Investing in AdSense Content
Using Investment Strategies to Make the Most out of Google's Ad Program

Disclaimer: This article is not intended as investment advice. Rather, it is an attempt to reconceptualize content development from the perspective of an investment strategy. Every reader of this article should note that taking this perspective in the development of your own website content might be a risky venture. All calculations are hypothetical and in no way represent actual or expected results. Because of the nature of Google's ad program, it is nearly impossible to predict the revenue that can be generated by pages before they go live.

One Dollar An Hour On Your Way to One Thousand Dollars Per Month

One of the great things about AdSense publishing is the way the system uses time to your advantage (even the time you sleep). So even when you are not working, you are making money.

For example, $1 an hour would be a miserably low wage for first world employees. But with Google AdSense and the power of multiplication, $1 an hour turns out to be about $720/month. $2/hour is $1440/month. $4 an hour is $2880/month. And $8/hour is $5760/month. None of these figures are chump change and some of them are even livable wages.

Think about it for a second. There is no human being who can work 24 hours per day. But with AdSense, your ads ARE working for you even while you sleep.

Now to be completely honest, there are certain times of day when you are more likely to make more money than others. But the AdSense workday (not your hours) is still much more extended than the average worker. Take the United States as an example. Your ads probably start getting into gear around 6 or 7am East Coast time. But they don’t stop making you money at the close of the 5pm workday. Nope. Instead, you get to take advantage of the three hour difference between the East and West Coast not to mention that internet surfers are out in masses well into the night. The majority of advertising money is made between 7am Eastern and 3am Eastern. That’s a 20 hour workday. And it is not unusual for your Ads to keep working for you the full 24 hours.

Meeting Your Goals

Ok. So we’ve done the math. But how do we meet our goals? There are several options.

The first option is to put the entire load on one website. Say you develop a website about some specific technology like WiFi networking. Your task is to get visitors to your website (because visitors are your source of AdSense income). You do this in a number of ways. Regularly develop unique and useful information that users can’t get anywhere else. If you do this long enough and well enough you may come to be seen as an authority on the subject. Other websites will link to you and drive traffic your way. But this doesn’t happen overnight. In the mean time, you should discipline yourself to write regular useful content, solicit links from other relevant websites, try to get placed in the Yahoo and ODP directories, post in various online communities (make a positive name for yourself) and include a link to your site. You can also try advertising with Google’s AdWords program to increase visibility at the outset. It takes time to get situated in Google’s natural SERPs (search engine result placement).

The positive of putting all your eggs in one basket are that you can fully dedicate yourself to making the website work, doing everything thoroughly and with high quality. This in itself is important. And if you have a single passion or hobby, it may be the easiest solution.

The negative of putting all your eggs in one basket is obvious. Just like in the investing world, without diversification there is less stability. If the topic of your website is cyclic (like NFL football) then you’ll have spikes of activity and then lots of downtime. Also, a change in Google’s algorithm might hurt you more significantly. Finally, the threat of competition looms large: if you get out performed in that one niche, you have nothing to fall back on.

The second option is to have a few, say 2-5, websites that you try to run just like the first option. The only difference here is that you have to maintain more websites (each focusing on different topics) and develop much more content. It is still essential to systematically create new, relevant content for each of your websites. Maybe instead of creating new content for each site every day, you create new content for each site every three days. That way you only have to work on one or two sites per day.

The benefits of option two are that you split the burden of generating AdSense revenue. To generate a total of $1/hour with five websites, each one only needs to generate 20 cents. This relieves the burden of any one site and creates instant diversification. If one website doesn’t perform, the others will provide backup. Similarly, if you face competition in one niche, it won’t hurt as bad because the others won’t be affected. This will give you time to develop a backup plan for the underperforming site (ditch it or redevelop it).

The third option is to develop a large number of websites (say 10-100) and put your hope in the strength of numbers. With that many sites, one of them is bound to be profitable (if done correctly). You can feel out the niches that do well and then even whittle down your efforts to focus on the websites that are performing well.

The negatives of the third option are many. First, you can’t do this alone. You’ll need several partners to develop websites and their content. Second, by having so many websites, it will be hard to maintain quality control. You may have a bunch of really bad websites that do don’t perform at all. Third, the cost of registering domains and paying webhosting fees put a major dent in any potential profits. Fourth, the administrative burden increases exponentially. However, if done correctly and systematically, this method could pay huge dividends. Think about 100 websites each returning just .10 cents an hour. That’s $10/hour and $240/day and $7200/month. But it is extremely risky and a lot of work.

As you can probably see, the preferred method is to start with option 1 and then work into option two. Who knows, in a couple decades, you might work your way to option three, but in a more organic fashion.

Developing Eternal Content

Content is the key to making money as an AdSense publisher. Quality content that is unique and relevant. However, there is one other factor that you should always consider when developing content: the distinction between eternal and time-sensitive content. Time sensitive content loses its relevance over time. Eternal content will be just as useful 10 years from now as it is today. With eternal content, the work you do today can still be generating income 20 years from now. Say I write something about the history of computing and information technology in the 20th century. That content is going to be just as useful in 10 years as it is today AND you will not have to update it except for corrections (or any tweaking that you want to do).

Think about this: you write an article today that takes you 7 hours of research and writing. You are not paid for the article, so it may initially seem like a waste of time. But you publish it on your website. A month goes by and you haven’t made any money. But then you start to generate an average of 25 cents per day. Doesn’t seem like much, does it? But then consider that over a year, that’s more than $90. It gets better, though. At .25 cents per day for 10 years, your article has generated $900. Ten years later and you were effectively paid $125/hr to write the article.

Investing in AdSense

Content is king when it comes to AdSense. And, the trick is to generate new content on a daily, or at least weekly basis. But how do you do it? One option is to write the content yourself. But what if your ideas have run dry? How about paying someone else to write for you?

It may seem like an odd idea, but investing in AdSense makes a whole lot of sense if done properly. The important thing to remember is that content keeps making money, not just the first year, not just the second year, but as long as your have the article up, ads placed, and visitors coming.

Here’s how it works. Let’s say you take $10,000 and pay someone .10 cents per word to write 100000 words worth of content on your subject. It would be useful to employ someone who is knows about your topic. Now it is essential that you make clear that the content needs to be unique and topic relevant. Guard heavily against plagiarism of any form.

With you $10,000, commission an individual to write 300 pages of content that is approximately 333 words in length. The first 100 pages that are written should be viewed as “launch material.” You’ll launch your website after 150 pages have been written, but start with only 100 available to the public and 50 in queue. Then, over the next 50 days, unveil one page per day from the queue, all while more content is being created.

$10,000 is a large investment. Perhaps you could negotiate a lower per/word rate or maybe only commission 100 entries total. But if you think about it as an investment, things start to make sense.

At the end of one year, you will have 300 pages of useful, relevant content with an initial investment of $10,000. The first year will be the least predictable because of the protective mechanisms that search engine algorithms have built in to prevent spam. So, this should certainly only be considered a long term investment. However, let’s do the calculations that for a hypothetical 2nd year return.

[Note: This is a hypothetical situation and in no reflects a guarantee of returns. Revenue from AdSense is dependent on to many variables to accurately predict, including the fact that Google could at any time cancel the program or disable your account. Additionally, the subject of your website goes along way in determining the rate of return that you can expect for your content. The sole purpose of this thought experiment is to analyze how investing in AdSense might be profitable]

300 pages of content
.10/day/entry = $30/day = $900/month = $10,800/year

So let’s say that in the first year you made no money (though you certainly will make some – we’re just trying to be conservative). In the next year, you average .10 cents per entry per day. That will generate $10,800 in the 2nd year. So, in two years off of $10,000 you’ve generated $800 (you have to account for the initial $10,000 investment). $800 over two years ain’t that great. You could do better in the stock market, for sure. But in the third year, things could really take off. Let’s say you generate another $10,800, this time of pure profit. Now, you’ve more than doubled your investment in three years. In four years, you might have tripled it.

Re-Investing in AdSense

But that’s not the end of the story. Why not employ the same reinvestment principle that they do on Wall St.(ever heard of dividend reinvestment)? Take some or all of your returns and reinvest them into content for your site. This will keep your website fresh, and all along, create more opportunity to generate income.

See Also: Investing in Information