Entrepreneur Blog

I know I just made a thousand of you little wannabe internet entrepreneurs all pissy and you think I’m an idiot. Give me sometime to show you the light and if you still think I’m wrong then you can go obsess over your whopping $30 check you got from Google last month for all your efforts.

First lets get rid of all of your lame reasons why Google Adsense is awesome. Shoemoney, John Chow and that guy that runs plenty of fish make tons of money with Google Adsense. Yes some amazing web marketers are making good money with Google Adsense or other website monetization methods. However, compared to the number of people who are trying and those who are succeeding there is a vast disparity. You are not John Chow or Shoemoney.

Secondly, they make the large majority of all of there money through affiliate marketing.

So why isn’t Google Adsense a business model. It’s not offering a substantial product or service that is traded for cash. If your site is providing content or information and you place passive adsense ads on the page then you are not monetizing your site. You are hoping that by chance google will place a relevant ad that will possibly peak the users interest long enough for him to click the ad and you make an amazing .15 cents. This would take millions of transactions to equate to a substantial income.

So can you make money with Google Adsense? Sure. Will you make a lot of money with Google Adsense? Probably not. Relying solely on Google Adsense simply spits in the face of common sense.

1. You don’t rely solely on one thing for your source of income. It’s like putting all your eggs in one basket.
2. You are not able to inspire users / customers to act on your product. You are a passive by stander hoping that you generate enough visitors to your website that will just happen to click on one of your Adsense ads. 3. Users are becoming more and more web savvy and are beginning to ignore ads like Adsense.
4. You can make much more money with other methods of monetization. Example
- Notice that Affiliate sales are 1. and Adsense is 6. with a difference of $3,800. Now multiply that by 12. That would make an annual difference of $45,000.

I’ll follow this up with a some posts about how to monetize your efforts or develop business models for your website endeavors. Think of providing a service or a product and then outsourcing the actual implementation so that you are left to manage and promote your business. This is essentially what you were trying to achieve by creating a crap Adsense empire, being your own boss. Well find a niche and build a business model around it. Stick with the internet medium and just adapt services and products to be delivered by the wonderful internet. The internet is only going to grow and get bigger. Whether or not you are around to take advantage of it’s wonderful opportunities will depend on whether you are able to build a sustainable business model. To better understand what makes a business model check out the wikipedia entry.