Adsense – Can it hurt more than help?

This is mainly a thought I had when driving home yesterday night.

Google Adsense is the biggest and most successfully paid-to-click advertising system. It’s a must for every new blogger that starts its way to the make money blogging journey and can definitely make you tons of money.

But, said so, can it hurt more than help?

Quickly said, yes and no. Google Adsense will work extremely well for a particular blog but will fail on another.

While my biggest tip to make money blogging is to use every income source possible, including Google Adsense, quite a few bloggers fail because of Adsense. Not directly, but mainly because of it.

What’s the problem with Google Adsense?

Now, really, can you have any problems with a program that pays you for just displaying some ads on your site?

It depends. If done right, it can make you tons of money, but here comes the strike: It can make you lose all your blogging interest, especially when starting.

Why?

I’ll say it again. Google Adsense is a great way to make money blogging, but it can kill (it’s killing) bloggers. As stated before, it’s not because of Google Adsense, it’s just because of human nature.

Humans, apart from being lazy, are very impatient and want quick results without the need of working too hard. And to make money with Adsense you need the opposite. You need:

-          Traffic: Tons of traffic. Thousands of daily unique visitors reaching your site every day. We all know how hard is to get and maintain it. Even more if we’re talking about targeted traffic, which is the kind of traffic we need here.

It requires a lot of time, hard work and loads of patience.

-          Patience: You need it to do the most important task on blogging: Testing, checking results and comparing to previous tests.

We’re talking about ad placements, ad units, colors, tracking CTR rate… A big checklist.

So, as Adsense is not a get-rich-quick scheme, you’ll need to take your time to succeed.

-          Intelligence: Yes. As said, humans are very impatient, me first, so, when starting to work and seeing almost no result, before leaving our blog and letting it die (phase 2), we’ll came across the phase one.

Phase One: I desperately need help!

This is the almost-dead-blogger phase. On it, the blogger will start to check if there’s a magic way to make money quick and easy using Adsense, digging on forums, checking for ebooks and magic programs. Results?

1) Losing money: Most of the ebooks and programs out there claiming you can make $5K per month from Google Adsense, with guaranteed results within 24 hours are just a fraud, hence, you will lose the money spent on purchasing those things.

2) Adsense Banned Account: Apart from ripping off your money, those programs and ebooks are full of blackhat techniques that will lead you nowhere but to a Google Adsense account termination.

So think it twice before start purchasing ebooks like crazy.

The most common situations that can lead to a dead blogger are:

1) Lack of money: When bloggers see that a click “only” worth $0.x, they just go out to do something else, thinking they’re just losing their time.

2) Lack of creativity: Creativity to test something different, something new and original that may increase the clicks rate.

3) Lack of luck: Yes, luck always play a small (or a big one, sometimes) role on every business.

4) Lack of patience: Everything stated above is just because of lack of patience.

For all the reasons above, yes, Adsense can kill you. Better said, it can lead to a self-destruction.

Tips?

-          Take your time to succeed.

-          Take your time to test, to keep the good things and recycle the bad ones.

-          Be patient, don‘t cheat.

-          Last but must important: MAXIMIZE YOUR INCOME SOURCES.

So, to sum up, Google Adsense is a great way to make money blogging, you can make more by setting a strategy and doing a good niche research, looking for the perfect niche (high cpc rate and low competition).

In can hurt too, because of the reasons stated above.

I would say that everyone should at least try Google Adsense, but just be ready to receive a slap on your face in terms of earnings. Be ready so you can keep blogging and not to precipitate yourself.

Thanks for reading.

Update: Dan, from Dan Harrison, simple tricks and tips to get the best from your website, dropped the following comment:

My theory is that psychology plays a part too, namely the mindset of your audience and their motivations for reading your blog or website.

If people are coming to your site looking for something free and they don’t want to spend any money, adsense is a good contender for revenue.

If people are coming to your site looking to buy something, you might do better to make money from affiliate marketing, targeting those products or that niche.

Just a thought.
Dan

I think that’s true, and can be applied to any kind of business, so it worth to update the post and link to Dan’s blog.

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