Can You Really Use AdSense in Blogging and Earn Money?

how-to-make-money-blogging

Among many ‘firsts’, the first rule of business is to check out who you’re competing against to establish your business. My question – what is your chance, if any, of making money blogging when there are more than 133 million bloggers (February 2010 data) there already, out of which at least 50% of them are earning money online from blogging? Seems scary, right?

Where do you rank? Search any keyword and Google shows thousands of search engine results of meaningful blogs, which have been optimized with money making models but only a handful of them ever succeed.

Often, people fail to make money from blogging because they ignore the primary rule of business – you need to offer something worthwhile for the customer to purchase.

Everything boils down to basic economics – there is demand, you fill the demand and you earn!!! When you want to earn substantially from blogging, it ceases to be a platform where you can go on ranting about your feelings and personal life…however, you do want your readers to know who you are.

This definition of blogging was still relevant, maybe 5 years ago, but not anymore. Like other businesses conducted online, blogging has become yet another way to make money for the long term.

Nevertheless, our question was – can you really make money blogging?
The answer is both Yes and No.

AdSense and Blogging:

Both were like Siamese twins but not anymore! In the early years of blogging, people earned much by activating Google AdSense on their site. It was the latest fad.

If you are aware, the concept of Google Cash Cow was quite popular with new bloggers and some of them claim to have earned thousands, but does it still hold true now? Let’s see.

The problem with AdSense and Blogging these days is three – dimensional: lack of unique niches, flawed search engine optimization and less amount of traffic.

You will agree with me that competition in niches like blogging for earning money has enormously increased in the last few years. Therefore, we have reached a point of stagnancy because bloggers need to give their readers something new and fresh.

Yes, there are people who like to create blogs based on Google’s “high paying keyword” search but that too fails to materialize because the high paying keywords are not constant, they change according to user’s search criteria and interest.

Secondly, even with so much technological advancements around us, bloggers are still clueless about how to monetize their site or how to place advertisements.

A point to note here is that advertisement no longer falls under a preferred alternative for site monetization because visitors show the least amount of interest.

If a thousand visitors come to your site, perhaps 100-150 will click on those ads and there is no guarantee if anyone is actually going to purchase anything from those advertisements; therefore, if you are trying to promote affiliate products through blogging, there is a slim chance of you making actual commissions.

Blogging advertisement has become redundant. It is more redundant because the blogs are not able to provide any actual benefit to the reader.

Ask yourself – would you prefer visiting a site that actually helps you in some way, let’s say, to help you solve problems or would you prefer visiting a site just for 10 minutes of entertainment daily?

Thirdly, due to the first two factors – lack of niche and flawed search engine optimization – a blog will rarely have any visitors. Even if they do, they will hardly translate into any earning if the blog is solely dependent on AdSense. For many, you can make about $200-$250 monthly…

So, what other alternative do you have?

Well, the idea is to use blogging as a “supporting” platform for your main website. This means that you cannot earn from blogging directly but you can get lots of traffic to your main website, which provides products or services to the buyers.

Suppose you are a designer and you want to provide art copyrighter services to global clients; your website is: artcopyrighter.com, which you create like any other business website highlighting your services and pricing.

Now, as a “supportive” platform, you create: blog.artcopyrighter.com, which you will use to blog about your art, your experiences and other things.

Now, in both the cases, you have to do search engine optimization for promotion but essentially, you are not expecting to “earn” from your blogging but using it as a way to capture the traffic and direct them to the main business website.

The purpose of your blog is to give the visitors a reason to return again and again, implying that your blog content should be interactive enough to catch the reader’s interest. And by blog content, one usually means the writing, but one cannot ignore other factors like presentation, format, images, and easy navigation.

If you follow this alternative, you automatically lessen your competition because then your competition will not be measured by the blog itself but by the number of people actively involved in art copyrighting!!!

Hence, your competition reduces, you are able to provide something of value to the consumer by marketing your service to a select market niche geographically and you are able to make your business grow.

A Final Thought:

You need to think twice before creating a blog solely for the purpose of turning into an income source individually. Of course, if you are happy with $200-$250 per month, we don’t have anything to say but what we suggest is to do blogging as a supportive fraction of your main business site.

If you are planning on earning money online, best is to go the professional way. Show your talent to the world or if you have a great product that you know people will be eager to shell out $$$, then its best to create a business website and use blogging as an additional Internet marketing strategy to draw visitors to your site by perfectly optimizing the blog pages and promoting it.