Paid Search Marketing - Can you make a mint out of AdSense?

There are numerous claims on the internet regarding people who have made large sums of money out of AdSense. You can even purchase ready made websites that are advertised as AdSense optimised and promise large rewards. No doubt most of us take most of these claims with a very large pinch of salt, but in reality, is it possible to make a reasonable income stream from displaying AdSense ads? After all, Paid Search Marketing generates many billions of dollars revenue a year.

This article looks at some of the ways to maximise your AdSense income. There are essentially three measurable variables that determine your income. These are the number of visitors, the click through rate (CTR), which is the proportion of your visitors that actually click on an ad, and the cost per click (CPC).

There are many ways to increase your web traffic. Some are legitimate and some illegitimate. Illegitimate short term scams might make you a little money for a very short time. In the longer time frame it will get you banned from the program. We will not describe these short term scams here but if you are determined then you can find them. The two legitimate ways to increase traffic are (a) to provide a website with interesting and novel information that people want to access and (b) to get good search engine rankings. There are many articles on (b) but again we recommend that you only consider legitimate ones.

CTR can be maximised by ensuring that the advertisements match the interest of your visitors. Often this means avoiding certain words in the text of your site that might attract inappropriate ads. The layout and colour scheme of your ads is also important, as is their position.

CPC depends very much on the theme of your website. For instance, if your website deals with aspects of the law, you might well attract ads for injury lawyers which pay $6 a click, but if your content concerns music then ads for CDs might yield only $0.05 as pay per click can be very different.

The short answer to the original question is AdSense won't make you rich quick, however if you apply a reasonable amount of effort then it should generate a useful income stream.