Lately, I’ve been curious about something. Google has two services out there for webmasters to use regarding their wonderful adwords. One is called Adwords, the other Adsense. They serve opposite functions:
Google Adwords is designed to allow you to advertise your site. It works by choosing various keywords, and then setting a “bid” on them to tell google how much your willing to pay to have your ad displayed. For at little as a penny, you can pay you have your ad displayed (and clicked), and thereby drive more hits to your site. There are even tools in adwords now to allow you to advertise offline (like on the radio).
Google Adsense is the exact opposite. It’s designed for webmaster to put on their website. It allows others to advertise on a website, and the webmaster to get paid for it. In fact, I’ve had Adsense on this site for quite some time. I haven’t made more than 2 cents on this site, but I have on some other sites, for example: on my tetris site Blockstats, I’ve made close to $35.00.
Well, I’ve always wondered if you could make money by advertising on adwords, a site that designed for adsense. After doing some research on google, I learned about something they call “Adsense for Adwords” pages. It turns out, that if you can find the right high price keywords, and advertise at a lower rate, you can in fact turn a profit. After I did some research, it turns out, that this is easier said than done.
After a few hours of work, I did find a keyword though that I thought *might* work. I created some useful content, put some adsense on it, and drove some traffic to it using adwords.
It turns out, that I was wrong when I started.
After a day or two, I had spent about 10 dollars on ads and made about a dollar. I was determined to figure out what I had done wrong… I started by lowering the amount of money I spent on adwords. This caused my ads to be seen by fewer people (because I wasn’t paying as much). It also caused it to be displayed lowered than the other ads (like towards the bottom of the list). Normally, you would think this is a bad thing.
Something strange happened though… I started breaking even. It seems, that if people got to my ad, they were serious about finding what they were looking for, and wouldn’t stop clicking until they found it. This was the first sign of hope for this project.
I was still just breaking even though… I figured it was probably the market I had picked… There just wasn’t enough differential between the money I was getting from adsense, and the money i was spending on adwords.
The best part is though: I found a way to pull it off… I brought in a third program, in this case, Amazon’s Affiliate Program. At first, I didn’t think it was working, and then I would get the occasional sale. This was just what I needed to get to positive flow.
That said though: it’s still slow. At present: I am spending about $5.00 per week, and making $7.00. Not millions, but, let’s think about what those numbers really mean. I’m getting a 40% return on my money.. Better than any stock market, or CD. If I repeated this exact same process 500 times, I might be able to make $1,000 per week, with just Google powering things. I don’t have the time or the interest to do it, but if you want me to talk more about it, let me know. I’ll give you all the adwords/adsense insite I can come up with.
In case your interested in trying it yourself… I’ve included links to google’s program to the left.
Comments on this entry are closed.
I read this through not long ago – and I agree it's feasible. I wonder if Google has run the numbers on it and figured out what the max revenue you could earn is?
There really is no max revenue you could earn… I mean, there might be if your working solely with adwords and adsense, but when you start bringing in parties like Amazon, the skys the limit.
I'm sure Google has some general formula worked out, but there are tons of keywords, so I doubt they've taken time to maximize every possible variations potential.