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This is a guest post brought to you by Shaun Connell, webmaster of Make Money, a free resource for those who want to make money online and think outside the “money box.” Find out what the money box is by visiting the site.

Don’t get me wrong, AdSense paid me my first check. For doing that, they’ll always have a special place in my heart. ;-) But unfortunately, most bloggers rely on AdSense as their primary way of earning an income for their main blog. AdSense is fantastic, but should it be your primary source of income? Let’s do some casual number crunching to see.

This is Why I Hate Algebra

Let’s say you want to make a $100 a day with your primary site. To find out how much it will take to get there, you’ll use a super simple formula that looks something like this:

[AdSense cpm]*[x traffic]=100

If the AdSense CPM is $10, your formula will look like this: 10*[x]=100 which means this: 10*[10]=100.

This isn’t just gibberish. The “x” stands for “thousands of impressions,” meaning if you make a whopping $10 per thousand visitors, you’ll need 10,000 impressions before you make your $100. How many impressions do you serve? This is a vital question for understanding potential AdSense earnings.

How Many Baskets do You Have?

That’s nothing to sneeze at. It takes a lot of work to generate a constant 10,000 impressions a day, but the fact is that most websites, even by the pros, won’t generate that much. So what to do? Just remember the age old advice of financial planners:

Always Diversify.

Day traders always argue that you should diversify, never putting all of the proverbial eggs in one basket. If you diversify, it’s harder to get wiped out, and even if most stocks go down, at least some will go up. It’s just safer.

The same concept applies to internet marketing. Diversify. Sell ads, sell an affiliate program, just diversify. AdSense is a great supplement, but compared to the other monetizaton strategies, it simply shouldn’t be your primary focus.

Look at it this way: Let’s say you are selling an affiliate package worth 100 bucks, and when you make a sale, you get 50 bucks. You get 10,000 impressions a day from 5,000 visitors. Of that 5,000, only 1,000 end up clicking through your affiliate link. Supposing you get the typical 1% conversion rate, you’ll make 500 bucks, which means you’ll be making well over a 100k per year.

Last Words

In light of the above numbers, a lot of people have turned AdSense off all together. I decided to take AdSense off my main website, even though I wouldn’t go as far as Chris Pearson when he said, “[AdSense] is quite literally the worst monetization service of all time for people who don’t have millions of pageviews per month.”

AdSense is helpful, but it should only be a small part of your earnings. Do the numbers, and figure out how to launch your traffic into an income. Test the waters, try out programs and increase your earnings.

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