The Five Different Tiers of the AdSense Publisher Spectrum

The Google AdSense program pays hundreds of millions of dollars to its publishers every month, and there is a very wide and different variety of all the webmasters and bloggers that currently use this contextual advertising system. Each of the publishers follows different rules and methods when it comes to using Adsense, and members of each group earn a different amount of money.

I have been participating in the AdSense program for a few years and a significant part of my monthly income comes from this program. I’ve talked to dozens of different webmasters and publishers and seen thousands of different AdSense sites and from my own experience I’ve found that there are actually five different levels that AdSense publishers are at. I’ll describe each of these levels, and if you’re an AdSense publisher yourself, it can be fun to figure out where you fall on the spectrum.

First Tier of the AdSense Spectrum: Monetizers

The first group is what I call the ‘monetizers’. These are the guys who don’t really know too much about web design or search engine optimization, would never imagine caring about keywords or ad relevancy, and for them to just find out that they can copy this super cool and incredibly cool javascript code into your website. that will actually *make them money* (!) It’s just the coolest thing they’ve ever seen. There are a lot of publishers who fall into this category and they rarely make more than $150 per month. These are usually the non-profit websites or the family-type sites, and they will generally use your AdSense earnings to pay for hosting costs.

Not to generalize too much, but older people who have trouble using Windows make up a large part of this category. I find that some of these types of people remind me a lot of my mother: very kind with good intentions but they type at 10 words per minute and have no idea about computers. And they’re happier than a kid at Christmas when they log into their AdSense account and see a whopping $0.23 in their daily earnings.

Second level of the AdSense spectrum: applicants

The second group are the ‘adsense wannabes’. In fact, I kind of feel sorry for this group because they usually end up failing miserably at being AdSense publishers (if they can ever get accepted into the program!) and accomplishing nothing except lowering their already low self-esteem. I can deeply empathize with this group of people because this is where I really started. They approach the AdSense program with a kind of “get rich quick” mentality, sometimes because of the hype of an ebook writer and sometimes because once they start learning about the AdSense program, their brain has trouble accepting the fact that it is a real business. .

I mean, come on, a business is where you work 60 hours a week to make someone else rich, right? There’s no way you can rack up a high 4-figure monthly income with this AdSense craze, right? Well, I hope you know better, and this is the level of thinking that these people are stuck on. These are the opportunity seekers, the people who will sign up for a new network marketing ‘opportunity’ once a quarter and then prostitute themselves to their family and friends because they have failed at everything else and are always jumping to the side. to another so that they never succeed at anything.

But I don’t want to be too critical, because like I said, this is the level I started at. These are the people who have been convinced that this is the next big thing and that once they set up just one website, they will make enough money to retire. Most of these guys will not generate any real income and move on to the next ‘big thing’. But those who start at this level and stay long enough will move on to the third level.

Third level of the AdSense spectrum: newbies

Statistically speaking, if you’re reading this, there’s a good chance you’re an AdSense newbie (short for newbie). It is by far the largest category of AdSense publishers. This is not something to feel bad about and in fact I consider it something to be proud of because you have shown your devotion to learning this new business and actually earning a decent residual income with it. If you weren’t devoted, you’d still be at the wannabe no-money level, so be careful noob because you’re on your way to success.

I define an AdSense newbie as someone who earns less than $300 dollars per month. They are probably pretty smart and very web-savvy people, and they probably read tons of material and e-books related to AdSense and internet marketing, but they just can’t seem to get past this invisible threshold that prevents them from earning higher profits.

I’ve been stuck at this level for longer than I care to remember, and if you’re at this level, let me offer you some humble advice that may allow you to advance to level 4 or 5 depending on your personal preference. If you’re really trying to make your AdSense earnings high enough to live on and make a big change in your life (maybe quit your job) and you’re frustrated because you just don’t know what you can do to make more money, then For the love of all things good and holy in this world, pick just one website and stick with it! This was my biggest mistake that kept me at the level of a newbie for too long, because I’d pick a new theme and create a new website, and then a few weeks later I’d do the same thing to the point where it felt like I was running instead.

If you’re like me, sticking with just one website or blog instead of trying to build many different ones simultaneously will be a real game changer for you. Think of it this way: When you strive to focus all of your attention like a laser on a single project, you’ll be building this website up to 5 instead of building 5 websites up to 1. Not only that, but you’re literally amassing an asset because if Your website was making you $2,000 a month pretty reliably, there’s a good chance you could sell it for 8-14 months of income.

Another factor that goes into graduating from the novice level is having all the information you’ve been reading about Adsense, traffic generation, and internet marketing to digest on a subconscious level. This can take a while, because you need to read or listen to something at least seven times before it really sinks in. But once you keep reading and absorbing information for a long time, it will eventually become a habit and you’ll find that you can create highly optimized pages intuitively, and it’s at this point that you should be able to move to level 4 or 5 if you want.

Fourth level of the AdSense spectrum: Empire Builders

Empire builders are the people who approach being an AdSense publisher from the perspective of building a business. They waste no time and spend a decent chunk of their mental energy focusing on the cold, hard numbers. The empire builder has many websites and focuses on things like finding profitable keywords, improving CTR, finding out which website themes tend to be the most profitable, testing page setups and traffic generation methods, etc. If this doesn’t sound like fun to you, it certainly isn’t, and that’s what separates the empire builder from the novice.

But just because focusing on improving CTR and split-test page layouts isn’t exactly fun doesn’t mean it’s hard, and the potential reward may be worth the inconvenience of taking the time to get it right. There is a major paradigm shift that needs to take place in your consciousness if you want to be a successful empire builder: You need to realize that your profession is literally connecting advertisers with people who are interested in what they are promoting.

By building content sites around a certain topic, you’re attracting people who are interested in that topic, and then you’re ‘giving away’ those visitors to other websites that may not be as good at marketing as you are. The main thing to keep in mind here is that even though you are building a base of website visitors with the intention that they will leave your website by clicking on relevant ads, they will leave some money in your virtual tip jar as they go. . ! If you’re an empire builder, it’s important that you don’t get too attached to your websites and spend most of your attention focusing on how you can connect your visitors with relevant advertisers.

Fifth level of the AdSense spectrum: AdSense prostitutes

By my choice of words, you may think this is a bad thing, but it’s not and it can potentially be extremely profitable to be an AdSense hooker. The AdSense whore business model is to have a single website and have ads appearing on potentially millions of pages on the site. The key distinction here is that most of the time the only website this person focuses on will be a community site or networking site, and there will be thousands of members effectively creating unique content every day. And with all the unique pages your member base is creating, you can put your code on almost all of them.

A forum or social networking website are great examples of websites that can make a killing using this type of business model. Many sites that run on user-generated content will employ an ad rotation script so that their AdSense ads are continually rotated with other types of visual ads so that visitors don’t go “blind” and ignore the ads entirely .

When you have a popular website and a member base in the thousands or tens of thousands, a 6 figure monthly income is not out of the question when you can monetize the sheer number of pages being created perpetually. This level is out of reach for most people because it usually requires extensive knowledge of web application programming and you will usually need to hire qualified programmers to work on the back end of the site and make sure it is secure. . This can be expensive and there is a chance that you will also need to hire people to moderate the content that users create. It is a complete business and pays accordingly.

As you can see, AdSense publishers come in all shapes and sizes, and I hope this has been an enlightening comment on your journey to higher earnings.