Google Adsense – Make Your Hobby Self Supporting And Maybe Even Make A Bit Of Money
Is Adsense Really A Good Way Of Making Some Money Online?
When I first started the e-eeasy website it was only supposed to be a hobby, something to allow me to keep my interest in computing and web technologies alive. It’s all very well reading books but there is nothing that can replace the knowledge gained and maintained from practising a skill. There was a small cost involved but all hobbies cost money!
Unfortunately for me it soon grew into a monster, the more people downloaded the higher my bandwidth costs became, my hobby was starting to cost me serious money. At this point I looked at various ways of making the website self supporting, I tried a lot of affiliate programs. I knew I had a lot of traffic, it was just a case of turning this into some sort of revenue.
Without exception they all failed to live up to the hype that the people pushing the programs would have you believe. I spent more than 18 months supporting this site and peoples downloads from my day job. The costs just got bigger and bigger. I even resorted to asking for donations which has had some success, maybe 1 in every 5000 people who downloaded software would make a donation and this really helped a lot. It just wasn’t quite enough.
More by luck than judgement I eventually came across something called Google Adsense. Adsense was different from the types of advertising I was using in the past in that it was targeted. Only ads relevant to the content of my web pages are being shown and results have been exceptional. I’m not going to kid you with figures of $100,000 a month or anything even remotely like that but thanks to Adsense my hosting, template and any other ad-hoc costs are covered. Some months I even make a little money over and can treat the wife to some flowers!
Once you are approved by Google the whole process is very straight forward, choose your advertisement layouts copy and paste some code onto your pages and away you go. You really do only need the very least amount of HTML knowledge to be able to use Adsense. There are loads of resources available on the internet to help with optimisation and to show you the best places to put your ads. It should be within realistic terms for most webmasters to make their websites self supporting in a way that doesn’t detract from the actual content of your website. In fact I’d go as far to say that the adverts provided via Adsense really can compliment your website content.