How to Start Making Money Off Adsense Right Away

Well, now that we’ve all got our blogs up and running… it’s time to start thinking about… ah… MAKING MONEY.

The truth is, it can take YEARS to make money blogging. It takes time to start getting traffic. But, I’m of the opinion that you should start monetizing your blog right away. The reason why is, there is nothing quite like seeing your blog make money to motivate you to make it better and get more traffic — even if, at first, your profits probably won’t pay for a burger and fries.

The easiest, simpliest, quickest way to start “monetizing” your blog — geekspeak for “making money off of” — is to use Google Adsense.

For people knew to this, the search engine Google makes money two ways:

1. By SELLING ads through its Adwords Program; and

2. By BUYING ads (or, more properly, brokering ads) on people’s websites through Adsense.

Some people, like me, use both: I BUY advertising through Adwords and I SELL advertising through Adsense (although not on the same sites, a violation of Google’s dreaded Terms of Service).

It only takes a few minutes to get up and running with Adsense — and like everything else associated with blogging, putting Google ads on your blog comes down (once again!) to merely copying and pasting blocks of HTML code.

I have about a dozen blogs at the moment but only one or two are making me any real money through Adsense — but it’s starting to add up. A few months ago, I started making $10 a day through Adsense… then $20… now $30. My goal is to get up to $100 a day on a consistent basis or $3,000 per month.

One thing that REALLY make a big difference for me was using “Adsense optimized WordPress themes” for my blogs. My Adsense income literally TRIPLED almost overnight when I switched themes.

Here is a link to some cool “Adsense Optimized WordPress themes.” The one I like a lot is “BlueSense.” (However, I’m not sure if this is available through the free WordPress site.) I installed it on my hosted websites by FTPing the files to the server like I describe in this video here.  Here’s a little blog on natural cures I started that uses BlueSense (although I modified it to more like “Greensense.”  It really shows you you can change the colors to fit your blog and get maximum impact for your Adsense ads.

Once again, these Adsense-optimized WordPress themes are FREE!  Just download the file to your computer and then follow my instructions for uploading it to your hosted site.  Easy as pie.

Of course, you have to already have an Adsense account to make use of these themes.  Perhaps I will do a video on that topic soon.

Followup #2 to “JoshMadeCash.com” Review

Well, surprise, surprise: The “JoshMadeCash.com” — or “GoogleTreasureChest.com — folks billed my credit card $72.21 on June 1st… even though I canceled my “free trial” within minutes of ordering it and sent not one but TWO emails to their customer service email address.

Here’s what happened.

1. I noticed a charge for $72.21 for “Google Chest” on June 1. The telephone number on the charge was 1-888-526-1248.

2. I called that number and got a call centre. I think it was in India, judging from the accent. The very nice operator located the charge but said that she regetted she herself could not refund the charge. She gave me another telephone number for “corporate” and, she said, they could give me a refund. She did offer, however, to “cancel” my “account” — an offer which I happily accepted.

3. I then called the number the first operator gave me – 1-866-951-1406. This time I got a male American operator who said… I would NEVER believe it… but he was just a call center for a number of products. And guess what? The “new management” of Google Treasure Chest just switched call centers within the past 24 hours. Imagine that? Alas, he did not have the new number of a new call center… but… I could call him back in a day or so and he may have it then. I could also try checking on the GoogleTreasureChest.com website to see if they have a new Customer Service number.

So: It looks like I’m out 72 bucks, folks! I’ll see if my bank will reverse the charges on what is increasingly looking like a pretty nasty operation… but I’m not sure if they will. This is what happens when you review Internet Marketing products. Every once and a while, you get a scam operation that doesn’t honor its own Terms of Service.

Why Blog in the First Place?

I had my first “live,” in-person blogging class Wednesday night – and it was a whopping success. The participants were friendly, eager-to-learn and asked lots of great questions.

But one question stood out: Why blog at all? Isn’t this just an indulgent waste of time? Who really cares what you think anyway? Is this “Myspace” for grownups?

I’d like to address that briefly from my perspective as a veteran copywriter.

1. Advertising Saturation. First off, we are living in a hyper-marketing world. New technologies have created a situation in which the average person is bombarded by between 500 and 5,000 sales messages every single day.

More and more, marketers are viewed as SCUM, unwanted guests who shove their way into our personal spaces and whom we want to avoid at all costs. We create strategies for filtering out sales messages – from TiVO screening commercials to spam filters for our computers.

2. Peer to Peer. What this means is that, increasingly, we are turning to peers or friends for our buying advice. If we’re thinking about buying a computer, we ask our friends which is better, not the sales guy at the computer store.

3. Making Friends. Businesses of all types are discovering, therefore, that they have go back to basics if they want to sell anything to people. They have to actually make friends with their prospects first… and only later sell them something. They have to serve their customers by providing them with quality information that they can trust.

4. Starting Conversations. And that is why blogging is increasingly a “must have” tool for all businesses – especially mom and pop operations but also big businesses as well. Blogs are designed to create two-way conversations. They allow readers to post comments on your posts – and you can interact with your prospects and customers.

5. Getting to Know Customers. Blogs allow people in a market niche to tell businesses what they REALLY want… as opposed to what businesses THINK they want. They allow businesses to GET TO KNOW THEIR CUSTOMERS, to make friends with their customers. They allow businesses to test out ideas and concepts in a low-cost way and see what their market thinks about them.

6. Peer to Peer Marketing. Blogs are easy-to-create, inexpensive and easy to modify. That allows small businesses to use technologies – including email newsletters, videos and mass marketing – until recently reserved only to big companies.

Bottomline: So, the bottomline is this. The reason why you should be blogging if you’re in business is that blogging allows you to identify, interact with and serve prospective customers in your market niche.

You can build an online business by dedicating yourself to SERVING a particular market niche – whether that niche is professional crocket players or knitters or Mixed Martial Arts enthusiasts.

You become a preeminent CUSTOMER of your own niche. You buy all the products that people want to sell to your prospects – and then you tell your prospects what are valuable and what are crap.

Do that… be a true and loyal friend to your market… and then, when it comes time to sell your market something, they will trust you and buy from you. You’ll have built up enough street “cred” so that your market will know you know what you’re talking about.

That’s why you should start blogging. Identify a market you want to be in. Step up and become a “servant leader” in your niche. And then start selling people what they really need and want.

P.S. If you haven’t started a blog yet, you can set up a free blog in under 2 minutes by viewing my introductory video here. If you’d like to get your own domain name and start a blog for business, you can start here.