with this account - just over $65k. This is for the past two years and includes about $8k from the other blogs. The main blog has earned roughly $46k this year and the remainder in year one. (Two of my other networks have earned more)

The Beginners blog has also earned just over 15K from affiliate sales this year - the largest source from Project Payday which sits quietly out of the way down at the bottom of the page - the least effective spot and I have wondered what it could do if I just put it where my posts are.

Overall the Beginners blog has earned a little more than 60K this year with total expenses (re: link building) about $1800. Not bad for a blog that averages 4 posts a month and costs me nothing to maintain.

Traffic

The blog averages 1500 - 2500 visitors on weekends and 3500 - 4500 weekdays. This is all search engine traffic. 90% from Google. On days I post I get an increase between 5000 and 6500 visitors - my Adsense earnings/affiliate sales don’t see an increase on those days and this is why I have stated that social traffic does not convert to sales. Traffic has increased steadily every month and is due to targeting new keywords. The site ranks on page 1 on G for over 70 related terms and I’m adding more every month.

That is my system - pick a keyword and get to the top of the serp’s with it. Then repeat with a new term. Over and over and over. It works and it gets easier to do as you build up authority for the site as a whole. Last week I showed just how easy I can claim top spot for just about any MMO related keyword I want. It took less than an hour for Google to rank me number 2 for “make money online in Canada” without quotes and number 1 with quotes. (12 million competing pages)

Now while this all comes across as bragging I’m not really that impressed with myself as I know that this can be done by anyone. And that’s the whole point of this post - if you are starting out online the chances are good that you are going to come across Problogger or John Chow or Shoemoney and then spend the next year trying to duplicate what they have done. You will fail - yes - you will. You just don’t know it yet.

The reason you will fail is because they don’t teach you how to make money online. You will copy them like Caroline Middlebrook has done or John Cow did - and then you will begin to wonder why you still aren’t making money even though you have 3000 RSS subscribers. Caroline still hasn’t figured it out (you don’t have the right traffic Caroline) or you will sell out like the Cow did when you realize how much work is involved in building a social site with no return on the investment. Most of you will never see 3000 subscribers to begin with so take a cue from them - they aren’t making money following the A-List and they are successful as far as social blogging goes. Closer to home two friends of mine Vic and Court are busy with new ventures in spite of 3000 and 5000 subscribers to their flagship blogs. Why? Because there is no money in just having readers - they are using the flagships to funnel traffic to where they can make money. All the people I just mentioned have talent and quickly grew a large audience - most of you won’t even get that far - far enough to realize that you are wasting your time chasing bloggers. I have readers as well and truly enjoy them but I don’t need them to make money.

And that is why my system succeeds while social blogging doesn’t.

If you are new here and made it this far then you have just experienced what I do - I write agonizingly long posts full of terms that Google is going to rank me for. When I finish I am going to go out and build backlinks for all those terms and the end result will be that G will send the same traffic to this blog as it does to my other one. This site will be making the same kind of money as the other MMO blog but in a quarter of the time. And then I will build another site and do it all over again.

There are 36 million pages telling you how to make money online in Google’s index - only one of them sits on top of the list and it doesn’t belong to an A List blog. Google it and then start reading.

Thanks for enduring this,

Cheers

Qamar