Sunday, March 18, 2007

Adsense, Nonsense

After extensive and expensive research I can exclusively reveal the secrets of Adsense.

The secret is it makes Google a lot of money.

That's it.

It also seems to make some "internet marketeers" a fair wodge but after carefully reviewing their proposals it all comes down to getting people to click on adverts on your web page. Your chances of getting people to your web page in the first place are small to the point of non existence and the chances of a click on the ads once they get there even less so.

If you want to make some money go and get a job. Just don't build your hopes on the Internet and all those Get Rich Quick schemes. They don't work except of course for the authors.

Now I'm not saying that it doesn't work. Adwords, where you pay for keywords, are effective (ish). The secret is that you must appear at the top of the page or it's a complete waste of time. It's just another form of advertising and costs us around £40 per week. From this we might get a couple of sales per month.

As for Adsense, the number of clicks we get is pathetic. We have tried running ads for potentially useful information but it wouldn't pay for a pint.

I'm sure some people get lucky, but you probably won't be one of them.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Given your connections to Sage, you might find this interesting. There is apparently a successful AdSense business behind www.managemyaccounting.com and related sites owned by the same company.

The company will write articles for you, or teach you how to write them in such a way as to maximize traffic to your AsSense based website. Managemyaccounting.com seems to be a showcase for their techniques.

It's also were an article appeared that recommendes Sage software products over Microsoft Dynamics. The author has no real credentials as a software reviewer, and applied no methodolgy toward his "review". It just includes some of the right keywords to make it come up frequently in a search.

Yet, Sage US touts the article and the "expert" that wrote it on their www.sagemas.com website. You've got to be pretty desparate for positive press to call out an article like that. Now that's pathetic.

Anonymous said...

I don't know if it's your "schtick" to be curmudgeonly or what, but you've painted with such a broad brush here as to be quite inaccurate.

Adsense was designed to simplify ad sales for webmasters with good sites, but who hadn't had any success with standard affiliate programs.

I doubt that anyone at Google suspected that things would become quite as strange as they have. But, wherever there's a penny to be made, some idiot will throw together a system to try to cash in on it.

Some of your criticisms are justified. But if you remove the "get rich quick" thing, and step back to just being the webmaster of a site with compelling content...i.e., building sites for the "right" reasons, Adsense is a godsend. I'm nearing 4 years of involvement with the system, and it's been a huge benefit to myself and my family financially.

Your criticisms are better directed at the shysters...not at Adsense itself. It may not be the highest-paying deal out there, but for what it is, it's still very good.

andrewcsaky said...

You can make a living out of Adsense. The main problem is getting huge amount of traffic. I would say if you were getting around 10000 people a day you can make a full time living out of it. I recently put ads on a game site (Slingshot Games) which brings in around 1000 people a day and its not 'making a living money' but still a nice amount. My advise to people out there who wants to make a buck out of Adsense is to do what ever you can do to increase traffic to your site/blog. I recently started a blog on this topic which is
http://learnwithandy.blogspot.com/

Check it out if you want