google adsense

hmo

does anyone use this and if so does it earn you any money

hamcaster

I use it and get a steady income.

Basically adsense is a middleman between advertisers and publishers, people pay them to show their adverts, and adsense in turn pay websites to show the adverts, obviously minus their cut. Adsense is good because they don't just show random ads, they show ads related to the publisher website, and related to what the visitor has been searching for.

Adsense isn't a get rich quick scheme though, you need a website, or a page somewhere to show the ads, and you need people visiting the page. Generally around 5% of all visitors click an ad, and the price you get per click varies depending on many factors - generally, finance-related ads are highly priced, and can get you anywhere between £1 and £50 per click, while entertainment-related ads are usually pretty cheap, sometimes less than 1p per click.

So really you need a lot of visitors to make money, or have a website in a high-priced niche.

chris1973

You have to have a website generating traffic in order for it to work. The more traffic and the better placed the Ads the more effective it is.

As above, its not just a case of throwing a website up, putting on Ads and sitting back to reap the income. You have to work hard on creating a website with lots of interesting and unique content, work even harder in promoting it and optimising it in order to get it a high search engine ranking, and visitor traffic from that high ranking.

I used it on a forum with 20,000+ members, and it only just about covered the VPS hosting fees and software licenses so no 'get rich quick' by any means.

There are people making money at it, but they are usually the ones with a whole battery of well built, well publicised and high ranking niche' websites, one guy on the forums where this is often discussed has about 300 websites and he's just about making a comfortable wage from the income.

azmilsyahmi

I agree with everyone. This is not a get rich quick scheme as advertised by many people. It takes a lot of work but the rewards is great. I have just started receiving some money.:j:j:j

Suarez

I earn around £15 a month from a small website. It's not going to make me rich but at the end of the day its £180 a year for nothing..

Jingo

chris1973 wrote: »

You have to have a website generating traffic in order for it to work. The more traffic and the better placed the Ads the more effective it is.

As above, its not just a case of throwing a website up, putting on Ads and sitting back to reap the income. You have to work hard on creating a website with lots of interesting and unique content, work even harder in promoting it and optimising it in order to get it a high search engine ranking, and visitor traffic from that high ranking.

I used it on a forum with 20,000+ members, and it only just about covered the VPS hosting fees and software licenses so no 'get rich quick' by any means.

There are people making money at it, but they are usually the ones with a whole battery of well built, well publicised and high ranking niche' websites, one guy on the forums where this is often discussed has about 300 websites and he's just about making a comfortable wage from the income.

Whilst I agree with most of that, if you need 300 different websites just to make a comfortable income (although I guess income comfort levels vary...), you are doing something wrong. I have 4 websites at the moment, and each brings in £300-£500 pm, mainly from Adsense. To me, that is a comfortable income, and certainly enough for me to have given up my day job to devote more time to my sites.

chris1973

I have 4 websites at the moment, and each brings in £300-£500 pm, mainly from Adsense

Isn't that a little bit like putting all eggs into one basket as far as the longer term is concerned?.

Some years ago, I made a steady secondary income using Ebay's affiliate scheme, far more than I earned from Adwords. However Ebay suddenly changed the rules, cut back on their affiliate numbers and removed 10,000's of Affiliates, I was one of them. There was no breach of their terms, and nothing underhand or blackhat behind the scenes, just that 'they' had a meeting and wanted more niche' sites creating more traffic, as opposed to many thousands of sites all selling and saturating the same popular products. Suddenly, as a direct result of Ebay's policy changes, that income was gone, snatched away, with no warning, no appeal process and no way it was coming back.

Its entirely possible at some point in the future that Adwords may adopt the same philosophy. In addition, we all know how fickle Google is with its ranking algorythms and I would personally, prefer to have more websites each trickling in a steady income, than a handful of sites generating the lions share, because who knows the next time Google 'dances' where some of those sites will end up if the ranking 'criteria' should change and a new policy of ranking websites created?. A quick search shows up plenty of working examples where this has occured in the past, seriously affecting a webmasters income from marking down a previously high ranking website by several pages, either temporary or permanently for no obvious reason, whilst a whole new ranking 'pecking order' is created. Obviously the greater number of different sites you have 'out there' the smaller the risk of this happening on the whole scale, and at least bolstering against any changes causing a serious loss of income.

For much the same reasons, i'd also be capitalising on using affiliate schemes also to protect against any losses elsewhere should things change, certainly any sites creating traffic enough to each generate £300 - £400 a month from Adwords, will also generate a significant CTR for affiliate schemes also, and some of them have equal or better commission rates than adwords.

Jingo

I completely agree that relying on Adsense and nothing else for my income would be foolish, and one of my main tasks at the moment is trying to spread the load by introducing other income streams. I have dabbled with Aff links and selling ad space directly in the past and will be putting a lot more time into things like that in the near future. Luckily, I have alternate methods of paying my bills anyway, so if all my sites died tomorrow, I wouldn't be in too much trouble

I think that a few high quality sites, that are updated regularly and each contain hundreds of pages, stand a much better chance of avoiding being hit by Google algorithm changes than 300 MFA sites or auto-blogs (which is what they surely must be). My websites now attract inbound links organically, purely because they are pretty in-depth. That's not to say that I won't be adding more sites, covering a wider range of subjects, to my portfolio. My method is to research a niche, build a site, get it up to around £10 a day and then repeat the process. I try to add at least one page to each of my websites every day (freelance and other work permitting), and I just can't imagine trying to maintain 300.

mp80

Suarez wrote: »

I earn around £15 a month from a small website. It's not going to make me rich but at the end of the day its £180 a year for nothing..

Minus income tax

Josh27

I am. Contrary to popular belief, I still seen many of small sites (micro niches) out there in google's first page. There are literally thousands perhaps even keywords out there so I believe unless one is doing it really wrong (duplicate contents / auto blogging without trying to mask it) then it is still possible to earn from micro niche. If one site can make $50 a month then 20 sites means $1k and you don't need to maintain it everyday since you have less competitors. Google still need something to put on their search page right? If no one else is writing about it then they have no choice but putting yours no matter how ugly it is. Probably not *that* ugly though..

But I agree with the other posters here, mainly chris1973 and Jingo, to earn from adsense we can not entirely depends on set-up-and-leave site, sooner or later big G or competitors will catch us.

mrsyardbroom

I use AdSense and make around £30 to £40 a month. However, I don't want, "In your face," ads all over my site and the home page doesn't have any google ads at all. I would prefer it if people buy things through my site as I make affiliate commission on it and this tends to be more than Adsense. I am an ebay affiliate and this month I'm expecting to get paid £110, more than three times the earnings generated by Adsense. I also use Webgains for affiliate marketing and this can be profitable. Last month I made over £40 in one day with Webgains but this is exceptional. You need to put in a fair amount of work to earn from a website. You can't just create a few pages and wait for the money to roll in. You need to keep updating and adding new material. The more hours you put in the more money you make. Good luck.