Making money with your website is definitely possible. There are a number of different ways that you can make money, but the easiest is through the pay-per-click model.
Common providers of PPC services include:
- Google Adsense
- Ezoic
- Monumetric
- Mediavine
We're going to continue by talking more about Google AdSense, not because it's necessarily the best PPC ad network, but because it's the most well known and biggest ad network on the Internet.
With PPC advertising, ads will be displayed on your website and you will be paid whenever someone clicks on them. Companies are paying Google (and other PPC ad network providers) to advertise through their ad network. Google then automatically chooses relevant sites within their network on which to place their ads: this could be your website.
The ads that Google will display on your website will depend on a variety of different factors and will fluctuate depending on the industry and topic of the page. Lets take a closer look at PPC.
Why Is PPC So Popular?
Getting paid per click is the most popular way to generate money from your blog. The reason for this is because you don't ever need to go look for advertisers or negotiate directly with companies looking to spend money on advertising. Google does all that for you.
Google has the most popular PPC program out there called Google Adsense. This program allows publishers, bloggers, and owners of any website to insert a little bit of html code on their website, and have ads displayed to their website's visitors.
It's extremely easy to setup when you've already got a WordPress website, and that means you can start making money right away.
How Much Money Can I Expect To Make With Google Ads?
That depends on a number of factors. Google will pay you per click. The more visitors you have the more chances there is of someone clicking on an ad, so once you've got ads set up on your site, your next goal will be bringing in more visitors. Also, depending on what ad is being displayed you will receive a different amount.
Honestly, we've seen sites that have made about 1 or 2 cents per click, and we've had sites that made well over 6 or 7 dollars per click. For most blog or news sites, you could probably expect to see anywhere from $0.10 to $1 per click.
So now you can see why you'd want to increase your readership and viewers - the more eyeballs on the blog, the more people will click on your ads.
Website Performance Caveat
One detail to watch out for when picking a PPC provider is the number of external requests they make to load their ads. Lots of external requests, and in particular ones that include multiple redirects of their own, can cause slow page load times.
Sadly Google Adsense is known to have some of the slowest external requests, whereas Monumetric is mid-range, and Mediavine is known to be the best for having as minimal an impact on website speed as possible with an ad network.
Ezoic used to be in the poor performance category, however they've made efforts recently (2022) to reduce redirects and improve their ad loading performance. However keep in mind that loading dozens of external requests is always going to be slower than, well, not doing that.
Why does Google want to pay me for this?
This is a common question when first getting started - how and why does Google simply pay you for all this? Let's take an example.
Steven runs a local pizza shop. He's looking to increase his brand awareness and wants to invest a little money into online Advertising. He turns to Google to setup an ad campaign through the Google Ads (formerly adwords) service. Steven creates an image ad and a text ad and submits them to the Google network. For argument sake, lets assume Steven decides to spend $1 per click.
His ads now run all across the Internet on websites that are somewhat related to food, pizza, local dining, or whatever else he wants to target.
Now Donna is a food and healthy living blogger who shares her personal stories and recipes. She recently added Google Adsense to her website so that Google can display ads.
Transparent to both Steven and Donna, Google searches for the best locations to place Steven's ad. In this case, Donna's website is one of those locations. Now when someone visits Donna's blog they are served an ad for Steven's local pizza shop. If someone clicks on that ad, Donna receives a percentage of that $1 that Steven agreed to pay. The split is close to 50/50, so in this case lets assume that Donna gets $0.50 for that click and Google keeps the other $0.50.
Clear as mud? There's no sense in overthinking the internal workings of the Adsense program. Just know that it's a very easy way to get paid for having a website that gets traffic.
Simply follow the next three steps to get set up!
Step 1: Create your Adsense Account
Click here to read through Google's documentation on how to create your Adsense account.
Step 2: Setup Google Adsense On Your Website
Although it might not make you the most money, it is definitely the easiest way to make some money from your site. I'll take you through how to setup your adsense account on your site.
It's Installed; Now How Do I Make Money With Adsense?
This is the best part (beyond getting paid); you just do what you were going to do anyways. Build a beautiful and useful website, one that people will visit, and one that people will engage with. The more people engage with your site, the more they trust it and connect with it, the more likely they are to click ads on your site. The more they click ads on your site, the more money you'll make; that's pretty much the best motivation there is!
Content:
A good website needs to have quality content. This is true of any site, regardless of advertisem*nts. Depending on if you're pushing original content, or if you're re-hashing other people's content into a digest format, you'll need to change how your content looks and behaves. The important thing, though, is to know that AdSense revenue won't just *happen*. You need to give visitors a reason to read your site. The more they read, the more ads they see, and the chances of them clicking on one (and making you money) increase.
Additional to just having good content is to have new content. New content bringsreaders back for more, gives more chances for them to click on ads, and is good for SEO. Speaking of which...
SEO:
It might not be immediately apparent how SEO will impact your adsense revenue, but it's important! You need people to find your site before they can click ads on it. The more traffic your site has, the greater the likelihood of building solid Adsense revenues.
