Adsense revenues with free niche blogs

At the moment my main business idea for this blog is to monetize it using AdSense banners. It might not be the most lucrative source of revenue but it is easy to use and Google as owner of both Blogger and AdSense has nothing against using AdSense on Blogspot blogs.

In fact, the combination of a free blog platform and advertising limits our search for possible ways of monetization somewhat. On one hand some free blog platforms like Wordpress do not accept any advertising on the freely hosted blogs. On the other hand, some advertising affiliate programs do not accept blogs that are published on free hosting services to join the program.

But AdSense and Blogspot combine well together. The Blogger menus for setting the layout of the blog even include AdSense widgets that are extremely easy to add to the blog with only a few clicks (blog layout -> monetize). Thus it is not at all surprising that AdSense is the most popular advertising program used by a growing amount of bloggers who use the Blogspot as the platform for blogging.

There are many other good reasons for the choice besides it being free to use. As it is one of the most popular platforms, there is a huge selection of free templates to use. The default selection of templates is pretty boring, but the Internet is full of nice themes that can be used with any Blogger blog.

So far I have used several different Blogger templates that are "AdSense ready". Some bloggers might argue that this does not mean anything, as any Blogger template can be used with AdSense code. But for those of us who are not html and css code wizards they certainly make the life of a webmaster easier. At least I have been pretty happy with several free adaptations of popular Wordpress themes.

On the other hand I have used the very plain Minima white on one of my most lucrative blogs. So it seems that even the plainest design can be used for a money-making niche blog as long as there are customers who are interested in the content of the blog. I think I will use Minima also with this blog at least in the beginning. Keep it simple, Stupid!

I will return later to the theme of blog branding when I myself have to start considering the branding and visual image of this blog. Even if I don't consider it as the most important part of successful blogging it certainly helps to have a well designed blog template that is designed with AdSense in mind.

AdSense added to the blog, waiting for the revenue

I have written already six different, unique articles to this blog to be published during the next days. As I'm pretty sure that I will continue to add content to this blog even now that I decided to add the AdSense widgets to the blog. I made this decision a lot earlier than what I originally thought. At the end of the day, the idea of getting maybe 1 EUR a day more than now was the main reason for acting fast. It might have been clever, or it might not have been clever. But it's done :-)

The template I use is the very clean and basic Minima lefty. Minima lefty differs from the classic Minima template by using the sidebar on the left side instead of the right hand side in the Minima. Some readers of my other blog have complained that having the sidebar on the left makes it more difficult to read. On the other hand, according to Google the ads are clicked more often in the left sidebar than they would be clicked in the right column. So the choice is based only on the idea of profit-maximization. You might not like it, but I have to consider the money-making potential of the template.

It will be interesting to see how long it takes before any readers find their way to the blog. Furthermore, I'm very interested to see how high or low the click rate is in this rather competitive niche where the readers are aware of the fact that Google ads are paid ads that should bring some money to the publisher of the blog or web site.

I have read somewhere in the wide kingdom of the Internet that the people who read blogs on the niche "make money online" are among the worst possible readers when considering their willingness to click the AdSense ads. As I have already one blog where I write about open source operating systems and applications I cannot imagine that this niche would make even less money as AdSense revenues. But let us see what happens!

In the articles that are published during the next days, I will write about SEO (search engine optimization) and content as the king of GO (Google optimization). Please come back for more even more interesting articles!