Was reading a post on 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