Turn Your Blog into an Asset and Make Money Online with Adsense

So many people miss out on the powerful effect on your finances the idea of turning things that could otherwise be liabilities into assets.  For instance if you are paying for webhosting and have a blog, simply by adding adsense or other ads you might be able to turn what was a liability into a stream of revenue.  It just takes looking at it in the right way.

There are many blogs that exist on the web today and many people don't realize that they can use paid advertising such as pay per click ads from Google Adsense to monetize their blog and turn it into a real asset for them to earn extra money.  Part of the trick though is to understand that you can't look at it as though you will get paid for ads as you just type about whatever happens to you from day to day.  You need to plan carefully the kinds of things you write about and tailor them towards topics that lend themselves well to paying ads.

Ultimately if you don't make your advertisors happy, you won't make money online for long, so you have to figure out what kinds of keywords would be most likely to make advertisors happy.  For instance, if someone is just researching information for a paper, or browsing the web with no particular motivation but to read the latest gossip, odds are they may click on ads and probably not buy anything from your advertisor.  Ultimately the traffic you send in this situation looks worthless and in the long term you will get paid accordingly.

If however you have a page that is well targeted towards a specific buying keyword.  For instance maybe a specific product or service.  Then the people visiting your site may be more likely to buy and in general your traffic will be considered more valuable in the long term.  This is why I think it takes careful keyword research and planning to earn money online.

So, if you want to earn money online you need to start by researching the kinds of things that people search for.  You also need to focus on those searches that imply that they are looking to spend money on something related to their search.  Product names lend themselves very well to this.

One of the best places to get ideas of product names is to look at Google Product Search.  Each time you view the page you will see a fresh listing of the kinds of products people are looking for.  If you find some interesting ideas here, make a note of them and run the keywords through Google Adwords Keywords External Tool.  What's really neat about this tool is it can give you monthly traffic estimates for that keyword and it will suggest similar keyword phrases.  Here you can investigate and find keywords that get heavy traffic and learn about which months they are higher volume searches, how much it would cost to advertise in the search results, etc.  I would choose keywords with 3000 or more searches a month or more.

You should do the search for yourself and see how competitive the top results are.  Compare the sites on their pagerank, on how well they seem to be optimized for that keyword phrase.  (Do they mention the phrase in their text, is it frequent, or does it show up only once, etc.?)  Compare their backlinks also using a tool such as Backlink Watch to see how many links they have and if THOSE are targeted well for the search phrase.

When you find a phrase or collection of phrases that seems to have high volume traffic and weaker competition you can go ahead and register a domain (or if you like free hosting, go to blogspot.com and register a site.)  Try to get your keywords in the domain name for your site.  This is important but not a do or die problem.  If you already have a domain you may still be able to rank well for that phrase even if it's not in your domain name.

Develop your site to target those keyword phrases you have chosen with hopefully well written, longer articles.  Try to aim for 500-800 words or so, primarily because in longer articles you will probably ramble and pick up some "long tail" keywords or phrases that include your main phrase plus a few extra words.  This can really help boost your overall traffic.

If you haven't already apply for adsense when you have plenty of content on your site and it is at least 6 months old.  If adsense does not approve you, there are other advertising options.  The real secret to making money online is having good targeted traffic and being able to consistently get it.

If you are able to use adsense remember that your advertisers will be happiest if you send them well targeted traffic.  The best way to do this is to have traffic coming from very well targeted search phrases to a page that is exactly on the same topic, with ads on the page that match said topic.  It's kind of like a three legged stool.  Without one of the legs, the stool falls over.  In the long range if you try to game the system by luring people in on keywords that you don't adress in your page, you will have poorly targeted ads, and you will not make as much money in the long run as you could with a tightly targeted approach.

When you have developed one idea or set of keywords, continue to research and look for new ideas, expand out and work on getting traffic for more keywords in different areas to highly targetted sites.  It's all about knowing where the traffic is in reasonable numbers.  3000 searches a month translates into around 100 searches a day.  A site in the top spot of the search results will probably not capture all of this traffic, but it will likely capture most of it.

Even with a relatively small amount of traffic it's possible to make quite a bit of money with online advertising and then your blog will be an asset to you providing you income instead of being a liability.  It's hard to consider it truly passive income in this way, since you do wind up investing quite a bit of time researching keywords and building content, but ultimately if you do it right that up front work will pay off for quite some time down the road.