The Wealth Gang

If you’ve started to make money with AdSense, you may be wondering how much of an income you can actually make from Google. Can pennies a day really add up to a lucrative, relaxing lifestyle?

There are many people and websites cashing in on Google AdSense and making a lot of money. These aren’t your big time website marketers either. Everyday people have their own little niche blog that completely by accident started making a heck of a lot of money. I’m not just talking about a few hundred dollars a day either. Many people are able to produce $20 – 50,000 a month, while I’ve seen checks for as much as $900,000 from one month (granted it was in Canadian dollars – but still!).

Now the chances of single handily building a website that produces over $900,000 in a single month is rare. It’s obviously doable, but it’s by no means average results. But you can effectively build a website that makes $300 a day or more. All you need is…

1. Traffic
2. Competitive Keywords
3. The Highest Paying Niches

Here’s the nice thing about making money with Google AdSense… you don’t even necessarily need quality traffic. Most Internet marketing strategies are built around getting highly targeted traffic to your website. But with AdSense, you’re not selling anything. All you need to do is get people to your site and optimize it to make the most amount of money.

We talked about how to optimize your site by picking the best AdSense placement and colors before, so we won’t rehash that. But you remember that it is important that your website is about a topic that is very competitive. That way the AdSense ads that run on your site are very expensive ads to the advertiser.

The more it costs the advertiser, the more money you make.

And because Google makes money when you make money, they are more than happy to pay out these gigantic paychecks. What’s interesting is how Marcus from PlentyofFish works by himself (no employees and from home), and just 2 hours a day. It’s doubtful it will be $900,000 a month, but even 1% of that is $9,000 a month (or $108,000 a year).

Here’s one tip… Have you ever seen AdSense clicks that make you $0.03.  That’s kind of frustrating. You can get 100 clicks on your ads and only make $3. But if you have those expensive ads running on your website (like investing, diet, dating), you could make $2 – $5 a click. Now instead of only making $3 from 100 clicks you are making $500 for the same amount of work.

See how important that is!

The bottom line is that you can make a ton of money with Google AdWords. All you need is lots of traffic and picking a competitive category to blog about. Both of which are fairly easy things to do.

Ready to make more money online? By using the best AdSense combination for your ads, you can dramatically increase your conversions, which means you’ll boost your income as well. What seems like small, insignificant changes could quadruple your income and put more cash in your pocket.

I’ll share with you my experience in terms of what has worked best for me, but this is no guarantee. Anything you do when it comes to making money online will vary from niche to niche and website to website. That means you have to test, record your results, and then tweak — always searching for that best income combination.

For me anyway, here’s what’s worked best…

1. Text Ads Only: Images don’t seem to get the same click through rate. Probably because they look like ads and the text ads blend right in.
2. Above the Fold: The term “above the fold” refers to the space your visitor sees as soon as they visit your website without having to scroll. Generally the closer to the top of your site, the better the ads will perform.
3. Start of the Post: I like to put a half banner right under the title of my blog posts and just before the body of the message starts. It stands out enough to get the reader’s attention, but is non-obtrusive. You can also try putting a small square at the beginning of your post so your content wraps around the ad and see what works better for you.
4. Slightly Blending Colors: You want the ads to blend in with your site, but I’ve found that using just slightly different colors for the URL and Ad Title makes it stand out just enough to get readers to click.

Best AdSense Placement:

Now, here’s the key part about the ads you pick and the placement. I’ve found that by minimizing the number of ads that are shown, you’ll make more money. Weird, right?

Here’s why…

Google tends to show the ads that cost the most money first, which means you’ll make the most money when people click those ads. If you have a lot of ads, Google will show a lot of cheap ads that don’t make you a lot of money. Don’t necessarily focus on the number of clicks you receive. Consider the revenue you can earn. I’d much rather get 2 clicks that pay me $1.50 than 10 clicks that pay me $0.20.

Best AdSense Colors:

As far as colors… the best advice I can give is to test it. Start with blending ads exactly with your blog theme and record the click rate vs. impressions, which you can find in your AdSense account. Once you have good data (I’d say 100 – 500 clicks), change it a bit. But here’s the important part…

Only change one thing at a time! Start with the title color and keep tweaking until you get the best click rate, then tweak the ad body color. Keep changing just one thing at a time until you are satisfied with your results — otherwise you are not effectively testing your ads. You have no idea what changes you made caused the results, and you’re just guessing.

One last important tip that can make the world of difference. My guess is that not enough utilize the power of Google Analytics. If you don’t know what this is, you need to learn immediately. Analytics will give you incredible amounts of detail about your website… who’s visiting, what browser they use, what time you get the most traffic, what websites they are visiting, how long they stay, and so on.

One feature is an overlay that will basically show you a heatmap of your website. Where your visitors are browsing and where their eyeballs are going when they visit your website. Use this valuable information to strategically place your ads in the most profitable positions — right where your visitors are clicking!