Why am I not making money with adsense

Here is an email response I wrote to a reader who emailed me about why he is not making money with adsense even though he knows the basic. I outlined two possible reasons below, which I thought I would share it with the rest of the 2 readers that I have for this blog (LOL). Btw, I am preparing my next post on how to make 1000 with adsense. I must say, the results have surprised me and you will be too!

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Given that you know the basics, there are always 2 main problems that I have seen for people who have been at it for a period of time and not seeing success.

First, you need to fix your work ethics. How many articles can you do a day to get the backlinks? If you don't have a constant rate, it is very hard to be successfully. When I was at the USD100 per month level, I wrote 5 articles per day without fail. No outsourcing, no games and tv after work etc. I just lock myself in the room and start typing. I kept this up for 4 months before I broke the USD500 per month. When you are at this level, then think about outsource. You need to know what to outsource before spending the money.

You need to understand that making money is a mental game. You need to win the mental game before being able to see any success. I have coached over 15 people during the past one year and only one has not given up. The rest of them cannot maintain this work ethic for long.

Once you are mentally prepared to put this much effort, then you need to look at your writing process. You should not take more than 15 mins to produce 1 300 word article that makes sense. This is the productivity part of the business where you need to be as efficient as possible given that you have a full time job. The one student who is continuing used to take 2 hours to write one article. I told him that is too long. I forced him to take a timer and keep the article to within 30 minutes. Now, he can produce them within 15. That is a HUGE leap. This means on a per hour basis, you are getting more links than ever.

Second, know what keywords to backlink. (see related post on how to backlink longtail keywords) A lot of people make the mistake of spreading their backlinks too thin. 5 backlinks for this keyword, 15 backlinks for another keyword. Worst of all, these keywords are spread among too many sites, meaning that there is no one site that accumulates enough backlink to become an authority.

What you need to do is to find out which site and which keywords on that site has the most potential to give you money. You need to link your adsense to your analytics to get this data. Then I chose Content -> AdSense -> Top Adsense Content. This will list the top 10 earning URLs on your site. Then I'd click on the first URL and from there I'd choose from the drop down box that has "AdSense Performance" in it, I'd choose "Entrance Keywords". Now at this point you have a list (and you might have to exapand it to see all the kws) of your top referring kws to that URL. Using some commonsense in determining if those are kws that seem likely to be used, you then check them through Scroogle (or other rank checking tool) and see where you're ranking and whether chasing those kws might be worth the effort.

For example, let's say one of the kws I've found in this list is "blue oranges" and it is bringing me 10 uniques over this most current 30 day period, if I check it out in Scroogle and see that I'm number 13 for "blue oranges" then I'm inclined to give it a go as I'm already getting a lot of searches being only in position 13. If one the KW is "where do I buy blue oranges" and I am already ranked in the top 3. then I will pass.

Once you have a couple of potential keywords (no more than five), then it is time to backlink them. Focus on them like your life depends on it. No work on other sites. No work on other keywords. No new shining objects. Just backlink these few keywords until they are in the top three. I guarantee your income will increase.

That is the way I do it in a nutshell when I was at your stage. No automation tools, no secret ways of finding KWs. Just pick the most profitables one and backlink them until they are in the top three.

Now that I have some money, I don't write anymore as I am my outsourcers. My KW process is also more refined now but that is because I am now very familar with the niches i have and know where to get new KWs that are not in the adword tools (such as TV shows, news site etc). For you however, all these can come later. Learn how to focus on producing articles for backlinks and what keywords these backlinks should point to.