Start With a Blog or Web Site?

Whether you decide to promote your Google ads on a free blog from www.blogger.com or build your site on your domain name (yoursite.com), the same principles apply.

You need traffic and lots of it.

Just because a blog is free, it doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll have an easier time making money and generating traffic than you would with a Web site.

I personally prefer starting with a Web site, but that’s not to say you can’t make just as much money (or more) with a stand-alone blog.

Blogs are quick and easy to setup, especially if you use Blogger.com, but Web Sites provide you with so much more flexibility when it comes to design, functionality and growth.

Remember, this is a business and you want to think long-term.

1) What if you want to add a chat room or message board at a later date? You couldn’t do this with a blog. You’d need a regular Web site.

2) Blogger.com is free and free is not always guaranteed. What if Blogger shuts down your blog all of a sudden? Since you aren’t paying for it, you have no real rights to it.

I heard a story once of someone having their Blogger.com account removed. The publisher was accused of spamming, but claimed he never sent out any spam. So it was his word against Blogger’s. Well guess who won?

Yup.

I had a free blog on Blogger.com, but I switched to WordPress and now host the blog and content on my own domain. See it here .

As you can see, the blog address is now http://blog.2CreateAWebSite.com . In other words, the blog is hosted on my own domain, not Blogger’s.

HostGator is a web host that makes installing a WordPress blog on your own domain extremely easy. Your blog will be up and running in 2 minutes.

I’m glad I did this. The story about the gentleman losing his Blogger account scared me a bit. It’s always better to own your own land out here instead of renting. Free is never guaranteed and always a risk.

Topic Choice Is Everything!

The Dreaded “How to Make Money” Blogs and Sites

The biggest mistake I see people making is choosing site and blog topics like making money online or making money with AdSense . First of all, any topic surrounding

“making money” is so heavily saturated out here that it is easy to get lost in the shuffle.

At the time I am writing this, Google tells me there are 401 million sites in their index that potentially focus on the keyword phrase, make money .

On the flip side, when I did a search for parenting advice , there were only 2 million sites . What a huge difference when it comes to having a chance at getting your site on

that first page of Google results.

Now 2 million may still sound like a lot to you, but it’s much, much easier to get a site ranked on the first page of Google with a number like 2 million than it is 401 million.

Of those 2 million, there are probably only about 300 sites that are extremely relevant to that keyword search. So you’re not really competing with 2 million people. It’s really

much less than that.

Remember Google is counting nearly every page that mentions that keyword phrase at least once so that’s why the number of results is so high. Another reason you should

avoid the money making topic is it’s a mistake to create a site or blog about making money if you haven’t walked down that street yourself.

People want to learn about making money from people who are already successful. Not from people just getting started who are just promoting the latest money making

scheme or product. They are looking for credible sources with proof on how to make money.

So if you are not successful with the topic you chose, it will become apparent in your delivery. Your content will look like so many others around the Web and you’ll get bored

with your site very quickly.

Passion Drives My Site and My Income

I would have never created www.2CreateAWebSite.com if I didn’t enjoy teaching others how to build their own sites. Not only would that have been a chore from hell, but I don’t think my site would have been as useful or successful.

After all, I would have had to get the content from other sources and paraphrase the articles myself instead of writing from my own experiences. Being interested in this topic has helped so much because I am never at a loss for new content, and I love coming up with creative ways to teach people what I’ve learned.

I am constantly visiting my competitor’s sites and dreaming up new ways to explain things better. It’s definitely an ongoing process because keeping my content fresh is a must for long-term traffic.

Through my writing, my audience can tell I have experience with the information I’m writing about, so they see me as a credible source. Much of the information on my site cannot be found anywhere else on the Web so they often bookmark it and come back later or tell their friends.

(Yup… more free traffic on the way!)

I would never been as motivated to maintain my site if I had chosen something like stock investing. Even though it sounds like a profitable topic for AdSense (Stock related ads may earn you more per click), I would have been bored to tears developing content for something I know very little about.

I cannot stress how important it is to choose topics you are knowledgeable on and have a passion for. You’ll make the process 10 times harder than it needs to be if you go around using other people’s ideas or choosing topics you think have a better chance of making a lot of money.

But the reality is… the topic that has the best chance of making the most money, is the one you can write the most about.

Ignore Other’s Success

When I tell you to ignore other people’s success, I don’t mean for you to disregard that there are a lot of people making money with Google AdSense.

As I’ve mentioned before, this can be a very lucrative program, but your earnings will vary depending on many different factors…

1) How well you understand the process of Internet Marketing Whether you want to hear it or not, in order to make money online (even if it’s just with Google ads), you are going to become an Internet Marketer in some sense.

2) How much traffic your site/blog receives

3) How much you earn per click (Google never discloses this sensitive information)

4) How many hours you devote to this everyday Remember you get out of this what you put into it. If you want to make $100,000 per year but only want to devote 5 hours per week to it, that’s not a very realistic goal .

What happens is, people get so caught up in how much other people are making and what topics can make the most money, they wind up using someone else’s success story as a benchmark for their own.

Just because someone has a site on car repairs that makes $5,000/month in Google ads, doesn’t mean you should go out and create the same kind of site.

That person is making that kind of money because they created a site on a topic they know a lot about. They have a lot of useful information on the subject, and over time, other people began linking to them and blogging about them. Slowly but surely the site begins to build traffic. And as the traffic begins to grow, so does the AdSense revenue.

So while it’s good to be inspired by others, don’t feel you have to mimic their ideas to become successful. You should choose topics that interest you. That way you’ll enjoy what you do and you’ll be motivated to work on your site consistently.

I get emails all the time from people asking me how long it took me to make X amount of dollars.

I very cautiously tell them that my success has very little to do with how quickly they will make money. People learn at different speeds and the amount of time people can devote to this venture will vary.

So the outcome varies drastically.

I know it’s a very difficult to hear that you could spend hours upon hours building and marketing your site before you start seeing any decent earnings. After all, it’s natural to want to get paid for the hours you put in.

When you apply for a new job, they tell you how much your salary will be so you can calculate exactly how much you’ll be making per day, month and year. You know what your time is worth.

However the Internet is much different and some have issues with not being able to measure their time.

And while I understand that, it goes back to what I said about treating this as a business and knowing your hard work will pay off in the end.

If you were to start a business offline, you wouldn’t know how long before you’ll see a profit. But you hope that the hard work you put into developing and marketing your biz will pay off in the long-run.

I remember back in 2000 when I was spending hours in front of my computer and feeling like I wasn’t getting out of this what I was putting into it when it came to time spent vs. income.

Fast forward today when I’ve quit my full-time job and can go on vacation for months and still come back to the same income without even turning on a computer, I realize the hard work paid off.

So while money was slow in the beginning, all that learning, trial and error was critical to my success now.

Consider yourself lucky. Now, there are a lot of “Net-preneurs” making money online that you can learn from.

When I got started in 1998, there was no AdSense, and not a lot of people making money online… period.

Take this advice I’m providing and use it to your advantage. And while I cannot tell you how much you’ll be making in any given amount of time, I can tell you that if you follow the advice in this book, you’ll see success much quicker than I did!

Not For The Lazy and/or Desperate

If you are determined to make money with as little work as possible, then AdSense is not for you. Period
.

Some people are so desperate to make money that they are willing to find any shortcut they can to make this work as quickly as possible.

I hate to tell you, but there are no shortcuts to success online. Even if you take advantage of Google’s free blogger.com service and create a blog, you are still going to have to work to get enough traffic to make money from AdSense.

I often get emails from people who want to know the quickest way to make a certain amount of money. Unfortunately these people are often so focused on the money they aren’t patient enough to learn the ins and outs of Web site creation and marketing. So they fail.

Nor do they want to hear that this takes time. And the longer you put off learning how this works, the longer it’s going to take you to make the money you want.

Just because the concept of Google AdSense is simple, the process of making money from it is definitely not. If it was, you’d know several people getting regular Google checks. And my guess is, you probably don’t, right?

So if you are in it to get rich quick, you will be disappointed.

But the good news is, once you’ve done the hard work upfront, the money will begin to come in on auto pilot. As your traffic grows, your site will begin earning from AdSense while you’re sleep, at work, on vacation, you name it.

But you have to get to that point… first .

Treat AdSense Like a Business

People don’t like to hear me say that AdSense is a business because it sounds too much like work is involved. And we all know people hate to work. They want to become

rich with as little effort as possible.

After all, it sounds much better to hear me say you can easily make money by putting Google ads on your site or blog than it does to say, “You have to build a ton of content,

learn how to optimize every page for the search engines, and market your site or blog like crazy.”

Who wants to hear that ?

But the truth is, the reason most people never make much with AdSense is they don’t realize this is all about learning how to draw enough targeted traffic to your site or blog

to make any worthwhile money. And that’s purely marketing. If you can’t generate at least 100 unique visitors per day to your site, you’re probably not going to earn enough

AdSense revenue to make this process worth your time.

People aren’t just going to stumble upon your site or blog just because you created it. It’s not like offline, where you can throw up a Lemonade Stand in the middle of a busy

street and thirsty people will just find you and buy your lemonade.

The Web is much different. People find websites and blogs by searching for information in a search engine like Google. And Google only “recommends” sites that provide

useful information and are recommended by other related sites.

And when I say “Google recommends sites” understand that I mean ranks . So when you see a site ranked #1 for a particular keyword phrase in Google, it’s because Google

can tell how many other related and authority sites are linked to them using the keyword phrase that was searched.

What do I mean by authority sites ? These are sites that have been deemed popular by Google because of their high traffic and quality inbound links (other sites linking to

them.)

So if you are building a site on how to negotiate a new car deal then it would be beneficial for you to get recommended by (or linked from) the popular site

CarBuyingTips.com.

At the time I’m writing this, they rank #1 for the phrase car buying tips in Google so that lets you know they must be a pretty popular site for keywords related to car buying.

And they earned that number 1 rank by years of building useful, unique tips on car buying that no other site offers.

Over time other sites and blogs related to buying cars thought this was a useful site so they link back to them, many of them voluntarily. Part of Google’s formula for ranking

sites is to calculate how many other sites link to a certain Web site and what keywords are used to describe that site.

For example, do a search on Google now for gardening tips .

What shows up? Generally sites that have a great deal of information on gardening. The sites closest to the top are probably sites that are linked from many other respected

sites related to gardening.

Those people on the left side of Google’s results (the natural results) are not paying Google for that rank. They earned it through their useful content and by other sites

linking to them.

So your goal with AdSense is to become THAT site people recommend in whatever niche/subject you choose to focus on. You want people to say “Hey, this is a cool site. I’m

going to tell my visitors about them.” Voila! They’ve provided you with a free link without you having to ask.

Not only is this free traffic, but Google looks at it this way…

Site A is linking to Site B . So that must mean Site A thinks Site B is a pretty useful/interesting site on “topic X”. The more links you get to your site like this, the greater

chance Google will rank you higher for whatever keywords your site focuses on. Any time a related site links to you, it’s sort of like a vote for your site in the search engine’s

eyes .

My site, www.flat-stomach-exercises.com gets found every month for over 25,000 different keywords related to fitness and flattening the stomach. A big reason for that

traffic is because people voluntarily link to me from their sites, blogs, etc. Often times I don’t even know they’ve done it until I check my traffic stats.

That’s the importance of building unique sites that offer a great deal of useful information on a specific topic. People will want to link to you.

So while I would love to tell you that making money with AdSense is about quickly slapping some ads and publishing your Web site or Blog. It’s so much more than that

because without the traffic, you’ll never make any money.

And you definitely have to earn that traffic.

1) After you’ve created your site, you have to take the time to learn how to generate that wonderful, free search engine traffic. That means going to sites

like www.seomoz.org and reading about how to get ranked high in the popular engines. Don’t ever pay anyone to submit your site to any of the search engines. You can

learn all you need to know about search engine optimization (SEO) for free on the Web. Submitting is free too.

2) Get creative and learn how to market your site in social networking sites like Twitter , Digg , StumbleUpon , etc.

3) Or if you’ve created a blog, you can join a site like www.technorati.com to help drive more visits to your blog. Also read up on Darren Rowse’s great site ProBlogger.net .

4) Do a search for forums/message boards related to your topic. If you’re doing a site for stay-at-home moms, it would be beneficial for you to join the ivillage.com forums,

create a profile and promote your site in your signature file. Now every time you go and post a message on that forum, your link will be attached to your message.

You can do this with any niche. Whatever your topic is, do a search for your topic + forums in Google to find message boards related to your topic.

Every little bit helps, but you have to remember, this all takes time. For example, it generally takes a few months for the search engines to start giving you that free traffic

and that’s assuming you’ve done your homework and learned how to optimize your pages for the search engines.

Treat this as your business, and remember businesses take time and work to develop.

My Personal AdSense Story

I have been receiving monthly checks from Google since 2003, and I've read numerous success stories of websites earning 5 digit incomes per month with AdSense.

Now, I will admit, a 5-digit commission in a single month is probably not the norm for most participants.

I promote AdSense on three of my websites and my checks have been as high as $4,500.

The more information you have, the greater chance you have of attracting free search engine traffic. That's why it's so very important you choose a topic you have an interest in so you can keep building and building.

My checks weren't always that large. I think my first month's earnings in 2003 totaled less than $20. However, I kept getting more and more search engine traffic by adding more content and the checks slowly began to increase. I had no idea it would grow to anything like this.
"How Much Can I Earn With AdSense?"

Google does not disclose exactly how much you'll earn per ad that is clicked.

The commission you receive per click depends on how much advertisers are paying Google for the particular ad. You will earn a share of that amount. I've heard of earnings anywhere from 2 cents to $15 per click.

So it is logical to believe that keyword phrases like debt free, employment, make money, mp3, sex, etc. will earn you more per click since these are highly competitive keywords that are searched for quite a bit on the web.

Advertisers generally pay more for popular terms because they are searched for more.

Even though Google will not reveal how much you are earning for each ad that is clicked from your site, you can still login to your account at any time and see the total amount of revenue you've generated that day, week, month, year, etc.

For example, if you see that you've made $12.60 today from 9 clicks then you can calculate that your average click-thru commission was $1.40 per click. That's as detailed as their stats will get. Also remember, that's only an average. You won't know how much each specific ad brought in.

The amount you'll earn also depends largely on the amount of targeted traffic you receive to your own site, how well the ads match your audience's interests, the placement of the ads on your pages, and of course the amount you receive per click.

Ideally, you should create a site on a topic you know a lot about. That way you'll have a much easier time creating a generous amount of content on that subject.
Why I Believe AdSense Works So Well

For years, website owners have tried to make money from their sites by putting up banner ads in hopes of visitors clicking them. The problem with banner ads is that the Internet audience is so immune to them, people do not click on them anymore.

When's the last time you clicked a banner ad?

...Exactly!

Second, in order for the web site owner to earn money from that banner ad, usually the web surfer that clicks has to purchase something. With AdSense, your visitors just have to click the ads. They don't have to purchase a single thing.

Third, most people that use banner ads do not do a good job of matching the ads to the website's content so the click thru percentages are dismal.

With Google's AdSense, not only are you displaying text ads, (which tend to receive a much higher click-thru rate than banner ads), but you are displaying contextual ads that match your website's content....thanks to Google's advanced technology.

Lots of times people think the ads are part of your site's content so they click because the information is relevant to your site. Whereas with banner ads, they often have little relevance and people tend to ignore them no matter how much they flash and fly across the page.

How AdSense Works?

Don't like to read a lot of text? Watch my 4-minute video on how AdSense works :

"Is Google Crazy?"

I know what you're probably thinking...

"What's the catch here? Why would Google just give away money advertisers are paying them?"

The answer...

Because Google is very smart.

If you understand how AdSense works, you will see that it's a win-win situation for everyone involved, and the bottom line benefits Google. Let me explain...

Since the advertiser's ads are now being displayed on more web sites all over the internet (instead of just Google's site), they are getting much more exposure. More exposure means more clicks and even more traffic for their site over a shorter period of time.

This is good news for Google because the more traffic the advertisers receive, the faster their advertising funds are used up.

Remember, they get charged every time their site gets a visit; and of course, it is Google's hope that they'll continue to keep funneling more money into their account for more ad exposure.

What an ingenious way for Google to increase the amount of money they earn from advertisers while building loyalty with website owners (like us) who are now getting paid to help them advertise.

Of course, I'd expect nothing less from the most popular search engine on the web. :)