Getting Paid Through Online Advertising

The most common way of getting income through advertising is with Google Adsense, but it’s not one we recommend. A couple of years ago Google split its advertising fees (Google Adwords) between ‘search’ and ‘content’ advertising, the first for Google’s search page and the second for sites with Adsense.

The fees Google charges for Adsense ads have gone way down, meaning you have to have tons of traffic that click on Adsense ads to make any money – and I mean TONS of traffic. You would do better to charge fees to advertisers directly for space on your site or blog.

For example, let’s say you have a site on dog training with Google Adsense. Someone selling dog food can use content ads, even picking your specific site for their ads, and be charged 10 or 15 cents per click. Of that, you get less than a nickel per click.

That means to make $1000 you need 20,000 click-throughs, which at a relatively high click-throughs rate of 3% means you would make $1000 for every 666,666 visitors. A more realistic CTR of 2% means $1000 for every MILLION visitors.

As I said, we don’t recommend Google Adsense.

Another option is to solicit paid ads directly from online sellers. You can have them pay per ad or pay per lead (click-throughs). So, let’s say you charge $40/month for an ad on your site/blog and another $20/month for an ad in your weekly newsletter and you find 7 advertisers. That’s $420/month or around $5000/year from one site. It beats trying to get 5 million visitors a year through Google Adsense.

As your number of site visitors and mail list recipients increases you can charge more for advertising, and/or create more sites.

Advertising can work as a sideline to products, even affiliate products, on your site, but I’ve found that after all the work to get a visitor to one of my sites, I don’t want them clicking away from it unless I make more than a nickel.