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Adsense Revenue Revealed: How I Make Money With Adsense Websites

Recently, one of my readers asked me to write about how I manage to get so much money from Adsense.

As you can see from my income reports, two of my websites, Elephant and Horse, receive a significant portion of their revenue from Google Adsense. For Elephant Website, it’s about 70-80% of the income, and for Horse Website, it’s 100%. In total, two websites make somewhere between $700 – $1,100 a month.

Apparently, that is not easy to get such a high Adsense income. So, the reader asked me to share my “secret” 🙂

And here we go! Let’s analyze what makes these websites so Adsense-successful.

What’s Common Between the Websites?

First of all, I have to tell you that I did not grow the websites from scratch. I bought them both on the EmpireFlippers marketplace when the websites already had a steady stream of income.

I bought them in October – November 2015 and since then, the websites have shown a stable growth, more than I expected.
You can read more details about the purchase process and how I made my choice in the previous posts: How I bought Elephant Website, how I bought Horse Website.

What else is common between them?

Let’s see:

1. Both websites specialize in providing useful information. The visitors are not looking for products (mostly). They come to get answers to their questions, to learn more… or to complain 🙂
2. The posts are long, more than 1000 words; some articles have more than 2000 words.
3. The website themes are simple with an enhanced focus on the content. This makes the websites look a bit simplistic.
4. The websites are ranked on the first page for their main keywords; while it is not always the #1 position, the ranking provides enough traffic to keep the money rolling in.
5. Both websites are about 2 years old at the moment of writing this post. Elephant Website was created in the beginning of 2014. Horse Website was created in the middle of 2014.

Elephant 🐘 Website

This website is about a particular brand. The brand is very popular due to the modern look of its products and attractive prices.

The domain name of Elephant Website contains a slightly misspelled version of the brand name. I think this is one of the important factors of its success.

People are looking where they can learn more about the brand, so they type the name in Google search and get my website among the first results. They then go to the website for the information or in search of replacement parts.

Or to complain.

I have put a full disclaimer on the contact page that I am not affiliated with the brand. However, it does not stop website visitors from emailing me about some faulty items they bought from the main distributor of the brand.

In the beginning, I was replying to the comments and emails but recently, I have stopped. It was too labor intensive and it did not bring me anything in return.

At the same time, the emails and comments themselves provide a big value for me: I can learn what bothers my visitors and use this info to make the website even more relevant and useful. I have done only a bit of that and plan to do more.

There are no pictures in the articles since I do not want to draw attention away from the ad units.

The website also has pages with Amazon links. These pages do not contain AdSense units apart from the one in the sidebar. I learned from the experience that it is not a good idea to mix Adsense and affiliate links on the same page.

The website was created in the beginning of 2014.

Adsense Unit Location

Here is how the Adsense units are placed on the pages:

1. On the top left of the text but after the first paragraph.
   This layout allows the unit to appear after the text on mobile screens, this is a requirement by Adsense.
2. In the sidebar.
   This unit is shown on all the pages including the Amazon ones.
3. In the middle of an article aligned to the right.
   There is no unit on the bottom of articles because Adsense allows having only three units per page.

Horse 🐎 Website

This website is about a particular type of education. I believe this kind of topic is perfect for an AdSense website. People who are looking for the information about where to study, come to the website and click on the ads of colleges, schools, etc. As simple as that.

Horse Website articles do have pictures. Its pages are particularly long, so the images break the monotony of the text.

The website was created in the middle of 2014.

Adsense Unit Location

Here is how the Adsense blocks are placed on the pages.

1. Top block: Aligned in the middle right after the 1st paragraph
2. Middle block: In the second half of a page
3. Last block: Before the last paragraph

On some pages, some ad units are placed next to the images.

Improving CPC

I did not do much to improve CPC after I bought the websites.

Before doing anything else, I decided to try Google Adsense experiments.

I started 6 experiments back in December 2015. It has passed more than a half a year since then… So far, I have managed to finish only one experiment. The rest 5 are still running with the overall confidence scores oscillating around 50-70%. Not enough to choose either the original or the variation (it should be 95%).

The next thing I want to try is to play with ad unit placement. There are quite a few free WordPress plugins that allow doing that, so I want to use one of them.

Switching Rat 🐀 Website to Adsense

Recently, I switched my yet other website, 🐀 Website, to Adsense.

It did not go very smooth.

I got rejected first. I had to do a Valuable inventory Under construction fix before getting the Adsense approval and being able to run ads.

This website is not so great yet in terms of Adsense revenue. I use AutoAds there.

The website sells goods from Amazon and the vistors click right on the product links ignoring everything else.

this might be an explanation of why the ad revenue is low.

More Questions? More Useful Resources!

Do you have more questions? Go ahead and ask them in the comments!

If you a beginner and got a bit lost reading my post, go check out a great post How to make Money with Google Adsense by my fellow blogger Shashank.You will learn all the basics you need to know when you are only thinking of starting making money with Google’s Adsense.

 

Featured image: A collage made of Animals At War and Animals At War by SNappa2006