Free ad revenue. Makes sense to me

Want to make some money by carrying advertising on your site? It’s easy, and the dollars roll in every time a visitor clicks on one of the ads.

Free ad revenue. Makes sense to me

Last week I had a rant about affiliate marketing. This week I want to chat about Google AdSense.

It’s yet another way to squeeze a few extra dollars from your site. I mean, people have to leave your website eventually, right? So if they’re not interested in your products or services (I know… I know… I can’t believe it either), then why not get throw some AdSense ads on your site and make a few bucks from your visitors on the way out. (That’s until the day when some bright spark discovers a way to make money from the back button).

As Peter Bray and Fred Schebesta quite rightly pointed out (responding to last week’s blog), affiliate marketing is not a system for everyone or every website. The same can be said for AdSense. Your call.

No doubt you’ve seen AdSense ads while you’ve been out and about online. They’re everywhere. In fact they’re simply Google ads served by Google on to a participating website. Google began the AdSense program in 2003 and invited website owners to join and share in the click revenue. It was a win-win for everyone; the Google brand got more reach, as did their advertisers ads and website owners had a new way to monetise online.

Which ads will Google give you? Well, it depends on your site content. Google uses its existing crawler and indexing technology to analyse the text on each page and serve relevant, targeted Google ads, images and now even video. And, like affiliate marketing, there are a lot of people out there making a lot of money with AdSense.

Google won’t reveal what the revenue split is between themselves and the AdSense participants, but certainly, for high-paying keywords, you stand to make many dollars per click. I remember years ago that the word “Mesothelioma” (an asbestos-related cancer) had topped $US100 a click on Overture as law firms battled for clients online. The estimates now are around $US50 per click to get your Google ad appearing on Google’s first page of results.

Other red hot keywords include, “loans”, “car accident lawyers” and “mortgage refinance” (to name a few). If your website discusses those topics and it receives reasonable traffic, you could do quite well serving Google ads.

(But don’t go clicking on the ads again and again… Google is totally on to that old chestnut and has lots of technology to detect “click fraud”. That’s a topic for another day.)

Personally, I make a modest but easy $2000 a year from some of the websites I own.

Maybe it’s something you could consider too?

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