Monetizing Content with Google Adsense

For a budding online entrepreneur, the first step is to create a blog or a site and go online. After going online your next natural step is to think about monetizing your content, apart from your main operation. One of the easiest ways of doing so is to use Google’s Adsense program.

What is Google Adsense?

Google Adsense is a contextual ad serving platform which delivers advertisements to your site. The ads are mostly CPC (Cost per Click) based and you’ll earn money when a visitor of your site clicks on the ads displayed in your site. Some ads are CPM (Cost per thousand impression) based and you earn money even when such ads just appear in your site. For CPM ads, you earn money without a click.

Is earning money with Google Adsense difficult?

Earning money using Adsense is super easy given that your site has good traffic. Now to use Adsense, just apply for Adsense program and then place ad codes in the appropriate places. If you use CMS like Wordpress, you'll get a plenty of plugins to manage your ads. You can do a lot of testing, for example, a placement testing to find out where the users click on ads most and where they don’t pay any attention to and optimize your earning. You’ll have to do some more research on this and you’ll start earning some money regularly. Afterwards, you don't have to do anything else and once your earning reaches $100 threshold, you'll receive earning either directly in your bank, or through Western Union. All these processes are really very simple.

However, is Adsense worth the effort?

The answer depends. If you want to make income through Adsense only then the answer is a clear NO – unless you are extremely lucky! Approximately for every 1000 page views on your site, you might earn 1 dollar in advertising revenue! Now, if you want to earn 1000 dollars per month you have to generate the traffic of 1,000,000 page views which is not a joke - but simply an unattainable goal for the majority of individual bloggers and internet marketer! This is equivalent to above 33, 000 page views per day which is nowhere near average! Although it differs from niche to niche, it will, in average, take a very long time for anyone to achieve that mark! Just ask other bloggers how many page views they get per day.

However, if you want to make a side income, then Adsense is pretty nice! You can just relax and focus on your main business once you have inserted the 'ad code' in the appropriate places or just the free spaces of your business website. Now you can earn a bonus income aside your main operating activity without putting much effort on it.

My Experience

In my experience, Google Adsense is not a tool to make a full-time income - it is just apt to earn a supplemental income. The greatest challenge in earning money with Adsense is to be able to drive enough traffic to your blog, which is hugely unpredictable. For example, how much traffic you will get and what amount of traffic is enough differ from niche to niche.

If your blog is about solving a problem which people look up in the search engines the search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo will drive traffic to your blog. However, if your blog is about something which people will not look for in the search engine (for example, the things people do not need but might use if they come to know about it), you have to use different means to drive traffic to your blog.  You have to publicize such content in the social media sites like Facebook and Twitter first, which is known as social Media Marketing (SMM).

Both of these methods of driving traffic are volatile and unpredictable. I have sites which get traffic automatically from Google, however, that traffic is not enough. So, I also use social media marketing. However, the social media marketing is highly time consuming and it just adds up your work. Similarly, getting help from SMM and SEO experts is very expensive in comparison to the return you'll receive through Adsense.

I, in particular, am using Adsense just to continue my online journey of blogging, which is again because, I couldn't stop since I've come way too ahead in this field. I'm now looking into real life businesses to make some money, after Adsense income didn't meet my financial needs.

Conclusion

To sum up, earning money using Google Adsense only is just a dream that only a few, perhaps about one in a hundred or less, can achieve. However, if you already have an online business, through which you sell your product or service, then Adsense can be a good way to make some extra dollars. Google Adsense is not an online business on its own, but it does support your other online businesses!