Adsense is one of those things that a lot of people know about. Adsense can therefore be seen as an example of the idea that because something is well-known it must be good. But how does Adsense stack up?

In short, can Adsense make you money?

Well, the truth is that there is no straight answer to that question. For example, after months and months of doing nothing whatsoever with either my Adsense account or in fact website development in general, I checked my account and there was 12 dollars!

Now 12 dollars is real money! One day Google will release me that money and I will have a pizza that I may not have had otherwise, or a night out at the movies. So in that case, yes, Adsense did make me real money.

Now notice something here -- Adsense made me money even though I did next to nothing to promote it. Hell, I'm only half sure where my Adsense ads really actually are that earned that 12 dollars!

(My guess is from Yahoo. You will see that if you do a search at www.yahoo.ca, for "montreal art camp" there is a blog at Number two as follows:

http://montreal-montreal-montreal.blogspot.com (You will also see that it is sadly neglected, and that the code is messed up on it!)

On that site there are a bunch of Google search boxes.

(None of the information on that site is valid any more; it is several years old, and I no longer live in Montreal (though I do live close). If you want a high quality portrait done, however, certainly email the address on the site (the phone numbers are long dead, as I have moved, as I say); expect to pay quite a bit (three figures in any case) and by the way, the example on the site is old, and the quality of work has shot up since then! Oh, and I no longer run art camps, though I did.)

Anyway, so yes, I did earn money from Adsense, and indeed without barely lifting a finger. A long time ago, I ran a site devoted to Stephen Covey (I won't give you the address as I messed up the code and it looks awful now!). Over a year of not knowing what I was doing, I still made the requisite 100 dollars required for Google to actually release my money to me; so, yes, again, you can make money with Adsense.

But this is not the question you are asking yourself (if you are asking yourself anything) I am sure. You want to know, not "Can I make 12 dollars doing nothing with Adsense" but "Can I make A LOT of money with Adsense?"

Now this is not an easy question to answer. Certainly the range of money that people make in a year with Adsense ranges, indeed, from 12 dollars, to millions of dollars (one is led to believe, in any case: look up Joel Comm).

A better question is the following: If I want to make money online is the best course of action to devote all my time to Adsense?

Believe it or not, despite being the owner of a site devoted to Adsense strategy, my answer is, in fact, no.

What, I hear you say? But you have named yourself on this hub "Adsense Strategies"! How can this be!

First of all, to say that you should not devote all of your time to Adsense is NOT to say you should invest NO time figuring out the best Adsense works. On the contrary, there are some very doable things you can do to your Adsense ads that will improve your earnings considerably via Adsense clicks.

(You will have to hunt through my site to find out what they are :-) ).

First and foremost, however, Adsense should be about INCREASING your income and not necessarily be the one thing you rely on to make money online.

That is, in order to make money online you need to have a website. I don't really see how otherwise you can make any serious money online.

And once you have a website then you can put Adsense ads, as well as Adsense search, on that site, to make you money.

But Adsense should not be your only or even your main way to make money online.

Yes Adsense should be a part of the picture. Yes you should learn how to make money online with Adsense.

But to make money online with Adsense only....

could be hard...

Best Wishes. The Adsense Strategist.