You can make money with Adsense on any blog or web site. It doesn’t matter what you niche is – or what you’ve been told before…

I’m tired of people saying either you can’t make money with Adsense, or you can’t make money ‘in this niche’ (blogging help, making money online) with Adsense. Google Adsense can make you money on any web site or blog in any niche passively and easily. How much money depends on your niche and if you’ve setup your blog properly.

I started thinking about this post from a comment I received yesterday on this page. Hock, of Marketing Tools Review writes:


I saw your message on Entrecard and decided to check out your blog. The AdSense blocks really detract from your actual content. Most of the folks who are serious about setting up a blog in this space will generally not put AdSense on. Think about it, your target audience is someone who probably knows and uses AdSense and chances of them clicking on the ads are very low.

I’m guessing that you would do better with other forms of monetization on this type of blog.

Hock has a good criticism, because I think a lot of bloggers feel this way. I don’t feel this way though, and I’m ready to tell you why. First – if you’ve been reading my post you know I recently wrote about how to make (more) money with adsense. That post was for all the people that say they can’t make money with Adsense. At the end I key in on a point that I learned a few years back about leaving money on the table. This was a phrase I first heard from Joel Comm a few years back. He’s an adsense expert that feels that he shouldn’t be leaving small amounts of money laying around if he can collect them – because it adds up! Day after day, week after week, month after month – it all adds up!

Think about this in perspective for a moment. What stage is your blog at? A hundred visitors a day (if that)? Five Hundred? A thousand? When do you think you should be making money? How much money will be you making? I am a firm believer in monetizing your blog from day one. I am also living proof that you can make money from day one on a blog that only gets 20-30 visits per day. I’ve had several blogs with that kind of traffic (they get more now) that made $1-2 per day from adsense alone.

I think that Adsense and be profitable as well as an indicator. “Use Adsense so your bounce rate doesn’t hit you on the ass on the way out the door, but instead drops a few coins in your jar.” Everyone has a “bounce rate”. I talk about bounce rate in 5 Key Google Analytics to Watch. Your bounce rate is the percentage of people that visit your site and rapidly leave. Because of the variety of ways people can visit your blog (and find you in search) everyone has a bounce rate. It’s a google analytic “to watch” because you surely don’t want nearly everyone that comes to your blog rapidly leaving. What good are 500 unique visitors a day if 90% of them quickly leave because you didn’t have the content they wanted? In that article I said (in my experience with many blogs and sites) that “I think (a bounce rate of) 90% and up is pretty bad, 60-90% is to be expected once you get 25+ quality posts, 40-60% is excellent, and under 40% is amazing!”

Let me give you a game plan here…

  1. You should be using google analytics and you should check your bounce rate at least once per week for an active blog.
  2. Take steps to reduce your bounce rate:
    • List recent and popular posts in your sidebar
    • Have a working prominent search box
    • Have both a contact form and an about page
    • Offer “related posts” on every page
    • Link similar and complementary posts and categories on every page
  3. Once you’ve done everything you can to keep them on your site monetize the bounce rate you can’t control!

There always seems to be some purist or lone holdout who says to my argument – “that’s unprofessional”, or “it detracts from your content”, or “there’s better ways to monetize a site like this…” – you get the picture. I say to you – first of all I am not an A-List blogger (yet) so I’m not worried about it ruining my “image”. I can certainly make more money (at a time) by other means on this blog – but I’m not making any money now from bounced traffic anyway! In other words – Adsense is setup on this blog (and most of my other ones) to make money from visitors who WERE LEAVING ANYWAY!.

What kind of person are you? Are you a saver or a spendthrift? Have you seen these commercials where they offer to “round up” your purchases on your VISA card and deposit the change from every transaction to a savings account in your name? I knew a woman once who did this (rounded up every purchase in her checkbook register) and in one year she saved $5,000! If you passed the same table every day and it had loose change that would be gone the next day – would you take it? Don’t leave money on the table – it could be your biggest blogging mistake..!

If you have a question or something to add to this lively debate, please comment now!