There are many posts online of webmasters and bloggers complaining about the Adsense program. Many of them claim that there is little to no money generated in using this form of advertising to monetize their website.
I have a difference of opinion. The individuals who make those statements, and there are a lot of them, have just not figured it out yet. They have not figured out how to make Google adsense revenue and therefore assume nobody has.
Keep in mind that the people who make these statements usually have great websites. Like my friend, who owns a blog about music, they put hours into their site and think that making a great website and sticking adsense on it is all that is or should be necessary.
It is not and the following are the fifty common reasons why people fail to make any significant amount of
adsense revenue in their life:
- Keyword(s) website is about has little to no volume
- Keyword(s) website is about have tons of searches but costs per click are worth very little (5-10 cents a click)
- Picking keywords that are extremely competitive
- Blog is just about general topics and not about a specific niche or industry
- Magazine type theme used
- Way too many images on a blog (Visitors distracted too much)
- Content is not engaging at all
- Website loads slow
- No traffic coming to website
- Hundreds of hours spent trying to make website or blog look “perfect” but not building traffic or links
- Website does not have enough back links
- Back links not on other websites in the same niche
- Spam or porn links built
- Any use of buying links (directly or using a text link broker)
- Links artificially built too quick
- No variance of the anchor text in links even if they are good
- Always researching SEO and traffic building but never actually doing them
- Not putting in enough hours of work on a website
- Looking for a quick fix instead of steady growth
- Putting all eggs in one basket and not diversifying (Multiple websites in different niches is suggested)
- Your blog or static HTML static website is not content rich
- High rankings in Yahoo or Bing (MSN) but no high rankings on Google
- Not using your targeted keyword or phrase enough in your URL, title, and content
- Using your keyword or phrase too much so that your website reads and looks like spam
- No networking skills (Like a real business successful bloggers know how to network with their peers)
- Subject not researched at all
- No investment in crucial tools
- The use of black hat techniques
- No desire to write ( You will need to do A LOT of writing to make decent adsense revenue).
- No investing time and money in educating yourself about search engine optimization which you will need to build traffic
- Not blending the background and border of your adsense ad block with your background
- Not making the text link and URL of your adsense ads match your overall website
- Failure to at least TRY to use the best adsense ad block which many bloggers testify, including myself, works the best
- Not following the Google Heat Map to make the maximum amount of revenue and instead trying to re-invent the wheel
- Thinking they can “beat” Google instead of operating ,though creatively, within their rules.
- Believing link exchanges do not hold any value (Many people will debate this but I am a firm believer in them)
- Failure to actively look for websites where you can do a guest post to become an authority within your niche
- Not participating in forums within your niche.
- Failure to work on your website on a routine basis. (Make no mistake, the people who make the most amount of adsense revenue have put in 100s of hours of work in before they collected their first check for $100.)
- Being obsessed with a “pretty” website instead of a simplistic yet informative site.
- Making a website that is not properly optimized with meta tags, 150 words on each page, proper keyword density, and clean coding according to W3C standards. Your home URL should also be easily navigational to any page on your website within two clicks.
- Failure to use social media outlets like Hubpages or Squiddo to not only get a nice profile of back links but exposure
- No patience (Sorry people but making great money with Google adsense takes work and time)
- Becoming obsessed with Google “PR” instead of relevancy
- Not exploiting experts and asking for advice from people who know more than you
- Not linking out to good websites (Understand that the internet was first designed for people to navigate to one page to the other via back links and not with the help of search engines
- No privacy policy page
- No channel testing
- Your adsense account is smart priced therefore severely decreasing how much you get paid per valid click from your website.
- The majority of your traffic is not coming from search engines, namely Google.
*If any one has any other reasons why moderate to fantastic passive adsense income evades many people please comment and tell me what it is so I can add it.
I recently wrote this post after reading an excellent post by Eric Ward talking about “
what makes a website link worthy.” This is an excellent read for anyone looking to make any sort of revenue with Google.
Over the past four months I personally have started shifting my mind over to thinking like the big G thinks. This may seem like a weird statement to say but I firmly believe that understanding the corporation that is actually paying us will help us make more money. You can go against the grain or go with it. I will tell you that it is easier to go with it.
When I first started doing SEO and internet marketing I was big into the following:
- link exchanges
- article writing
- niche directory submissions
As time moved on I still did the previous three things but got more into:
- guest posting
- social media
- utilizing 2.0 properties
Now, I still use all of those techniques but I am heading to creating great:
- viral marketing programs
- link bait
As you can see I am moving to creating great interactive sites that people cannot help but link to. You start making hundreds of thousands when you get good at making web pages that linked to naturally instead of you, the webmaster, always having to hunt for them.
It is not easy at first and that is why you should start with the basics.
Create great content and tell people about it. Period.