If you could run a website of your own and have an income stream to cover your domain and hosting fees would that make your day? How about if that same income stream increased over time along with your sites growth and you started making $100.00 a week from it. As the more traffic you brought to your website, the more your income increased to even $100.00 a day. Got your attention yet? Im not trying to sell you anything, or get you to try my product, because I don’t have one. Im just giving some insight into how Im using the internet to monetize my websites.

Having a variety of income streams is best because if something were to go wrong with your only stream and you rely on it to survive then you will have a problem. But thats a different topic entirely. You can read my “Dont Put All Your Eggs in One Basket” post to learn more. I use a variety of things to send income my way, I try to be as creative as possible and have it require the least amount of effort. With my main stream,..its basically effortless. Well effortless as in once I have it ready to go in my website. I use Google AdSense as one of my main sources of income. Google AdSense is one of the most popular services out there where you can embed a few lines of code to display ads related to the content of your page. If somebody clicks on that advertisement, you get paid because you referred somebody to their website.

But I like my color palette, will the ads look weird?
AdSense ads are very customizable, you can even see one to the right of this page. Im using a 160×600 skyscraper. It could also be customized to be other sizes and colors. But all I did was embed one snippet of JavaScript and it does the rest automatically. But is it really that simple? In essence yes, but to have it optimized for best performance then it takes a little more work. But you get the idea. Google will pay a publisher monthly if they can earn $100.00 or more. If you dont make it in that one month, they will send it once you do. To be honest its a really cool system they have going.

But how much will this earn me?
There are many factors that Google takes into consideration when determining the click value, most factors are for Google’s eyes only. But some are proven to be true like placing your ads in the “hot spots” of a web page, or above the fold, etc. One other major factor is the keyword that is being targeted to show the relevant ads. For instance content on home mortgages will be worth more of a click value than a website on Pokemon Cards, because the market for competition is much higher and business are competing for clicks. On average people can get paid anywhere from $0.2c to over $1.00! Now thats cool. I have a little formula I created which is common sense but very simple. More traffic = more clicks = more money. The more traffic you get, the more chances you have for someone to click on those banners. Thus generating more income for your website. Now like I said before, once you insert the code all you do is sit back and watch the money come it.

Is AdSense really worth it?
I would definitely say yes. It has proven to me to be a successful source of income both short term and long term. You can monitor your click through rates, impressions and so on. The feeling of knowing you are successfully running a website and profiting off it is a feeling of success and it can only get better if you stick with it. Thats why once you get into AdSense you develop both long term and short term goals to constantly raise the bar to be as successful as possible.

Are there other ways to make money?
Of course there is. You can do link submission, banner advertising on a per customer basis, referral programs and many other various forms of website monetization. I like to use a variety, not only because its safer, but I can get exposed to new services out there that I could benefit from.