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I am participating this forum mostly in php coding area, but sometimes I look at adsense forum also, because I make my living off adsense and I am interested in it. And every time I see lots of people who are trying to make money from their websites but only reach 25 USD per year. They all think that there is some secret which they don't know but if they know it, it could bring them to success. They discuss somewhat strategies of better banners placement, mixing adsense with text, tuning colors, etc, etc, etc. They think that it will make them more money.
Yes, there is some kind of point in tuning adsense appearance. But it is useful when and only when you have sufficient amount of traffic. It is all just a matter of probability theory. When you have hundreds or thousands clicks per day you can say for sure that the ad placed here with such colors work better (or worse), because everyday income after the change went up (or down) by 30 (20, 10, 5) percent of the average. When you have 100 visitors and 5 clicks per day you cannot say for sure whether changing link colors gave more earnings, because the earned sums bounce too far from the average value, both ways. And still result in 25 USD/year.
So the first and quite obvious rule is: get traffic. And here comes the main problem. Most MFA (made for adsense, you know) websites I know either steal content or take it from open sources. Obviously such sites are quite of no use and no interest to the publicity because the original is always better and people are more used to it. Even if somebody came there from SERP he will more likely never return. Only the extremely high volume of SERP traffic can give you money but this is all just a game of fortune and all these visitors can easily vanish after the next google update.
More clever guys try to manage a kind of blog but most often the enthusiasm ends after a month or so and so does the traffic (if any). I tried this and I quit this because my short and ugly fantasy did not allow me to regularly generate sufficient amount of articles on given topic.
Another obvious way of getting traffic I see in the conditions of constant growing number of garbage sites is creation of some source which provides UNIQUE service to the publicity. Image hosting, blog hosting, online image converting, etc, etc, etc. Yes, this requires a lot of work at start, along with relatively high investments on hardware (you will quite definitely have to rent a cluster of highly productive dedicated servers), special knowledge and absolutely strong assurance in what you are doing. This is what I am going to try in the most nearest future and I am very hopeful about it. One guy (also from Russia) tried to create the servce of this kind (some online omage processing) but due to lack of special knowledge his service was working only on low amounts of traffic. When it raised significantly his server got loaded so much that it was able to serve only the static frontpage (with adsense). That guy made about 500 USD daily from that not working service. That's a pity that people went away soon.
One more way is creating a site with user-contributed content. This forum, youtube, flickr are very good examples, but quite as mentioned above they all will require a lot of work at start.
The main problem of each and every adsense beginner lays in not understanding that if you want to get paid for your work you must work hard. Both filling your site with content and creating unique online service is long, hard and very tiring job. If you don't want to do it - don't start it at all. You can get lucky enough and get your project skyrocketed but this is one chance in a thousand and it will obviously end sometime. I went through it myself and I know how it feels.
Now I have two main income generators. One of them is a doorway-like shareware downloads website which earns only owing to extremely high volumes of chinese traffic. Another is website with downloadable themes for symbian smartphones. It is the sort of user contributed content. This site has about 60k pageviews and 3200 visitors per day and it brings somewhat 3000 USD per month (and constantly growing). Only 15% of traffic comes from search engines, all others come from linked sites because such sort of content is highly required. It took me about a month to develop this service and something about half a year to get such volumes.
What I am writing this for? Do not expect the money to come fast and in large amounts if you do not want to work with your brains. The competition is too high to allow lazy webmasters to earn. Only the hard-working or very very smart guys will succeed in this rat race. And till you try to rearrange adsense blocks for your 10 daily visitors you will get what you deserve: 25 USD annually.
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