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How to Make $100,000 with Google AdSense?

Since Google AdSense surfaced as a way to monetize a blog or website, bloggers have been trying to push the limits on how much they can earn with a blog, and many have managed to turn an unassuming hobby into a primary source of income.

Running a blog is not that difficult, especially if you’re knowledgeable in the topics you’re discussing or, the very least, you’re willing to do research and come up with interesting ways to serve your content to audiences.

Let’s say you have a single blog that you’ve been working on for a while now (AdSense has a 6-month minimum requirement), and you’re aiming for a six-figure payment a year from AdSense. “Is it even possible?” you may ask.

Well, I’m here to tell you that it is, and that I, but many others too, have done it.

In this article, I’ll outline everything you need to know on how to make $100,000 with Google AdSense, so let’s get right to it:

The Hard Prerequisites to Making Money with Google AdSense

Before we can talk numbers, there are some hard prerequisites that your blog must meet.

Namely:

  • Your site must be advertiser-friendly;
  • Your site must get a lot of traffic;
  • Ads on your site must be optimized.

Each of these things come with their own set of requirements that I’ll discuss below:

What’s an advertising-friendly site?

A lot depends on the advertising-friendliness of the topic or category of your blog. In fact, it’s kind of crucial to have a blog about things that all people or a well-defined segment of the population is interested in.

If you do a quick search on Google Keyword Planner for generic keywords in your industry, you’ll get an idea of the competition that’s going on in your niche.

Top-paying AdSense niches include Internet Marketing, Technology, Web Hosting, Health, Computers and Software, etc.

Searching for related terms in Google Keywords will signal the level of competition for each term (Low, Medium or High) and even offers an estimate to the cost-per-click advertisers would bid in AdWords for the given keywords.

This is just an estimate and it doesn’t tell you the exact amount you’d be getting paid, but it gives you a general idea of how much you can expect after each click.

Beyond covering marketable topics on your blog and avoiding topics that are not of interest to advertisers (hateful content, violent content, drug-related content, etc.), you’ll also need to make sure your site conforms to technical and content-related quality requirements.

One quality requirement of Google AdSense is to feature a Privacy Policy and Cookie policy on your blog or website. Another quality requirement related to content is to put out valuable and original content.

As for the technical requirements that you will absolutely need to adhere to: Your site must be secure and mobile-friendly.

If you have these aspects locked down, you’re well on your way to tick off advertising-friendly site on your list of Google AdSense requirements.

How Much Traffic is a Lot?

If you’re dreaming of getting the big bucks with AdSense, you’ll need to build a site that attracts a lot of traffic.

Although it’s difficult to gauge the exact number of daily visitors you’ll need to earn $100,000 per year on AdSense, I can give you some estimates based on my experience.

But first, let’s clarify some terms and notions that you’ll need to watch for when monitoring traffic and conversion rates on your site:

  • Page Views – the number of times a visitor views a page displaying AdSense ads;
  • Page Click Through Rate (CTR) – the number of ad clicks divided by the number of page views or impressions;
  • Cost per Click (CPC) – the amount of money you earn every time a user clicks on an ad on your site;
  • Page Revenue per Thousand Impressions – the estimated amount calculated by dividing the estimated earnings by the number of received pageviews and multiplied by 1000.

Now, the higher the number of page views the higher your chances of getting a higher click through rate, which translates into higher earnings. Of course, the cost per click is also crucial to pump up your AdSense earnings.

Going back to the target amount of $100,000 per year, let’s see how many page views per day do you need and what CPC would be ideal?

Again, it’s difficult to say with certainty that X amount of page views would equal y amount of CTR and bring z amount of money, but I found (and many AdSense marketers agree with me on this) that a 1% CTR is an attainable average and an average $0.25 CPC is not far-fetched either.

If we work with these numbers, it means that to earn $100,000 per year, you’d need to make $274 per day. If we take the average CPC of $0.25 and divide it by $274, it means you’ll need 1096 clicks per day. With a CTR of 1% this amounts to approximately 100,000 page views per day.

But there’s another problem as well, namely bounce rate, which is the percentage of visitors that will navigate away from your site after a single page view. If this number is 100%, you’ll need 100,000 unique visitors daily to generate the required page views.

While technically this is a huge number of visitors, your click through rates and cost per click numbers may be higher than average in your niche or in certain periods.

How to Optimize AdSense Ads?

To earn six figure ad revenue with AdSense, another important prerequisite is to optimize your ads.

There are various parameters you can optimize when it comes to ads including format, size, ad placement, and color.

The best way to tweak ads on your site is to do an A/B testing and monitor results. A/B testing will reveal the best-performing ads in you niche, helping you to maximize ad revenue.

In terms of ad format, in your A/B testing, you can use text ads only, image ads only, or a combination of the two. Once you find the format that’s most successful, stick with it.

In terms of ad sizes, you can select from multiple sizes including 728 x 90, 336 x 280, 300 x 250, and 160 x 600.

When you get to the point of selecting a format for your page in AdSense, you’ll see that some formats will be market as “Recommended”.

What this means is that Google has found that these formats are the most popular and most targeted by advertisers, therefore, choosing those ad formats is your best option to enhance their performance.

Still, it doesn’t hurt to mix up ads on a page, but don’t go overboard as you risk bombarding your visitors with too many ads.

Place your ads in best-performing locations like those above and below the fold but do take A/B testing data into account on this issue as well.

As for ad colors, use colors that stand out, but make sure they’re not annoying and they don’t detract from your content.

Keep ads at a minimum as an ad-heavy website has a negative impact on user experience.

Ensuring a smooth user experience for your visitors is another important thing to consider. Make sure your site loads fast, that information is well-organized on your page, and do everything that you can to ensure visitors like spending time on your pages.

The more creative and interesting your content is, the more traffic you’ll get, and the more time visitors spend on your site, which can increase Google AdSense revenue in an organic way.

Alternatives to Google AdSense

If you find that Google AdSense alone does not bring in the desired ad revenue, I recommend spicing things up in the marketing department.

Even though some niches are thriving solely off AdSense revenue, it may be that using a combination of monetization and marketing strategies will be the key to success in your niche.

Here are some options to try in addition to Google AdSense:

  • Cost Per Impression Ads;
  • Direct Banner Ads;
  • Affiliate marketing;
  • Sponsored content/links.

Cost Per Impression Ads

CPM ads or Cost per Mille ads are payments offered after every 1,000 page views. If an advertising network is offering you $1 CPM it means that they’ll pay you $1 for every 1,000 page views you generate.

On the one hand, generating page views is easier than generating clicks, on the other hand, CPM networks may pay less than Pay-per-Click advertising networks, but again this is not necessarily the case across all niches.

In a sought-after niche, you can be paid as much as $3 per 1,000 page views, so if we take the numbers we’ve discussed at making money with AdSense, 100,000 unique pageviews a day could earn you $300 per day from CPM networks.

Even so, combining CPM with PPC advertising is a good idea to get the best out of your blog.

Direct Banner Ads

This form of monetization is similar to CPM networks, but you can negotiate ads with prospective advertisers and work out long-term or short-term advertising campaigns.

Here too, the amount of money you can charge for banner ads is also correlated to your daily traffic and unique visits. Unfortunately, this one metric you can’t escape regardless of the type of advertising you choose.

Therefore, unless you’re operating in a highly unique niche, you need to focus on driving a lot of traffic to your site, so you can earn more through selling direct banner ads.

Affiliate Marketing

Affiliate marketing is another marketing strategy to generate revenue from marketing products and services on your blog.

It’s somewhat a more difficult way to monetize your blog given that you’ll need to generate sales for your advertising partners to get a commission.

Affiliate marketing is also tied to the numbers of visitors, but click-through rates also matter.

This should not discourage you, however, from trying out this strategy as well, especially if your niche is about recommending or reviewing products or services.

Sponsored Content/Links

The fourth alternative to AdSense is sponsored content. This option works by getting paid for content you publish on your site to publicize certain services or products.

You can get paid simply for the content you write (e.g. review) or just to publish an article written by the advertisers themselves.

Also, some advertising agreements may ask you to place links on your site to drive traffic to the partner site to generate leads or sales.

By diversifying your marketing strategies, it will be much easier to earn $100,000 from your blog.

Let’s say that each of these strategies is earning you $60/day ($300/day in total). With a bounce rate of 100%, you’ll need 100,000/5 = 20,000 unique visitors a day to make approximately $300 per day.

If your blog is a popular blog that’s somewhat of an authority in its niche, it’s highly unlikely that your bounce rate will be 100%. The lower the bounce rate, the lower the number of visitors you need to generate to earn the same amount of money.

You can also A/B test each form of advertising to see which performs best in your niche.

Usually, there’s no impediment to why you shouldn’t use all advertising methods discussed here to generate ad revenue.

Conclusion

In advertising, a lot depends on your site and its various metrics, but the key is testing and experimenting with various methods.

It’s crucial to find a niche that’s advertising friendly and to identify the best ways you can monetize your blog.

If you notice that Google AdSense alone won’t get you close to the $100,000 goal, diversify your marketing strategy.

By taking advantage of multiple advertising channels, you’re more likely to get things rolling in the direction you want.

The numbers discussed in this article are based on my experiences and chances are that your numbers can be much higher depending on your blog’s authority, niche and your own marketing efforts.

Hopefully, my article has managed to shed light on the various metrics and strategies needed to boost your ad revenue through Google AdSense, and to show you that earning $100,000 per year with Google AdSense is an attainable goal.

Updated on: March 2, 2019