Is Adsense Any Good?

Someone emailed me the other day and said:

"Dominic, How much Adsense revenue do you make...is it loads?"

This is my reply:

"Adsense and money are the two most hyped things on the Internet. Many ebooks will tell you many things, but Adsense will only make you a significant amount of money if you do 3 things:

1- have more than 5 websites/ blogs,

2- talk about the right keywords. Real Estate, Insurance, Diet, Casinos and finance are the best, outright. $2/ click for insurance is pretty good going.

3- Traffic- without traffic you get no money. If you have 10 people/ day you will make nothing on Adsense, if you have 4,000 then you will get a couple of dollars, say $4. If you have 10 sites- $40/day. "

Now Adsense in itself is quite good however there are some major problems that we can't do anything about:

1. Once someone clicks through the link, they are probably lost for good. If only you could get an affiliate link for that ad, but Google doesn't say which specific ads are better than others.

2. Unless you have the three main Google Needs you are not going to make that much money. this is especially so if you have a music site. Music and Google Ads are notoriously low paid especially when you compare it to marketing or ebooks. The only good ads are those to do with MP3s...nothing more.

3. You have to test and retest ads. This is great if you are getting a $20 comission through an affiliate link, but for 80c?

So when I made the 20 BluePrints ebook that is what I wanted to dispell. I don't believe Adsense is going to bring in the vast amounts of cash that people want. Sure you will get enough money through the year to pay for hosting (as long as you have the traffic to do so) but that is it.

I would like my visitors to be enjoyed by the experience of my site. Once they click away without saving your site off- are they going to come back?

Is Adsense actually any good once we look at it from that perspective?

If our site is not constantly updated and evolving visitors won't come back. So the one customer who clicks our adsense link will they come back? No, because they have found the information that they want, through a 50c ad.

Do you know what annoys me more? The company is probably going to make $20 on that 50c link. I have used Adsense from a business perspective and it is great. Steal customers from a competative site and make your money.

The people who advercate Adsense are the people who set up sites to actually optimise Adsense money, Google and the companies out there that actually make the Ads, why would they want to shoot down the cash cow?

For the site that actually wants to increase knowledge among the web, those that make their site a cool hobby...you are getting suckered into a win - loose game.

The answer?

1. Get your own products up and going and then advertise them.
2. See which adsense blovks are working and set up a separate site that houses information on those terms.

Keep potential customers at your site, and keep the ads away.