Hey, David Risley here with Blog Marketing Academy, with another reader question of the day!

Today’s reader question of the day comes from Frank Angelone, from Social Tech Zone. He’s asking today…

“Is it still possible to make decent money with Google AdSense?”

And he sent a little bit of background information…

 “All the talk is related to more traffic and specific ad placement to optimize your click through rate. However, with so many bloggers using it, is there much money to be made in this area of blogging and what are the most effective ways to properly implement it, in your opinion?”

So, it’s a really good question. and one that is on the minds of a lot of people.

AdSense is the lowest common denominator of making money with the blog.

It is easy and therefore, it doesn’t pay very well.

So, typically, yes… those people who do make good money with AdSense do so because they have a lot of traffic. The thing about AdSense is that a lot of people who go to Google with an advertising budget tend to find the content sites fairly low value. So, they’re going to spend more of their budget probably with the search side of it because it’s more targeted than the content network. Now, there are exceptions to that. Typically it’s going to be whether the person is already in a buying mentality.

Now, that leads me to my primary point. You are asking how you properly implement it. Well, in my opinion, the best way to make money with AdSense is to have a website which is designed to cater to people who are in the buyers’ mindset. People who are looking to buy something and they’re literally just looking for something that puts them over the edge.

So, review sites, things that talk about equipment and things that they might be buying or looking to buy. Those types of things can perform fairly well with AdSense. If you look at markets where people like to spend money; if you’re in those markets talking about it, then it might make you perform fairly well at AdSense.

So it really comes down to your content and what you’re talking about.

Now, in a tech market, its difficult because it’s a very, very large saturated market and if you’re talking about a broad array of topics under the tech umbrella it’s going to be hard to target with AdSense unless you throw a lot of traffic at it.

If you’re more targeted and you’re specifically and on purpose talking about things that are going to attract potential buyers like product reviews, comparisons, “this versus that”… things where you actually have keywords in the article that are designed to attract people who are looking for that specific thing and they’re looking to buy it… these are people with their wallet “open”. Its going to make your site more attractive.

For the same reasoning, AdSense income tends to be seasonal. Around the end of the year, you’re going to likely find your AdSense income increase. It’s because there’s a lot more people out there surfing around that are in the buyers’ mindset.

And the advertisers know it and they want to tap into that. During the rest of the year, it’s kinda more up to you to attract them.

So, generally, you’re up against the fact that AdSense tends to not perform super well for the advertiser on the content network unless you have a site that is attracting buyers’ mindset people. Because that’s what these advertisers are after. They’re after people who are going to spend money and if they don’t find people who are willing and wanting to spend money on your site, they’re not going to put the budget into it. Therefore, you’re not going to make much money with AdSense.

Other than that primary thing, it really does come down to… getting as much traffic as possible, optimizing your click through rate, all the stuff that you had already mentioned and there’s lots of stuff out there on that… optimizing the color of the AdSense ads, the placement of it – all that stuff. It’s really about the best you can do until you start getting in to what you’re actually writing about in the overall content direction of your site. That’s really going to determine your AdSense income and how much your eCPM is.

So, hopefully that helped and will help anybody out there who’s using AdSense.

My last comment would be…

Don’t depend on AdSense.

AdSense is not a super good way to make money. If you’re depending on Google for traffic, if you’re depending on Google to track your stats and yes, if you’re depending on Google for income as well, it’s not a very secure business. You haven’t really built anything because you’re basically relying exclusively on Google. This is extremely insecure and not a good place to be.

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