Someone wrote to me asking me to share any tips and tricks I know that might help him make more money from Google AdSense. He wrote:

I’m very frustrated. I’ve been trying to make money with Google adsense but can’t seem to make more than a few cents a day. I read where there’s people making thousands a day. If I could make thousands a day that would be great, but I don’t expect to make that kind of money. I get bummed out when I read about these people making that kind of money because I’m finishing most days with just a few cents. If I finish a day with more than a dollar it’s a good day for me which is obviously ridiculous. I want to know how I can at least come out with $25 - $50 a day. I figure if people are making thousands a day, twenty-five bucks can’t be that much to hope for. Any suggestions?

First of all let me say that I fully understand the frustrations of the gentleman who wrote to me, but as I wrote back to inform him, there are plenty of reliable sources on the web for AdSense tips and tricks compiled by individuals who have successfully utilized these tips and tricks. I do not consider it appropriate that I should attempt to give expert advice about something in which I do not have expert knowledge. Nevertheless I did share the details of my own personal experiences. I remember some time ago I was trying to figure out how to make more money as an AdSense publisher. While brainstorming, it occurred to me that the reason I was making so little money, was that the competition for keywords related to my site’s content was very small; and because the competition was small, the monetary value of a click amounted to pennies at the end of the day.

Before I began to ponder this mystery of why I was making next to nothing, I had no idea that there were people making a business out of building websites around competitive keywords for which they could potentially make upwards of $30 from one click. I had not built my websites for the purpose of capitalizing on Google AdSense. This is perhaps one of the key areas in which AdSense money makers differ from those of us who continually struggle to make a couple of bucks from the Google ads we publish on our websites.

Because we did not build our website with the idea in mind of using it to profit from Google AdSense, we did not factor in such considerations as whether our site was targeting high paying keywords or not. Google AdSense was just something we added as a possible way of monetizing our website. The site wasn’t built for the purpose of making money from Google.

As a former AdWords advertiser, I’m a little bit uncomfortable with the idea of having people building websites that specifically aim to make money off of me. However in those cases where an actual, useful website is built around a high paying keyword and the people who are clicking through are actually interested in the product/service they click through to get information about, everybody stands to win. The advertiser actually benefits by having other people doing his marketing for him indirectly, because the owner of the website has to get people to the website in fairly large numbers in order to turn clicks into thousands of dollars per day.

Admittedly, if you’re targeting keywords that pay $30 per click, you only need between 33 - 35 clicks per day to make yourself $1000 per day; and you can get that without needing a million page views per day. But its not quite so easy to become a grandmaster of the high paying AdSense keyword chess game. The average Adsense publisher isn’t someone who is in the business of playing Adsense Chess. Like the gentleman who wrote to me, most AdSense publishers are people with websites who just want to make a little extra on the side with Google ads. They didn’t come out trying to become Google AdSense millionaires. But the more they hear about people getting hundred-thousand-dollar checks from Google on a monthly basis, the more dissatisfied they become with having to wait 5-6 months before they manage to accumulate the requisite $100 in AdSense earnings that qualifies them to receive a check from Google.

If you already have a website and you find you’re not making very much money even though you’re getting a few clicks, the problem might be that your site’s content is not built around highly competitive keywords. This means that your AdSense earnings per click can be fractions of a penny to just a few pennies; so even if you are getting up to 100 clicks per day, you can still finish a day with under $3.00. Look at this chart that shows how 100 clicks can be profitable or not depending on the value of the keywords being targeted:

Getting 100 clicks per day, however, is not quite so easy for smaller publishers, many of whom can barely manage to get 100 visitors per day. If only 1% of your visitors can be expected to click on your Google ads, then with 100 visitors to your site per day, you’re looking at 1 click. The value of that 1 click will depend on the value of the keyword behind it. Certainly it’s possible for someone to make more from 1 click than someone else makes from 100 clicks. But you would need to be targeting high paying keywords if you hope to profit from a single click. If you’re bringing in less than 100 visitors per day and you hope to make money as a Google AdSense publisher, you probably need to start assessing the value of your website as far as Google sees it when analyzing your content to determine what ads to display. You want the ads to have as high a pay value as possible so that you can still make a few bucks even if you only get a few clicks per day. This next chart shows how 2 clicks per day can be profitable or not depending on the value of the keywords being targeted:

Obviously you can make money from AdSense a number of different ways. Which way will be effective for you will be dependent on factors unique to your situation. You might not be able to attract higher paying keywords based on your site content for example, and changing your content might not be possible. In that case you need more clicks to make more money, which means you need more traffic. Or maybe you have the traffic but you’re not getting the clicks, so your issue then becomes one of how to get your visitors to click on your ads, which shifts the discussion to placement and presentation of ads. For more in depth information and more qualified advice, I recommend this resource: Greywolf’s SEO Blog - Google Adsense Tips, Tricks, and Secrets