Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I have heard that I have to have 100 sites in order to make big money from adsense, but I am wonder how can I create content and in the same time marketing all of them in limited 24 hours a day?
That is a gross generalisation that is wrong - some people have one site that makes them a fortune, others do well with the model you described (many smaller sites), whilst others (like my humble self) have a hand full of sites with a focus on two - and don't make significant amounts of money.
It depends on you, your competitors and the market how far you will get - so don't trust general rules of the thumb. There is no such thing as a general recipe to success.
I have only 1 site with Adsense.
Initially the site had only one subdomain with 6 pages (now more than 5 years old). Put Adsense on one page in June 2005.
Second subdomain was launched in December 2005. It did very well in the serps from the start.
First subdomain still has the same 6 pages with Adsense on one page; second subdomain now has 1400+ pages with Adsense on nearly every page.
Launched a third subdomain more than 6 months ago (for a product, no Adsense), but it's still not on the first page if you search for the product name, which is a unique name, even though it has 250 pages relevant to this product. It is outranked by old sites with one page about this product.... I am considering to discard the third subdomain and just add it to my old product site, which I started in 1999...
...and it's construction/housing/remodeling related...go figure.
Do you think that hobby websites (which includes construction/DIY) is generally better for AdSense?
Thanks
Would someone please sticky me the URL of one of these sites making $4000 to $10000 a month!
but the scary part is CTR continues to drop since Sept, down a full 2% from the rest of the year. Nothing else has changed. No idea what's what.
Ricki: Local news doesn't pay - probably the same 4k people, more or less, anyway "News" isn't a buying frame of mind or a research to buy frame of mind. And most local people don't know about Adsense, it will be 10 years before that really starts to make anything. I'd sell local banners and put on tribal fusion... 60k pv's a day, you could probably make $40-$60 a day on banners alone!
Also, few will show you their site, afraid you'd copy it or sabotage it.
If I were to do it all over again, I'd go for some kind of review site. Problem is new products are out all the time, so its constant work and the old stuff doesn't monetize.
I have one small site, 80 pages, makes about $2.30 a day. No additional work required. Be nice to have another 49 sites like that...
Be aware that with success comes potential problems. The more popular your site becomes and the more money you make, the more competitors will start popping up.
Years ago my market was dominated by 3-4 sites (including mine). We were a little known niche that was doing really well in serps and making a decent buck riding under the radar.
Well in the last few years my niche has become much more popular, and as such our traffic has gone up, but our competition has shot up as well. We went from having less than 10 competitors to having hundreds of competitors just within 2 years.
So now instead of spending the majority of our time improving and growing our site, we have to deal with battling DMCA violations, scrapers, hackers and a boatload of other crap that we never had to worry about before...
But congrats none the less... ;-)
If you have that much traffic, why use adsense and send people to other sites? I certainly hope it's not the only way you monetize the traffic
Most online advertising involves sending visitors to another site. The trick is to use a placement that is secondary to your content. That way you make money when folks are done with your site and ready to leave.
Espn, NyTimes, etc all use online ads that when clicked direct users to another site. Magazines run ads geared towards directing readers to a website. Radio stations run ads that direct folks to websites. This is not a new concept.
just trying to have an constructive discussion here .. i noticed people start these threads to brag about their revenue, but when asked for details by people like rickigou above they go silent or reply with simple 'NO'
don't get me wrong - I understand you don't want to give out your urls or do anything that's against TOS .. however it might be to your advantage to share a little more, b/c if you have a website with traffic that I think could generate you this $4k at say $15ecpm than you can possibly od much better with other forms of monetization
using your espn, nytimes for example - do you know a percentage of their revenue that's adsense generated?
For me, reaching this level of income was directly related to the time I spent building a useful service/site. You must offer more than just good content. Offer a free service that people can't get at most other sites. This is where you need to get creative. Do some research in your niche, perhaps aggregate your research into a tool you offer your visitors.
Once you have found a free tool that folks find useful, you can start to grow the site by both advertising and word of mouth. Content helps incredibly. Perhaps your free tool helps bring in new content?
I hope this is making sense. Sites that grow this large need more driving them than one person posting articles. You need to harness the power of the masses.
How did YouTube grow so much? Because they offered a free place for the world to post videos and share them. That is the idea I'm trying to get across.
Hope this helps.
What would you like to share here that would garner a $16 CPM on average?
Either an affiliate program that nets 1 sale per every 20 visitors? And pays at $15 per sale? (I look at ANY ad having an average of a 2% CTR as excellent...)
I haven't found any affiliate stuff that's been worth our bother at all.
Especially if you have diverse content. Then what, constantly updating 100's of pages with affiliate programs?
Affiliate programs are great way to advertise a business but I'm not impressed at what it does for a publisher.
It needs to be its own business.
plain and simple - what a lot of us would like to find out from a person that makes $4k from adsense is
1) how much traffic do you get
2) net or gross? - how much do you spend to get the traffic
3) whatever you can share about ctr, cpms
You can stay anonymous if you want, but offer something other than pointless bragging and pitching for google
and hunter .. i'm not trying to sell anything here .. what you're asking would probably require a seperate thread not to change the subject
Plus, you can do the math yourself to see what it takes for the varying eCPMs that folks make:
$5/eCPM requires 800,000 pageviews to make 4k/month.
$10/eCPM requires 400,000 pageviews...
$20/eCPM requires 200,000 pageviews...
Regarding folks sharing their advertising budget, I would bet that many folks making the big bucks do very little purchasing of traffic. I don't spend a dime.
Again, if you read my post above, it is more about what you are offering to the community that makes it a success. Not many folks succeed at buying enough traffic to make a site successful. That can be helpful to build your brand... but ultimately you need to have something of value to offer your visitors to keep them coming back and keep them talking about your site.
Hope this helps.
@Wolf: I mean, when you started your site, did you use Google Keyword Tools to estimate the kind of CPM you could get for your topics? I like to use the 2% CTR rule - even though overall CTR tends to be higher than that - for estimating the kind of CPM or CPC that a topic will bring in.
@Drazek: All the information you want is already here, in this thread and others. Re-read it more carefully. All the income here is gross, but *net* is just labour. So when I say $4k, that's what I live on every month. But costs beyond my hosting of $9.95 a month and my domain fees? $0 per month. People have already shared unique visitor AND pv traffic in a few comments, you can work the CPM from that. CTR is different on EVERY site, pretty much, even within my own site.
I figured it out by reading, re-reading, and testing ideas from threads. What Max alone wrote is more than enough to solve your problems. NO one is going to give everything away: The reason we are all here and contributing is that we recognize enough truth from each other, and our experience.
Hell, beware anyone who does give it all away. Like the guys that sell the ebooks on how to make millions on Adsense: what they do is make a ton of money for a few months, and as the idea gets found and exploited, they resell it to other people for a huge profit. I'm not into that kind of short term thinking.
Finally, check AdSense Case Studies posted by Google for ideas for sites, layouts, and how it all works.
the math you're quoting is 'scary' .. congrats on the traffic, but how long did it take you to get to this level - say 200k pageviews? especially that you're both saying it's 100% free seo .. obviously you're not counting your time and effort when you say costs are $0, right?
but it does answer my question kind of - see, I thought you get something others don't - like 1000 cpms ;)
@Drazek - For me, it took literally years and years to reach substantial traffic levels. I spent almost 4 years building up my site before I even turned a profit! This was before Adsense even existed. Also worth noting, only half my traffic comes from search engines... the other half is repeat visitors/bookmarks/links/etc.
But I have plenty of other sites that just sorta lay there, too. Mostly because I'm pretty good at starting stuff, but not so much at finishing them.
