I've been designing a high content site on my spare time for the last year or so

My best student started June last year. Now with 1400 pages a little bit above 500.-EUR a month with AdSense alone.

1) Comparable to direct advertisement, Adsense is for pennies. How, if at all, would I know if this would be true for my particular niche?

Time consuming for a new site

Which is time consuming? Direct Advertisement?

Thank you!

~Miles

Which is time consuming? Direct Advertisement?

Yes!

And also Google can pay more.

I tried it once 2005 to have one direct advertiser.

I visited a fair, made a photo from one of his products and was some days later on place 5 in Google with the general term for this product.

But this company was only to deliver maybe 100km around. So about 2 million people mainly in the area around Munich can be covered from 100 million in the German speaking area.

So this small company has only a chance to sell at 1 from 50 visitors, the others are too far away to negotiate and deliver a made by measure product.

But whan a visitor from Hamburg searches for this product, AdSense can show the ad of a similar company in Hamburg (800km distant from Munich)

So AdSense can pay more, because can do much more with this ad space.

Comparable to direct advertisement, Adsense is for pennies. How, if at all, would I know if this would be true for my particular niche?

Take your major niche keywords and run them through Google search. If they return page after page of advertising along the top and right hand sides, you're good. If not, then it's a crappy niche.

Then take the keyword phrases related to your site, the ones people are finding your site with, and run those through regular Google search. Analysis same as above.

Before you build the site you have to plan out your site architecture according to what your site visitors are going to want to search for. Plan the site, research search volume, research competitors, research PPC competition, run some PPC campaigns on several different keywords using exact match to see what specific phrases are popular then do another analysis with broad match to correlate with your traffic analysis to see what popular longtail phrases are.

Etcetera. Etcetera. There's more. Ultimately if you want to learn how to make money with AdSense, you will not find the answer scouring the AdSense forum. You need to break out of the AdSense Forum and study the other forum categories [webmasterworld.com] if you want to understand how to analyze the earnings potential of a site or niche.

@Jettero

Thanks! That's exactly what I was looking for in regard to adsense vs not.

@Martini

Wow...I think that topic (subsequently bookmarked) just filled up my entire day with all of ITS threads. Thank you for that link.

Thank you for your insight.

My keywords and keyphrases searches pan out just fine.

I am, for the moment, flat broke. I'll have to run PPC campaigns once I have capital again.

Thank you again though. I'm getting to reading for the moment.

~Miles

To answer Q2 - not sure if any of us fully undrstand how AS works but you will need a privacy policy that includes all the methods G may use to collect this information (infact they have insisted on it in the past - have not heard of anyone falling fowl of this requirement though).

To answer Q3, I would have thnought if you have been building the site for a year, you should be able to monetise it now. What are your vistor numbrs like?

I am, for the moment, flat broke. I'll have to run PPC campaigns once I have capital again.

I never paid for visitors. All by search engines and links from other sites.

Also my best student.

He started June 2008.

Now he has about 14000 visits a month by search engines
and little bit above 500.-EUR from AdSense.

1) Comparable to direct advertisement, Adsense is for pennies. How, if at all, would I know if this would be true for my particular niche?

a) is the above argument only for well established websites?

Adsense pays out around 80-85% revenue share. So if they are paying you pennies, than you'll be able to make 15% more pennies with direct ads. Mathematically speaking. The only way to know how well your niche pays is to either try Adsense, or try to sell to some advertisers directly, or look at the Adword competition for your keywords.

2) Adsense collects my users information and stores them for targeted advertising and such. I don't entirely understand how this works and how, if at all, it would affect any disclosure I have to make to my future visitors? Can someone explain this to me?

I believe you can opt-out of this.

a) as a side question to "2," is this collection of data something that is gleefully overlooked by visitors and that the messenger of such a practice generally is "killed"?

Unfortunately (or fortunately) most consumers are unaware of how much they are tracked by ad companies. This will change in the future (I believe), but for now no one really understands it.

3) I also hear opinions about not using advertisers for the infant stages of a website being live. The logic of this is that it provides an exit for first time visitors. Do you find this to be true in your experience? Is a better long term strategy to be ad free while I build a consistent viewership?

I typically follow this rule since the money to be made in the early stages of a site usually pales in comparison to the value of having those few first visitors stick around and help get your site going.

On the flip side of that, some sites can look more established by just the presence of ads, if done well.

I never paid for visitors.

jetteroheller, the OP is making reference to my post previous to yours where I advised of a keyword research method via PPC campaigns, involving traffic logs and PPC impression data. So, just to clarify what he's referring to before someone mistakes that comment for a reference to arbitrage, he's not talking about paying for traffic, it's a reference to paying for keyword research via PPC. ;)

1) Comparable to direct advertisement, Adsense is for pennies. How, if at all, would I know if this would be true for my particular niche?

The easiest way to find out is to put AdSense on the site and see what the results look like. But don't jump to conclusions after you see the first earnings. Try a few different ad locations and formats to find out what works best for your site.

a) is the above argument only for well established websites?

Sure it's probably easier to sell ads directly after you have a lot of established traffic. Advertisers want to see traffic, well targeted traffic.

But AdSense can give you an idea of what you might be able to charge at a minimum.

Don't forget that AdSense and direct sale ads can be on the same pages. Maybe start with Adsense and then add direct sales when you can.

2) Adsense collects my users information and stores them for targeted advertising and such. I don't entirely understand how this works and how, if at all, it would affect any disclosure I have to make to my future visitors? Can someone explain this to me?

a) as a side question to "2," is this collection of data something that is gleefully overlooked by visitors and that the messenger of such a practice generally is "killed"?

All I'll say about this is that you need to have your privacy policy page up to date, AdSense has specific demands on this.

<-------- loves you guys for helping me.

I'm a millennial, so you'd have to pardon that I use text very informally. :)

@ denisl

Thanks. I'll check about the Privacy Policy.

As for the site. I've been building it offline for a year. It's been the quintessential side project about what I've learned it takes to be successful in one of my careers. (content)

So the last year has been brainstorming, creating the pages, creating content, forming ideas for weekly hooks, reforming the IA, etc etc...

I took it's first incarnation live once for a few months, and was such a novice about SEO that I didn't even realize I had to submit it to URLs. I thought it just happened.

Whatta newb I was. Hence me loving this site for its info.

@ Jettero

I believe I misunderstood an acronym then. I thought PPC was pay-per-click, but that's an assumption since "C" tends to always mean click (e.g "CTR"), still very new to the vernacular.

Congrats for your student though!

@ Maximillianos

I had forgotten till now, but I recall that number being tossed around somewhere too. If Adsense keeps it's information (and supposedly "binds" users from saying derivatives of their earnings by not even allowing them to share eCPM and the like), how is that verifiable?

80-85% I feel much better about. I had the impression it was much smaller ad share.

Re: your response to 2)

I had a feeling that was the case. Glad to hear it is. I think?

Re: your response to 3)

Thanks for that. As I read more of these forums I realize more and more this is likely the way to go with my website as well. I just made adjustments to long term goals last night and this morning that fall in line with that.

Thank you!

@ Martini

I'm afraid I don't entirely know what PPC is. I'll run a goog search on it later and see what I can learn.

Also, I did what you mentioned with my keywords and key phrases and I think I'm good. Then I tested a few I figured wouldn't hit at all (cause I dont recall google every NOT showing me ads), and sure enough a few searches didn't return more than one. It was good to get a "feel" for that.

Yet another also, Martini, thank you a bundle for that link. I read it, and all subsequent links housed therein, for about 5 hours yesterday, copied and pasted the stuff I thought was gold I didn't know, and now have summaries of some of them posted in a MS Word document.

Priceless. Thank you.

@ ken_b

I just took a look at the hotmap yesterday too. I'll probably experiment with that. Also read another post on here about someone who made their adsense theme in contrast to their website theme. It resulted, to them, in long term reduction in CTR but an increase in conversion.

Hadn't even thought about how it reflects in a privacy policy...as I never designed one for the site.

-------------------------

Took the site down yesterday. Lots of work I'd never knew I'd have to do for it is now on the white board hanging in my office.

Thanks again everyone. This is an adventure!

~Miles