www.affiliateconfession.com

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.

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