My friend Michael makes an average of $370 per day on his blog. That’s an annualized income of $133,200 from blogging. I’ll leave out his last name so that I don’t violate his Adsense ‘Terms of Service’. ( For those who don’t know, it is against Google policy to directly discuss one’s Adsense earnings for a particular site ). The other day I sat down for lunch with Michael and asked him for his story: In a little more than 18 months, he went from earning less than $1/day to quitting his day job, and building a successful site.
His advice was priceless…
Every first-time web publisher wonders “How much will I make with AdSense”. While the somewhat discouraging answer may be, “Beer Money” (or less, depending on your taste for beer), it’s important to keep in mind that there are those who generate astronomical amounts of advertising revenue with their sites.
Most independently owned websites start out using AdSense ads. Why? For starters, no one wants to sell their own ads. It’s time consuming and likely to be fruitless given the amount of traffic most new websites start out with. AdSense is also one of the two big cpc ad-networks that everyone’s heard of (the other being Yahoo! Search), and Google is a reliable name that people trust. But after awhile you may feel like exploring the hundreds of other networks out there. …Or maybe not.
Ad units are like water: they’ll eventually flow into every nook and cranny of your screen real estate. We’ve all witnessed the generations of efforts — some successful, some not — to find new and more prominent places to stick just one more ad. We’ve seen pop-ups, and pop-unders. We’ve seen banners, towers, skyscrapers, super-skyscrapers, thumbnails and every possible size you can imagine. We’ve even seen the cursor itself used as ad-space (remember