Sometimes Adsense Just Makes Sense

After all the email you receive with all the false promises as well as the overexaggerated sales hype on TV and radio, it is difficult not to be put off regarding the marketing of business websites especially when it comes to profit potential.

Being a professional SEO, I decided to perform a little test of my own to determine how a brand new site could become profitable and what timeframe for this achievement is within reason. Of course, I wanted to make this profitable for me as well.

Rather than develop some laboratory experiment that would provide results that others might find difficult to repeat, I set out a plan to build rather basic websites using topics I was already familiar with and include Google Adsense advertisements on each to allow visitors to click on the ads which causes me to get paid on a monthly basis (provided the revenue exceeds $100 US at some point).

Google Adsense Websites for My Test

The 2 sites I created were Seafood Plus Info at http://www.seafoodplus.info/ and Topsail Island Info at http://www.topsail-island.info/. Each of these sites were created with a "standard" look and feel using PHP coding that uses Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and the new Google Sitemap Protocol.

Being that I wanted the sites to gain recognition and usage quickly, I wanted the largest of the major search engines, Google, to find each site and index all of their pages quickly. The Google Sitemap Protocol, which is still in beta testing, enables that to happen.

Results So Far...

Not to violate the Google terms of service for participation within the program, I will not disclose exact amounts of revenue. Instead I will provide results in relation to other expenses involved in creation and maintenance of a "standard" business website.

Thus far, the Seafood Plus Info site has already paid back the full amount expended to register the domain and host the site for a year. This occurred within the first 4 months online!

As for the Topsail Island Info site, it has already started getting revenue within the first 9 days of being online (from date of registering the domain and purchasing hosting)!

This is rather amazing as so many other web design and SEO "professionals" say it should take 6-9 months to see results. Oh well...

What Does All of This Mean?

To me this means that link building, my favorite form of website promotion, is still quite effective on the major search engines. It also means that through careful consideration and proper planning, a business website can be developed to become profitable in a reasonable period of time. Similar to running a storefront business, online business does take time and effort.

The rewards can be outstanding!