Income from AdSense

A common question people ask about AdSense is how much income from Adsense can I earn from my website or blog and what is the average income from AdSense. Giving a figure for the average income from AdSense would be misleading because of the wide range of types of sites but working out the potential income for a site once you know the typical number of visitors and the niche that the website or blog is in isn't difficult.

Let's look first at how you might work out what potential income from AdSense that a site might get.  The most important measure first of all is knowing what the typical number of visitors per day is to the site.

So let's assume for the moment that your blog or website attracts 100 visitors a day and that each visitor only views one page. This makes the maths very simple - we can now work out that the number of impressions per day is 100. ( Note that you can do this the other way round as well - if you know the impressions and the number of unique visitors then it is easy to work out the typical page views per visitor).

Ok so we are now at stage one in working out our typical income from AdSense for this site. 

The second step is to know how many of these impressions will typically result in a click on an AdSense advertisement. Advertisers used to get clickthrough rates ( CTR) on their ads of 3% and beyond but these rates have been dropping for some years as visitors have become ad-blind and ad-averse.  If we assume that you site isn't all ads but that it is fairly well optimised re ad placement then let's assume you get a click through rate of 1%.

So in working out your income from AdSense we now know that for every 100 page impressions you can expect about 1 click on a AdSense advert.

All we need now is to work out how much we get per click and we know what the income from AdSense will be for the website - right? Well yes and no. Three are  so many different niches and they don't all cost advertisers the same for their ads and as a result the money you get per click can vary widely between differentt niches.
Lets assume for the moment that you are in a niche were you are attracting ads that pay on average 10 cents per click.

If you serve 100 page impressions you can therefore expect an income of around 10 cents per day based on these figures.

This gives us pointers to key things that you need to do to improve your income from AdSense.

Increase the number of visitors to your site
Increase the number of pages seen per visitor
Find ways to increase the likelihood that people will click the ads ( increase click through rate or CTR)
Make sure your blog or niche is attracting well paying ads - by using content that triggers the best paying ads
Find a good niche

None of this is rocket science but it does take dedication and hard work to increase your income from AdSense to levels where you are getting a substantial income. It can be done though - thousands of webmasters and bloggers have made a great income from AdSense and there is no reason that you cant do it to.



One more thing - Many people stumble with Adsense and either earn very little or end up getting banned. If this happens to you then try one of the many other programs available for earning income from advertising. Look out some of the other posts on this blog where you will find information about different programs.

Affiliate Marketing if it aint fun dont do it

There are things in life that start out as great fun and after a while start to seem more like a chore. Affiliate marketing and making income from ads on a blog or website can be like that - if you are not careful.

Some people start a blog or a website solely to make money. If you are one of these people then good luck to you. I hope that your money making motivation carries you through the days when your interest in your website or your blog is dropping. Because it will drop, and you will need to remind yourself that it was all about making money and maybe that will keep you going.

Creating good quality content for a blog or website can be hard work. Don't get me wrong here - it's not slave labour or anything - but it does take effort. It's much easier to keep putting in this effort if your motivation is about more than just making money. It's much easier if you actually enjoy writing and you are genuinely interested in your subject.

This is why the fundamental advice to anyone just starting out is to develop a blog or website that reflects the things you are interested in or a subject you feel strongly about.

If you are running a blog you will need to produce content regularly and you are much more likely to be able to do this on a subject that you know and care something about.

When you write about something that interests you you will write with passion and you will make strong clear points that people will enjoy reading.

If the fun and interest goes from maintaining a particular blog or website then don't beat yourself up over this. It has happened to all of us. Leave that site for a while and ask yourself if you are truly writing about what interests you - then do it.

If you approach things this way then you are much more likely to build a solid blog or website. Do this and the money will flow and you will be still enjoying what you are doing in the future when your site is really earning money.

What is Niche Blogging?

What is niche blogging and why should you care anyway? Well, niche blogging is one of the ways to get your blog a focused stream of visitors and it is one of the ways that you can improve your income from blogging and income from ads on your blogs. It's simply about focusing your blogging onto a narrow subject range so that your blog does well in the search engine results.

Niche blogging is not right for every blog of course. Two of my other blogs for example are very wide in their scope. I blog about anything that takes my fancy on them. They get a good readership and I enjoy blogging on them. They even make me money.

Niche blogging though is about focusing the attention of a blog down to a narrower range of things. This blog for example is in the Internet marketing, publisher affiliate and advertising income niche. This blog is still fairly broad within that niche but it is still a niche blog.

Blogs can be focused even more narrowly on a niche of course. If I focused this blog solely on Affiliate programs for example this would be an even narrower niche. I could then go further and focus even more narrowly on one affiliate program.

The advantage of niche blogging is that you may stand a better chance of coming higher in the search engine results when someone searches for something to do with that particular niche. The visitors who come to your site will be very much the ones who are looking for information about that particular niche. This is of course helpful if your advertising inventory is also focused on that niche.

Personally I like narrowly focused niche blogs for their ability to get focused visitors. I do think they sometimes make it harder to get people interested in your blogging and involved in a "conversation". So. I use niche blogs but I also blog more widely on other blogs, including this one.

There is no doubt though that if you choose your niche carefully and match your niche with well selected Advertising inventory then niche blogging can be very rewarding.

This is why some people get obsessed with "high paying keywords" in their quest to maximise their income from adverts. If you know that keywords related to "insurance" for example pay a high rate per click in AdSense then it seems to make sense to make a niche blog about insurance.

The problem with this is that some niches are very crowded. Many people have thought of this before you have and even a narrow niche blog may struggle to get anywhere in the search results.

The secret, if you can really call it a secret, is to find a niche which is not crowded, and , very importantly one which you will enjoy writing about.

Put AdSense code in a Blogspot Blog

This is basic but it is something that many newbies scratch their heads about when they first get a blog and an AdSense account so here is a walk through on how to put AdSense into your blogspot blog.

First things first. You must have already signed up for a blogspot blog and have some posts on it with some reasonable content. Then you will have signed and been approved for AdSense. In AdSense you will have generated some AdSense code and now you are ready to put it into your blog. OK?


Well first of all you don't actually need to get the code from your AdSense log in.

There is a gadget that you can use in blogger that makes all this very easy. Go to the layout tab in your blog editor. Then look for the "page elements tab". You now see the layout of your blog in graphic form.

Click Add gadget and then look in the list for the AdSense gadget. Click on the + sign and a page comes up as shown in the picture. Choose the format ( size ) of the add that you want and the colors. If you haven't already linked your AdSense account you will need to give your identifying information and thats it. You save the gadget and make sure you have dragged it to somewhere on the page layout where there is room for the ad size that you have selected.

If you want to generate the code in your actual adsense account then you can also do it another way. Simply get the code then add a HTML gadget on your page elements page. When the HTML gadget is open paste the code into it. Save the gadget and you ads will show.

Blogger Buzz: Learn how to add an image to your blog's header

Someone asked me recently how to add an image to a blogspot blog header.

The basics of adding an image to your blogger blog header are really straightforward. You might use this to add a small logo to your Header for example or to add a background behind your blog Title and description. You could even replace the Title and description altogether and replace it with an Image. I wouldn't recommend this last approach though as it will reduce the ability of the search engines to find you and index you properly.

First - go into your Template tab and go to the Page Elements page. Click Edit on the Header element and you will see the option to add an image from your computer or the Internet. You can also choose to add the image behind the title and description or to replace the title and description. Make your selection save and that's it done. Simple.

Remember - if you are going to use a full image to go behind your Title and description - if your Title and description are in dark/black text then your image should be quite light in tone - otherwise your title text will not be readable.

There are some refinements that you can make to this process of adding an image to your header and when I get time I will update this post with some further information on this.


Blogger Buzz: Learn how to add an image to your blog's header

Adsense CPM is it important?

New Adsense users seem to get very worried about the eCPM figure varying for their sites or blogs. Usually all this worry about effective Cost per Thousand page impressions ( which is what eCPM is) is completely unnecessary and pointless - in particular when you are just starting out with your blog or website with Adsense on it.

Let see what eCPM actually is. eCPM is basically just a statistical tool that shows you what your effective earnings are per 1000 impressions. It does this based on your current rate of earning and assumes that this is typical. The result of this is that eCPM can vary quite a lot over time.

Also when the numbers of page impressions and the numbers of clicks and amount of earnings are relatively small these fluctuations tend to be wilder - this is just a consequence of the way this statistic works and is not something you should waste time worrying about.

Lets imagine that you have achieved 100 page impressions. You have earned 10 cents for these 100 impressions. This gives earnings per 1000 impressions (eCPM) of $1. eCPM =(earnings *100)/1000 (If you had 200 page impressions with 10c earnings then eCPM would be 50c.)

Note: That equation works if you are quoting earnings in cents ie 10c etc. If you are using earnings in dollars then its simply earnings/1000.

So each page impression that shows up new in your AdSense report is going to change your eCPM figure - the figure will fluctuate as page impressions and clicks come in at a varying rate over time. So short term variation to eCPM is not something to go grey haired about.

Over longer periods of time it can be worth thinking about the eCPM figure because it is more stable and reliable and is then telling you something about the effective earning capacity of those pages in relation to the amount of traffic that they get.

If you are still unclear then leave a comment below and I will try to help.

Page Impressions and Click Through

If you are new to Adsense it can be confusing at first trying to understand all the different terms that are used to describe things. It also takes time to understand what are the important things that you should be checking. In this post I want to say a little about page Page impressions and Click Through rate.

Whether you are just relying on your adsense reports to monitor your traffic or also using some form of logging software you will want to know about page impressions. This tells you how many times the page with your adsense ads has been loaded. Easy eh?

Now remember that each visitor may read one page or a few so you will also want to know how many unique visitors you have had. And if you know the number of page loads and the number of unique visitors then you know on average how many pages each visitor is reading. This helps you to understand if visitors are interested enough to explore your site looking for more information.

Click through rate tells you what percentage of your visitors clicked through on your ads. This is a very important measurement.

Consider two different sites lets call them Site A and Site B. I will make these examples simple to illustrate my point.

Site A - this site gets 1000 page impressions a week and has a click through rate of 1%
How many clicks do they get? 10 clicks.

Site B - this site gets 100 page impressions a week and has a click through rate of 10%
How many clicks? 10 clicks.

Now if both sites are earning roughly the same money per click then both sites earn the same amount of money but site B is earning this with only 10% of the page traffic!

Of course what you really want is to have site A's page impressions and site B's CRT! That would give you 100 clicks and ten times the earnings ( assuming you were earning the same per click.)

So keep an eye on your click through rate. use some of the advice on this site and make sure you have good relevant content. In later posts I will discuss what strategies you can use it improve your CTR.

Notes: New Adsense users often get overly concerned about variation in their CTR ( Click through rate) and in the CPM ( cost per thousand impressions) figures. It may be helpful to clarify a few points about this to save you some sleepless nights.

CTR
Variations in the CTR are quite normal. In particular the lower your number page impressions the more wildly your click through rate will vary from day to day. This is largely due to random fluctuations and is not a cause for concern. As you gain more visitors and more page impressions your click through rate will still vary but probably not over as great a range. If you are getting a CTR of 10 - 15% over a period of time this is a good result. A CTR less than this may indicate that you still have room to better optimize and target your site. But remember - dont make this judgment on the CTR for a day or two - measure it over at least a week AND with a reasonable number of page impressions.

CPM
The Cost per thousand impressions is another figure that new users get more worried about than is necessary. This is a guide figure only and gives an estimate of the payment per thousand impressions. It too can vary over time. Concentrate on the quality and targeting of your content and don't fret about this figure. Some of the Ads that Google serves you will be site targeted and will pay you by CPM. The earnings per page impression tend to be very low and for small numbers of page impressions the earnings are so small that they don't show up on your Adsense report. Don't worry though - they are being credited to you and will show up as additional small amounts on your earnings.

In summary - Pay attention to CTR over time because for most Adsense users Ad clicks will be your main source of earnings. Pay attention to the way you construct your content and make sure you optimize it. Make sure you optimize your ad placement , types and visualisation.

Remember your Blog basics

I thought a little mnemonic to help you remember some key points might be helpful. I am going to write a post in the near future on each of these points so it would be nice to see you back here. This should help you remember some key points as you blog.

"CONTENT IS KING"

C - Create great content
O - Optimize your site
N - Nourish your Niche
T - To write is to earn.
E - Engage your readers.
N - Never click your own links.
T - Tools tell all.

R - Regular posts pay.
U - Understand your readers.
L - Love Links.
E - Every Post shall have a Theme.
S - Shy bloggers stay poor.

Contextual Advertising 101

To really understand Adsense and how it can work for you on your content rich sites it is important that you understand a little about how Adsense works.

It isnt necessary to go into every technical detail and the basic concept is really very simple.

You as the "publisher" or the "webmaster" or the blogger are given an individualised java script which you place in your website. Every time the page with the Java script is accessed, the script "pulls" advertisements from the Adsense program. The software that runs the Adsense program examines the content on the web page and targets Ads that are related to that content.

The ads that are targeted therefore relate to the content on the web page serving the ad.
Now if a visitor clicks on an advertisement, the webmaster on whose page the ad appeared earns a portion of the money that the advertiser has paid to the search engine for the click.

Google handes all tracking and payments and so this is a very easy hassle free way for website owners and bloggers to display content-sensitive, targeted ads.

If the process was not automated this way you would have to find advertisers for your own site, negotiate their rates. collect funds from them, monitor clicks on their ads and check statistics - all at the same time you are trying to run your business or website.

Google acts as a "man in the middle". It offers the adsense program to website owners who get targeted ads served onto their pages which can earn them income when clicked by visitors. For the Advertisers Google runs the Adwords program and this allows the advertisers to design their own advertising campaigns and bid for adverts on websites and searches.

OK What is Adsense?

While there are other advertising programs available on the internet Googles Adsense is by far the best known and the easiest place to start for the website owner or blogger just starting out.

If you are running a website or a blog and you haven't yet considered using Adsense to generate income then now is the time to give this serious thought.

First I have to make sure that you are going to be realistic about what Adsense can do for you. You will see websites and adverts that promise you untold riches if only you will sign up to their particular scheme. Now these can be worth checking out if only to understand what your range of options are. There can be pitfalls to some of these though and I'll tell you about them later.

So theres a lot of things to look at look at in future posts but now just remember one thing - like anything else in this world you will only get out of your Adsense activities what you put into them. Sure you can earn income from Adsense and some people earn a very very good income. But you are not going to earn a significant income without putting some work in - even if it is in your spare hours.

In this Blog I hope to help you save yourself some time on the Adsense learning curve so that you will be up and running with your Adsense income quickly. Remember to bookmark this site so you can find it again easily for further tips. (Check the add to favourites link at the top right).

I guess you'll want to know how much money you can make from Adsense then?