Help! Can I Make Money From This Website with Adwords??

Thermidor

Hi Folks,

I'm hoping some of you can advise me here. I'm thinking about starting up blog-type website with a forum attached to it discussing holidays and living in Turkey - a general kind of forum with some interesting and funny blogs. pictures etc including advise on buying property out there and so on.

Obviously it'll cost me to start up and run (host fees, maintenance etc) so expect to run at a loss the first year or so unril it (hopefully) gets a little following and some traffic.

I'd like, if I could, to sell advertising space to local hotels/restaurants in Turkey - but haven't a clue what I could charge.

I've seen Adsense and Googlewords (?) on websites, and I wondered how they work? If I got my websire up and running would I get paid 'so much per click on an advert? Is that how it works?

Basically, could the Adsense ads cover my running costs of the website, and give me a little bit over for myself? I've done some searching on the web and have come across fanciful storis that you can make thousands and thousands a month from running a website with Adsense but I'm very skeptical - if taht was true everyone would be doing it.


So any idea of the sort of income you could make from having Adsense adverts on your website?

Cheers in advance folks!

Thermidor

By the way, please excuse all those spelling mistakes and typos! I really can spell (lol) I just knocked it out in a hurry:o

JuniorDesigner

First of all you would need an immense amount of traffic to your website to make adwords worth it, income wise.

I would try and generate a good traffic to your site before you start thinking about Adwords!

paddyrg

Those ads you see for 'make zillions from Adwords' want to charge you money to 'find out how' - and *that* is where they make the money.

Friends who've tried this kind of thing find they barely break even. If you want to do it for its own sake, go for it and see the adwords as being a bit of a subsidy for your (cheap) hosting. Affiliates and local ads will make a few more quid if relevant, but it is not big money.

Sicksorry

Hey,
I've used Adsense myself in the past and It'll come in fairly handy if you think you'll have plenty traffic running through your website. In the past I found that I would need hundreds of page views to gain a single click, and depending on each individual advert that is clicked the amount of money you will make is varied as each company set there own Price Per Click. It's worth noting you won't make any money out of it for a few months at least also as funds need to build up in your account first before they are released.

That all said and done, It's free and if you don't mind a couple adverts on your website then you can't really go wrong. Unless of course your website is advertising a trade or a product and the adverts displayed will possibly be of the same nature so you may risk loosing customers.

steve1980

As others have said, you need huge amounts of traffic coming through your website/forum.

I run a very successful forum which generates approximately 500,000 visits a month. This will bring in the money but remember that you will only receive a payout when it reaches £60.

InsideInsurance

You seem to be confusing AdWords and AdSense a little given the title.

AdSense is good in that it detects information about the user, about your site and from that serves up "appropriate" ads from those that are currently spending. The down side of AdSense is you only get a small slice of the money involved and therefore you need a lot of visitors to make money.

Where AdSense comes into its own is where you cannot fully predict who your visitors are or what their interest is in your site. So mainly things like forums or other such things where user contribute the content. So I run a basic reverse telephone look up site in the USA, people enter the number of spam callers and who they are. Adsense therefore makes sense as it uses what sort of people are calling to serve the ads as I dont have the time or inclination to look at every phone number in the directory and get individual advertising for the page.

I get a eCPM (basically the amount of money per 1,000 impressions) of around £3 and with 3,000 impressions per month its all ok given my £40 comes at the cost of none of my time and less than £15 a year in costs.

If however you control all the content and/ or you can accurately identify who your visitors are then you can get much better revenue generated by other means. If your big you can directly sell advertising space but an intermediary step may be to use affiliate advertising... you write a new article on hotels in certain region and you link through to Hotels.com for the hotels themselves and through to Thomas Cook for holidays. You then receive a percentage of what each of the people who click through spends with that company.

This website uses affiliate marketing in its articles, if you look at the hotel section both Travel Supermarket and Trip Adviser links are affiliates so they receive revenue for bookings subsequently made.

Affiliate marketing is more time consuming and you have to rely on how good the other companies are at selling but if you pick the right ones you get much more income. The pit fall is not to simply chose the highest paying affiliate marketing company, for example RAC are currently offering affiliate £75 for every car insurance sale they initiate which is tempting against the 5% Laterooms are offering but if your site is about holidays youll get a better conversion on laterooms than RAC car insurance.

Horace

Set up your website using Wordpress - this makes it easier for you to update your site at will and it is great for blogging. You can add your own keywords and do your own SEO too.

I use affiliate marketing for my site whereby I register with companies such as Buy at or affiliate window and apply to join various programmes - I know that I have one for Hotels.com and there are tons to choose from. Once accepted onto the programme then you can use various banners on your website (these are provided in the affiliate areas of the company that you are using) and when people click on these and buy then you earn commission.

Thermidor

steve1980 wrote: »

As others have said, you need huge amounts of traffic coming through your website/forum.

I run a very successful forum which generates approximately 500,000 visits a month. This will bring in the money but remember that you will only receive a payout when it reaches £60.

Wow, some interesting responses here...

Steve, I wouldn't have a clue how long it would take me to build it up to 500,000 visits a month level - probably never knowing how things turn out for me! Could I be nosey and ask you what sort of income you can generate each month from those figures? I'd imagine that takes a long time to get to such a high level?

Cheers

Thermidor

InsideInsurance wrote: »

You seem to be confusing AdWords and AdSense a little given the title.

AdSense is good in that it detects information about the user, about your site and from that serves up "appropriate" ads from those that are currently spending. The down side of AdSense is you only get a small slice of the money involved and therefore you need a lot of visitors to make money.

Where AdSense comes into its own is where you cannot fully predict who your visitors are or what their interest is in your site. So mainly things like forums or other such things where user contribute the content. So I run a basic reverse telephone look up site in the USA, people enter the number of spam callers and who they are. Adsense therefore makes sense as it uses what sort of people are calling to serve the ads as I dont have the time or inclination to look at every phone number in the directory and get individual advertising for the page.

I get a eCPM (basically the amount of money per 1,000 impressions) of around £3 and with 3,000 impressions per month its all ok given my £40 comes at the cost of none of my time and less than £15 a year in costs.

If however you control all the content and/ or you can accurately identify who your visitors are then you can get much better revenue generated by other means. If your big you can directly sell advertising space but an intermediary step may be to use affiliate advertising... you write a new article on hotels in certain region and you link through to Hotels.com for the hotels themselves and through to Thomas Cook for holidays. You then receive a percentage of what each of the people who click through spends with that company.

This website uses affiliate marketing in its articles, if you look at the hotel section both Travel Supermarket and Trip Adviser links are affiliates so they receive revenue for bookings subsequently made.

Affiliate marketing is more time consuming and you have to rely on how good the other companies are at selling but if you pick the right ones you get much more income. The pit fall is not to simply chose the highest paying affiliate marketing company, for example RAC are currently offering affiliate £75 for every car insurance sale they initiate which is tempting against the 5% Laterooms are offering but if your site is about holidays youll get a better conversion on laterooms than RAC car insurance.

Oh thank you for going into so much detail for me - I really appreciate that!

I'm sounding slightly dumb here, but when you say:

"
I get a eCPM (basically the amount of money per 1,000 impressions) of around £3 and with 3,000 impressions per month its all ok given my £40 comes at the cost of none of my time and less than £15 a year in costs.


Do you mean you get £3 for every 3,000 clicks on the adverts?

The affiliate advertising sounds more lucrative, but that would be a long way off for me, but certainly something to consider. Do you need to have a certain amount of visits each month before a company will advertise on your site? Or do they just see it as free advertising and pay out when they get a sale via your site?

Sorry to be a pain, but could I ask you as a rough guide (I know you can't be exact and figures probably go up and down each month) but say, for example, you had 500,000 visits a month, what sort of percentage of those would be likely to generate income for you from affiliate advertising, or is that an impossible question to answer?

Thank so much for your time and knowledge.

Cheers

Thermidor

Horace wrote: »

Set up your website using Wordpress - this makes it easier for you to update your site at will and it is great for blogging. You can add your own keywords and do your own SEO too.

I use affiliate marketing for my site whereby I register with companies such as Buy at or affiliate window and apply to join various programmes - I know that I have one for Hotels.com and there are tons to choose from. Once accepted onto the programme then you can use various banners on your website (these are provided in the affiliate areas of the company that you are using) and when people click on these and buy then you earn commission.

Thanks Horace, I'll look at Wordpress! Is it quite easy to set up?

What do you have to do to be accepted on the programmes for affiliate marketing? Oh, and if you are accepted, what sort of commision do you receive if people buy via your website?

Thanks in advance!