how to make money with adsense

I’ve been putting a bit of thought recently into the possibility of trying to make money writing to supplement the meager amount of cash I’m generating from my Internet Marketing activities. Admittedly things with my niche sites are heading in the right direction but as I don’t have a job in the real world it would be good to have a solid income that would give me extra money to put fuel in my motorcycle.

I think its a road that many people who are trying to earn money online consider due to the fact that most of us are attempting to avoid doing a real job at all costs and sitting in front of the computer at home typing articles seems a hell of a lot more appealing that getting to the office for 8:30 every morning. To our advantage most of us have been working on our article writing skills so we might as well put them to good use and make some fast cash to tide us over.

The problem of course is that any time I spend writing articles to make money will mean less time spent on my own sites but I reckon I waste so much time every day reading forum posts and generally faffing about. Having something to throw myself at which would generate immediate income has its attractions and it might keep me focused for the time that I do spend on my own projects.

So I’ve been researching how to make money writing through various channels, mostly searching Google for “make money writing online” and reading the forums at the Keyword Academy. From what I can gather my best bet seems to be to join up with a marketplace for freelance writers such as textbroker.com. Textbroker look like a nice professional outfit that I’d be happy to give a shot if only they accepted applicants from outside the US. They say they have plans to do so in the near future but for the moment their program is out of bounds for me but if you are in the States I suggest you give them a try and let me know how you get on.

The only other freelance writing jobs marketplaces I can find that might suit the bill are oDesk and Elance. Both look half way reasonable but the going rate for anyone willing to write for money looks to be pretty low from what I have seen. I think many people looking to get work done at these places are searching for someone who lives in a developing country who’s willing to work for under $8 a hour. Needless to say that kind of money isn’t exciting me.

At least at textbrokers you get paid dependent on the quality of your writing. Its not that I consider myself to be some sort of Shakespeare but I value my time more than many are willing to pay so I’m really going to have to do some digging to try and find writing jobs that pay something I’m willing to accept.

If anyone knows of an article writing marketplace similar to textbrokers where I can ply my well honed make money online and keyword aware writing skills from outside the USA then give me a shout and point me in the right direction. I’m also open to hearing about any other money making ideas that any of you may have, just leave a comment.

Monetize blog might sound like a strange name for a blog post but I’m trying to target that keyword phrase in this post so we’re going to have to make the most of a bad situation. I make no claims to be an expert in the art of making money from a blog but I am learning quite a bit as I go along so if you are a newbie to the world of Internet Marketing we might find something useful that you can apply to your own earn money online ventures.

So if you are looking to monetize blogs what are your options? I’ve only got experience with a couple of methods of making money with blogs so that’s what I’m going to talk about here and to be honest its all you need to get started. The thing is that you can choose to monetize your blog in a huge variety of ways but you’ll figure this stuff out for yourself as you go along and different needs crop up.

Deciding how to make money from your blog with regards to what monetization method to use pails into insignificance when compared to the important stuff such as choosing profitable keywords, search engine optimization through intelligent linkbuilding and ultimately getting the traffic which you can convert into cash. Get these things right then you can start having fun trying to work out which is the most profitable way to generate money.

Right off the bat most people who are trying to make money online from blogs or websites add Adsense to pages and hope that visitors will see something on one of the Adsense ads that catches their eye. If the visitor clicks on an ad Google will ship some money to your account. There are plenty of other similar advertising programs out there, if you are interested enough you can do your own research but Adsense is the daddy and the best place for to start.

Google Adsense has the advantages of being extremely easy to use and can be implemented successfully with a huge number of niches due to the number of advertisers who pay to have their ads displayed in the system.

Negatives of Adsense are that the Ads in some niches will pay you a very little per click so to make a lot of money you’ll have to get many visitors to your pages and get a good click through rate.

Affiliate Programs

Another way to monetize blog is to become an affiliate for one of the vast array of companies with products and services to sell who offer such possibilities. When you are doing affiliate marketing you are basically a partner of the retailer and work to promote their goods and services, you’re rewarded whenever you send a visitor to a site who goes on to make a purchase.

Obviously the affiliate system differs from Adsense due to the fact that your visitor actually has to buy something when they click on to someone else’s site. You get paid less often than with Adsense but have the potential to make more money as affiliate programs pay a percentage of the value of the sale. Work in a niche that concentrates on expensive products or services and you could make a living from a small amount of traffic in comparison to regular advertising programs.

Where To Find An Affiliate Program

Whenever I’m on the lookout for a company to partner up with for a particular niche I’ll simply go to Google and search for “My niche + affiliate” or “A particular product + affiliate” to see what comes up. You’ll usually find something that suits your site that you can push to your visitors. Of course, there is always the opportunity to become an amazon or Ebay affiliate. I’ve had some success with Amazon recently although many people moan about the small percentage you get from sales but for some niches it works well. I haven’t tried Ebay affiliates yet but plan to sign up for an account in the near future and give it a shot. I’ve heard good things about the Ebay Partner Network so I’ll report back when I get some experience.

Clickbank.com is another popular place to find products to sell to the “guests” on your niche blog or website. With high percentage payouts per sale you can make some great money using these products although some of them won’t sell well and many are of dubious quality. Still money is money in the battle to monetize blog.

If you were reading this post hoping to find the definitive guide to how to Make Money Online from blogging with various methods of monetization you may be disappointed I haven’t covered all the possibilities. But the reality is there are more important things you need to do to earn cash online than monetize blogs with the perfect advertising program or affiliate product. Work on the big stuff to get more traffic to your blog then you can worry about searching for the best way to make money from that traffic.

The truth is that this post was a bit of an experiment on my part to try and get a post to rank in the search engine results pages for the term “monetize blog”. I’ve tried to impart a little knowledge for anyone new to earning money online along the way so I hope you have found something useful. And if you found this post by typing the phrase “monetize your blog” or something similar into Google or some other search engine leave a comment and let me know so we can see if the experiment worked.

By the way I have installed the KeywordLuv and Dofollow plugin on this blog so if you leave a contextual comment you’ll get a free “dofollow” link back to your blog to help with your search engine optimization efforts. You can’t say any fairer than that!

Today I’m going to continue talking about the same subject I’ve been blogging about for the last couple of days, namely how to get backlinks. I’m going to change track a little though and look more in depth at why we need backlinks in the first place and their important to search engine optimization.

Why Do We Need To Get Backlinks?

If you’re trying to make money online then you need to either get traffic to whatever it is your trying to sell, or sell traffic to someone else that has a product or service they’re selling. If you’re attempting to make money with Adsense then you are basically just a middle man funneling traffic to other people with a product that needs buyers. So in the Internet marketing world traffic is money and those who have the most traffic are generally making the most money.

You might be struggling to see what relevance this has to the topic on hand but to get the most web site traffic we need to get our sites as high up on Google as possible because Google is the big boss when it comes to controlling Internet traffic. We need to convince the world’s best search engine that we are worthy of their respect in order that they will send us a nice steady stream of visitors for us to convert into cash in whatever way we choose. This is the game know as search engine optimization.

The battle to get to the top of Google is like a giant popularity contest where the most popular site gets to sit at the top of the Google castle and scoop up 40% of the traffic for a particular keyword. Backlinks are the key to the popularity contest in that they are the way that we collect votes in our favor from the rest of the Internet community. When someone with another blog or website links to your site they’re telling Google that they think you’re one of the coolest kids in school. Collect the most votes and Google is going to start taking notice of your site and send you to the top of the SERPs.

Another, equally important aspect of backlinks is their ability to signal to Google what your site is about. For example if I link to this site with the text Make Money Online than Google knows that this is a site about making money online and will take that into consideration when deciding where to put me in the search engines.

The words you use to link to your site is known as anchor text and its vitally important if you are to make the most of your backlinks that you take so much effort to find. A mistake that many beginners make when they are building backlinks to their domains is to use anchor text that bares no relation to the subject covered in the site.

If you leave comments in blogs for a backlink with your name as an anchor link what are you telling the search engines about your site that is of any value? Do you want Google to rank you highly for the word “George” or “Susan”? Probably not! At the same time using anchor text such as “click here” as a link to your site at the end of articles is a waste of your energy.

When getting friends to link back to this site I will get them to use anchor text such as “Make Money With Adsense”, “Make Money Online” and “Adsense Make Money” because thats one of the best ways to let the search engines know what subjects I’m covering. Hopefully it will also let them know that my site is respected for the content that covers that topic though if you’ve read much of my content you’ll realise that the respect is misplaced, but that’s another story.

So get into the habit of having all your back links to be keyword rich anchor text that is related to you blog. On that point make sure you mix the anchor text up or you might be penalized for Google bombing.

What Is Google Bombing?

Google bombing is a method of manipulating the search engine results by using a specific keyword relentlessly as your anchor text in order to get ranked highly for that word or phrase. Google has cottoned on to this practice and now punishes sites whose anchor text links look unnatural. The remedy for this is to vary your anchor text between a large number of related keywords for which you would like your site to rank. This is the reason that I don’t always use one specific keyword such as “make money with google” in the resource box of any articles I write.

Now you know the importance of being able to get links and making sure your anchor text backlinks are relevant to the subject of your content to further your SEO efforts. Next time I’m going to talk about another element of your links that is important and how to get yourself the very best quality backlinks available.