How To Make Money With Google AdSense

Making money with Google AdSense seems like a simple thing to do. Create a website, put some advertising on, and wait for the clicks and money to start rolling in.

Unfortunately it does not work this way. Most people do not make money. The reason is that they do not understand how AdSense works. Things are never as simple as they seem – this also applies to AdSense.

The key to Google AdSense is this: Get visitors to leave your site by clicking Ads. This seems obvious but it is not. The reason is that it goes against everything most webmasters have been taught and believe to be good website design practice.

General practice and understanding of a good website is that it is well designed, pretty, and has good content. Make the visit pleasurable for the visitor: nice graphics, easy navigation, and interesting content. Make sure the visitor comes back: frequent updates, big RSS button, subscriptions to a newsletter, etc.

But if you want to make money with AdSense then the above is all wrong. Actually it is the opposite of what you should be doing.

Standard thinking is that you want people to stay on your website as long as possible. That is why you try to make it a pleasurable experience. With AdSense the idea is to get them off your website. You want them to not have a pleasurable experience, to not be wowed by your pretty website, to not be reading your content, to not be subscribing. You want them to leave by clicking on an Ad.

To make money with AdSense you need to completely change your thinking. Instead of thinking about how to get your visitors to stay, think about how to get them to leave by clicking ads.

Here is a table showing the change of thinking required to make money with AdSense:

Change Your Thinking For Google AdSense

	Standard Thinking (Please your visitors so that they stay)	AdSense Thinking (Frustrate your visitors so that they leave by clicking on Ads)
Website Design	Well designed site that is pleasing to the eye. Good contrast between text and background, easy navigation, bells and whistles that attract the visitor.	Poorly designed site. Difficult to navigate and hard to read the text. Nothing catches the visitors' attention. The only thing that stands out is the ads. The visitor is confused and does not want to read your yellow on green background text. They want to leave so they click an Ad.
Build A Community	Be kind to your visitors. Answer emails, ask them to subscribe and send them pleasant updates. Have a big RSS button to encourage people to return. Have lots of online friends and encourage them to visit your website.	Return visitors do not click on ads. They come to see how you are doing and to read your content. You do not need return visitors or a community. For AdSense the best types of visitors are from search engines – targeted traffic that has never been to your site before.
Content	Well written and interesting. Short paragraphs, lists, headers. Everything possible to keep the visitor reading your content.	Long paragraphs, no spaces between paragraphs, no headers. You want the visitor to see your content and instantly not want to read it. Get their eye of your content and get it on the ads.
SEO	Do not focus on SEO, focus on your readers. Write good content that people want to read.	You do not want people to read your content. You want them to click on an ad. You must focus on SEO because it is search engines that bring the targeted traffic that clicks on ads. To increase search engine traffic you need to write content with SEO as your focus. Better SEO content means more search engine traffic.
Blend the Ads	Blend the ads into the website. Have the background and fore color of the ads the same as the website. The visitor should believe the ads are integrated into the website. The ads should not distract from the main content of the website.	Make the ads stick out. The first thing the visitor should notice is the ads. The ads should be convenient way for your visitors to leave your website. Ads should be a big red shiny abort button for the visitor to press to get off your website.
Visitor's Experience	An eye pleasing, entertaining, and engrossing experience. Visitors keep coming back for your great content.	The second they land on your site they hate it. They want out. They do not like the appearance, the navigation, or the few lines of content they started reading. They want to get off your site the easiest way possible.
Bounce Rate	The lower the bounce rate the better. You want people to go through every page of your website reading everything.	100% bounce rate. Everybody that comes to your website should bounce off via an ad.

The Ideal Scenario For AdSense

To understand how AdSense works lets go through an ideal scenario. For this example lets imagine that you have a website dealing with impotency in men and a guy named Bob is a typical Internet user.

Bob has just finished a successful first date – everything went really well. So well, that he is lying in bed with his eager date. Unfortunately, to Bob's horror, a certain body organ is not working like it should.
Bob jumps out of bed and runs to the computer. He does a search for, 'how to prevent impotency'. He clicks on the first search result which is your website.
Bob is in a hurry. He lands on your site. He is quickly frustrated because your website design is confusing and the font colors are poorly contrasted with the background. But then in the top center of the page he sees a big white box with text in bright orange colors stating, 'Get Rid Of Male Impotency Now'. Frustrated with your site and looking for a quick solution to his problem Bob clicks on the ad.

The point of an AdSense website is to be the middle man between the search engine and the product the Internet user is looking for (the websites of your ads).

For Bob the best thing would be for the 'Get Rid Of Impotency Now' link to appear as the first result in the search engine. But thanks to all your SEO work your site is the first result instead of the product website. So Bob lands on your page first. Now it is your job to get him to the webpage that answers his question. Make the advertisement clearly visible and easy for him to click - help him ignore your website content and focus on the ad. When Bob spots your ad and clicks on it everybody is happy. Bob is happy because he got his answer, you are happy because you make money.

To make money with Adsense you need to make it easy for your visitors to click on ads. Do not distract the visitor with a pretty website and good content. Focus their attention on your ads.

The Paradox – Getting Search Engine Traffic and Having An AdSense Website

To make money with AdSense you need visitors to leave your website via an ad. This means that contrary to popular belief, instead of having a well designed and good content website that encourages visitors to stay, you should have website that encourages people to leave.

Simple enough. But here is the problem (isn't there always).

Notice that in the ideal situation presented above, when Bob does a search your website comes up first in the search results. This is a very important point because the most important aspects of making money with Adsense are:

Visitors clicking Ads
Visitors arriving to your site via search engines

Like Bob, you want visitors coming from a search engine looking for an answer to a problem. AdSense works best with search engine traffic because these are visitors looking for a solution to a problem. And they want the solution fast. Like Bob they have a problem that needs to be solved fast. Bob does not want to spend hours browsing your website admiring all the pretty graphics, subscribing to your RSS feed and contemplating the beautiful metaphors in your 3000 word pages. Bob, and search engine traffic want information that is quick and easy - information you provide by showing ads that solve their problem.

Compare this to traffic from Digg or Facebook (Social traffic). Social traffic is completely useless for ad clicks. They arrive at your site looking for nothing specific. Most people coming from Facebook do not have impotency problems so they are not going to click on your ads – they are just going to hit the back button and leave.

You need search engine traffic. And to get search engine traffic you need to be at the top of search engine results.

Here is the problem:

To make money with AdSense you need search engine traffic.
To get search engine traffic you need to be on the top of search engine results.
To be at the top of search engine results you need backlinks.
Paradox: To get backlinks you need a pretty website with good content.

So far I have been arguing that to you need a website that drives your visitors away. But to get search engine traffic you need a well designed and good content website so that other websites backlink to it. Because without the backlinks you will not be at the top of search engine results.

The paradox is that you need a well designed and good content website for backlinks and you need a website designed to encourage visitors to click on ads.

These are two completely different types of websites:

	Good Site Design And Content	Poor Site Design Site and Content
1	Visitor like the website and content.	Visitors want to leave your website.
2	Visitors Backlink to your website.	Nobody backlinks to your website.
3	With lots of backlinks you will rank high in search results.	No ranking in search results.
4	Ranking high in search results will lead to lots of search engine traffic.	No traffic from search engines.
5	Visitors will not click on ads because they will be too busy admiring your website design and reading your content.	Search engine visitors would click on ads if they came to your website. But since you do not have any backlinks your website does not show up on search engines and thus no traffic.

If you want to make money with AdSense you need to find a way out of this paradox.

Solutions to the AdSense Paradox

Solution 1 – Create Your Own Backlinks

The first solution is simple. Create a website tailored for AdSense and then create your own backlinks. Nobody is going to backlink to your website so you do it yourself.

Open an account on any of the online blogging platforms like Blogspot or Typepad. Then create a blog with a few post and backlink to your AdSense website. Create 20 blogs and you have 20 backlinks.

Or you can join link exchanges. The idea is that you exchange links with other websites. The trick is that you do not do a direct exchange. Because search engines ignore direct link exchanges you do indirect link exchanges. For example, you place a link from website A on your website, Website A places a link from website B on their website, and finally Website C places your link on their website. This way every website has a one way backlink – search engines love that.

Using these types of methods you do not need to rely on other peoples' backlinks to your website. Your website can be the most useless and ugliest website but search engines will love it because it has a lot of backlinks that you generated.

Many people use this approach. But is has a major drawback. This approach is cheating the system. It tricks the search engines into thinking that people find your website interesting and good. Search engines do not know that you are the one creating the backlinks – they assume the backlinks are from other websites not owned by you.

Search engines do not like being tricked because then they dole out crappy website to their users. So search engines do not want people creating their own backlinks in this manner. So if they find out you are doing it they will penalize you by being removed from the search results. If this happens to you then you are suddenly making no money.

The problem with this solution is that it is temporary. Sooner or later you will lose. With this solution you are like the mafia. You make lots of money, but only for a short time. It is only a matter of time before the FBI come knocking on your door. You have to sleep with one eye open, always worried that today is the day that it all ends. Every time the doorbell rings sweat forms on your forehead.

Google is the FBI. They want you to follow the rules of the game. Their billion dollar business is based on their search engine returning good results to the users. They are always on the hunt for anybody trying to cheat the system. Maybe not today, or tomorrow, or in a week, but sooner or later they will come crashing through your door and seize everything. You do not go to jail – but you do lose all your search engine traffic. Busted.

Also, although this is a lesser point, it should be mentioned. By creating your own backlinks you are degrading the overall value of the Internet users' experience. By creating your own backlinks you are forcing people to end up on your page even when it is not in their best interest. Search engine users want to land on pages that are truly reputable and have good information - they do not want to land on your page because you made a lot of your own backlinks. Think about how you are affecting the users' experience – poor Bob, in his state of emergency, has to land on your site first wasting valuable time. He does not want to land on your site because you successfully created a lot of backlinks. He wants to go to the source of the best information as quickly as possible. You probably do not care about Bob and his plight, but I had to mention it – creating your own backlinks by cheating is not good for Bob.

As you can probably tell I am against this solution to the AdSense paradox. I like playing by the rules and do not like to risk loosing everything if caught. I do not force backlinks to this website. I do the standard stuff like guest posts and article submission to create backlinks, but do not go as far as creating other websites, or link exchanges, for the purpose of generating backlinks.

Solution 2 – My Solution To The AdSense Paradox

If you do not like solution one because you want to play by the rules then you will have to come up with your own creative solution to the paradox.

As a suggestion I will tell you how I solved the AdSense paradox for this website.

This website in broken up into two main sections. There is the blog and there is the website. The blog is my backlink generator and the website is my AdSense earner.

The blog has no advertisements. It is simply good and interesting content written to please visitors. The blog is designed following all the standard good website design rules: good content, interesting, SEO is ignored, pretty pictures, good navigation, RSS feed etc. The hope is that they stay on the blog a long time, read all the posts and occasionally backlink to the website.

The website section, on the other hand, is designed to encourage clicks. Pages have advertisements, the articles are written with SEO in mind, and most articles are long to discourage people from reading the content. The focus is placed on the ads and not on the content.

Of course, not all of the pages are AdSense optimized, only a few. I mix people oriented pages with AdSense orientated pages. Overall I want this to be a quality, good content website. But that does not mean that I cannot have a few pages optimized for AdSense – after all, I want to make money with AdSense.

This page is a perfect example of an AdSense oriented page. The hope is that when somebody does a search for 'How to make money with Adsense' they land on this page. Seeing how long this article is they instead click on one of the conveniently placed 'Make $500/day with AdSense' ads. I lose a visitor but make money.

By using this two section approach I have both the backlinks required to get ranked high on search engine results and the AdSense optimized pages to get the clicks.

Conclusion – A Balance Between AdSense And Good Content

Google wants you to have a well designed, good content, website. By following their rules you will receive lots of traffic. So if you want to make money with AdSense for the long run you better do what Google tells you to do. But you also need to keep in mind that for AdSense to make money you need people to leave your site via ads.

Find a balance. Overall have a great website by providing value to your visitors. But do not forget that you are not doing it for charity. You want to make money with Google AdSense. Have pages on your website that focus on the ads – your money pages. For these pages you need to change your thinking. On these pages you want your visitors to leave your website by clicking ads – make it easy for them.

Of course the best place to get tips on how to use AdSense is AdSense.

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