Writing for Your Wealth

2009 was the first year my Google Adsense earnings didn’t increase significantly, but they didn’t drop either. Considering my sites sat on the back burner for the second half of the year (as you can see from the lack of recent posts here, I shifted gears for a while, spending more time on writing fiction than blogging), I really can’t complain. I’ve noticed others in the industry (webmasters and bloggers running Adsense) saying that there have been big hits to online advertising spending and their earnings have been down significantly.

In this post, I’ll share why I believe my earnings held up and what I think you can do to keep (or increase) your own Adsense earnings, even in troubled times.

Why My Adsense Earnings Didn’t Drop in 2009

I’d like to say that I had brilliant prescience back in 2004-2005 when I was picking my niches, but any brilliance was accidental. I have a short attention span, which led me to diversify my site topics. I’ve done a bit with fitness and travel, but many of my niches are in the home improvement arena, which is a pretty broad and flexible area. Today there may be fewer people reading my posts on luxury steam showers and $10,000 hot tubs, but there’s plenty of interest in my articles on home security, heating with wood stoves, and renovating on a budget. In short, I picked niches that were adaptable and could be popular in good times and bad times.

How You Can Make Good Money from Adsense Today (even if the economy gets worse)

If you’re just starting out and trying to pick a niche to write about, you might go the same route, choosing a subject that is going to be popular in any economy. What do people always want? What do they splurge on no matter how tight the budget gets? Beauty and dieting? Entertainment? Alcohol? Health care (lots of aging baby boomers out there)?

Also, what might they buy if they believe there isn’t a light at the end of the tunnel and the economy will be down for some time? Information on self-sufficiency? Fuel-efficient cars? Growing their own food?

You’ll have to do your own research for the niches you’re interested in. Use keyword tools (such as the Adwords Keyword Tool) to determine the popularity of niches and what advertisers are bidding for clicks. Remember, it’s not just about choosing a popular niche. It’s about choosing one that’s profitable, too!

To do well with Adsense, you need people searching for information on products and services in your niche, finding your site, reading your content, clicking your ads, and occasionally buying from the merchant.

If you’ve already picked your niche, and you’ve built a website, look at how you can make posts that are applicable for today’s economy. Also, if you want to score with Adsense, don’t forget to focus at least some of your posts on consumer-related topics. Someone reading your blog post about growing strawberries might click on one of the nearby ads, but someone reading your product review of the Ultra-Gizmo Space-Saving Strawberry Planter is a surer thing (people searching for product reviews are usually in buy-mode and are thinking of making a purchase before they even get to your site).

For more on doing well with Adsense, please check out some of my older articles:

• How Can You Make Money with Adsense (without spending any money)?
• What It Takes to Make $100,000 a Year from Adsense
• Why Your Google Adsense Earnings Suck

A couple of entries ago, I suggested making things easy on yourself by writing shorter blog posts from time to time (or all the time if it fits your blog). PFincome mentioned that a lot of search engine optimization advice suggests longer posts or articles of 250-300+ words. So can short blog posts rank in the search engines?

As I said in the comments, my short answer is… sure. (Thought-provoking and eloquent, I know.)

Plenty of my short posts come up on the first page of search results for their keywords, and I bet you’ve stumbled on short posts from the big blogs such as Gizmodo or (one I come across a lot doing searches in my home improvement niche) Trendir. Many shopping or gadget blogs specialize in posting frequently and, er, shortly.

Sometimes posts on the popular blogs will be lengthened significantly by user comments, but in the case of Trendir, the site keeps comments turned off, so it certainly appears that short can work just fine.

So, why do many experts suggest longer pages?

My thought is that it can’t hurt, and it can help.

The more times a keyword phrase appears on a page (in the natural flow of sentences, not stuffed in there left and right until the page doesn’t make sense), the more weight the search engines may give your post in deciding where it should rank.

We don’t necessarily need to be thinking SEO with every blog post, though, and if writing short entries makes it easier for you to put out content on a regular basis, that may turn out to make your site more popular in the long run.

SEO and blogging

Unlike with article sites, a lot of bloggers don’t worry about SEO much on individual posts. This is either because a) they don’t care about/know about SEO or b) they prefer to build their sites organically and let the traffic gods judge their sites as they will.

I’m somewhere in the middle when it comes to blogging. I started out with SEO-based article sites and moved to blogging later, so SEO is usually in the back of my mind.

On my home improvement blog, I’ll usually try to put a likely keyword phrase in the title and sprinkle it throughout the post, if only out of habit. However if I’m promoting an affiliate product, where I’m actually hoping to make sales down the road, I’ll actually look up a keyword phrase to target (I stick to less searched and less competitive phrases for individual blog posts, since I rarely go on link-building campaigns for single posts), but for day-to-day writing, I’m often just putting things out there because they might interest folks and to keep the fresh content flowing.

I’ve found that a lot of time the posts like that (not specifically written with SEO in mind) sometimes do well and bring in quite a bit of traffic for a phrase I didn’t intentionally target, while the ones I worked harder at aren’t always winners.

In the blogosphere, what really helps is when an author of one of the big popular blogs happens to like something you wrote about and links to it just because. You can’t always predict what will win the natural links, and those are often the difference between popularity and obscurity for a specific blog post (whether you worried about SEO or not!).

To get back into the swing of things here, I’m going to be answering some reader questions over the next couple weeks. Some have been left as blog comments and some have been sent in. Feel free to use the contact mail link in the header or if you’re on the mailing list, you can just hit reply to an email to send a question.

To start things off, a recent commenter asked…

How can you make money with Google Adsense if you don’t have any money to get started?

As I’ve mentioned before, I make a big chunk of my income from Adsense, so I’m always game to answer questions about the program. If you’re serious about starting a web site (or two or three or ten), I recommend buying a domain name and getting your own web hosting, an investment of less than $20 up front with an ongoing $5-$8 a month for hosting fees.

However, if you’re broke (which I was in the beginning, so I can sympathize!), you can indeed make money with Adsense without spending a dime out of your pocket.

The easiest way is to set up a Blogger account and build one or more blogs there. Since Blogger is owned by Google these days, they make it easy to apply for the Adsense program and serve ads right on your blog (when I got started, you actually had to have your own domain name in order to apply, hmmph!).

It’s actually not a bad idea to cut your teeth on freebie blogs. You can start several on Blogger and see which niches end up keeping your interest, drawing a decent amount of traffic, and making you noticeable money with Adsense.

Remember, content that is closely associated with products and services tends to do best for pay-for-click publishers.