Monetizing with Google Adsense

Can you really make money with google Adsense? Lately I have been bombarded with so called programs on how to make money with Adsense. In a nutshell the majority of them are advocating have dozens if not hundreds of sites each making a little money a day. Well that does add up but it sounds like blog spam to me. And who has the time to create and maintain all those sites?

I guess if all you are about is making a quick buck and not caring for the quality of your sites that might be the path for you. For those that know me, you know that I care about the quality of my sites and that I care about helping people. My websites are a reflection of who I am. So if you are just interested in making a quick buck this is not the place to come to.

With that said, what is my philosophy for Adsense? And can you really make more than a few cents a day? My philosophy is that Adsense should be a part of your monetization strategy and not something you completely depend on. One should have multiple streams of income so that when one starts to dwindle another one will fill in the gaps. To answer the second question. Yes you can make money with Adsense, and here are some strategies.

One of the great things about partnering with Google is that as they acquire new products they are incorporating them together in innovative ways. Google Adsense is not the old Adsense it was 5 years ago, and yet, as I visit many blogs and websites, not many people are taking full advantage of Adsense on their site.

Link Units

We all know that with Google Adsense you can only have 3 ads per page. But do you know how you can get more? Check out google link units. These are one word ads that work great if placed well. On some sites I like to place them above my posts or in my sidebars. As the google terms for use may change be sure to check with them on how many of these you can use in addition to your regular google ads. While on the subject of Adsense for content I also like to make sure I select displaying both text ads and images. That is just a personal preference.

Adsense in Feeds

I Feedburner, and I have the majority of my feeds in feedburner. With Googles acquisition of feedburner you can now place ads in your feeds. If you have a lot of people who subscribe to your feeds this adds a nice little revenue stream. How sweat is that?

Adsense for Domains

If you have a parked domain you can now add Adsense to it. Having a lot of parked domains myself I was very pleased when I saw this option.

Adsense for Mobile Content

I don’t have any sites with mobile content myself, but if you do you should be aware you now have this option and should be taking advantage of it.

Adsense for Search!!

I am amazed at how many sites are using google search, but are not using Adsense for Search! One of the nice things with Adsense for Search is you can list the sites you want google to return results from!! That means search results will be relevant to your site and that the only way for a person to ‘click’ off your site will be through an Adsense ad.

How have I used this? Yes and it works great. One site I have on wordpress has many multiple relevant subdomains. The standard wordpress search only returned search results for the domain searched on. Now I can offer my readers a way to search my full site that includes all my subdomains and monetize the search at the same time.

For an example check out the search I have on this site. When you do, you will see how well you can incorporate the search into your own site.

In summary, making money with Google Adsense is not too hard as long as your site gets a decent amount of traffic or has highly profitable keywords. It is a great monetization strategy, but should only be thought of as one source of income. You should have multiple sources of income on your sites to be profitable. When using Adsense make sure to take full advantage of all it has to offer, from the new video units to the Adsense for Search. Doing this will help leverage your monetization strategy and help bring in an additional source of income. 

Stay tuned… next week we will discuss some ideas to help get your blog more exposure and drive more traffic to it…