Making Money Online

I've started to think about how to earn some extra side money from my time surfing the Internet. I've done some research into this area and online advertising and affiliate programs look promising. Although I don't expect these activities to become my primary means of income, I hope that it will at least provide me with some extra spending money - either to save for a rainy day or perhaps to help obtain a better camera for my hobby in photography.

I've signed up with Google's AdSense program. How does this program work? Basically, Google places ads on your website and will pay you per click of an advertiser that gets shown on your web page or per thousands of views of an ad.

You can see my participation with this program in action right on my Journey of the Mind blog. You will notice on the side a label that reads "Ads by Google". These are the ads that are provided from Google that is displayed on my page.

So, now when someone clicks on one of the ads I will get paid. The amount of money varies, and depends on how much the advertiser is willing to pay.

You may track your earnings via Google's AdSense website.

I will now share with you a "secret" to achieving a successful return from Google's AdSense program.

The easier way to make the money from Google's AdSense program is of course via clicks on the advertiser. However, the other method that also is available is by ad views (per thousand). The secret, which is really no secret at all is to make as many webpages on the same topic.

How will that help? Well, for one thing you can place the same Google Ads code into your other websites/pages. For example, I have another site here that uses the same Google Ads code: DigitalElement. Since they all refer to the same source/beneficiary (that is, me in this case), the views are accumulative and getting the 1000 views suddenly becomes within reach.

So, a single page may only contribute a small amount of views but if you have many single pages then together they amount to a larger number views... as you can see, this really is no secret, but it does require some effort.

Comments are always welcomed.

posted by R.Q. Chen @ Saturday, June 02, 2007