How Blogging Can Make Money? – Advertising and Selling products. Blogging is profitable now too in 2024. This is my blogging success story that describes complete blogging and monetization tools such as AdSense, AdWords.
How Blogging can make money?
Google Adsense will be the answer and king of the CPC Market still 2021. It has so many drawbacks like lower CPC, Reduction of Invalid clicks, and so on. But still, it’s one of the best platforms every blogger and YouTuber likes to join. Here I shared my experience with Google AdSense and how I earned $5000 from Google AdSense earnings.
Yes. You read it correctly! I got Adsense Payment of US$5000.
Before we enter into my Google AdSense earnings report You must understand the basic process behind Google AdSense Earnings, such as how it works, from where Google gets money, why CPC is not stable, and how others are making more money than you with less traffic.
What is Google Adsense?
Google AdSense is Google’s advertising program for publishers and webmasters who can make money by showing ads on their websites/blogs. It’s a PPC (Pay Per Click) program that pays you when someone (a genuine click from a genuine reader!) clicks the ads on your site. Each click may pay you differently depending on how much the particular advertiser is paying to Google.
What is Google Adwords?
Google Adwords is another part of the same Google advertising program that works for advertisers who want to advertise through Google. So, Google Adsense shows ads on your site, which are received from advertisers through Google Adwords.
I found this infographic very informative in describing the process of Google Adwords. Even though it shows how Adwords works, you will get some good ideas about Adsense too, because both are directly connected.
How does Google Adwords work?
Google Adsense Account and Signup
To start with Google Adsense you need to get an Adsense account with the minimum eligibility criteria for Adsense approval.
- A Well-Worthy Content Website/Blog
- You must follow the Google Adsense Policies for content.
You can sign up for Google Adsense here to start your earnings.
My Google Adsense Earnings
At the beginning of 2011, I started my first official blog thinking that Adsense payment would be the main source of income. It’s about the top ten listings of every field. From my interest, I have started with the history niche (which has very low CPC & CTR).
What is CPC?
Cost Per Click (CPC) refers to the actual price you pay for each click in your pay-per-click (PPC) marketing campaigns. Adsense normally offers up to 50% share for publishers.
What is CTR?
In Internet marketing, CTR stands for click-through rate: a metric that measures the number of clicks advertisers receive on their ads per number of impressions.
I thought I should start a blog with at least 100 articles that can be identified as a minimum guaranteed content website. I chose History as Niche for my blog and started to write my first 100 articles for my blog. It’s all about the history and geography-related content.
i.e. Top 10 freedom fighters, Top 10 Lakes, etc.,
After writing these articles, I had to wait for months for more visitors and huge revenue. But it’s all just expectations, nothing happened. There are few more visitors daily (around 10-50) and the average Google Adsense earning is $0.0001.
As soon as I realized that If I need more AdSense income, I need to receive more traffic to my blog.
Even if you have awesome content on your blog , you need to market it in a right way to reach more visitors.
Paid Advertising
As soon as I realized Traffic is the key to Google Adsense Earnings, I started with Paid Advertising through Google Adwords.
I just calculated that if I got 100 visitors per day, I could earn around US$5 to $10 (with the help of the oldest AdSense calculator 😛 ) – Actually, the tragedy is, still people using that and assume how much they can earn from Adsense. 🙁
So I thought I just need 100 visitors per day to earn $5, which is comes to around $150 per month. It was enough income at that age. So I started to spend on Paid Advertising to achieve the target of 100 visitors per day to generate my expected Adsense earnings.
After 30 days from the date I started paid advertising, I need to verify the ROI (Return of Investment). The report comes like this below:
Spent on Google Adwords – US$70 (US$2-US$5 average spent per day)
Google Adsense Earnings – US$12 (US$0.4 average per day)
The Earnings are still not sufficient and meet my target. The profit was Negative. 🙁
I was very upset with this result. I wonder, why I couldn’t achieve the expected revenue from Adsense even though I spent something for visitors. Even though I got 100+ visitors per day but still did not get any income from Adsense.
So I realized that I should start from scratch. I need to generate more visitors organically.
In the middle of 2012, I kick-started my blog and traffic strategy in a new way.
Search Engine Optimization
How Google Adsense Works?
Infographic Source: WordStream.
Adsense Sign up
You can start adsense earnings sign up Google Adsense Sign up here.
I continuing my traffic-build strategy through Social Network Websites as well. With the help of Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and StumbleUpon I could generate more visitors every day. And I started to earn money from Google Adsense.
Ad Placements
I found that not only traffic and niche play a vital role in Adsense earnings. Ad Placement is also an important aspect of increasing CTR (Click Through Rate). When I changed different Ad Placements I saw major differences in earnings. I settle with high CTR ad placement which is 99% bloggers following.
- Top Banner (728×90)
- Sidebar Banner Ad (336×280)
- In Article Ad
With the above placement of Google Adsense ads, the CTR is highly increased within a day. And the revenue comes in an uptrend.
Long Content Articles
In most daily life cases, we could implement the 80:20 principle. I have had a few successful experiences with that rule. In Blogging too I can see the rule can be applied in most cases. As per the rule, I found one big fact.
80% of my blog income comes from a 20% of articles which I have written.
So I concentrate on the particular articles to add more content to them in text form, pictures, and videos, So They will get a higher Google rank to get more traffic. The trick has worked. I have got Google SERP (Search Engine Ranking Position) Rank #1 for a few keywords. Every day it sends me more and more Organic Traffic. My Blog revenue is growing.
Email Marketing
Revenue has grown a little bit, but not as much as I had expected. I still depend on first-time visitors and their clicks. Unfortunately, 70% of first-time visitors went away after their first visit.
So I realized My website has visitors but most of them are one-time visitors. They never come back a second time without the help of Google. So I built an Email Subscription System that sends notifications of new articles to the subscribers.
It was one of the best Ideas that I have ever had. It’s a massive success in my business. When I reached 5000 subscribers, I could get at least 1000 regular visitors to my new articles. It also gains some Brand value. So I started to collect more and more subscribers for my blog. But because of the low CPC niche, I couldn’t achieve more. But I got a potential subscriber to whom I can refer to a product or an ebook and a brand value.
Now I build traffic through Quora, Facebook, and Email Marketing. And also now I don’t depend on Google Adsense income only. There are more ways to generate money when you have a niche-based high-traffic blog, like selling your ebooks to your readers. You can also earn something from an affiliate system (i.e. Amazon Affiliate)
Google Adsense Earnings – Important Factors
- Niche is Important as Content
- SEO plays a vital role in generating traffic
- Right Ad Placement is a must for higher CTR.
- Email Marketing and Subscribers are Important
- Social Media Plays Well
- Continuous effort is the main key (both in crafting awesome content and building quality links)
Hope you enjoyed my journey with Google Adsense Earnings from the beginning.
I would like to know your experiences with Google AdSense as well.