Make Money Online- the baby steps part 16

Most internet entrepreneurs want to make money as soon as possible. And we totally get this. There is nothing as exhilirating as hearing the online cash register ring. When we started out, we quickly built a number of websites where most were painfully unsuccessful. But we did get the occassional jackpot. There was always one or a couple of websites making more money than all the other put together. Very often, it came as a surprise when we noticed which website started to take of. It is sort of a humbling experience. It made us understand that despite the fact that we read all that we could get our hands on, and despite the fact that we put a lot of effort into learning everything we could, in the end the market place made the decisions. And more often than not, the decisions of the market place were not according to our plans. So the market taught us, early in the process, how little we actually did understand. We did however adapt to the situation. Having been real-life entrepreneurs for many years before turning to the internet we knew instinctively what to do; we simply listened to the market place. Ultimately we knew from previous experience that the customer is king, and that he or she, is the one who is ultimately paying the bills. We learned a lot from those early days, and back in those days Google AdSense was the way to go when you wanted to monetize.

Google AdSense is still THE best way to monetize you website if you are a first-time internet offender. And the truth is that there is still some real money to be made utilizing AdSense, but it is a lot harder these days and you need to know so much more in order to get some good numbers going. We wanted to wait before starting to cover the monetization process. There are a number of reasons for htis. First and foremost, you shouldn´t really be thinking about monetizing before you have reached a respectable number of visitors to your website. We know this general rule is hard to abide. We knew that we certainly didn´t. Despite the advice of not going AdSense, we did just that. And despite all the advice regarding not thinking about the money (which was really sound advice, we can tell in hindsight)  but rather focus on gradually improving the website, we couldn´t help ourselves. We wanted  to know what to expect, or rather we wanted to know how much we could expect to make from our websites. And we wanted to know really bad. Well, as it turned out, we didn´t make much. At least not as much as we had hoped for.

When people tell you about great internet sucess stories you will very often hear about the fantastic profit opportunities on the web. They tell you about the large amounts of money that can be made as an internet entrepreneur. Media focuses on the success stories, where individuals make money online seemingly easy, with little or no effort. What they do not tell you about is the years of hard work that went into many different less successful projects before striking internet gold. The hard work, the failures, the learning curve and the many times they thought about quitting altogether. These parts of the story are often not included, they simply do not make very good headlines. “Hard working internet entrepreneur strikes gold on 53rd attempt” sounds a lot less compelling than “Youngster becomes internet millionaire. All it took was one website.”. You can make money online. But it takes knowledge, effort and discipline. Also, very often it takes time.

Google AdSense is the most common way of making money online, at least if you have a content-rich website like a blog, information resource or magazine. When you sign up for Google Adsense you will need to wait in order to be approved. In general this should take you no more than 2 weeks. After that you can create some ads on you AdSense account and copy and paste these ads onto you website. And that´s about it. That´s really all you need to know in order to monetize your site using Google AdSense. Google does the rest for you. Google will fill the your website with relevant ads based on its content, and based on what the visitor is interested in. Every time a visitor clicks on one of those advertisements you will make money. The bots that are crawling your site are quite intelligent and they are getting smarter by the day. It will set up relevant ads on your site in no time. They will do this without any additional work on your behalf. You can just set up AdSense once and the rest will be managed by Google. This particular ingredient opens up a world of possibilities, down the road. The other side of AdSense is AdWords. AdWords is the program that advertisers use in order to get to advertise with Google. When the bots from Google place an ad on your website, it is a advertisement payed in Google AdWords. When someone clicks on the ad the AdWords user is charged and you get a piece of the revenue. Google usually takes around 40 % of the revenue and you get to keep 60 %.

So how much money can you expect to make from these ads? Well, that depends on a lot of factors. The most important factor is what your website is about. Are you predominantly writing about algorithmic trading (excellent AdSense Payoff) or is your site dealing with Shakespear quotes (not good Adsense Payoff)? In general, the topics that work best in terms of AdSense revenues are the ones that are “close to market”. What this means is that if you are writing about something were there is a big, natural market for your topics you are generally paid more per click. Are you reviewing TV:s or HiFi-equpment? Well in that case there is a big, natural underlying market for your website. Sony, Samsung, Phillips and the other market giants are going to be drooling over getting to advertize on your site. In the case of Shakespeare quotes, there is no natural market. You might come up with a creative idea or two, but the market is simply not there.

Besides being close to the market regarding your topic, in general you are better of the market your site is related to has highly priced, high-margin products. Advertisers will in general pay more for keywords if they know that their margins are high, and that they make a considerable amount on each sale. As you might imagine, the competition for those keywords is very high, and it is not easy to obtain a top spot in these categories. Another thing to consider is how relevant the ads are for your visitors. If your website is operating in a well-defined niche and the Google AdSense ads are highly targeted your CTR (Click-Through-Rate) will skyrocket. Put another way, are your visitors in “buying mode” or not? Being in “buying mode” simply means being in a state where they are likely to be interested in closing the deal. Or at least inquire more about the product. If you operate a website where you review specific products, chances are that many of your visitors are in “buying mode”. They are searching the web for more information, and very often this information gathering is done in order to make a purchase based on this information. This is a perfect example of visitors being in “buying mode” and a website like this will likely have no problem in getting some relevant, nice and profitable AdSense ads up.

There is a lot more to cover, but in the next part of our guide “Make Money Online- the baby steps part 17″  we will take a closer look at the numbers behind Google AdSense, that is how much can you be looking to make when you monetize? Join us for an even closer look at what to expect once you go AdSense, and what you can do in order to improve on your profitability even further.