My Google Adsense Payout Earnings - the First $100 in My First Year!
My Online Story - Rags to Riches? Err. Not Really!
I have been trying to earn an online income for almost a year now. I had achieved some success with Squidoo (now a defunct website), but like how everyone believes – I couldn’t just put all my eggs in one single basket. I wanted to use Google AdSense because I have heard many success stories from people who have used the program. If they can do it, you can too right? Right – provided you do as much hard work as them!
This page is not to show my expertise but to show you that it’s possible to earn some money online even if you are an amateur. There are many AdSense tutorials out there that will give you awesome SEO tips and techniques, and you might as well refer to those.
What I’m going to share here is different from others – because it is my story. I will even openly talk about the mistakes I made initially so that you can learn from them too if you are a newbie. I’m no expert in the field, but when I see many people out there struggling to get their first AdSense payout, I can’t help but feel relieved that I’m doing okay so far. Remember this is NOT a rag to riches story. This page is solely to make you understand - if you have given up - that it is possible to earn income online by working at home and increase it over a period of time.
I will be creating pages like this one hopefully each year – with your support and acknowledgment – to keep a tab on my performance. More like a yearly review of sorts. Hope you find this first page of the series interesting, motivational (yes, all of us needs to be motivated now and then, don’t we?), and useful!
The Initial Stages and the Mistakes I Made
I came into the online money-making scene pretty late. It goes without saying that I knew next to nothing about legit programs, strategies, and techniques. I just wanted to make ‘quick’ money online like the rest of them. This is where I went wrong! Why?
- You can never earn quick & easy money. You’ll always have to work for it! – I went around looking for programs that offered me quick money. I did come across some programs like mturk which offered quick money, but the money paid was a pittance. Not exactly what I was looking for.
- All the hard work for less revenue? NOT worth it! – The problem with using ‘quick money’ programs like mturk is that you end up doing loads of hard work throughout the day. If it’s worth it in the long run, I would recommend doing all the hard work. But the problem is – you have to keep repeating the same steps over and over again in order to make the same amount of money. You cannot earn income passively this way. You have to be actively involved. When you stop working, the money stops coming in too. This got to me after a few days and I felt saturated with all the mechanical work.
If you are serious about making money online, you would want to opt for a method that will earn you money even while you’re relaxing after doing all the hard work.
Mistake no. 2 was to create useless, short pages and expecting traffic to come my way. Yes, guilty as charged - I was one of those lazy marketers who created short, "lazy" pages on both Squidoo and Hubpages in the hope of getting some "quick" traffic. This doesn't work well, mind you! I see good traffic only coming for pages/articles that have more than 400 words.
Another mistake I made is to start something which I wasn’t particularly good at – designing T-shirts. I came across an online design store and thought ‘Hey! This seems easy!’ and just put in random, abstract designs on T-shirts thinking it would attract customers. Yes, laugh at me – but I did that. The designs were amateurish and I didn’t really have any ‘unique’ witty one-liners to imprint on them. I didn’t make any sales (duh!) but the Printfection forums introduced me to one of the best passive income sites on the Internet back then – Squidoo. Ultimately, Squidoo led me to HubPages, and here we are!
Work At Home with Amazon.com Mechanical Turk - Video Tutorial
Squidoo
I discovered Squidoo (a now-defunct website) by mistake. Some users on a design forum were discussing the best ways to promote their designs outside of the site and they mentioned Squidoo. I thought I would be able to sell off some of my rubbish designs this way. I always believed to give anything and everything a try before declaring it as a failure – so off I went and registered at Squidoo.
If you want to make legit money online, then I would totally recommend websites such as Squidoo and HubPages. You’ll have to work hard for it though and have to wait for a few months before you actually start seeing results. What I like about such sites are the various Amazon modules that help you out in making sales. I didn’t make any sales using them initially, but slowly and surely the purchases are increasing. Right now while I'm writing this hub, I see another Amazon purchase made from one of my pages.
Payments are done via PayPal. Nowadays I use PayPal money to invest more into my online venture.
After spending considerable time at Squidoo, I decided to check out Hubpages. Many Squidoo users seemed to have hubs too and some of them preferred Hubpages. I decided to check it out myself.
Hubpages
I’m slowly leaning towards creating more content for Hubpages as compared to Squidoo. My hubs tend to get indexed faster on Google.
I had tried creating blogs and sites with AdSense before, but they never really took off. Due to this very reason, my AdSense earnings were far from satisfactory. I never really thought Hubpages would work for me – but I’m glad it did! Hubpages solely is responsible for increasing my AdSense earnings in the last year or so. If you have an approved AdSense account, then I would recommend you to try out Hubpages! It’s totally worth the effort. But like Squidoo, you have to take time out in creating unique and great quality content in order to see the cash coming. Like I said before if I can do it, so can you!
HubPages: What Are They And How You Can Make Money
My First AdSense Payout
I received my first AdSense payout of $100 recently from Google. I collected my earnings from Western Union Quick Cash. The good thing about using Western Union as a cash payment method is that you get paid the next day itself after payment has been issued.
P.S - You will have to take some documents like a valid ID and your unique MTCN (Money Transfer Control) number in order to get payment from Western Union. AdSense started sending checks to my address after my first payment. Now they offer direct bank transfers.
Will The Next AdSense Payment Come Faster?
This is what I see in forums whenever someone mentions their first payout – "your next payment will come faster". And I feel so too! I can already see the difference as compared to the previous year’s statistics and hopefully, it will just get better!
By the end of it all, you might have realized that I’m just another person like you who is looking to earn an income online. It need not be a daunting task as long as you’re willing to work for it.