You may have noticed, that I re-introduced Google Adsense into this blog.
As I've started this blog, I decided not to try making money with Google Adsense on this blog, but things have changed.
When I started this blog in March 2013, this website was my only representation in the internet. It was the only place where you could meet me, read my posts, and share my progress on becoming a successful entrepreneur.
Having just one single blog, I knew that I won't try making money with Google Adsense. But now I have my second blog that I'm using to brand myself.
And since we all need to make money, so am I searching for opportunities to earn income online fast. This blog post will show you, if making money with Google Adsense is worth trying for you and why I re-introduced it on this site.
I had certain prejudices and I know that I'm definitely not one with those thoughts.
If you don't want to read them, you can head right over to the benefits of making money with Google Adsense and the tutorial for adding Google Adsense to your WordPress website.
The biggest prejudice against using Google Adsense was, that Adsense encourages people to leave a website.
Making money with Google Adsense requires that people click on the ads. That is the point where they leave your site and open a site that obviously is more interesting for them.
Otherwise they wouldn't click on the ad and continue reading your content.
You shouldn't use Google Adsense on a blog that has the goal of personal branding.
Let me explain this statement.
In the time before launching my personal blog besides this one, I was absolutely hesitant against using Google Adsense and recommending other sites to my visitors.
This blog had about 25 - 50 daily visitors and I desperately tried to keep them on my site.
And this was totally right at the time. My plan was, to create information products for monetizing my site.
Selling your own information products is very hard, since it requires a lot of trust. To build trust, people needed to stay on my site, read my content, and understand that I have knowledge to share with them.
I needed to brand myself and allow people to trust me. Therefore I needed to make it as easy as possible to stay on my site and to consume my content.
So Google Adsense was the exact opposite of what I needed.
This is why some bloggers say, that they discourage you from making money with Google Adsense on your blog. And under certain circumstances they are right.
Those are some reasons not to use Google Adsense:
Please be aware that those reasons are my personal opinion and may not apply for everyone.
Let me explain, why I decided to re-introduce Google Adsense.
There definitely are some benefits of making money with Google Adsense, otherwise I obviously wouldn't use it here. Since I need to earn 600€ per month until September (read here why), I'm building up income streams that will close the whole in my pocket.
For me, the biggest benefit is generating passive income.
I'm publishing two times per week, regardless whether Google Adsense is displayed on my blog or not. So using Google Adsense doesn't cause more work after it is installed.
It just drives money to my bank account. I already made the first 1,14€ on my first day with Adsense on one single post! With a little tweaking this will definitely increase over time.
The second benefit from Google Adsense is the huge advertiser network.
This point might not be obvious at a first glance, but it definitely is. The advertiser network of Google ensures, that your visitors always see relevant ads.
Google already knows what keywords your targeting in your content and it also knows, what pages your visitors has been on before coming to your page (yes it is scary, but that's how it is).
That are important information that Google uses to display relevant ads, so that your visitor doesn't see ads for cars when your site is about the latest games.
Is Google Adsense the right way for you to monetize your website?
There are some criteria that you should consider before you decide whether you use Google Adsense or not.
You'll need a certain amount of daily visitors to really earn some money with Google Adsense.
It's important that those visitors are coming from free traffic, when you need to pay for traffic, you won't monetize your site with Google Adsense.
In average only between 2% and 7% of your visitors really click on your ads.
This blog has around 250 daily visitors right now and that was for me the barrier that needed to be overcome before trying to make money with Google Adsense.
It doesn't mean that you need 250+ daily visitors on your website, but I recommend to have at least 50 unique daily visitors, otherwise you'll just get no clicks.
To get more daily visitors, I recommend using tools for keyword research like the free Google Adwords Keyword Tool, Long Tail Pro or Market Samurai.
I use Long Tail Pro and Market Samurai myself each time before I publish a post and I'm convinced that these tools helped me a lot to rank #1 for several keywords.
This is the amount you will earn for a click on a single ad. This price is determined by the advertiser who pays Google to display his ads.
The price varies and isn't consistent, so it's likely to happen that you earn different CPC's for clicks on different ads.
The PageRank of your site is important. Google calculates his PageRank not only for a whole website but also for single pages within a website.
A good PageRank results in displaying ads, that generate more revenue due to a higher CPC.
Another positive effect of a high PageRank is, that competitors analyzing your site will be discouraged to compete with your high PageRank.
Your content plays a huge role for making money with Google Adsense. The first barrier is to get approved by Google. This means, Google tests your site and verifies the quality of your content.
To get approved, you'll need to have a certain amount of pages and posts. I recommend to create 5 to 7 posts with minimum 400 words each, before you apply to the Google Adsense program.
The keywords in your content decide on the ads being displayed. Make sure that you find a niche, where the ads have a reasonable CPC, so that you can really earn some money. To find this out, you could again use Long Tail Pro or Market Samurai. Those tools let you filter for CPC, so that only promising keywords are displayed.
Also your content has to allow the ads being seamlessly integrated to your website. When you use a lot of tables or forms, it will be hard to display the ads in a way that won't distract the user. You can modify the ads to match the colors of your website and I definitely recommend doing so.
Those are only a few key facts you should be aware of, when you want to use Google Adsense on your website. Feel free to leave a comment if you have further questions to this, I'd be glad to answer them.
Making money with Google Adsense is fairly simple when you use WordPress.
There are several plugins that let you integrate Adsense on your website easily. I'm using a plugin called Ad Injection.
You can install it directly from the WordPress repository in your administration backend.
It lets you integrate your Adsense code in four different places. You can display them on the top of your site, randomly in your posts, at the bottom of your site, and in your footer.
The great thing about this plugin is it's customizability. You can run split-testing, which means that you can display different ads in the same place randomly and thus find the ad format that converts best.
Also you can decide on where to place the ads randomly, so you don't destroy tables, lists, or forms.
Ad Injection is quite complex, though it gives you every option you need. Just leave a comment below and I'll help you to configure it for your site!
I hope, you've learned something new about making money with Google Adsense and I hope you understand, why I did re-introduce Adsense to this blog.
Let me know what you think about this strategy to build up a stream of passive income. Did it work for you?
To your success,
Jan
