Using Adsense to Create Extra Income From Your Websites

If you’ve been around internet marketing for any length of time, you no doubt have heard of Google Adsense. You’ve perhaps heard some grandiose claims of extraordinary income, and equally lurid stories of just how hard it can be to create any sort of consistent income with Adsense. The truth, like in so many things, lies squarely in between.

Yes, people have made and continue to make great sums of money with Adsense, and yes, others have failed miserably. There are many reasons for this, but here I’ll just go into some of the best ways to create a stream of passive income from using Adsense on your sites.

First of all, those who succeed wildly and those who fail miserably have one thing in common: traffic. A wealth or a total lack of it. Those with abundant traffic, and can optimize their pages to achieve a CTR (click through rate) of somewhere between 10-25% will see a lot of clicks. As an example, take a site with 1000 visitors daily, who are clicking through at a rate of 15%. Say these clicks are worth $.37 each to the site owner. That’s a cool $55.50 per day in passive income to that site. Take another site with 65 visitors a day, and a CTR of 4.5%, and you get $1.08, not even coffee money anymore.

So clearly, if you want to make any consequential cash with Adsense, you need to be getting traffic, as well as having your site optimized to make the most of that traffic. There are numerous courses to help with this, and simply by hanging out in some of the more influential internet marketing forums, like DigitalPoint, Sitepoint, and the Warrior Forum, you can get a lot of good advice for free.

One thing you should know about Adsense. All clicks are not created equal. You might have a wonderful site all about parakeets, but the reality is that clicks for that keyword are selling at between $.19 – $.37 cents apiece, and you’ll get roughly half of that per Adsense click. Conversely a click on another keyword, such as “mortgage refinancing quotes” gets between $2.27 and $37.81 per click. Quite a difference! Of course, if parakeets are your thing…

Unless you are going to try and make Adsense your business, the best way to maximize your dollars from it is to make sure that it blends into your existing site very well, and that you don’t over indulge. By that I mean having many large, ostentatious Adsense ad blocks looming over your visitors. If your intent is to make a few extra bucks, make your site as pleasant as possible, and not a virtual billboard!

Google Adsense can be a nice source of income for those whose sites are built for another purpose other than showing Google ads, and possibly a great business model all by itself, which is the subject for another article!