How to Set Goals and Make Money With Google Adsense

The Google Adsense program is a great low-maintenance income bucket that you can set-up for your blog. I want to share with a you little bit about how I set goals and make money with Google Adsense. Once you install the adsense code to your blog, you are set and ready to go. This is truly one of the great benefits of having Adsense on your site. The code will look for keywords in the content of your page and display relevant ads to your audience. For more on it you can read: What is Google Adsense?

Some people are reluctant about throwing up ads on their blog because they are concerned that the end user will not like it. I understand because I was one of them. I waited 9 months before finally jumping in and displaying ads. That first month I think I earned between $20-40 just from the existing content and traffic I already had at the time. I was really kicking myself. You see, most people today understand that ads are going to be served on blogs. In fact, the ads are what allow us the ability to create and give out such great content!

How to Make Money with Google Adsense

Well, I could spend a lot of time on this subject but to keep it simple it comes down to one thing: targeting keywords. Use the free Google Keyword Tool and do a quick search on a topic you want to blog about. Use the specific keyword phrase in the title, url, and content. Remember, the goal is not to spam this keyword phrase, but instead to provide real value to the end user.

Another important piece to earning money with Adsense is ad placement. Each site is different and this is where testing plays an important role. Maybe you start with an ad unit in the top right area at the beginning of your blog post. Do that for one week, and then move the ad to the top left area in your content. How did the results compare? You can easily move ads with a simple adsense wordpress plugin.

The type of ads are also important. You can choose for your ads to be text ads, image ads, or both. Choosing both means that Google decides which ones are better to serve. Again, you should experiment with these. I have seen my earnings jump considerably lately on one of my blogs by choosing to let Google choose whether to serve text or image ads.

How to Set Goals with Google Adsense

Many people become quickly discouraged with Adsense in the beginning of the life of their blog. In my opinion, they were not patient enough to give it time to grow. It is important to set goals with your adsense earnings so that you can stay motivated to stay with it. To say, I want to earn $300 in one month with Adsense is a bad goal. Let me explain.

By focusing on an amount there is really nothing that you can do to get there. It is just a number that is not connected to any type of publishing goal. What I do instead is break down how much I am earning per blog post per month. This has been revolutionary for me when I started doing this awhile back. I thank Fraser the creator of the Keyword Strategy Tool for this method.

Here is how it works. Figure out how many total blog posts you have written and divide that by your adsense earnings. here is the formula:

Monthly Adsense Earnings divided by Total Blog Posts = Monthly Earnings Per Blog Posts

Let’s use some numbers and see if this helps.

$105.66 Adsense divided by 110 blog posts = .96 per blog post

For simplicity let’s round that up to $1.00. You are earning (passively) $1.00 per blog post you have written per month. While that might not seem like a lot you have to remember this is passive and scaleable. A post you have written 2 years ago has not only earned you on average $24.00 but it continues to earn you money. On top of that you are earning more for each new piece of content you add to your blog. Now I can safely predict that if I add 20 posts in a month I can roughly see an increase of $20 in Adsense earnings each month.

Real World Example

The earnings per post varies (you can read more about how much Google Adsense pays if interested). I have a blog that earns almost $4.00 a month per blog post and another that was around .84 cents per post. What is funny is that I started putting more effort in the blog that earns .84 per post and after 90 days of adding regular content that number has risen to $1.74 per blog posts. I hit a few winners in there by targeting keywords which raised the whole average.

What is the Big Takeaway?

If you have adsense on your blog, figure out your number and then set a publishing goal for yourself. If you want to earn $1000 a month in Google Adsense Earnings then figure out what you are earning per blog post right now and find out how many more blog post you will need to add to get there. If the number is discouraging just use it as a guide for now and re-evaluate in the future months. You might find like me that your average is going up!