I’ve recently stumbled upon a website that’s supposedly about SEO, PPC and Internet Marketing. The owner of the respective website had a post in which he rambled on and on about how making money with Adsense is difficult and it is not worth the time. First piece of advice: when you stumble upon a website owner and alleged Internet Marketing expert who says that about Adsense, just close the browser. Anything else you would do would be a mere waste of time.

So what makes Adsense so great?
First of all, making money with Adsense is the simplest effective way to make money online. If you don’t know how to do it, chances are that you will not be able to make money through Affiliate Marketing either. And since we are at the subject of affiliate programs, the majority of them will not even get close to Adsense’s EPC. My rule of the thumb: when I am looking at various affiliate programs with the intention of promoting them, I want their EPC to at least match the EPC of my Adsense account. There are a few exceptions where I don’t care for that, like Amazon’s affiliate program.

Even for the high paying pay per lead programs in the mortgage or insurance niches I don’t necessarily go for the affiliate program, because in the end, the EPC is what matters. Without exceptions, the high paying pay per lead offers also have great CPC values in Adsense. As an irony, the great Adsense CPC values in these niches are exactly due to the fact that they pay well for leads. There are many advertisers on Adwords and they need to bid high in order to get traffic. So how can you make money with Google Adsense? I will try to keep this short and sweet. Take action and follow it, and you will definitely make money.

1. Choose your niche
You don’t necessarily need to choose a high CPC niche. My philosophy is that you can choose almost any niche you want, as there will always exist long tail keywords that bring in good traffic and are low on competition. Just make sure you don’t choose too broad a niche.

2. Keyword Research
I use the Google tool and Keyword Discovery. I put all the keywords in an excel spreadsheet, write their search volumes and the competition. One mistake many beginners make: they take the volume numbers shown by various keyword research tools literally. I like to concentrate on their relative value. For example, if a keyword will show a medium search volume on Google and the same thing happens in Keyword Discovery, I know for sure that it receives traffic. I arrange keywords in the spreadsheet by their common root. For example, “gift basket ideas”, “homemade gift basket ideas”, and “holiday gift basket ideas”, all go in the same group. As for the competition, my most important indicator is the allintitle operator. For example, allintitle:homemade gift basket ideas will show 636 results, which means that there are 636 pages which have those words in the title tag. That’s very low.

3. Content Creation and onpage SEO
When the keyword research is done, I start creating the articles. Well, I don’t create them, I hired a person to do the content creation for me. How do I proceed about this? I start with the keywords that have the lowest allintitle competition and work my way up. That’s because I want to dominate the non competitive keywords first as their search volumes can really add up. I make sure that my content is unique. I really don’t care about the duplicate content argument. If I am to create a serious money maker, I like to make sure that my content is of quality, but that’s just me. I know I could get away with crappy content also, but I don’t care for that. It has to do with wanting to contribute something to the web, rather than spamming it.

As for onpage SEO, make sure that your pages have the keywords in the title tags. Also, make sure that all the title tags are unique, as well as the meta description tags, just in case.

4. Link building
Starting with the most non-competitive terms, start getting anchored backlinks both to your subpages and to the homepage. This is the single most important factor to the success of your website. Getting targeted backlinks can be difficult, and I could go on and on for hours about it. Once you start getting backlinks, you will notice your traffic increasing slowly but surely. Patience is another key factor of your success. If you want results right away, you are going to be disappointed. But money will start coming in, and building a website that produces $100/day from Adsense is very doable, especially if you place your ad blocks in specific areas.

That’s about it, it is not difficult, but it’s not for lazy people either. Finally, if I were to recommend you one single person who is an expert in Adsense, let me introduce you to Grizz, and his 2 blogs, make money online for beginners and make money online with Grizzly. Now what are you waiting for? Get to work.