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How Does Google Make Money? (Hint: It’s All About Ads)

@maheshoneFebruary 1, 2018By

If there are three companies that are dominating the technology space, they are --- Apple, Microsoft, and Google. And you know how Apple and Microsoft makes money. But, do you know how Google makes money?

Sixty billion dollars ($60 bn). Guess what? That was the annual revenue (and it was $37 billion when I first published this blog post back in 2012) of the world's largest search engine, Google, in 2014.

But how is that really possible when they hardly have any tangible products or when they don't charge a penny for most of their products and services?

Don't Miss: Over 151 Google Products & Services You Probably Don’t Know

Well, it’s advertising, and again advertising. Google's majority revenue comes from two advertising platforms --- Google AdWords and Google AdSense. In fact, 96% of Google’s revenue is from advertising.

Recently, I came across this interesting thread on Quora.com where Oliver Emberton answered the question "If I want to become an entrepreneur, where do I start?".

Oliver answers:

Think of a company as a machine you design and build. Your 'machine' always has certain parts. It sells something to someone, and re-invests some of that to help make more sales in future. What's left over is profit for the owners.

Make Money Blogging: What Does It Take To Generate 1,000,000 Pageviews & $3,000 Per Month

@maheshoneJanuary 31, 2018By

maheshone

You want to make money blogging? You do? I can help you. But don't think I am going to give you yet another 101 ways to make money online. Because it doesn't work that way at all. Seriously. If you already have a blog and is exploring ways to monetize your blog then here's a list of over 40 Google AdSense alternatives to make money blogging. Over the past several months, I have been trying to scale-up my content creation process --- to create more blog posts per month in a consistent way. However, I was not able to do it and is yet to find a way that works for me. But the good thing is, I ended up doing a lot of maths. I love maths. No, not the stuff that you and me learned at school --- differentiation, integration, algebra, matrices, etc. --- but the one applied in real life. In fact, that's how I ended up writing a fun blog post about How Much Traffic Do You Need To Make $100,000 a few years back. It was all about traffic and income and surprisingly it became one of the most popular posts on my blog. So, today I just wanted to do a reverse blog post based on the numbers that I have worked out. That is,

How Much Money Should You Invest In Content Marketing To Generate 1,000,000 Pageviews And $3,000 Per Month

And it's about traffic, income, and costs too. The only problem is, the math that I have used on the previous blog post can be applied to almost any blog/website out there. But the current math can't be as it's mostly based on my own traffic insights plus few case studies. So, there's every chance that the actual figures applicable for your own blog could be a lot different from mine. Needless to say, it ultimately depends upon your website's niche, authority, and marketing efforts. For instance, the number of pageviews of a blog depends very much on its bounce rate. Even a slight change in bounce rate means a lot in terms of pageviews. My bounce rate is over 85% and the number of pages per visit is 1.30/visit. Now if I've managed to reduce my bounce rate to say around 80% then the number of pages per visit will be around 1.50/visit. And it will easily result in a 15% jump in pageviews (with zero additional content creation). Coming back,

Make Money Blogging: I just want to decode four questions

How Much Traffic Does Your Blog Need To Make $36,000 Per Year In Ad Revenue
How Many Blog Posts Do You Need To Generate A Million Pageviews Per Month
How Much Money Should You Invest In Content Marketing To Generate A Million Pageviews Per Month
How Much Time Does It Take To Reach Your Traffic Goal

Don't Miss: Over 121 Websites For Anyone And Everyone To Make Money Online

How Much Traffic Do You Need To Make $100,000 With Google AdSense

@maheshoneJanuary 31, 2018By

maheshone

Is it really possible to make $100,000 a year from Google AdSense (or by selling ads on your website/blog)? If so, then the real question is how much traffic do you really need to make big bucks with Google AdSense?

While it’s true that we can’t predict the Google AdSense income exactly, we can optimize the ads in different ways so as to make the most out of it.

Also, you must make sure that your website category is advertising friendly because your AdSense income depends a lot upon the category of your website. You can use Google AdWords Keyword Planner tool to find out the competition in your industry.

If there is enough competition (i.e. if the suggested bid by AdWords for keywords in your niche is high) then we can assume that Google will fill your ad spaces with high paying ads (see how AdSense works).

For example, if you Google search "loans" then you'll see a lot of ads so it means that if you have a blog related to personal finance then there will be enough competition for your ad space.

Now I’ve randomly added few keywords to Keyword Planner to find out its suggested bid by AdWords. Here they are:

As you can see, the competition for keywords related to “finance” is very high compared to keywords related to “food”. Of course, the suggested bid is just an estimate and the real cost-per-click varies a lot.

But still, even if it’s $5 then it means a lot. Why? It’s because the cost per click to advertise on Google is very high compared to cost per click on Google Display Network. So if an advertiser is paying $0.50/click on Google then he may be paying only $0.10/click on Google Display Network.

Don't Miss: What Does It Take To Generate A Million Pageviews & $3,000 Per Month

Over 40 Google AdSense Alternatives To Make Money Blogging

@maheshoneDecember 24, 2014By

maheshone

First Published: July 22, 2012; Last Updated: Wednesday, December 24, 2014

Google AdSense is undoubtedly the best advertising network out there that follows a pay-per-click advertising model. When Google AdSense was first launched they were accepting almost all websites with over 100 content rich pages and that comply with their basic program policies. So almost anyone was able to get an AdSense account (even with scraped content) in less than a week or two.

But today, your website must not only comply with Google AdSense Program Policies but must also comply with Google Webmaster Guidelines. It means that you they can deny your AdSense application if your website is selling text links or is hosting copyrighted content, etc. Even if your website complies with these program policies and guidelines they may still reject the application based on the content quality.

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