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If you are looking for opportunities to make money on the Internet, you have probably run into the phrase “Google Adsense” a zillion times. In one of my previous articles I actually advised readers to consider Google Adsense as a legitimate source of income, rather than affiliate programs, based on my own experience (Click here) The real question remains: is Google Adsense for you and is it worth the trouble? In your search for information on business opportunities you have probably seen numerous rags to riches claims; you know, the ads saying “I make $4,000 on Adsense weekly” or “I make too much money on Adsense”, etc. These are basically hype. They are the modern day equivalent of the ancient newspaper ads “make money stuffing envelopes”. You are extremely unlikely to make a substantial amount of money on Adsense, unless you work on your website fulltime, and have the means of adding a lot of content on a daily basis. If you do this part time, come down to Earth, please. Bottom line, there are companies/sites who are making money with Adsense.

For starters, Google is, and lots of it! Nothing wrong with that, they are in business to make money, after all. Remember that Google does not disclose how much commission the company pays publishers, which incidentally, is entirely and indisputably their prerogative. It might not strike at something extremely nice to some, but that is their right, plus, they are not putting a gun on anyone’s head to sign up for their system. You do it if you want, under the provided terms. Remember that Google is a private company, so there is no such a thing as “entitlement” in your relations to the company. Next the large publishers are also making money, those that have huge amounts of traffic on a single site. We are talking about 100,000 to over 1,000,000 page impressions a day. These are not your regular Joes.

Huge traffic and return visitors will definitely result in greater Adsense payouts, although, again there is no guarantee. If your website gets a few thousand visits a day, you are likely to make tops $200.00 on Adsense. Let’s put it this way, you will not buy a summer home on adsense income, if your single site does not have a lot of content and traffic. Then, there are companies out there that literally have hundreds to thousands of websites, and they might make a nice amount of money on adsense by multiplying $100.00/$50.00 payout-a-site a month for hundreds of sites. These are normally not very good sites, use doorways (which Google and other search engines does not like for ranking as well) and some of these companies/individuals get kicked out of the program. It is pretty much impossible for an individual to run or put together thousands of websites, after all the day still has 24 hours.

Let us say you are reasonable and do not intend to get rich from this, but set a target $2,000.00 a month? Is it doable? Yes, but very hard, I am afraid to say. First of all, you have to design a website(or websites) that complies with all google design guidelines, or else, you might not only be removed from the program, but also have your site altogether delisted. But that is the subject for another article. This means that you have to use extreme care in attempting to increase your traffic: there are tons of unscrupulous SEO companies out there who will promise you all types of things that might raise your ranking for a very short while, then actually cause your site to be delisted, so watch out for that. If the German BMW (bmw.de) site has been recently delisted, believe me, it can happen to you as well. The fact that you are in the adsense network will not prevent Google from delisting you, in fact, might be an additional reason.

So let’s say your area of expertise is fixing teddy bear noses, and you decide that is how you are going to make money on adsense, with a website on that subject. Sorry to say, no matter how much content you include on this matter, you are likely to make cents a month, if at all. Even if you write a website on celebrities like Britney Spears, you might be surprised to find out that celebrities keywords pay very little, plus you are likely to be ranked 100,000th by this stage of the game. Therefore, ideally your subject matter should generate high paying keywords, and you might have trouble coming up with enough content to fill up such a site. Actually finding out which are the most expensive keywords is not that difficult: the trouble is putting together sites that will have content which will generate high commission ads and which are considered relevant content by Google. Again, you must be very careful, as Google might actually consider that your site exists for the single purpose of generating adsense clicks, and kick you out of the program and delist your site! Google seems to change every once in a while their criteria, so what is OK today might be grounds for your removal at a latter date.

Even if you do design a relevant site, with a subject matter that relates to expensive keywords, I am afraid the displayed ads are left to the discretion of the google adsense algorithm. I have examined thousands of my pages, in different days, times, etc., and realize that the adsense program often places ads that have nothing whatsoever to do with my site’s or page’s content, sometimes even in languages that are not used on my websites. You should remember that a lot of people sign up for Adwords targeting sites, rather than keywords, and they might decide that your site is good bet for them, although their subject matter is totally distinct from your content. This is often the case with dating services, that plague the internet. The paradigm for ad payment is different for them: the advertisers first pay for 1000 impressions, then for clicks, whereas regular Keyword targeted advertisers pay only for clicks generated on his/her ads. In my experience, the site targeting campaigns generate very little in terms of clicks. By this point you get the drift that making thousands, much less millions with adsense is not that easy.

The real key, I suppose, is that adsense cannot be your site’s single source of income, or for that matter, the site’s “reason for existing”. In fact, it might be downright dangerous for you to exclusively rely on adsense for income, for the very fact that ranking/listing paradigms are changing all the time, and one day, out of nothing, you realize your site with 10,000 content pages has been delisted by google. It happens (just ask bmw.de), and getting it listed again might not be easy. Then what do you do? Let’s face it. It works like this: you have to have your site well positioned in google, to get traffic to begin with, and then hope somebody will click on an ad displayed on your site, so you can make a few cents, and they leave your site. Unless you have a very good standing and returning audience already, your whole structure might be too fragile, God forbid Google delists your site! You see, it is more likely Google that got you a visitor in the first place! So there is a danger, a big danger investing a whole lot of time, and maybe even money, on a business plan that relies heavily on Google adsense income. Unless you are absolutely sure that your site is 100% compliant with the company’s policy, which incidentally is amended all the time, and continue to check it all the time. Last, but not least, once you put the adsense javascript on your site, you no longer have full control over your content/links. It might direct your visitors to competitors or to content you might consider objectionable. Let us say you have an article on dentistry, use the word “oral” and a couple of lines down, for whatever reason, you use that famous 3-letter word that starts with an “s” and ends with an “x”, and has an “e” in the middle. You might be shocked in finding out what type of ads the algorithm might pick up. If your have a religious content site, you might be frustrated to find that displayed ads might be from organizations whose doctrines you strongly oppose. Sure, there is a “competitive filter” in the adsense sign up, but so far you can only block individual sites, not keywords, topics or terms, and even that is limited to 200 items. Plus you have to constantly examine your pages to ensure your site is not pointing to sites promoting causes you might be disputing. You might consider this article a bummer, but in fact it is not. Get your expectations down a notch, don’t become another traffic neurotic, who spends inordinate amounts of money and time in the hope of making millions, because this is not going to happen. CONCLUSION: If you have enough sense, the adsense program will work for you, under a reasonable basis. If not, it might only be a source of frustration and expenditure.