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Google Adsense for many online marketers can almost be considered free money. It is the golden egg of revenue on the net. All you have to do is have a decent site that has content related to high paying keywords and you can make money with Google Adsense. And once you find those high paying Adsense keywords, you can just duplicate your efforts 10 or 20 times over and you too can soon be making millions on the internet.

If it were only that simple…

The problem with Adsense, or nearly any affiliate program, is that it usually isn’t a static way to make money. The dynamic way niches come and go, the way Google adjusts landing page guidelines (this does affect your earnings per click), the way your sites get ranked in the search engines and many other factors, require that you tweak your web sites on a fairly regular basis. Google dangles the Adsense carrot in front of you, but they constantly adjust the distance you must go to get the prize. And the horse you’re riding to fetch the carrot? It must be fed, watered, brushed, walked and see the vet a couple times a year.

In my last installment of Lessons In Perseverance I expressed some of my frustration working with Adsense because of this constantly changing face of Google and doing business as an affiliate marketer. And as you may have read or commented on in my March affiliate earnings report I do fairly well with Adsense, earning an average of $1,200 to $1,300 per month. But what you may not know is that the niches and sites that earned me money with Adsense this month are about 50% different than they were last year at this time. And even the sites that are the same have gone through many changes to be able to maintain those earnings since last year.

Probably one of the hardest things to get used to is watching your Adsense earnings fluctuate, even on a day to day basis. I’ve had days where earnings were $60 to $70 one day and then come in at $25 or so only 24 hours later. You also have to get used to watching one site start to rise in earnings and anticipate living life a little larger, only to watch another site tank because Google happened to make some sort of a tweak or an algorithm adjustment and whatever adjustment they made, your site happened to be in the cross-hairs.

A good example of this is, only a week or so after my best day ever in Adsense earnings I watched a high ranking travel blog go from getting 100 Google search visitors a day to only 5 per day. A site that was earning $15 to $20 per day was now earnings me $2 to $3 per day. What had I done to deserve this treatment. As far as I can tell all I did was update it after not posting for 3 months and the hammer came down. Did I freak out? No, not at all, because I’m so used to seeing this, it was just another day at the home office.

The packaging in the Adsense egg basket is not quite as soft and cushy as I would like. This is about as good a reason as any to diversify your income streams on the Internet.

This past Thursday was a pretty exciting day when I checked my Google Adsense earnings and found out it was my second highest day in revenue, coming in at $69.05. It was pretty significant because Thursday’s are not usually high earnings days or high traffic days on the net, at least not for me. I had planned to blog about it over the weekend, but just didn’t get around to it.

It was nice to see that much for a single day in revenue and it was encouraging because of it being a low traffic day. I thought, it can only get better from here. Well, today I woke up and logged into Adsense to see that yesterday was my number one earnings day with Google. The previous best day had been more than 2 years ago on Tuesday January 17, 2006 when the total was $72.77. Yesterday’s Adsense earnings came in at $74.38.

It’s hard to believe that it has taken more than 2 years to top my earnings, but if you’ve read lesson 4 in perseverance you’ll see that at one point Adsense revenue dropped by 50% over a 6 month period. I’ve been able to slowly build that back up again and I’m hoping this is a trend in the right direction. Since the past day of record earnings, it has been 2 years of not being able to average much more than about $40 a day with Adsense, no matter what I did. However, having my third best and first best day for revenue in the same week definitely signals an upward trend.

The biggest earning sites for me are in the travel niche and more specifically for vacation rentals. Of the 16 sites that earned me Adsense income yesterday, just 2 sites brought in more than 60% of the $74.38 total. And the great thing about that is, those two sites had combined total page views of just over 525 and unique visitors of just over 300 for both. Now, if I could just get 1,000 visitors every day to each of those sites, I could live off of that income alone. Extrapolated out, that’s over $300 a day from 2 sites. I need to put some extra time into getting more traffic to these sites.

I’m not going to reveal those two url’s, but making money in the travel niche isn’t all that difficult. One site just lists vacation rentals and the other site is a blog where I just write about rentals, attractions and stuff to do in a popular vacation area in the southeast. Beyond fairly good content, the trick is well placed Adsense units. I am also partial to a particular size of ads as well. I like the wide 336 x 280 unit. They make all the difference.

One last thing, I talk about Build A Niche Store a lot, but it’s probably not the best thing for a travel site unless it is just a small part of an overall larger site. Travel just doesn’t seem to do that well on eBay.

The next milestone for Adsense earnings is the magic $100 per day. I’m hoping to get there sometime next month.

Alan

One of the reasons for Affiliate Confession as stated on my About page is to show affiliates “how to make an honest $2,500 or so per month” because a lot of what you hear about is either people who make $25,000 or more per month or so-called gurus “making millions” from the internet. But there isn’t enough info and a good reality check about how to get started with process and dealing with the heartaches you can end up going through trying to just eek out a living on the net.

Through much trial and error you have to get to the $2,500 per month mark before you can get to the $25,000 mark. Part of that $2,500 mark has been a fairly consistent Adsense paycheck every month. I’ve been trying to bump that up past $1,000 per month, but it has been nice to at least be where it’s at.

To provide a little evidence, my Google 1099 form for 2007 just came in yesterday’s mail and shows my total Adsense earnings for 2007 at $12,349.64. I wanted to share it with the readers of Affiliate Confession to show that earnings of $1,000 per month with Adsense are a real and attainable goal to shoot for. Yes, maybe we can all hope to attain and set goals for the tens of thousands some make in monthly incomes, but this is just a good example of what’s possible on the other end. Google is about 30 to 40% of my total internet income.

Google Adsense Earnings For 2007

On my about page I talk about showing affiliates how to make $2,500 per month, but this month looks like it’s going to be somewhat higher. Income is already ove the $2,500 mark for January as of Thursday the 24th and I’m calculating the total should end up around $3,600 for the month. There are some advertising expenses this month around $250 or so, but January is looking very good so far at possibly $1,000 more than December and Adsense should be up a little at around $1,300 for the month.

Keep pressing on.

Alan

Tags: google 1099, adsense earnings, monthly income, set goals, internet income

There aren’t too many reports these days of mother-ship Google doing something and people bending over backwards to exclaim how pleased they are with the change. Their record is more in the realm of royally pissing people off all over the globe about as fast as possible lately.

Case in point is the recently announced change for Adsense referrals. Darren Rowse of ProBlogger announced that changes in the payment system will affect the amount of money a publisher can earn for referring new sign-ups to Adsense. But that’s not such a big deal when part 2 rears it’s ugly head. Google Adsense will no longer accept referrals for publishers outside of North America, Latin America and Japan regardless of where their traffic comes from.

If you can believe the insanity of this decision it actually means that Darren who has referred thousands of new Adsense publishers to Google can now no longer do so. The majority of ProBlogger’s traffic comes from the US, but that doesn’t count says Google, because he lives in Australia. Here’s what Darren has to say about this:

I’m just one example (I’m the example I know best) and a quick look at my stats shows me that I’ve displayed AdSense referral ads close to 20 million times. I’ve sent them tens of thousands of visitors and have been responsible for thousands of sign ups. I cannot even begin to imagine how much money those signups have made AdSense - yet today they’re telling me that they don’t feel that that kind of evangelism for them is worthwhile paying for?

You have heard the saying that you should never bite the hand that feeds you, but Google seems to be gnawing the hands of publishers like Darren Rowse into a bloody stump. One more example of Google drilling holes in the bottom of their ship.

Story discovered via Shoemoney. Watch the video at the end of his post.

Alan

Tags: darren rowse, problogger, adsense referrals, shoemoney

Usually the day after Christmas is almost as huge a day for shopping as is the day after Thanksgiving. May people take their Christmas gifts, in the form of gift certificates, and use them around town on the various sales that range anywhere from 30% to 70% off retail. If you didn’t get what you wanted this year, you can go out and find your own Christmas present at a great discount.

Well, I got a one day late Christmas present this year courtesy of Google and Commission Junction. This has never happened before, but both checks arrived on the same day, yesterday. The Google check was for $1,150.84 and the CJ check was for $969.30. No it’s not really a true Christmas present, but it sure is nice to get them on the same day, so I thought I’d share them with the readers of Affiliate Confession.

The CJ check, which is kind of hard to read, is off a bit from what I reported on my November earnings because of the way eBay pays its bonuses and I think there was also some late reporting involved as well. CJ checks are always off a bit from the reported monthly earnings because they pay commissions for the previous month and then eBay bonuses aren’t posted until the 9th of the month, but they’re paid in the current month.

I haven’t quite figured out why, but earnings are always higher than reported, never lower than reported. When you look at your CJ reports for a month, after the 9th, they would include your eBay bonus for the previous month. There should be times where your bonus from eBay drops, giving you a commission less than reported at the end of the month. It never works out that way and I’m not complaining.

If you’re confused after that last paragraph, so am I, but the nice thing is, I get to put more than $2,000 in the bank within the next couple of days thanks to getting 2 large affiliate checks on the same day.

The goal of course, is to keep making these checks bigger.

Alan

 Tags: cj, affiliate checks, christmas gifts, presents, earnings