AdSense – is it all that the hype says it is?

AdSense – is it all that the hype says it is?

We’ve all seen the hype surrounding AdSense, contextual advertising on your web site, and heard the stories of people banking thousands from this groundbreaking concept. But… for every person banking $1,000’s there are many, many more who are banking less than $50 per month.  There are many reasons for this so let’s examine a few.

We’ve all seen the hype surrounding AdSense, contextual advertising on your web site, and heard the stories of people banking thousands from this groundbreaking concept. But… for every person banking $1,000’s there are many, many more who are banking less than $50 per month.  There are many reasons for this so let’s examine a few.

* Value of the ads – despite the hype over the high paying keywords, many keyword pay only a few cents to the advertiser (that’s you).  The high paying keywords are fiercely fought over by both bidders and advertisers.  That’s a fierce arena for someone with little experience and little traffic to their site.  So forget about throwing up a “meso” or credit web site and then sitting back and banking your new found fortune.  That is probably not going to happen.

* Your business model – there are two ways to profit from AdSense – a few web sites with loads of traffic or numerous web sites with average traffic.  The concept is the same as with any business – it’s “bums on seats” or “people through the door” that make the money.

Looking at the first model – plainly the problem is to get many interested people to your web site – preferably those seeking information so that if they don’t find it on your site, they click on one of your ads and move onto another site – leaving you with a few cents as they leave you.  Traffic, as any internet marketer will tell you, is not only the life blood of your business, but is also very expensive and time consuming to build up.  Shouldn’t you be looking at capturing emails for your mailing list or selling them something rather than letting them go leaving you a few cents in tips.  Of course if you merely look at AdSense as a secondary income, then these few cents are more than welcome.

Let’s look now at the second model – the pile it high concept.  You need numerous very large sites, all attracting high paying words with thousands of pages, to make a good living with AdSense.  There is a place for this, and indeed we sell large batches of densely keyworded AdSense article sites ourselves – because we know they work.  But… here is the problem.  In order to make them work – you need not only a lot of domain names, but also a serious amount of hosting and we are talking paid hosting, not the no cost stuff.  Many packs sold have over 100 sites and tens of thousands of pages.  100 sites means 100 domains – that is about $1,000 a year and a lot of time finding good ones.  Of course you could use sub domains, but then you have problems getting them all into the search engines and pay per click advertising.  10,000+ pages and 100 domains – that’s a server you need to rent, be it virtual or actual.  That is serious money each month – and you have still not earned a dime! You have to earn a serious number of click thrus to cover your annual and monthly fees.

* The ads themselves – just as banners are no way as effective as they once were, then surfers are growing weary of AdSense ads.  This is especially so of those ugly sites that just throw up the maximum 3 sets of ads in the default colors, not caring if they are messy and detract from the site.  Many of these sites contain minimal information and are spoiling it for those that make much more effort with their internet business.  Google knows it has a cash cow and a virtual monopoly with the AdSense business, I can’t see it letting this happen for too much longer, but sadly it will take a long time to clear up and, as this happens, surfers will get more and more immune to the ads.

It’s not as if you can encourage your visitors to use the links, or disguise the ads, or even place graphics around them – all forbidden by the Google Terms of Service. 

So what can you do to keep making a secondary income from your web sites? 

Well if you want to stay with Google and why not? Then; understand that it is a business and be prepared to spend out on advertising, test your product, refine your web site, tailor your advert design to your web site and lastly offer good value to your surfers.

Lastly look elsewhere – we found a great software program that lets you provide contextual adverts on your web site derived from the 1,000’s of high commission paying products in ClickBank.  The beauty is that you can merge these ads into your web site, draw attention to them, encourage people to click on them and add graphics to them.  Better than that, although you don’t get paid when someone clicks on the ads, your Clickbank name is added to the link, so if someone buys from the powerful sales page you send them to, you make a very large commission – up to about $75 from some sites?

So AdSense is a great system, but what about looking at other methods? – Just a thought!