My AC Articles

Thursday, October 9, 2008

The Powerful Passive Income Generator!

Webmasters have a revolutionary new method of collecting income from their websites.

Whereas in the past advertising revenue was reserved for those sites with large a coming and going of visitors, now even teenagers are making a quick buck with their online hobby blogs. People place adsense on their online family photo albums, their blogs and their business sites. The minimum you would get, even with a small amount of traffic, is for adsense to pay for your hosting costs.

Adsense revolutionized the world of paid advertising; banner advertising is based on the number of visitors you attract to your site, so the number of "banner impressions" dictate the revenue you receive. Google Adsense is quite different; it is the number of visitors that actually click on the advertising that determine how much you earn.

There is also a great disparity between payouts; because advertisers bid up the price for certain keywords, some ads pay more than others. As such, a site with few visitors but expensive keywords in their google ads can potentially still pull in a hefty payout.

Google really has taken the web by storm; attracted to passive income, more and more people are seriously capitalizing on their Google adsense advertising. Some of the highest earners manage to attract enough visitors to make a four figure monthly income, just from using adsense alone! This is not one of those get-rich-quick schemes and Google's adsense success is largely thanks to the fact that Google already enjoyed a fantastic reputation before introducing the program. They are a publicly traded company with physical headquarters. This, and the fact that anyone can apply to use adsense for free, has caused millions of people to sign up. For google it was a smart move, because now they extend their presence to countless websites and generate millions of dollars in advertising revenue. People were never reluctant to sign up, because the program is free. Google benefits by more people using adsense, so offering it for free was the best thing they could do.

One of the driving forced behind the program are its relevance to each and every page on a website; the program picks up keywords appearing in the website copy and automatically displays relevant ads. This increases the chances of people clicking through, and the webmaster collecting more revenue.
People are leveraging their income by operating several websites and attempting to attract as many targeted visitors as possible; in many instances we can observe that people work hard at a site, then once it is established they can largely leave it alone, yet still collect significant checks.

A major concern for entrepreneurs was the danger of a competitors ads showing up on their site; thanks to the adsense feature where it only displays relevant advertising. However this problem was solved by offering webmasters the option of filtering out unwanted ads. They can submit the URL of the competing site in their account, and any ads from the website will be blocked.

Google recently came out with a new feature: small targeted keywords based on the site's content are displayed; then as people click on those, a page opens showing a variety of pay-per-click ads based on that keyword. This gives webmasters the chance of displaying more advertising in less space.
Adsense also adds creditability to your website; the more focused the content, the better the ads will be and this encourages people to built high quality websites. These make the net a better place and generally provide a free service; site owners can afford to share their expertise or passions because they can receive indirect revenue's. The visitor does not pay for the information; instead the advertisers do, making the website's existence possible in the first place.

It is no surprise Google adsense is the most widely used form of advertising; they have created a program that is beneficial to both advertisers and users with their "no click no pay" mechanism, or more popularly called "pay-per-click". Advertisers do not pay for ads that are not drawing visitors, and website owners are paid more for each click than they would if the system were based on the number of people viewing the ads, instead of clicking on them.

All in all Google adsense has developed itself into a powerful tool, used by large corporations and the kid next door. They have truly revolutionized how the web thinks about advertising and made the process more profitable for site owners, while less costly for advertisers.

Labels: , , , , , ,

Sunday, October 5, 2008

Is Adsense A Good Idea or Not?

For many webmasters, Google AdSense has become a great revenue generator. Since the program pays the webmaster every time a visitor of their website clicks on the ads that Google displays in their web pages, the same has become a truly viable and profitable option to earn a living online. As a matter of fact, there are countless webmasters who have dropped their day jobs so that they could focus on the AdSense program.

They build dozens and dozens of websites, all of which carry their AdSense code, hoping to generate amazing earnings from such an approach. After all, if one website can generate $25 per month (a low average at that), how much could 100 websites be able to produce for the webmaster?

But success with the Google AdSense program is contingent on three things:
1. Cost per Click (CPC) attached to the ads that will be displayed,
2. Page impressions, or the number of people who will get to visit the website, and
3. Click Through Rate (CTR), or the ratio of people who will click on the ads vis a vis page impressions.

The CPC can be approximated by checking out the going rate of the keyword to be targeted before building a website. The resource that can be found at is an excellent tool to help anyone in determining the possible CPC for certain search words or phrases.

The CTR can be improved by arranging the AdSense blocks in a manner that would make them look like organic parts of the website.

But page impressions would be a little more difficult to achieve.

Page impressions are actually equivalent to what is generally known as web traffic. Web traffic, of course, refers to the volume of users who manages to load up a particular page of your website. It has been said that traffic is the lifeblood of any online venture, and this couldn't be truer for websites that earn via Pay Per Click (PPC) programs.

In a nutshell, the success of your Google AdSense campaign would depend on the volume of traffic you'll be able to generate for your website, or websites.

You could try a lot of marketing tactics, but often, these strategies take time to gestate. Additionally, each and every competitor of yours would be trying out the same techniques, and there is no real guarantee about how much traffic you could derive from them.

This has led many webmasters to try out PPC advertising for their PPC earning campaigns. The way it goes is that they will advertise their websites through Google AdWords. Google will then display their links the way it displays AdSense ads. The webmasters who decide to take this route would then have to pay Google every time a user clicks on the ads that lead to their websites.

How do these webmasters earn, when they're supposed to spend for every click?

Well, most of them build websites that are exclusively made up of AdSense ads. Hence, whenever a user is led to their pages, he'd have no choice but to click on the relevant ads that appear therein.

There are some webmasters, on the other hand, who rely on the strength of their content. They use AdWords to expose their websites to people, hoping that those very users would love what they'll see and they’ll keep coming back every now and then.

There are pros and cons to this strategy, however. Let's take a look at the advantages first.

You will attain guaranteed traffic.
You will attain highly targeted traffic. Since your visitors will be composed of people who are interested with the subject of you website, there is a higher likelihood that they will click on the ads that would appear on your pages.

You will only have to pay for the traffic that your website would receive. Nothing more, nothing less.

But it's not rosy for this approach. Here are the disadvantages.
You'd have to spend.

There is no guarantee that you'll be able to recoup your financial investments.

Google is cracking down on websites that are merely composed of AdSense ad blocks. If you opt to use this approach, and your website is composed exclusively of AdSense ads, chances are, your website would get de-indexed and your AdSense account would get suspended if Google catches you.

The best way to go is to rely on the strength of your website. Prepare unique, premium content and hook your visitors with the same. Content is king in the World Wide Web, after all.

If you decide to use AdWords to get some traffic, make sure you have a mailing list in place to capture their contact details and ensure for yourself some repeat visitors. PPD advertising should only be used to gain initial traffic, until your other marketing strategies would finally produce the desired results.

Labels: , , , , ,