Advertising income

Problogger regularly runs surveys asking readers how much income they make from Adsense et al. The results are fairly consistent, and show that most websites don't earn much at all.

From ProBlogger Earnings Poll Results - April 2006

• 57% earned under $100
• 19% earned over $1000
• 13% earned over $2500
• 7% earned over $15000

By the way, this covers all sorts of income, including people selling through store fronts and so on. It's not just ad income, though that probably represents the bulk of it at the low end. Making money through on-line advertising is the major focus of the Problogger site, so most of its readers probably are strongly interested in that and are running ads on their web sites.

Everybody wants to make money with on-line ads. Hey, what could be easier? Plop a little code in and sit back and relax: day and night the ads earn income with no effort on your part.

Well, yeah. If you neglect the effort of of building the web site itself, that might be true. If you have other reasons for having a website (as I do here, for example), throwing ads on it is just extra income. Money for nothing, or almost so anyway.

But not very much money for most, as the poll shows. Right here we're well above the insignificant figures, typically pulling in around $1,000 a month from the various ads, but obviously that isn't enough to quit and do nothing else. It's nice extra income, but that's all. It pays the hosting fees, lets me send a little money to some of the other authors, and puts a little extra in my bank account. No complaints there.

But if you are going to do web advertising, you may as well do it as well as you possibly can. How you do it - what ads you run, where you run them, what colors and sizes they are - all make a difference. You can easily reduce your potential income by half or more if you make bad choices.

So here come the pros. Sites like Problogger (and dozens of others) offer advice on how to increase your passive income. There are courses for sale, books, webinars, conferences and so on. I have investigated some of these, bought a number of the books and so on. As I've said before, there is a lot of snake oil out there. Some of the advice is less than ethical or could end up hurting you more than it helps. However, there is good stuff too.

Recently I took a look at a set of videos offered by Michael Cheney. You may have noticed ads for these on some of the pages here . Honestly, it's the kind of advertising I really don't like: splashy, aggressive and in your face. Cheney claims to make over $19,000 per month and sells these videos to show you "how to do the same". If you follow the links to the videos you'll find more garish pages filled with phrases like "Explode your earnings", "I'm going on holidays to the Carribbean using the money I get from AdSense" and so on. It's high pressure sales pitch the whole way.

So if I dislike this so much, why do I run the ads?

Because the videos themselves are actually pretty good. No, you aren't likely to make $19,000 a month from ads, but if you pay attention to the advice offered, you definitely can increase your income. I picked up on a few of the hints and bumped my income about $5.00 a day, which was more than enough to justify the expense.

Do keep in mind that there is absolutely nothing in these vidoes that you can't find on-line for free. In fact, the changes I made were all things I'd seen advised in other places. I think it was presentation that made me pay more attention this time: the laid back, relaxed pace (nothing like the promotion itself) made me notice and act.

I suppose if his ads said "Increase your Adsense earnings by $5.00 a day" very few people would buy them. If you are now making $1.00 a day, you might not even increase that much. But if you are bothering at all, you might as well try to improve.

If you are running ads, and if you don't think you are doing the best you could do to maximise your income, I do recommend these videos. Yes, I get a kickback commission from the ads or that link, but that has nothing to do with my recommendation: these are well done, and have value.

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