i read a webmaster's post at another forum that he makes around 60 dollars a day from adsense. when i checked out his site, its a clothing catalog that looks ugly. his alexa rating is just around 300,000. the only thing i noticed is that his ads are in the middle of his pages. i just called his site ugly so i won't mention it - hehe.

can this happen to a site that just gets that many visitors accdg to alexa or is he just lying? do you have a similar success story? maybe he's just confusing us

Depends what value the is of adverts he's displaying. Some (very few) Adwords advertisers are paying over $50 per click. Others (although still not that many) are paying $5 to $10 per click. Of course the majority are $5 and below.

As you can see it wouldn't take many clicks from visitors to acheive $60 per day if he's targetting the right keywords to atract the high paying adverts.

If your interested in getting more for your Adsense clicks try out Joel Comm's excellent Adsense Secrets book.

I don't think clothing keywords pay all that much. My guess is that he's exagerating a little.

his alexa rating is just around 300,000

The alexa rating is about as useful as page rank - neither really tell you anything much about a sites traffic. So it is possible he is getting low-value clicks from a huge visitor base, though having read that thread myself I think it is more likely that there is a bit of over exaggerating going on.

It all depends on how many visitors he gets and how targeted they are. If he is not sharp enough to create an attractive site then the chances are he probably isn't a search engine master either but I don't know.

Maybe his site is so bad that he has a high click through rate for them to get away from it!

MattD

Originally Posted by Mattd

Maybe his site is so bad that he has a high click through rate for them to get away from it!

That seems to be usual technique, especially with the thousands of scraper sites and fake directories around.

<rant>
Maybe one day Google will figure it out and make it so ALL sites using adsense are to be approved by them first rather than the approve once use wherever you like approach.
</rant>

There's quite a few tools out there that let people produce hundreds of these directory sites in minutes. With people making lots of money from these pretty rubbish sites made purely for the Adsense clicks you'd imagine Google will have to do something about it soon.

Originally Posted by Mattd

Maybe his site is so bad that he has a high click through rate for them to get away from it!

MattD

wow, now that's a strategy...

The main thing that makes a visitor valuable to AdSense, is do they convert into sales for that keyword.

actually the ones with the fake directories and the "made for adsense" site don't care about that. They simply get paid for the clickthrough

My ctr is quite low, although there are a lot of clicks everyday, I couldn't earn much from google. I'm bewildered by that

Im earning around what he said, but im using top keywords and doubt that any clothes forum would reach that many, i tried clothing keywords and on average its $0.06 per click so grab a calculator.

Also remember the CTR would be low aswell

you know what, i've tested some high paying keywords and they do pay a lot! i can't wait to make my next site

Always a good idea to do your keyword research!

If his site is "ugly" as you say, then they'd probably click on the ads just to get out of it. Seriously, though, $60 a day is not that hard to make from AdSense, even from a clothing store website.

Originally Posted by weblaunch

Seriously, though, $60 a day is not that hard to make from AdSense, even from a clothing store website.

maybe he means .60 cents... hahaha. well, for those of us who aren't exactly earning riches from adsense, the above statement is hard to digest. this means, i really have to start setting up one of them optimized sites to see if this is true...

Yes some people make directories and when you view them, they have google ads first in same background color as the background. This gives them money whenever a viewer clicks on it.