Forum Moderators: martinibuster
Are people making money off their ordinary garden variety websites from google adverts?
I ask this as I wonder how much work its worth optimising my site for. I get 1000 per night visitors, yet only about $3.50 per night income.
What sort of stats do you need to generate more money? Must you have far more visitors than that (in which case I will work on that), or better optimised pages (which mine are pretty good) or better topics?
OK I am sure this topic arises every week, but is there a relationship between visitor numbers and income? If so what is it?
that sucks in my opinion. i woudl recommend using the google heat map to place ads. i moved my ads from the right side of the page to the middle, next to the article text, and now i'm getting a 4-8% CTR every day. if i had 1000 visitors, i'd probably be making a good 15 bucks a day with the way my ads are paying.
The relation between visitors and income is usually a direct one - more visitors = more income. However, it appears it is usually not a linear relationship. Most of us find that if you make $100 with 1000 visitors you won't make $200 with 2000 visitors (with the same content), you'll make a little less.
Good content in a monetized topic will do well over the long term. If you're not happy with the income then write more good content about things that people and companies buy. Ideally you'll know what your writing about so that you can make some original contribution to the topic.
Keep making pages related to topics that interest you.
You will steadily see results.
If you want to get rich, and do it tommorrow, AdSense is not the Holy Grail.
if the big money only comes to the less ethical.
I really find such skepticism of a publisher's ability to earn good money from Adsense very interesting. The mindset is that "how come you earn $300 when I earn only $3, ergo you must be doing something less ethical to do that."
Just because you don't know how to do it -- properly -- does not mean that other people are not doing it within the terms and conditions of Adsense. Accept the fact that some people simply know how to monetize their traffic and their websites.
Re visitors and incomes -- you can have a small site with small traffic and still earn big. Big earners are not necessarily high-traffic sites. Many are niche sites who have created tremendous value on their sites that they attract quality traffic.
OK I am sure this topic arises every week, but is there a relationship between visitor numbers and income? If so what is it?
Your topic and the nature of your audience may be at least as important as your traffic. If you've got a site in Latin about Gregorian chant that's read only by monks who have taken vows of poverty, it doesn't matter if you get a million impressions a month--you still won't make as much as, say, a 100,000-impressions-per-month site about luxury cruising or a site that reviews upscale kitchen gadgets and mail-order gourmet foods.
The type of content also comes into play, partly because of the user's mindset and partly because of Google's "smart pricing" (which values some types of content more than others). For example, a site devoted to travel-narrative essays won't earn as much as a site on travel planning does, because ads for Madagascar hotels or tours in a "My Adventures in Madagascar" article won't get the kind of response they'd get on a site called plan-your-trip-to-madagascar.com.
From the posts I can gather that
1 Some topics are worth more to google than others. I hadn't realised this, obviously the trick then is to write to the topics that people are paying more for.
2. Placement and content on the page is just as important as visitors. I sort of realised that long ago, and have been tweeking stuff to see the results, but certianly worth revisitng again.
3. Some scrapers are very defensive. Well soooorrrryyy :) But I don't consider using a program to generate a zillion pages by stealing others content to be ethical. The sooner they are weeded out the better, as they are only net parasites.
4. Google won't make you rich :) Good info, already in a minimal way it pays for my site, but its good to keep it inperspective.
5. Good content in a monetized topic will do well over the long term. Now this may be a kicker for me. I have not really worried about monetized content before, but I can see how it would appeal to the advertisers. I can turn my pages in that direction with soome tweaking as well. (Holiday pics can be useful for advertising a destination I suspect)
6.Use the Google heat map. I shall! I never knew it existed! Good tip :) 
Wonderful Ideas, thanks for all your help :)
Take it slow and read this forum in detail first. Very slowly till you are sure you understand the stuff.
Making money from Adsense quickly is the wrong way to go about it - research WW properly (if necessarily for a month) and then start.
The answer to your original question? Of course not. But spend some time reading before you start doing things, it will be worth it.
Are people making money off their ordinary garden variety websites from google adverts?
I answered before the telephone with "*** internet promotion"
Since autumn 2004 with "**** online magazines"
I have now a press card and I am driving around to visit interesting things and to write big photo reportages about them.
Do I earn money from it? Just returned from a family holiday in Crete, just about to go on a family holiday to Wales, saving up for a family holiday in the US next year.
I've been adding any scrapers I see on my site to my blocklist and guess what? Income is up, and that's fed through to higher valuation of my site by smartpricing.
So you don't have to be a scraper to make money.
What may benefit you is experimenting with different ad blocks and different placements. Some combinations work better than others. If your site is the one in the profile, then the one on the index page is buried a long way below the fold. How many people read down that far? It may be better placed as a large rectangle middle of the page above the fold. That's what I have on my index page, and nearly 80% of my income is from that.
Traffic varies depending on they of the week, but in general it is around 15k - 20k unique visitors a day.
I enter new content every day, in general news bits, 4 or 5. Once a week I post reviews/articles, 2 or 3.
