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Building Revenue From Adsense Sites 
By Patrick Hare
Expert Author Article Date: 2009-10-13 Can you make money building sites primarily designed to create income through Google Adsense? The answer is yes. As always, the definition of "making money" is different for different people, since the money you make on a daily basis may not exceed the value of a few hours' work at the burger joint on the corner. There are multiple "get rich quick" sites online that lead people to believe that they can make several thousand dollars a month with "Google Ads" but unfortunately it takes a lot of skill to build a site that gets traffic and generates ad clicks. For the uninitiated, Google Adsense is a service that runs contextual ads on websites. If you have an article about gardening and have Google Adsense code installed, Google will read the website content and populate the page with relevant ads. If someone clicks on the ad, you get a share of the money. Google Adsense primarily runs out of the Content Network of Google Adwords. If you advertise in Adwords and haven't turned off the Content Network, your ads are going to show up next to whatever text Google thinks is relevant to your ad. If you want to make money off Adsense, you have to have a site that gets traffic. Some sites get their traffic from user popularity, so MySpace will run Adsense ads to monetize content, but it probably is relying on regular user traffic to get clicks. MySpace also runs a lot of ads in addition to its Adsense. Sites along the line of Facebook, MySpace, and even YouTube fall into the category of sites that would get traffic even in the absence of search engines, because people recommend them. If you're building a new site, and expecting to get traffic for free, then you probably are thinking of using Search Engine Optimization (SEO) to generate traffic for your site. Basically you're trying to get the search engine to rank your site for profitable phrases, so people can visit and then click on the ads. As a fair warning, this is not always a recommended business model for anyone who is new to SEO or Google Adsense, since you can usually make more money online by selling the things that people are paying to advertise, or flipping the website itself when it gets enough traffic. Google also has a vested interest in ensuring that its search results don't get plugged up with sites designed to monetize clicks. Therefore, a site that makes money on Adsense (or any other CPC program) will need to pass the standard SEO tests for usefulness and resource value. Generally speaking, you will want to create the same kind of "sticky" content that makes people want to recommend the site to a friend and keep coming back. Google's webmaster guidelines recommend sites that "add value" and the way to do this is to have information that people want to see. There is also a standard SEO investment in a site that wants to make money off contextual advertising. If you want to rank for a competitive term, you're going to have to get links to your website, create a site architecture that is search engine friendly, and wait for the site to rise in the search engines. A small percentage of people who do SEO will see great results in the space of one or two months, but it could take 6 months and a lot of money to get "average" results on some competitive projects. Assuming that you can wait around to see things happen, you might find yourself making OK money with the Adsense model, but you could probably make even more running an affiliate program on sites like Commission Junction or ShareSale. Many Adsense sites go for terms that have been identified as high cost-per-click bids. There is a nice list of them at Spyfu.com. Theoretically, you could build a set of sites around these terms and cash in on the traffic. Unfortunately, the theory has a few pitfalls, since (1) there may be a high click cost but low search volume for the terms and (2) there are a lot of smart people who already know about this list, and got a head start! One thing you can tell from this list is that attorney, settlement, and insurance terms dominate the highest CPC keywords. The historically expensive term "mesothelioma" (asbestos related lung cancer) has cost as much as $100 per click over the past few years, since lawyers are working on multibillion dollar settlements for asbestos-related illnesses. Naturally, people have done a lot of work on SEO for sites related to this condition, and a search engine like Google, Bing, and Yahoo may put these sites into a more stringent category because big dollar click bids attract some of the more advanced SEO spamming techniques. Using SEO traffic to get Adsense clicks can also be problematic in the sense that your Adsense account can be suspended or cancelled if Google believes that there are any fraudulent clicks. Smart site owners never click on their own Adsense ads, and it is best not to encourage anyone you know to click on them either, no matter how tempting. Your site can't even encourage site visitors to click on ads, or you may lose your account. The world of online forums reveals that there isn't much you can do to appeal as suspension or cancellation, even if you believe it is inadvertent or caused by malicious behavior on someone else's behalf. To sum it up, the best way to get traffic that improves your bottom line in Adsense is to follow the same SEO rules that everyone else is using. Build a site with useful, interesting content. Get links from trusted sites that are relevant to the subject matter. Have features that keep people coming back to the site, or tools that they would recommend to a friend. Even though we don't run ads on the Web.com Search Agency site, we get good rankings and traffic thanks to our multiple SEO topics, popular search engine optimization tools, and our frequent updates, which have gotten unsolicited links from around the globe while showing Google, Yahoo, and Bing that our site has a better than average freshness factor. For people who want to build a website revenue model that is based on Adsense, it never hurts to be a thought leader in the online community, and a successful site may develop opportunities for better revenue than the contextual cost-per-click market can provide. Comments About the Author: Patrick Hare has been managing online and offline marketing projects since 1999. From 2005 to present, he has been with Scottsdale Arizona's Web.com Search Agency (formerly Submitawebsite). Patrick provides Search Engine Optimization and Marketing advice to in-house customers and Web.com Jacksonville’s web design group. |
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