AdSense? OMG

Oh my god, I’ve just heard of AdSense, they say that is by far the most popular contextual advertising system today. It’s ease-of-installation and use, and it’s compatible with most blogging packages available. This includes Blogger (YES), which is also owned by Google. Blogger even has AdSense setup built into its blog editor.

A friend of mine gave me some tips:

He said: There are several things to consider when starting out. You cannot just plaster ads all over your blog in the hopes that you’ll earn a few dollars because chances are you will probably earn very little if your AdSense campaign is not well planned and well executed.

He said: Are you willing to adjust your blog’s design and layout to give space to ads?

I said: Hell yeah!

He said: Not all bloggers are sensitive about design. But do consider that once you put in ads on your sidebar or main body (or anywhere for that matter), you will have to include additional design elements to your blog. If done improperly, your site can even appear cluttered with AdSense ads! Also some bloggers would rather have their ads unobtrusive, so the focus would be the main content. Others prefer the ads to be the first thing that a reader sees–this can bring in more clicks (and more money!) but at the expense of your readers being directed elsewhere once they click.

I said: that’s all?

He said: No. Is your traffic good enough? If you just started blogging recently, then you might want to increase your readership first before putting ads on your site. You can usually expect a clickthrough rate of less than 10% (and anything very high would look suspicious to Google and you might get banned). You might just get frustrated if you don’t get the clickthroughs and the revenues that you’re aiming for, if you have low traffic.

I said: how many views do I nead?

He said: One good rule of thumb in forecasting monthly revenues is using the daily page views x a theoretical clickthrough of 3% x $ 0.10 per click (this is highly dependent on your topic/keywords/niche!) x 30 days. So if you get 500 page views per day, your estimate would be $ 1.50 per day or $ 45 per month. But since the AdSense minimum is $ 100 before releasing a check, you better target $ 100 per month at least. And for this you would need about 1000 page views per day.

I said: 1000 per day, omg, I don’t have that many friends…