Google AdSense Insights After Over $14,000 Earned

Let me start out by saying that as of the moment I am writing this, I have made over $14,000 dollars with Google AdSense, but still feel that I have a lot to learn about making money with that excellent program. I can (and will), however, share some of the insights that I have discovered along the way.

One interesting fact, that I am not sure how to value, is that some of my worst pages were my highest earners. By this I mean that a particularly successful site for me was one that was little more than a listing of available products, with minimal info on those products, one page for each product. I assume that the success of such pages was that there was little else for the visitor to do … they either clicked on the “Order Now” link, clicked on an ad, or clicked on their back button. And because the pages were product oriented, I assume the AdSense ads were higher paying than average. Don’t get too excited about this, though … those pages stopped ranking well long ago, as they should have. They may have paid out when they got traffic, but the traffic could not be counted on.

I also have a site focused on free photos that makes a steady stream (I should more accurately say trickle) of income from Google AdSense; the average payout per click is much smaller on that site than on others that focus on technology or health, for example. So I take that to mean that focusing on a free market (of that type, anyway) does not lend itself to high payout on Google AdSense. To give some perspective, my payout per thousand visits is about 4 times lower than my payout per thousand on HubPages.

Things can (and do) happen overnight. I have seen a fourfold increase in earnings overnight on Google AdSense when I had a nice number of pages hit the big time in the Google SERPs. I was happy, happy, happy. Unfortunately, I have also seen a ten-fold decrease in earnings overnight; I was sad, sad, sad. Having said this, however, I must emphasize that the standard rule is stability … on the whole, averaging month-by-month, my earnings remain very stable with Google AdSense.

Ad placement does matter. I have changed the placement of AdSense ads throughout a site, and seen a definite increase in income from that site from that moment forward. I have not experimented or tracked enough such changes to give any more solid or certain advice than: make it visible and ‘easy’ to click on.

Do I think that you can earn enough with Google AdSense to quit your day job? Yes I do! Am I anywhere near that point? Not today, my friend! But I have faith; and with a little bit (read a lot) more time and effort, I know it can be done.

Definitely time is not my friend. I fear that I do not set enough aside, and that I waste far too much. I feel with the right mindset and enough time to push through, I could be earning $7,000 a month or more with Google AdSense. Part of the problem is that I am already running a successful business, and raising a family, and trying to have some quality downtime each day to make like worth living. That often leaves no time at all for building up my online empire.
I am fascinated by automation, and have has some success with automating some of the repetitive tasks that we all face when trying to build or “online portfolios”. But I also fear it, and try to think of ways to work smarter, so that I don’t have to (and by extension, my automated helpers don’t need to) work so much or so often. Quantity, for sure is important, but I have definitely discovered that one good page is worth one hundred or one thousand or more pages lost in the great digital morass.

YouTube seems to me a great venue, and I have some little success there at this time with videos that have been singled out for micro-partnership. What I mean by that is that YouTube has invited me to earn money with particular successful videos that I have made, and that is working, but that I have not reached a scale where I would be considered for full partnership where every video that I made would automatically earn income. One of my main goals over the next year is to earn full partnership rights on YouTube; AdSense revenue through that program is making a lot of people happy full-time video bloggers.

What about you? Please share your insights in the comment section.