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AdsenseAdwords_ _make_a_million_lose_a_million
| Adsense/Adwords - make a million lose a million?
The orig version of this article can be found at:
http://www.HelpmeBuilda.com/newsletters/news010505.asp - and it
contains graphics.
but none the less here it is:
Adsense and Adwords Make a Million Lose a Million? In this
months newsletter I’m going to deal with the hot topic of the
moment. Everyone seems to be talking about how easy it is to
make money with adsense using adwords - and it is.
Now there’s probably more than a few of you out there who
perhaps know what one of the two are but not both and I’m
guessing that many of you don’t know how you can tie these two
systems together in an attempt to make money – well don’t worry
- that's what I'm going to explain today.
To start at the start:
Q. What is Adsense? A. Adsense is Googles name for the system
that puts context sensitive ads on to your web pages (if you’ve
included their script code). The idea behind this system is that
if you run a site that has content on subject ‘cars’ then the
adsense adverts should be on the subject of ‘cars’ – not ‘DIY’
or ‘Mortgages’.
Q. Why would I be interested in letting Google put adverts on my
website? A. Because you get paid per click, not per result but
by click. Payments range from a few cents to over $10 a click –
pretty compelling reason.
So, in simple terms you now have an overview of adsense (please
read the rest of the article before disappearing to register for
an account). :-)
Q. What is Adwords? A. Adwords is the opposite of adsense, it is
in fact Googles system for allowing you to advertise on other
peoples websites (using adsense as the delivery mechanism).
Q. Why would I want to pay Google to advertise my site? A. There
are many reasons why you might want to pay Google to advertise
your site
Your site is brand new and not indexed yet You seem to be
getting little or no traffic from the search engines You want
pre-qualified traffic for your service or product You want to
make money with adsense I’ll be explaining that last point in
detail so don’t worry.
It is worth considering those first three reasons in a little
more detail (because they probably don’t make immediate sense to
anyone who’s not overly familiar with internet marketing).
Site Indexing. When you have a brand new site that you’re really
happy with and want to share with the world you need to let
people know it’s there. This is done in many ways such as link
exchanges, banner ads, email, etc.
However one of the cheapest ways of getting the word out, if
you’re not bothered about speed, is to get indexed by the search
engines (visited by and then added to their database). This will
obviously involve a large search engine optimisation effort from
you and be an ongoing process (because your competition will be
doing the same). This means that when people search for a
certain word or phrase you might be seen (depends on your SEO).
Traffic If you are competing in a very crowded arena it might be
hard or impossible for you to get on the first page of
Yahoo/Googles results for your chosen words or phrase, an
example of this would be the health and wellness market – there
are over 120 million websites out there and some of them are
VERY well done – so how are you going to beat them?
Pre-Qualified Traffic Traffic to a website is said to be
pre-qualified if it has come from an advert for your subject
area, a search engine search for your keyword/phrase or from a
mailing list. By this example people who read my newsletter may
be considered as being pre-qualified traffic on the subject of
starting/improving an online business.
Now that you have a basic understanding of what they are you may
have guessed how people try to make money with them, but I’ll
explain anyway (just to make sure we’re all on the same page).
We buy cheap words in Adwords and display Adsense adverts for
expensive words
You may think that this is an easy exercise but believe me it’s
not.
Lets have a look at how this works in reality – note that word,
not in our dreams, how does it ACTUALLY work.
If we develop a website with the keyword 'Mortgage' in mind
(because we are selling information or products within this
subject area) then from the screen shot below we see that to
advertise with the keyword 'Mortgage' it will cost a fortune!
(screen shot taken from google adsense - these figures change
daily - this is purely as an example)
We can see that the average price per click is $12.78 - this is
just for one click, not for a sale but just a visitor having
clicked you advert to get to your site - and that's if we bid
just over $39 a click, if you bid less you get less (if you bid
20 you get 2,400 hits and they cost $9.27). Obviously the
adsense vendor site will not see anything like this amount of
money (Google doesn't say what portion of the advertiser money
you will actually get).
So if you know that these keywords are really expensive (and
there are keywords that cost up 8 times this value) the question
should come to mind - how much could I make with an information
site on this subject?
Well lets see. If we assume that you want to target expensive
words with cheap words you might use the following:
As you can see we have selected three 'cheap' phrases that will
deliver targetted visitors (remember that this is only an
example - don't rush off and do this as you will lose a shed
load of money!). So from the example above we see that for a
total cost of $40 we can get 76 visitors and if we assume that
the 'mortgage' keyword pays $1 a hit then we'll be in profit by
$36 a day.
Isn't that nice, not a quick way to get rich but free money
........................dear sweet Jesus, if only it were that
simple! This is why I said DON'T rush off and implement this
example.
If this was all there is to it there would be a lot more
millionaires out there. There is one aspect of this example that
has not been covered. We've assumed that everyone seeing the
advert for the cheap keywords will want to click on the more
expensive keyword adverts - they don't and they wont.
In general terms a good conversion rate for adsense is 5% (this
is considered a GOOD conversion rate), so lets have a look at
that example again.
Total hits = 76 Cost per hit = $0.53 Price per expensive hit =
$1 Click through rate (CTR) 5%
hits * ctr * $1 = $3.80 Cost - profit = Bugger!
Oops! - you just emptied your bank account.
As yo can see from this example it's only when you sit down and
really work out what everythings worth that you realise that you
can lose big time. So, this example shows you how NOT to do it,
it doesn't mean that in general it doesn't work, it does mean
that you need to carefully select you keywords (the ones you're
paying for and targetting) and develop a site for them.
This then begs the question How do you go about choosing the
right keywords and markets? There are a couple of ways of doing
this, first you can sit down and think of a few areas that seem
to be really popular, for example mortgages, loans, forex
trading. You can then go to somewhere like word tracker (they
have a free trial service via our link - top right, completely
free) which you can use to see how many people are actually
searching for a given phrase - this then will tell you if there
is sufficient interest to make it worth while. You then go and
create your site and content. this then allows you to zoom in on
one particular area, one niche if you like - but there is a
better way.
The second way of getting yourself up and running with a money
making adsense campaign is quicker and easier. You start by
going out and finding all of the public domain articles that you
can and saving them to your hard drive - ensuring that you also
save the authors ID and link text (fair is fair). Once you have
a reasonable collection of documents you then apply them to you
web page (you have a single page and just save multiple copies
of it with different names using the free content). Each one of
these pages should have your adsense account script embedded and
then it's just a case of getting indexed.
For both of these methods you still need to perform your own
search engine optimisation.
This of course is also not an over night solution. if you are
the impatient type you get yourslf a piece of software that will
take your content and mass produce web pages for you and perform
the required search engine optimisation for you (so in other
words a turn key solution). This then leaves you with only the
task of getting a domain name and hosting account to perform
manually. This solution can obviously be expanded upon to
include many different niche areas within one site, thus
ensuring that the software does all of your SEO across the
entire site and that all of your pages get listed.
Once you have your site completely up and running you can simply
buy some very cheap pay per click advertising to get pre
targetted traffic to your niche pages (doesn't have to be from
Google - can be from findwhat or another smaller service or a
big boy like overture).
For the impatient amongst you there might still be the question
of cost, i.e. what does one of these all singing all dancing
solutions cost? Simply put it depends, I know that there are a
variety of solutions out there ranging from $50 a month up to
$150 a month - and these are effectively rental systems, these
systems have a variety of functionality but none seem to auto
SEO for you.
If this strikes you as an interesting way to make money - but
you don't want to shell out on expensive software, or worse
still 'rent' software, you might like to consider the 'Cash
Sense' system (which is in beta test at the moment).
More information on Cash Sense is available at
http://www.Cash-Sense.com Until the next time, have fun.
Disclaimer: Adsense and Adwords are copyrighted trademarks of
Google, adwords figures are shown here as an example only.
About the author:
The author, Paul Foley, is the webmaster at
http://www.HelpmeBuilda.Com and is also the author of the Page
Generation Software 'Cash Sense' (which can be found at
http://www.Cash-Sense.Com. Paul is an IT consultant with over 17
years in the business.
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