Make Money With Google Adsense
With
Joel Comm: It’s called a happy accident.
I actually go back online all the way to 1978 when I had a TX 80 Model One and 300 BOD modem. It was the kind that you had to take the receiver and put it on the modem in order for the data to transfer back and forth.
Fast forward to 1995 when I started on the internet. I just turned 10 here this past summer. As you mentioned earlier, created www.classicgames.com and sold that to Yahoo! in 1997.
In fact, for anybody that plays on Yahoo! Games you know those little avatars that you can select from to pick a character that you want to be? There is one of them that is a guy with a hat, goatee and glasses and that’s me. It’s my permanent effigy in Yahoo! Games.
June 2003 Google had launched their Adsense program.
We were still coming out of the great dot com bust. Starting in 2000 the bottom fell out of the internet. The economy went down. The stock market went down. The whole, internet businesses were going out of business left and right. We were doing all we could to survive.
When Google came out with their new program. We thought, oh, here’s a fantastic way to monetize the web pages that we had. So I applied for an account. I got approved. I was very excited. I got my Adsense code, slapped it up on my website and waited for the big checks to come.
After a few days of doing this I checked my reports and I realized no big checks are heading my way. I was only making a few dollars a day with Adsense. At that point I decided this obviously isn’t going to work so I’m going to move on to something else.
It wasn’t until early 2004 that I heard some people were making good money with Adsense. I decided it was time to go back to the drawing board. I sat down. I started optimizing my Adsense code on my pages because Google gives you lots of options, lots of power in the hand of Adsense publisher. Not only do they provide various size blocks such as the traditional banner, two ads in a block, sidebar blocks, wide leader board blocks, but they also allow you to change the colors of your backgrounds, your borders, the text within and they allow you to place the code anywhere on your pages.
I started testing color, block size and page placement. I found out some things that Google was not telling anybody; that there are optimal ways to do all three of these that can increase your revenue dramatically.
The long and short of it is I went from making $30 a day to making over $500 a day with Adsense.
