By Charles Harmon
If you are in Internet marketing or have been reading the ads all over the Internet about how to make money from your website you can't have missed all the talk of AdSense. This is one of Google's main revenue generators and over the few years it has been around has made quite a few early adopters a lot of money.
Google makes a percentage of the cost of the ads and the website owner where the ads show up makes the remaining percentage. The AdSense ads are actually the ads placed through Google's AdWords Pay Per Click (PPC) advertising program.
Unfortunately as with all good things it seems, the money making potential seems to have diminished for the majority of those trying to make a go of AdSense as a viable money maker. That is not to say you can't make money off the AdSense program, it's just not as easy as it apparently was. Unfortunately I was not one of those who made good money off AdSense ads.
Regardless of all the ads promoting really big money from AdSense and the fact that there are still people collecting big profits from it, let's look at it through the eyes of someone just getting into the program in earnest. Someone like many of us that do not have a large source of traffic, or maybe even no traffic to sites we want to add AdSense to. In many cases we might have sites made specifically to be monetized with AdSense. Is it worthwhile to have sites specifically designed to make its income from AdSense ads? I say sites because it is not logical to think someone with a site that does not yet have a huge amount of traffic to believe they can make lots of money from a single site with AdSense on it.
Not going into details, the Google AdSense program is where a website owner has joined the AdSense program and allows Google to place AdSense ads on their website. When a visitor to the website clicks on an AdSense ad the website owner makes a few cents to many dollars from that click. How much you make is dependent on several factors such as the market the ad is trying to capture clicks from, the efficiency of the ad, the keywords the ad is focusing on and other factors. Certain types of ads almost always pay more per click than others. Insurance, loans, and finance ads pay a lot more than an ad for garden tools or gift baskets or paper plates, etc. would pay.
Real Life Example
I decided to give AdSense a try and see if I could make an average of $5 a day from a site designed to be monetized with AdSense ads. The sites are essentially sites with articles on them based on the theme of the site. I wrote some of the articles but purchased most of them. Articles to be added to the sites in the future will be mostly purchased due to lack of time to write articles myself. They are the content of the sites. The sites are mostly written in html, although I do have a few that are php coded sites.
On the pages with the articles are the AdSense ads, usually three blocks of ads on a page. The sites are small with most being about nine to 15 pages total. Adding articles on a regular basis will slowly build up the sites over time which is what the search engines want to see. I started with twenty new AdSense sites and three older blog sites I already had, plus two new portal sites that had no traffic going to them. All sites were monetized with AdSense.
The AdSense sites cost nothing, but the few articles on each site cost about eight dollars each. Articles can cost from about twenty-five cents to fifteen dollars or more depending on the source and quality. The lower cost articles require considerable rewriting so as not to cause your article to be considered a duplicate article and incur a so-called duplicate content penalty.
Allowing for placing five articles a month on a site plus some miscellaneous costs like hosting, domain name, software, and potential maintenance costs, a fifty dollar monthly cost per site is incurred. Yes you could write all or most of the articles yourself, but that is not practical if you have many sites and is very time consuming. So I am discounting that solution as impractical if you have many sites. So to break even on these types of AdSense sites each site needs to make about $50 a month. That’s an average of $1.70 a day.
A measly $1.70 a day, that should be easy for a site to make. Maybe it is, but it is heavily dependent on the traffic to the site and the corresponding clicks on the AdSense ads that result from it. To put things in perspective, look at the results of my twenty AdSense sites, three blogs, and two portal sites. All sites except the three older sites have been up slightly over three months. I started getting a few links to each site just this past month.
Real Life Terrible Results
Only last month did I start getting links to any of the sites. I am averaging about $1 a day from all twenty-five sites together. That’s about $25 a month total, far less than break even cost. I just checked today and have made $50.55 for this current month, month four for most sites. That's about one twenty-fifth of what I need to break even for the sites. Half the money came from the twenty AdSense sites, with the rest from the other five sites. There are still two more days left in this month.
I believe the results will continue to improve as long as I add articles and get links to the sites. It is a long way to go until the sites break even, if they ever do, so I am not holding my breath. Although these results are terrible, in my opinion, it must be mentioned that I am doing this part-time and only recently has there been an effort to get links to the sites. If it had been a full-time effort (and it could easily have been) then the results would seem even worse. I have totally ignored the effort (which has been considerable) in getting the sites up and working properly, correcting and adding the articles and revising the links for each new article I added to the site.
I do have software that would easily generate such sites, but decided not to use it due to leaving footprints and having the sites considered spam sites by Google or the other two top search engines. From the looks of it right now it's too early to make an accurate judgment as to whether the sites will be worthwhile. I tend to think the effort is too great the way my sites are set up now and the cost of the articles too high to make a decent long term profit. I figure I need to revise how the articles are added and probably get the cost of the articles down a lot more, to less than half what I am paying now to have a fair chance to break even, let along make a profit.
Is AdSense Worthwhile for Beginners?
So the question, can beginners make money with AdSense sites cannot be answered yet with any accuracy from my results so far. On the surface it appears the answer is no, not if following my route. Only if extraordinary amounts of traffic can be obtained does it look like my sites will make any decent money from AdSense. Probably another, a better approach, will be necessary and a lot more pages with AdSense ads on it will be required to be able to make any significant money. I suspect I will need at least 50 to 100, or more, articles per site to have a fair chance of creating a small part-time equivalent income from the sites.
If you consider an average cost of six dollars for an article, and that is a very low cost for a new article, and still the same five articles a month, with just half the estimated ten dollars monthly miscellaneous costs being only five dollars, the thirty-five dollar monthly cost per site still is difficult to conceive making even that much from the poor results experienced so far. Only time will tell whether the effort will be worthwhile.
I am already changing my html sites so they will be easier and faster to add the new articles. Unfortunately that may cause me to effectively start over with my AdSense earnings since the links will be different and any pages already indexed will have to be re-indexed again since I am changing the sites little by little to php sites. I did something similar several months ago to a single larger site and even months later over 500 of those original pages were still indexed even though they had been off the site for many months.
If you agree it's difficult for a beginner to make money with AdSense or if you have made a worthwhile AdSense profit in a short time period please enter your opinion on www.cackel.com if you would like to share your success or failure. I would like to see other views on this topic, especially those who have made a decent return on non-directory type AdSense sites within a reasonably short period of time.
Copyright © 2007 Charles Harmon
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