I am just trying to see how successful people are using adsense. Do some of you make a lot of money per day/week or very little? What sites do you think make the most with adsense in terms of content? Thanks for the feedback!

overdrive how much you make depends on so many factors. Personally I don't make much, but given my site is a technical subject I never expected to make much.

You can find sites making nothing and there are some sites that have made millions. Depends on the topic of the site, the traffic the site gets, and the how well you optimize the ads for CTR.

I think low tech sites will probably be the best as far as a topic. Less savvy users don't always realize the ads are ads which seems to result in a higher CTR.

But again it depends on other factors. One of the more publicized success stories is the plentyoffish.com site, which is a dating site. The CTR for that site is extremely low from what I understand. The money is made because the site gets a ton of traffic.

Think this way ->

1. Hot topics in current class-action lawsuits
2. Rx/Medical
3. Webmaster/SEO

Advertisers tend to pay a lot per click in those fields.

Thank me when you are rich

Put it this way: I never make enough in adsense to cover what I pay for adwords.

True for anyone else?

yasha I'm going to disagree with that last one. webmaster/seo topics generally don't have very high bids on keyphrases. Also the technical audience tends not to click that much.

I wouldn't recommend chasing after hot topics. For one they won't be hot forever and in a few months you can find yourself with a site no one cares about. It can also be more difficult for you to come up with content unless you have an interest in the subject.

Now if your plan is to build disposable sites, make as much as you can with AdSense for a short time, and then move on to the next topic, then yeah it can make sense to go with the hot topic.

Originally Posted by vangogh

yasha I'm going to disagree with that last one. webmaster/seo topics generally don't have very high bids on keyphrases. Also the technical audience tends not to click that much.

I wouldn't recommend chasing after hot topics. For one they won't be hot forever and in a few months you can find yourself with a site no one cares about. It can also be more difficult for you to come up with content unless you have an interest in the subject.

Now if your plan is to build disposable sites, make as much as you can with AdSense for a short time, and then move on to the next topic, then yeah it can make sense to go with the hot topic.

True.
You could have a site that addresses the fleeting hot topics on a permanent basis

in my experience, most tech sites aren't the best to target adsense with, the click through rates are generally lower and the ppc is also lower

I haven't made very much with adsense as of yet, but I only have one website with fairly low traffic. I've heard plenty of people say that they earn a good few grand a month out of it though, once they are experienced enough to create high-traffic sites

More traffic definitely helps, but you can also make money with the right topic and by optimizing the ads for a high click through.

It is more than having a site and dropping the ads in. It's a good idea to set up channels through AdSense so you can track which ad types are working, which pages are performing better than others, etc.

But yeah, having a lot of traffic will help.

i had a single page landing site, that makes $5-7 per day.

Now you just need to duplicate that 50 times and you'll be one of the six figure AdSense publishers.

Originally Posted by vangogh

I wouldn't recommend chasing after hot topics. For one they won't be hot forever and in a few months you can find yourself with a site no one cares about. It can also be more difficult for you to come up with content unless you have an interest in the subject.

I can't resist commenting on this.

I read The Economist, since Dec of '05. The cover of the first edition I read was "The Story of Man," about human evolution. Well written, interesting, tied in with a lot of ideas I wouldn't normally expect. In fact, it's kind of shocking how little of the magazine is devoted to math, and how much to current affairs.

Most magazines I toss when I'm done with, but these I hold onto. They cover the kind of topical news you're talking about, and make predictions or draw bigger inferences about what the news represents. I like to go back and reread some of this with the benefit of hindsight, and it helps temper their current opinions.

So I would be really careful about how you write if you're going to cover this kind of stuff. In the photography corner of the web, one particular site made a big stink about how raw formats that were starting to become common were doomed to obsolescence, and bad for everyone. When Photoshop started supporting these natively, it made the guy look very out of touch.

I'm not saying don't cover anything new; just be mindful.

I started using adsense a few weeks ago. So far I have gotten 659 page impressions, and out of that iv gotten 18 clicks, which has resulted in 4.72.

I have a feeling its so low because I am a fairly tech oriented site (gaming site) and alot of my traffic comes from digg.com

Originally Posted by charlesgan

i had a single page landing site, that makes $5-7 per day.

What was it about? Can you link?

I wish I could do that

I checked my web logs a few weeks ago and realized that I had a few pages that were getting about 25 unique visits a day. These are pages for my shareware applications that usually land me a few hundred dollars a month.

I realized after reading this thread that I might be able to squeeze a few more dollars a month from those pages using adsense, and sure enough... after adding a few adsense blocks I started getting clicks right away.

The fun part is when you get a click from a high bidder, and they bring in a dollar or more per click! I had a couple of those in a row a few days ago

I plan to duplicate this approach on a few other pages where I market other developer's prorgams as an affiliate, and build up the content on those pages as well to draw in more traffic. Even if I only bring in a buck a day (or even only 50 cents), if I create a few new pages like this a week, that'll start to add up!

Rick just make sure you still sell the same amount of shareware. If you lose a few sales to the AdSense clicks it might not be worth it.

But it may also turn out to become more profitable than the shareware. I guess testing it is the only way to know.

Good advice, and thanks.

I'll keep an eye on that. So far this month I'm on target with typical sales numbers. Last month set a new record, but I didn't have the adsense ads running either (and I lucked out with 2 site licenses for $299 each!)

Sales are usually highest towards the second half of the month, and since I did well last month it's a good month to test the waters - if it takes away from software sales then it'll still average out with last month's revenue.

It'll be interesting to see what happens. Are all the pages on the site selling shareware. If not maybe having AdSense on the non-sales pages would work the best in the end.

The only way to know of course is to try them in a few places and see.

You might try taking two pages that generally get a similar amount of sales and run AdSense on one and not the other too.

My situation might be a little unique, in that I'm both a shareware affiliate and a shareware vendor. I have over 27000 programs that can be downloaded or purchased from my site, but 2 of them are programs that I wrote myself (PC iMail and Flow Pro).

Of the 27000, only about 13000 can be purchased, and the rest can just be downloaded (ie. they're not signed up with Regnow, and I don't have an affiliate relationship with the author, so I just provide a download link).

A site license just came in this morning for Flow Pro, and a single user license came in for PC iMail. Combined with other sales up to this point in the month, I'm on track for having as good a month as I did last month... maybe even better. So it looks like the Google ads are not taking away from the sale of my shareware programs, and they're helping me make money from the other pages where I don't have an affiliate relationship with the shareware authors.

I'm predicting at this point that the situation will only get more lucrative as traffic increases on the site, and that the google ads will continue to be a nice money generator for the site.

That's good to hear. Are you just adding AdSense on the pages where there are free downloads then? That would make sense since nothing else is monetizing those pages.