Bambang $ Hadi

The web 2008. Harsh realities.

Hello. Welcome to the realities of making money on the Internet

in 2008. Let’s face it, not many do. Perhaps you set your blog

up full of anticipation of easy (or even hard) money, and it

just didn’t happen for you. Well, you might not have done

anything “wrong” and this article explains some of the

realities of making money from your blog with AdSense.

The mechanics of AdSense

Every time someone clicks on one of the AdSense ads you are

displaying on your site, you are going to get a cut of the

money Google charges the advertiser. The amount you get varies

depending on the topic keyword, competition levels for that

keyword, what percentage of the pie Google actually decides to

give you and which way the wind is blowing at the Googleplex. I

would say typically you would get between 5 and 25 cents per

click. Let’s go with 10 cents to make the sums easier.

To make a $1000 per month, which is doable for a one person

blog, you need around 10,000 ad clicks a month. Yes, 10k clicks

a month - that’s a ton of clicks.

What you need to know about page views

The next thing to understand is only a small percentage of page

views will result in clicks on your AdSense ads.

For each page view there is a fixed chance of the visitor

clicking on an ad, say around 1%-10%. It really does depend,

but let’s go with the higher figure of 10% (I’m feeling

generous today). That means, based on the previous calculations

you’d need around 100,000 page views to get your monthly $1000.

And the good news is…

As a visitor browses your site (page views), the chances of

them seeing an ad that catches their interest and clicking on

it increases.

So you want to maximise your page views per visit. The higher

the page views per visit the higher the number of ad clicks you

are likely to get. In short, the longer they stay on your site

the more chance you have of getting a click out of them!

But how to get page views?

Putting it another way your revenue will depend on the total

number of page views per month (well not quite, but I’m

simplifying things here a bit for this article). This will

depend on:

1. Traffic (number of visits)

2. Number of page views per visit

If you have a one page website then you are going to need a LOT

of visitors to generate high page views per month!

There are several points that arise from this:

1. You need to have quality content -> traffic, people will

come back (you want more visits than visitors)

2. You need to have lots of pages -> high page views

3. You need to have AdSense ads on every page -> increases

chance of click

4. You need to add new content frequently -> prevents page

views per visit from declining

5. Have a good spread of topics -> increases chances of

seeing an advert on a topic of interest

You need to have all these key things in place to start making

good income.

Blog layout mistakes

Bearing this in mind it become obvious why many Blogger blogs

on Blogspot don’t generate much money (don’t get me wrong I

like Blogger and use it for some of my own blogs). They are

just not designed to maximize revenue.

Usually Blogspot blogs only have a couple of AdSense ads on one

page - but maybe 10 or more posts per page. This means people

are getting 10 “pages” worth of content for one Google Ad. In

other words by just displaying one post per page you could

increase your revenue by 10 times! (This is easy to configure

in Blogger)

The alternative to doing this is to have Google Ads, or other

link ads, embedded in each post. This is becoming more common.

However, you still need great content, and lots of it, to get

the page views you need to generate income.

An example

Let’s just finish up the article with an example.

Let’s have a look at one of the most successful blogs on the

web, stevepavlina.com. This is a Wordpress blog.

Good layout and content

The first thing to note is there are only two posts on the

first page of the blog. Not 12, not 10, just 2. Enough to catch

the reader and maybe another topic to keep them reading. This

will increase the number of page views, as you can only read

two articles before you need to click to another page, and be

served more related ads in the process.

Note that each article is fairly lengthy compared to most blog

posts and well-written, high-value content. There is also a

“great big ad” per-post, so ads are always per-article (as well

as having the ads on the side banner).

Wide range of topics

Also, there is a huge range of topics covered. Just look at the

categories list. This increases the chance of a context

sensitive ad catching the visitor’s interest.

There are a lot of articles in the blog (several hundred).

Naturally this increases the page views per visit as users have

a wide range of interesting articles to choses from. This is

encouraged by the fact that at the end of each article there

are a list of links to other articles. This helps keep the

number of page views per visit high.

Updated regularly

The content is updated regularly. This keeps visitors coming

back to read new content. So even visitors who have read all

articles to date have something to come back for.

The bottom line

The revenue for the site will be high not only because there

are a lot of visitors, but there are a lot of page views per

visit, giving a high monthly number of page views. In addition

revenue is high as the ads are well positioned. As mentioned in

addition to the side banners there is an ad per article - so on

each page view there are multiple opportunities for the reader

to see an ad of interest.

Final words

In summary, if you want lots of AdSense revenue you need to

have a lot of page views per month and more to the point a lot

of ad clicks per month. You achieve those through great content

and intelligent layout.

It can take literally years to generate the high-quality

content necessary to get the page views up, so don’t expect too

much from your blog in the early days. Keep with it,

concentrate on getting a wide range of topics (within your

general niche) and tune your layout.