Making Money Online... not

Make money online - easy advert website? Not!!

The other way of making money is to be the publisher himself. You put the Google ads on your website, which is no effort at all. It requires no effort to run. If somebody clicks on your advert, you earn a few cents. Hooray! Problem? You need a website. One with traffic. This requires much knowledge and cunning about search engine optimisation, and also requires that you write a heck of a lot of content. If you are doing a website about something you know and are passionate about, this is not too difficult. However, if it is a popular topic, there are doubtless lots of people out there with existing websites on the subject. It becomes difficult or impossible to deflect traffic from their websites and have people visit yours instead. If your website is about something very obscure, you may well get a large percentage of the available traffic, but this traffic level is quite small. Even if you get 1000 visitors per day to your website, you're not going to make much more than $10 a day out of the Google advertising programs. Mind you, that is still over $3000 a year.

But making a new website that attracts 1000 visitors a day is VERY hard. It requires a LOT of content to be written, and it requires a lot of search engine optimisation. Like other money making schemes, only the top percentage of the clever people make the majority of the money. In most cases people will get bored trying to make a website that attracts the level of traffic needed to make more than a dollar or two a day. Mind you, a dollar or two a day is not to be sniffed at, it could by you dinner out once a month or something. If you have something you can write good content about, it is worth doing for some extra pocket change. Even if each page earns you a doller or two a month (not unreasonable), if you manage to turn out 3 pages a week, after a year you will have over $200 a month coming in. You are not going to retire on it, but it is useful money. You should also note that Google does not like people making websites solely to host adverts. They get angry. Google mustn't be made angry. Your website must have original, useful content that contributes to the internet as whole. That must be your main focus. The money making side of it is just a neat extra.

Actually, there are a number of policies put in place by Google to keep things fair. By sticking to these policies religiously, Google ensures fair operation of the Adsense and adwords system, and thus maintains its own survival.

• Don't ever, ever click on your adverts on your own pages, or encourage friends or relations to do so. Google is very very good a spotting false clicks.
• Don't do anything to draw attention to the ads on your pages
• Don't try and be sneaky. Go and read the policies on Google's websites and abide by both the letter of the law, and the spirit of the policies.
• The list goes on!

Getting those links and pageranks

The difficulty with getting a successful website is down to how Google works. As well has having the right words in the right quantites in your content, you must demonstrate to the Google algorithms that your website is popular and useful. The only way to do this is have links to your website from other people's websites. These "inbound links" boost your "Google popularity ranking" - known as pagerank. The more targetted your content and the higher your pagerank, the higher you appear in the search engine results, and the more visitors you get. As an extra twist, Google rates your inbound links based on how popular the refering page itself is! A hundred inbound links from Pagerank Zero websites is not worth much. One inbound link from a high pagerank site (eg 6+) is worth infinitely more. However, you can only get those links in one way. By having great original content that people want to read. If this is the case, then links to your website will appear organically over time. If your website is good, then you can also ask the webmasters (via email) of higher ranking pages to add a link to your site from their site. You can do this if you have a pants website... but most webmasters will ignore you.

In fact, getting "inorganic" links is even harder than I am suggesting. If you have great content, you can ask other webmasters to host a link to your site. First of all, about 1/4 of them will give an outright "no" if your site hosts any kind of advertising. Probably half of the remainder will just ignore, or miss yor email. You will then find a few that do say yes. However, if you go back and look at their links pages a few weeks later, they've forgotton all about their promise. A good trick at this point is to click on some of their links and find one or two that are broken, and write and tell them about these broken links.

Another, often overlooked, issue with Adsense on websites is the time delay. The pubisher accumulates clicks during the course of a month. At the end of the month, assuming you have more than $100, Google starts its payment cycle. However, your cheque for earnings in Month One will not turn up until mid way through Month Three. In addition to this, if you add new content to your website, it may well take a month before Google spiders your pages and adds your content to its index. So, if I had good content to my website today, it can be 4 months before I physically bank earnings from that page. Mind you, if you get into the habit of creating new content regularly, then, once you get 4 months in, this delay is less of an issue.

There are many scams surrounding adsense and adwords - and none of them are likely to make you any money. There are also a lot of scams and ploys for artificially boosting your pagerank. Most of these will not work in the long run. The Google advertising system will most strongly reward good, solid, honest websites that are rich on unique content. You cannot beat the Google advertising system, Google is far cleverer than all of us.

Or, to put it another way, if Google could be easily beaten, then Google would not be the success that it is. Google works very hard to stop people beating it, because it's continued existence relies on nobody fooling it.

On to Surveys and Banners

Or consider the Failure of adwords to generate Adsense income