The web 2008. Harsh realities.
Hello. Welcome to the realities of making money on the Internet in 2008. Let's face it, not many do. Perhaps you set your blog up full of anticipation of easy (or even hard) money, and it just didn't happen for you. Well, you might not have done anything "wrong" and this article explains some of the realities of making money from your blog with AdSense.
The mechanics of AdSense
Every time someone clicks on one of the AdSense ads you are displaying on your site, you are going to get a cut of the money Google charges the advertiser. The amount you get varies depending on the topic keyword, competition levels for that keyword, what percentage of the pie Google actually decides to give you and which way the wind is blowing at the Googleplex. I would say typically you would get between 5 and 25 cents per click. Let's go with 10 cents to make the sums easier.
To make a $1000 per month, which is doable for a one person blog, you need around 10,000 ad clicks a month. Yes, 10k clicks a month - that's a ton of clicks.
What you need to know about page views
The next thing to understand is only a small percentage of page views will result in clicks on your AdSense ads.
For each page view there is a fixed chance of the visitor clicking on an ad, say around 1%-10%. It really does depend, but let's go with the higher figure of 10% (I'm feeling generous today). That means, based on the previous calculations you'd need around 100,000 page views to get your monthly $1000.
And the good news is...
As a visitor browses your site (page views), the chances of them seeing an ad that catches their interest and clicking on it increases.
So you want to maximise your page views per visit. The higher the page views per visit the higher the number of ad clicks you are likely to get. In short, the longer they stay on your site the more chance you have of getting a click out of them!
But how to get page views?
Putting it another way your revenue will depend on the total number of page views per month (well not quite, but I'm simplifying things here a bit for this article). This will depend on:
- Traffic (number of visits)
- Number of page views per visit
If you have a one page website then you are going to need a LOT of visitors to generate high page views per month!
There are several points that arise from this:
- You need to have quality content -> traffic, people will come back (you want more visits than visitors)
- You need to have lots of pages -> high page views
- You need to have AdSense ads on every page -> increases chance of click
- You need to add new content frequently -> prevents page views per visit from declining
- Have a good spread of topics -> increases chances of seeing an advert on a topic of interest
You need to have all these key things in place to start making good income.
Blog layout mistakes
Bearing this in mind it become obvious why many Blogger blogs on Blogspot don't generate much money (don't get me wrong I like Blogger and use it for some of my own blogs). They are just not designed to maximize revenue.
Usually Blogspot blogs only have a couple of AdSense ads on one page - but maybe 10 or more posts per page. This means people are getting 10 "pages" worth of content for one Google Ad. In other words by just displaying one post per page you could increase your revenue by 10 times! (This is easy to configure in Blogger)
The alternative to doing this is to have Google Ads, or other link ads, embedded in each post. This is becoming more common. However, you still need great content, and lots of it, to get the page views you need to generate income.
An example
Let's just finish up the article with an example.
Let's have a look at one of the most successful blogs on the web, stevepavlina.com. This is a Wordpress blog.
Good layout and content
The first thing to note is there are only two posts on the first page of the blog. Not 12, not 10, just 2. Enough to catch the reader and maybe another topic to keep them reading. This will increase the number of page views, as you can only read two articles before you need to click to another page, and be served more related ads in the process.
Note that each article is fairly lengthy compared to most blog posts and well-written, high-value content. There is also a "great big ad" per-post, so ads are always per-article (as well as having the ads on the side banner).
Wide range of topics
Also, there is a huge range of topics covered. Just look at the categories list. This increases the chance of a context sensitive ad catching the visitor's interest.
There are a lot of articles in the blog (several hundred). Naturally this increases the page views per visit as users have a wide range of interesting articles to choses from. This is encouraged by the fact that at the end of each article there are a list of links to other articles. This helps keep the number of page views per visit high.
Updated regularly
The content is updated regularly. This keeps visitors coming back to read new content. So even visitors who have read all articles to date have something to come back for.
The bottom line
The revenue for the site will be high not only because there are a lot of visitors, but there are a lot of page views per visit, giving a high monthly number of page views. In addition revenue is high as the ads are well positioned. As mentioned in addition to the side banners there is an ad per article - so on each page view there are multiple opportunities for the reader to see an ad of interest.
Final words
In summary, if you want lots of AdSense revenue you need to have a lot of page views per month and more to the point a lot of ad clicks per month. You achieve those through great content and intelligent layout.
It can take literally years to generate the high-quality content necessary to get the page views up, so don't expect too much from your blog in the early days. Keep with it, concentrate on getting a wide range of topics (within your general niche) and tune your layout.
Tony Bedford first started blogging in March 2000. Tony currently maintains a free guide to more profitable blogging at http://the-business-of-blogging.blogspot.com
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