Adsense - How Much to Spend?
I got this question from Steve the other day. It’s about Adsense. Now, I am not an expert in Adsense, but I try my best to help him with this.
And maybe you can learn something too …
QUESTION:
Can you tell me how much I should be prepared to spend (USD), for a beginning Adsense site, before it returns to my account? I mean, do I need 20 domain names and twenty hosting programs and money for advertising, or just what do I need?
ANSWER:
Again, I am no Adsense expert. While I make some money with Adsense (and my earning is quite alright), Adsense is NOT my main income stream.
However, I will try my best to help you with this.
Before I go into how much you need to spend, let me explain my understanding to huge income with Adsense.
I believe there are only two ways to make it big with Adsense
[1] Build many sites
Now, there are many ways that you can do this. We all know that some people build good quality content sites, and some build spammy sites and use questionable techniques.
With this approach, you start with researching topics and keywords. And then you start to create content for it. Of course the site has to be search engine friendly to make it for search engine ranking. The next tiring process is link building …
Here’s a cool trick … if you offer unique quality content, people will link to you freely.
Clearly, you can’t win big with just one site. You need more than one site.
My suggestion is this — START WITH ONE. And then keep learning and honing your SEO skills. As you get good and start to make income, you can build two, three, four … or maybe 10 sites simultaneously.
Maybe you can go for the low hanging fruits. Topics that popular but not many know about. Maybe something like warplane models, or mini 4WD.
Stuffs like this is what I teach in my Adsense SEO Guide ebook - http://AdsenseSEOGuide.com
I don’t recommend you go for that spammy techniques. You know those that are using some kind of content-generators? I know that you are tempted to. But with this, I can assure you, you need to be churning out new
sites more and more, faster and faster … as the ones that you’ve created keep falling off the search engines (because of getting banned).
And it’s a race — you and search engines. And the search engines are getting better and better at identifying spammy sites.
You used to be able to earn from a spammy sites for two years. But now, spammy sites get kicked out from the ranking as soon as next week.
[2] You build few community based website
When I say community-based, I don’t just mean forums. Some websites which are not forums, can be considered as community-based too.
I consider some blogs and news sites as community-based
too. Let me give you an example …
- Slash Dot (http://slashdot.org)
- Site Point (http://sitepoint.com)
- Liew CF (http://liewcf.com)
The thing about these types of sites is that when you build on it, it can give you huge traffic. And with community-based sites, you can expect to retain that traffic.
How can you retain the traffic?
Well, if your content is any good - unique and quality, you earn readerships. And with powerful content management systems like WordPress, Mambo, you can offer RSS feeds where people can subscribe to.
So reading your community-based website will be like reading the newspaper, or a magazine, where people are eager to read the next issue.
I think the key to this is — Uniqueness and Quality. And maybe also fresh new content. Maybe you readership is low at the beginning, but if you keep building it, I am sure that people wil catch on.
But of course, this requires a lot more commitment than building smaller sites. Smaller sites like in the first kind of website, you can even try to build and throw them on the wall and see which sticks … but you can’t really do this if you are going to build a community-based sites.
So back to MAIN QUESTION — how much do I have to be prepared spend?
If you are going with first method, and let say you are good at it, you can build 10 sites simultaneously. 10 sites would mean 10 domain names, and 10 web hosting.
10 domain names, $8.88 each at NameCheap.com, that’s about $88.80. Let’s make it $90.
And the 10 web hosting. Let’s consider a full-year commitment to the web hosting. I don’t know where, but I am sure you can find web hosting as cheap as $5 per month. Multiply that by 12, that’s $60. Multiply that
by 10, that’s $600.
What else do you need?
If you are going to write the content yourself, then fine. But if you are not, let’s do some calculation.
Let say you are paying $5 per article. I would say that you need about 40 articles per site. That is $200 per site. And multiply that by 10, $2000.
All together, that’s $2660 for 10 sites for a year.
Let say that your site isn’t making you any money for two months … you were still building links, and distributing articles to article directories. You are left with 10 more months.
And let say, conservative speaking, each sites is making an average of $100 per month. So that’s $1000 per month. And with the 10 months left, you are making $10,000 per year. Minus that with the costs … you still make $7,340 in profit — with just 10 sites.
Of course, I can’t guarantee you this result. This is just a simple calculation to illustrate the concept. Maybe you’ll make more … maybe you’ll make less. I don’t know.
Anyway, I hope you learn something from this.
And not too long ago, I wrote about the four secrets in earning with Adsense. Only four things make the difference between huge earning and lame earning … Maybe you’ll want to read that too.
Feel free to drop comments …
