Was reading a post on http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=918134&page=8 Digitalpoint forums where someone who was trying to make money online through AdSense had posted they had lost their job! Started a post but it got long so turned it into this post on my site (why waste the content on a forum).
I’ve been doing what this person is trying to do for years (make money online) and I have banned sites making more money than what he reported ($2 a day from AdSense).
Some of my Google banned sites make more than this because they have a LOT of pages, but they are penalised (not really banned as they are still indexed in Google) because the content is thin affiliate content: Google hates thin affiliate (meaning you use the affiliates content with nothing unique) sites, will spider/index them but send very little traffic to them.
I also have sites with quite a lot of unique content that are under a year old and they don’t make a dollar day yet from AdSense. The unique content should do well long term though, so anyone with a reasonable sized site with unique content should hold in there, as long as you work on the backlinks over time and don’t do anything stupid your site will gain traffic long term.
Make a Living From AdSense/Affiliate Revenue
It’s difficult to make a living from AdSense/affiliate type money, I own over 100 domains many built to make money from AdSense and I could barely live on what I make from AdSense (looks like I’m making over $60 a day this month) and other affiliate type income, (see July Affiliate Revenue Report for details) but I would never give up my SEO business, because even when you do really well in affiliate marketing/AdSense you only make a fraction of the money made from the sales.
For example I’ve sold over 1/4 million dollars worth of Amazon products over the last few years (most in 2005-2006), but for every $100 I made Amazon I only made around $6!
Interestingly I tended to make a similar amount from AdSense as well (would put AdSense on the Amazon affiliate stores) so I was making around 10-12% of the products value sold.
If I wanted to earn a living from selling Amazon products I’d have to sell over 1/2 million dollars worth every year! Until Google began penalising thin affiliates I would have been able to get to that amount of sales, (quite easily actually) but now I can barely make $100 a quarter from Amazon!
I’m not saying you can’t make enough money from affiliate/AdSense type income to live comfortably, but it’s not easy any more.
Currently I get around 20,000 visitors a day which some online businesses would be able to convert to millions in sales (assuming it was the right traffic) and if I take my SEO income from my income pot (which accounts from maybe 500 of those 20K visitors a day**) I’d have made under $3,500 in July (just enough for me to live on in the UK).
** Since I have long term clients I could delete all my sites and as long as I didn’t loose too many clients I wouldn’t need a visitor looking for SEO services for a year or more: have had my SEO quotes page turned off for nearly a year, not after new clients, though will be turning it back on soon.
A point is coming soon, honest 
It wasn’t easy to get to 20,000 visitors a day (used to get up to 50K due to thin affiliate content in 2005-2006) and I have excellent SEO skills, very good HTML skill, OK design skills, OK writing ability, excellent people skills (I get on with clients/customers) and know I could loose everything I own today (all my sites) and still make more than enough money to live off (my SEO business), so I can take BIG risks with my sites with out worrying about how to pay the mortgage next month.
As it happens I took about a year off doing any serious online site building other than my SEO business, my AdSense income halved: over the last few months have built it back up.
Anyway, if you work it out $60 from AdSense a day from 20,000 visitors works out at around 0.3 cents a visitor which is not a lot! Even if I take into account affiliate revenue it takes it to around $100 a day or 0.5 cents a visitor, still not good.
Admittedly some of my traffic is rubbish for making money (classic literature for example, about 5,000 visitors a day) since my first websites was built not for making money from them directly.
If you planned your sites content better you could make the same revenue as I make on far less traffic, still even if you can double my money made per visitor your going to need to pull in 10K visitors a day to make $100 a day and that’s not easy!
Because of the low amount you make from AdSense/affiliate product sales you can’t pay for your traffic from AdWords for example, so your limited to free traffic sources like Google organic search.
So unless you think you can get to 10K visitors a day trying to make a living from AdSense/affiliate based income isn’t going to be easy. I would say for the vast majority of people you could use this sort of money to supplement your main income: that’s what I do, though I do this sort of stuff more for fun than money since I could make more money selling another product/service (I find this an interesting challenge).
How I Make Money Online
Before I got into SEO services I sold lingerie and sex toys online, I have no interest in these products before you ask, I needed a business that was online because I’m disabled (had to drop out of University in the final year on medical grounds) and through research found adult products have a GREAT markup.
After learning the basics of SEO (learnt on the job so to speak) I took a new site adultlingerieuk.com (now an Amazon affiliate store) from zero visitors to around 8,000 visitors a day, but used blackhat SEO techniques (comment SPAMMING, got the home page to PR7) that eventually got the site penalised. Still in the year or so it did well I sold over £80,000 in stock and the profit for that year (which was all mine) was just under £25K (~$50,000).
Since most businesses make a loss in the first two years and at the time I had less than £1,000 to spend on setting up a business (actually spent about £300 to set the business up) that was really good.
Had I not used blackhat techniques I’d have made less money in that time, but the site would still be working for me today and would almost certainly be making more than £80K is sales a year by now (the site sells nothing now).
Based on how I’ve helped similar online businesses with whitehat SEO techniques if I had to guess how that site would be doing today I’d say if it was running well it would make me around £120K a year which is more than I make right now from my SEO business and other income (I prefer doing SEO to selling adult products, think soiled returns!!!!!!!!!!!!! so no regrets).
With all this in mind IF I didn’t own a SEO business or I was starting from scratch (like I did 10 years ago) I would not go into affiliate/AdSense type sites to make a living. That’s not to say I wouldn’t use AdSense/affiliate products, but like now they wouldn’t be my main focus because you can make far more selling your own products/services online than you can make from AdSense/affiliate sales.
Think about it, AdSense/affiliate sales you make a small percentage of the revenue the affiliate and Google AdWords makes. With most affiliate type programs your lucky to make over 10%, which means to make an OK living you need to sell $500,000 of other peoples products/services! And to have a good living you need to sell $1,000,000 worth of other peoples products/services.
There’s not many people who can sell a cool million dollars worth of stuff every year!
And that’s just to have a good living, not a GREAT living.
On the other hand if you sell your own service/product you can potentially make 90%+ of the money you make (all depends on what you sell). This means you don’t have to make anywhere near as many sales as with affiliate products. And with how Google has changed over the years it’s far easier to sell your own products/services than it is to sell affiliate products/services.
Only problem then is what service/product to sell
Good Luck…
David Law
Website - SEO Consultant
11 responses to How to Make Money Online
Excellent Post my friend.
Dave, again well written post on how to make money online. I would agree with most, if not all of what you say. However, the sites that make the big money from google adsense are often “user generated content” interactive sites, I think. The users create the unique content. For example, free dating sites that take off, often rise to the top of Alexa (for what its worth) because once you get a user to sign up, they come back everyday for years sometimes. But most do not get the critical number of users. But if they do you get sites like plentyoffish or nasza klasa (the Polish Facebook).
These sites are the sites that really take off and generate income from adsense. Otherwise you will have to work hard and build content and make a pittance like Bob Cratchit for Scooge like affilates.
Selling your own product on the other hand is a good idea. Do what you love. But, also I would be curious if anyone has a detailed analysis of profitability, of various niches and sectors for online product sales not from affilates.
How to Make Money Online
ps you referred to clickbank in your other posts on how to make money, and your revenue reports and this type of affiliate revenue is often 50% not 10%. You could focus on a few good products that pay high here. Or you could create your own product and have others sell it for you.
Hi Mark,
I have to admit to have completely missed the boat on user generated content, I keep starting forums for various sites, but never get around to finishing them. Always a case of not quite finishing the template system (SEOing the forum script), and if it’s not perfect it doesn’t go live, so never quite gets done.
Another thing I’ve completely missed is mailing lists, you can make a small fortune through a list, you get people to join and they tend to stay for years as long as you don’t only send them SPAM ads
With my 20K visitors a day it would be easy for me to build a list, I MUST do it one day!
Your right about Clickbank, I’ve tried marketing about half a dozen Clickbank products and only ones in one niche have sold well, 90% of my Clickbank revenue comes from one product right now.
My eldest son (who tried Clickbank before me) markets the same niche and also makes a small amount from this one product.
I know there’s a lot of Clickbank products and the revenue share is fair, but so far I’ve not found a way to sell Clickbank products that works for multiple Clickbank products. The success in one niche is due to reviewing the product I used (for real, I bought it to use), it’s not really possible to accurately review dozens of products that way.
I can save a lot of you some serious time, don’t eve waste your time just linking to Clickbank products, doesn’t work. One of my sites receives over 7,000 visitors a day and for about 6 weeks has had a set of links on the menu (site wide) to relevant Clickbank products, had 2 sales!!!! Two sales from all that traffic is pathetic, so you have to give your visitors a good reason to buy.
I think the problem is the SPAMMY way Clickbank product pages are made, the big bold text on the single squeeze page with a few well written testimonials of how this product changes the world. For a online shopper like myself it throws up big red flags, I wish they’d use normal product type sales pages
The sad thing is some of the products are very good, like I said I’ve bought some Clickbank products for personal use, but all have been thoroughly researched before buying (those sales pages put me off!).
David Law
How to Make Money Online
For once, its nice to read an honest and genuine article.
I have spent many many hours scouring the internet for ways to make and earn money online. One of the ¨CONS¨ that I have noticed, is with many so called money making plans, Get rich quick schemes, is that all the testemonials, if you cross reference them are all actually the same people endorsing other peoples systems. Just take a browse round, make a note of the names and you will see them popping up again and again and again! Seems alright if all you want to do is join a self appreciation society instead of earn any money. The whole point of the research in the first place.
Because of all these bogus webpages floating round the net, its hardly any wonder that many people are extremely sceptical about earning any real money through the internet.
It will be interesting to see how this moves forward in years to come, but I believe it will become harder to earn a real income from the net alone in the future because of all the dross out there.
I feel for websites to have credability thesedays, they need to have real live people backing them, and if possible, legitimate business premises to be operating from, although I realise that this is sometimes not always possible.
Your (still searching!)
John
How to Make Money Online
That’s a really good point. I took a look at a course/system called: Social Media Marketing System and wrote about it on another site of mine http://www.morearnings.com/social-media-marketing-system-social-networking/ (recently updated the short article).
What pulled me into this course was the creator (Brian Campbell) had apparently given someone a big cheque for some reason (forget the details now, but it was another marketeer type person) and to get involved was free, (I never paid a penny) Brian Campbell had a paid version of his Social Media Marketing System, but wasn’t 100% necessary to buy it.
With my SEO skills and network of sites I should have been able to do really well with social networking and working with others.
The system started with signing up for Facebook and inviting everyone and their dog as a friend, (Facebook kept warning me I was asking for too many friends, I’d stop for a while as the system suggested, but the account was banned: probably had a couple of thousand friends) made a few FaceBook groups (one on AdSense and one on SEO and member wise they did OK: 1,000+ members now I think), but despite being willing to work with others nothing happened (I tried).
Basically the creator of the Social Media Marketing System was looking to pull in thousands of newbies and have some of them pay for his membership course, when people paid for the membership course it made it look like his membership course was a success since his revenue went up from people buying the membership course!!
Reality is if you don’t have a product or service of your own to offer you are going to be used by those who do have a product or service to offer. How badly you are used and what you make from it is where it gets interesting. For me with my above experience all I wasted was time, though did learn some new stuff (how to spot more scam like offers), so not that bad I suppose.
I have a BIG problem deliberately ripping people off, if someone offers a good product and only those who work hard can make the product work, fine that’s business. But offering a crap product/service knowing it’s crap just to pull in money goes against everything I believe in (I like money, but not that much)!
I’m thinking about offering my themes for sale via Clickbank, I just made a new WordPress theme that has Clickbank ads instead of AdSense ads and as far as I know there’s nothing else like this available? If there is I bet it’s not as good
If I do manage to set it up as a membership site (offering all my themes for one price) I’m obviously going to benefit more from it than my affiliates, but at least it will be a good product and I’m not looking to rip anyone off. I’ve had people for years asking me to write a Clickbank product they can promote, but I tend to put my time into helping my SEO clients (they do pay me a lot of money
) and messing around: I only created the Clickbank theme (it’s running on the site now as a test) because Google pissed me off when they banned a couple of my domains from their program 
I’m the first to admit I don’t take making money serious enough!
I’d have never even got into this business if it wasn’t for my back, if I had my way I’d be happily messing around with DNA in a lab now, I wanted to cure something like HIV (actually had a good idea to control secondary infections in full blown AIDS cases). Basically if it’s not an enjoyable challenge, I’m not interested.
David
How to Make Money Online
i am new to this make money online programs. i used Adsense and Adbrite for making money online.
I make money online by monetizing my blogs with Google Adsense. I am currently studying the tricks of trade on Affiliate Marketing.
i am pretty new to this Make money online stuff. i started making money online by monetizing my blogs and websites using Adsense, Adbrite and Kontera. i have yet to try affiliate marketing.
i Make money online using the very popular Google Adsense program. i also tried Amazon affiliate program but i dont earn that much from amazon.
In a free world – I do believe anyone can get rich – IF THEY KNOW HOW TO DO IT RIGHT….as far as online businesses go – they are too saturated – yes 15 yrs ago it may have been a good idea to be innovative and try something new – but today unless you have a BRILLIANT idea – dont even think of it. There is also no short cut way to making wealth – unless u win a lottery or become a movie star overnight… but if you are a regular person like everyone else – there is only one way to become rich… and i’m not telling you that…
How to Make Money Online
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