Make Money Online- the baby steps part 17

One of the most popular topics to discuss with entrepreneurs that have recently made their online debut is “how much”? How much can I make? How much Have you made on your best performing website? How much are the top guys making? Is it possible to make a living online? Is it possible to get rich online? How long will it take before I can expect to get rich?

The questions are many. The answers are pretty straightforward. Don´t expect much. In fact, if you are just starting out, your objective should be to learn, not to make money online. If you learn what you need in order to win online, the money will take care of itself. But if we could give you one piece of advice it would be to first of all focus on learning and building the best possible website. Make the internet a better place, and very often, some monetary reward will ultimately follow. What´s more, you will learn a lot, and chances are those initial lessons will eventually set yourself up for some serious internet success further down the road. Now, that we´ve said that we can finally take a closer look at some of the numbers behind Google Adsense. Now there are no exact numbers regarding what you can make per click. Some topics are verylucrative while others are not. But in general each click could earn you between 10 cents and $ 10. Most of you reading this guide will earn around 50-70 cents per click. Now, that doesn´t seem that much but if you can get some serious traffic to your website and the traffic you get is truly interested in the topic you are covering the numbers can begin to add up pretty quickly. Once you reach $ 100 in aggregated revenues Google will offer to send you a check of your AdSense earnings. You can login to your Google AdSense account at any time and check how you are doing. This tends to be a very time-consuming practice for most first-time online offenders. We know we certainly didn´t have a healthy dose of checking our account out. We were checking Analytics and AdSense so many times each day, it started to take over our lives. Keep in mind that several of us have hundreds of sites at any one time. Fortunately we identified the problem and today we have a rule of thumb; we only check our stats three times a day. This is probably overdoing it as well, but our addiction craves it, and if we don´t feed it appropriately, we are afraid it might once again take over a larger chunk of our lives.

Your revenues are updated continuously and together with Google Analytics you can do some pretty nitty-gritty analyzing of your website´s performance. What are people doing on your site, where are they clicking on your ads? This can be immensely helpful information. After all, you need to know what works and what doesn´t and there is no better place to find out than by looking at what your users are actually doing. In general, our experience shows us that in order for you to get a meaningful payoff from Google Adsense you need at least 500 unique visitors per day to your website. This takes into account all the hard work you will need to put in  and some of the initial costs associated with operating a website. Now, that is just our number, based on our experience. If you ask someone else, their number will be different. Some will not even want to give you a number (and quite honestly neither did we). This early in the process, you should be thinking more about building and creating and less about making money. We know quite a few who didn´t make any money of their first websites, only to go on to make huge sums of money down the road. It´s really about persistence. And about learning something new each and every day that goes by. And about trying. Trying, failing, and trying again, until you get it just right. If you want to get a feel for what kind of ads might be seen on your page you can go to the Google AdSense Preview Tool. We don´t use it much ourselves, but we know others have found it helpful at times.

There is a whole lot to be said about ad placement. Different ads pay different amounts of money. But even more important, different ad placements generate different click through rates, i e the number of times your visitors click on that particular ad placement. Very often you will find that one or maybe two of your ads are generating almost all clicks on your site. If that is the case, it might be a good idea to do something about the ads that are not really contributing. Another, thing you will realize once traffic starts building up is that you can improve the CTR (Click-Through-Rate) immensely by tweaking your ads. Buy tweaking we mean adapting the ads to better suit the specific look and feel of your website. There is so much information that can be provided about this individual topic, but our advice is to simply play around with it. In general, you want ads that are a natural part of your website. What this means is that many website owners typically tend to set up AdSense ads in the exact same colours, font size and type, as they are employing on the rest of their sites. If you do this in the correct manner your CTR will go up. But don´t take our word for it. See for yourself. Play around with it and learn by doing. That is really the best way to learn how to monetize your website and make money online. In typical online marketing the CTR (Click-Through-Rate) is typically 1-2 %. What this means is that out of every 100 visitors to your site, 1 or 2 will click on one of your ads, and make you a bit of money in the process of doing so. The numbers from Google AdSense are generally higher. This is in part due to the fact that the ads provided by Google are very often relevant to the target audience. You can expect CTR:s of anywhere between 0,5 to 7 % using Google Adsense. Internet marketing experts with highly targeted websites and a bit of luck have managed to get CTR:s as high as 20 %, but this is no easy feat. A good rule of thumb is that you will make between 1 and 15 cents per visitor. If you are new to this game you will probably be making in the range 1-8 cents per visitor. If you´ve been around the block once or twice we would expect numbers in the range of 5-15 cents in AdSense revenues per visitor. These are rough estimates but they do a good job at giving you a feel for what you are dealing with, and we use these numbers quite often to asses how we and others are actually doing. We leave the exact science of online revenues to somebody else. We are quite happy to grasp the bigger picture.

While you do want your ads to blend naturally with your content, you should not hide the fact that the ads are in fact ads. There is certainly a thin line between nicely integrated and plain tricky ad configuration. Our advice is to integrate the adds into your website in a fashion that is easy on the eye, yet do not make them so integrated that visitors cannot see they are in fact ads. There is a trade-off to be made here, as a “tricky” ad configuration will in most instances provide more clicks, but they will also result in bad will from visitors as well as Google. This will impede your traffic and longer-term revenues. Another thing that is certainly worth stressing is to never click on your own ads, as this will probably get you banned by Google. They are working just fine, we promise you. Don´t try them out. Eventually, you will get your first kill, and when you do it will be that much sweeter. Be patient.

Online success will take time to build. This is not a get-rich-quick scheme. You will find no such nonsense on Richopedia.com as it simply does not exist. In the end making money online in general, and making money through Google AdSense in particular, is to a large degree a numbers game. The more visitors you get to pass through your websites the more money you will make. That´s really all there is to it. Some can have quite high traffic and yet they tend not to make that much money (typically they have high bounce rates, or less relevant material). But there are no website owners who make a lot of money that don´t have significant visitor numbers. The best websites are obviously the ones that are able to get the visitors, and also are able to keep them coming back, thanks to lots of quality content.

Get the visitors. Keep them happy. And the money will follow.

There we are. We just covered soem of the numbers behind Google Adsense. This line of topic usually attracts a lot of interest, but to be honest, we almost didn´t write this part of the guide. Our hope is that you use peruse this information with interest, and then go build on your site. Making money online is a process that takes time and effort. The money are a simply a byproduct. Don´t let the money be your single goal, or you will be prone to look for short-term profits instead of long-term visitor relationships. Join us for the next part of our guide “Make Money Online- the baby steps part 18″, where we will contnue our journey towards internet success together.