Some people really do get rich on AdSense earning tens or hundreds of dollars a month from their websites. I came across a post from a couple of years ago about AdSense superstars on The Worst Business Ideas blog and it is not the only one to name some of these top AdSense earners. The top earner is estimated to get about $300,000 from AdSense a month and those that earn over $10,000 a month have been referred to as the Fedex Club because there are unconfirmed reports that they receive their checks by Fedex. So how do they make this kind of money?
Making big money from AdSense
There are really only two ways to make large amounts of money from AdSense:
- have a single website with a very large amount of traffic
- have many websites with decent traffic
What they have in common of course is that in total they have a large amount of traffic. That is the key to unlocking the money. After you have the traffic, it is then possible to optimize positioning, colors etc to maximise the number of clicks and boost revenue.
The top AdSense earner
Markus Frind is thought to be one of the top AdSense earners. He build his free dating site, PlentyofFish, himself coding it from scratch and he and his girlfriend run the site. His key inspiration was frustration at having to pay on other dating websites so he set about creating the first free dating website. Because it was a first, it went viral and traffic grew.
One of the pieces of advice he gives, is to do the work as opposed to thinking through concepts. In his opinion, there are too many thinkers and not enough doers. Also he described his efforts as being like a video game that he was determined to win. “…defeat isn’t an option you just find some way to win.” Being first to market or buying your way into the market are the two routes he sees to be successful.
Interpreting AdSense earnings with caution
I have to add a note of caution to these declared AdSense earnings. If you are earning $300,000 a month from AdSense but spending $290,000 on advertising, then your profit is a hell of a lot smaller than is initially apparent. So while seeing photos of extremely large checks is great, any business lives or dies by the net profit. Buying traffic is very common and Google even enables this with their AdWords program.
Putting AdSense on your websites
AdSense is a good option for the small publisher as a supplementary income but as your website and your traffic grows, it is good to look closely at your website visitors and understand what they are looking for. Then you can see what other options you have for maximizing profit from each visitor.
Mixing various revenue models can work very well if you have diversified traffic. You can mix PPC with affiliates and drop shipped products for instance. This also makes your revenue model more robust because you are not depending on any one revenue stream. You should make sure though that you are not losing conversions from your most profitable stream to a lower profit stream. For example if you are making $10 a conversion from drop shipment, you do not want to lose that traffic to AdSense at 20 cents a click.
You can see that Markus’s PlentyofFish.com website is really very simple and even somewhat ugly. He hasn’t spend the time or money giving it the glitzy look many other dating websites have but it still works well.
Here is the AdSense Superstar blog article listing some more high earners.
Additional items
I have added a suggestion widget to the right column where you can make suggestions for topics you would like me to cover. You can submit these anonymously if you wish and you can vote on other suggestions that have been made. As always you can suggest ideas by email through the contact page.
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All the best,
Barry
{ 5 comments… read them below or add one }
Barry,
Very interesting post. $300k a month sure is impressive. I’ve recently started developing more, so in the future will hopefully be a member of the “Fedex club”
James
Nice attention grabbing headline! The point about net income vs. gross is something that is often overlooked, especially in affiliate marketing product promotions.
Phil,
I think gross earnings are used a lot by people to grab attention. When you are buying traffic, it can really cut into your net profit. I would never put a sensational title on a post … or would I?
James,
I would also suggest looking beyond AdSense for revenue. Relying on one revenue source is very risky.
Very interesting post. I did not know that was possible
Great Post.
One thing to note is that Markus Frind has a knack for writing code (this guy’s a genius) and wrote a phenomenal algorithm for PlentyOfFish. I believe part of his success (in addition to providing a free dating website) was the fact he offered a unique search/match capability that set him apart from his competition. He saved some serious bucks in programming by doing it himself! But really, we could do without that UGLY website.