Cracking the AdSense Puzzle

If you're into SEO, web optimization or making an income from the web then you will either have employed or are thinking about adding AdSense to your website. But what about all those people out there making $1000s from AdSense every day? How do they do it?

I'll admit that I use AdSense extensively on my site, though it's really more a sideline than a main income source, though it the money from AdSense campaigns does bring in more than enought to pay for my domain names, hosting plans and my DSL access. But I only have a handful of sites and they're all content-focussed. Indeed, I'm operating completely the wrong kind of model to make and real money from AdSense.

In reality, if you want to make serious money from AdSense then you'll need something like 1000 sites with just enough content to get them indexed and the maximum number of AdSense ads on each page with those ads blended into the text as far as possible. You will need to target these pages with the best keywords you can find and you then need to buy a whole bunch of under-performing keywords in AdWords to drive some traffic to the sites (about 10 per page as a minimum) and you need to keep writing pages with new ISPs as the ones you have already are likely to be banned from Google quite quickly. As a result, to make $10 000 per month (which is possible) you will need to spend at least $6000 per month.

You're also entirely dependent on a single stream of money and as Google is tightening its rules for the kinds of sites (as described in my previous post on Google's slap in the face for small sites). The limiting of the number of AdSense ads you can have on a page to 3 is also limiting this business model somewhat. The problem is that most of these sites are either entirely spam or contain useless information and are polluting the search indexes. Google is right to try and eliminate them.

Another AdSense model is to set-up so-called AdSense microsites that are sites targeted to a specific niche or keywords set. These types of sites do have real content, although they are tiny in size. But there's still the problem that you're entirely dependent on Google's AdSense program for all your income. If Google chages its rules or indexing algorithm again your entire income may vanish in a puff of smoke.

The secret to maintaining your on-line income (and it's not really a secret) is multiple streams of income. Increase the number of revenue streams that you have. This way if one source of income dries-up (as it's likely to in the current search engine environment) you still have other sources of income to rely on. Diversify and, as I point out in a previous post on the importance of products provide something that visitors to your site will want.