Joel Comm
07-06-2006, 04:47 PM
When I first started using AdSense, I had no idea where it was going to take me. I knew that it looked like a good thing but I certainly didn’t set out with the idea of running a bunch of sites and picking up five-figure checks every month from Google.
My immediate goal was just to earn a little extra money from the pages I had online. That was the easy bit. I put up a few ads and it wasn’t long before I’d made three dollars. Mission accomplished.
The next goal was to make those earnings meaningful. That was when I started playing with AdSense, trying different formats, using different placements and experimenting with different strategies while keeping track of what worked and what didn’t.
That was a lot harder. It took a fair amount of time but it was also when the results were the most spectacular. My income went through the roof.
I could have stopped there. Most people do. But I didn’t just want to turn my websites into cash. I wanted to share what I’d learned with other people. It just killed me to surf the Web and see ad units in the wrong place and in the wrong colors and know that with just a few simple changes, that publisher could multiply his earnings. I also knew that I could save him the months it had taken me to find those strategies.
Eventually, I reached the point I’m at now: still making a good income with my ads but also attending seminars and conferences, and helping other people get the most out of their AdSense code.
But I might have got here a lot earlier if I had always known that this is where I’d wanted to end up.
AdSense isn’t a get-rich-quick scheme. It’s a business opportunity that takes time to exploit to the full. That’s why it’s useful to have goals -- just like a business plan. You’ll want to have short-term goals for your current sites, medium-term goals for the sites you want to build and long-term goals that include all the other ways that a site can earn revenue.
If you can always see where you’re heading next, you’ll find it much easier to plan ahead, you won’t get stuck wondering what you need to do next and you’ll help your Internet business reach its final goal much earlier than you might think.
My immediate goal was just to earn a little extra money from the pages I had online. That was the easy bit. I put up a few ads and it wasn’t long before I’d made three dollars. Mission accomplished.
The next goal was to make those earnings meaningful. That was when I started playing with AdSense, trying different formats, using different placements and experimenting with different strategies while keeping track of what worked and what didn’t.
That was a lot harder. It took a fair amount of time but it was also when the results were the most spectacular. My income went through the roof.
I could have stopped there. Most people do. But I didn’t just want to turn my websites into cash. I wanted to share what I’d learned with other people. It just killed me to surf the Web and see ad units in the wrong place and in the wrong colors and know that with just a few simple changes, that publisher could multiply his earnings. I also knew that I could save him the months it had taken me to find those strategies.
Eventually, I reached the point I’m at now: still making a good income with my ads but also attending seminars and conferences, and helping other people get the most out of their AdSense code.
But I might have got here a lot earlier if I had always known that this is where I’d wanted to end up.
AdSense isn’t a get-rich-quick scheme. It’s a business opportunity that takes time to exploit to the full. That’s why it’s useful to have goals -- just like a business plan. You’ll want to have short-term goals for your current sites, medium-term goals for the sites you want to build and long-term goals that include all the other ways that a site can earn revenue.
If you can always see where you’re heading next, you’ll find it much easier to plan ahead, you won’t get stuck wondering what you need to do next and you’ll help your Internet business reach its final goal much earlier than you might think.