It’s a pretty tempting offer and becomes even more tempting once you search for a little more information or some reviews on the e-book. Every review raves about the e-book and how great it is! Everybody says that they’ve made a fortune and that you should buy the book!

Sounds good doesn’t it! You see these ads and reviews everywhere in the ‘make money online’ world and there is a good reason that the ads spread through the internet so much - commissions. Chances are that if you see an ad like this, it is not the author actually selling it but an affiliate marketer who is probably making up to a 75% commission on the sale! They may be earning this commission through a direct agreement with the books author or they may be selling the book through an online marketplace, such as Clickbank.

How many of those great reviews provide you with a nice affiliate link at the end so you can go buy the book for yourself? 99.9%!!

There’s the catch - within these books, there is often mention of the book’s affiliate program where purchasers of the book can then resell the book to others and earn a lucrative commission. This is often written:

And that’s why you see rave reviews for the book everywhere. Some sites will even offer you massive discounts on the regular retail price of the book. How can they do this? If you’re earning a 75% commission on a $49.95 e-book then you’re already earning $37.46 per sale. Why not sacrifice a bit of your commission and become the cheapest seller of the book? The extra copies you’ll sell will cover the loss on your commissions. Makes sense.

There is money to be made online selling these e-books to the suckers who will buy them. They are suckers because the books will not help them make money online.

Sign me up!! Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. But for the sake of argument let’s say that the above is true:

The Adsense gurus will tell you that they build sites where 20% of visitors will click on their ads - that’s a straight out lie. Perhaps when Adsense first started out this was possible but these days visitors are used to seeing the ads and ad blindness has become a real phenomenon. Visitors are a lot more likely to ignore the ads these days. Most webmasters agree that a 5% click-through rate (over a long period of time) is a very good rate to achieve. The majority of webmasters who say they are getting more than 5% are talking about one day only and low traffic levels (ie, 3 visitors and one click - Wow! 33% click-through rate!!).

So, given a 5% click-through rate, we would need 20 visitors to our site in order to get a magical $50 click. Sounds easy, right? Well, unfortunately word is out! Google says that there are 19 million sites on ‘mesothelioma’, which is believed to be one of the highest paying keywords. Add to that the fact that most search engine users don’t browse past the third page of the search results and it suddenly becomes very, very, very unlikely that you’ll get those 20 visitors through a search engine. Think you’re going to get referals from other sites? Ask another webmaster to link to your ‘mesothelioma’ site and see the reaction that you get! Even if what the Adsense e-book authors are saying is true, their system is impractical to implement.

The market has become saturated and made building a site based around a specific keyword (a ‘Made for Adsense’ site) a pointless exercise.

It’s a fact that some keywords pay more than others. Sites based on video games generally pay very little while sites related to medical and financial keywords generally pay higher. But we’re talking cents, not dollars. The majority of webmasters that I have communicated with (who run a variety of different sites) have generally agreed that 50 cents is considered a good price for a click. That’s 50 cents. Not dollars.

Of course, the market spikes sometimes and I’ve heard of some people earning a couple of dollars for a click. But it was one click only and the price was a lot less on subsequent clicks. Over time, 50 cents is considered a good average.

And then there is Smartpricing.

Smartpricing is when Google automatically gives a discount to the advertiser based on the perceived value of your site. It’s believed that certain types of sites generate more sales for advertisers than other sites and improve the advertisers return on their investment (ROI). This is great for advertisers as it means that they are not blowing a large advertising budget on sites that are not producing sales.

To illustrate the point, if I have a cheap-looking, automatically generated ‘Made for Adsense’ site, would an advertiser want to pay a large amount to advertise on my site? Of course not. However, if I have the internet’s number one resource on a topic, advertisers would be willing to pay more to advertise on my site. Google automatically implements SmartPricing to ensure that this is what happens.

Remember, the advertisers are Google’s customers, so what’s good for them is good for Google’s profits.

The bottom line:

Is there a lot of money to be made through Google Adsense? Not the way the e-books will tell you to do it. Save your money and don’t buy the e-books!

The way to make money through Adsense is to generate large amounts of traffic - and the only real way to do this is to provide a site that people want to visit.

That doesn’t mean publishing free articles. That doesn’t mean filling a site with RSS feeds. That means quality content. Content is Queen. The people who are making lots of money from Google Adsense are doing so because they have great content that people want to read and are getting large amounts of traffic because of it.