These days much of the online conversation about AdSense is focused around AdSense no longer being a viable opportunity for making money online.

My opinion is completely different. I know first hand that AdSense is a viable revenue source but in order to be successful you have to approach it correctly. It takes work something many people hate.

In this post, I will give you my view of seven steps to making 12K a month with Adsense.

Of course, your results may vary but this is my method to earn money online with AdSense.

Step 1: Your Niche Must Be Highly Profitable

With AdSense I start by selecting a niche where the price to advertise keywords is at least $5.00 per click on the Google AdWords side. This ensures I get a good share of the revenue when a user clicks the Google AdSense ad on my website.

By opening a Google AdWords account and setting up a fake campaign you can manually filter through various niches and find highly profitable niches.

The method I prefer is using Keyword Country which provides access to the top paying AdSense keywords with the click of a button.

I never focus on the highest paying keywords because they are normally way to competitive and saturated. I focus on keywords with bid prices in the range of $5 to $15 per click.

Once I find some niches I run that data against Google trends to make sure the traffic trend is solid. If it is declining rapidly I don’t use that niche.

Step 2: Research And Look For Golden Opportunity

Every niche has keywords that are super competitive. I never focus on these. Therefore, once I select a high paying Adsense niche I focus on finding long tail keywords with good search counts.

For example, if I select the niche of Teeth Whitening I would probably not focus the site around that keyword. I would pick other less competitive keywords like professional teeth whitening, zoom teeth whitening, Colgate teeth whitening products, etc..

All these keywords have decent search volumes and much less competition then the generic term teeth whitening.

By focusing on less competitive keywords I can normally land in the top 10 of Google with a little SEO work. I will describe SEO in future steps.

Step 3: Building Content Fast

After doing my research I have the map for my site and start building content. For speed I outsource my content writing. You can outsource at elance, guru.com or just do an google search for article writing.

I pay around $10 an article and the content is of good quality unique content.

It is important you get good quality original content, your goal should be to build a nice quality site that covers the key topics in your niche.

I normally start with about 30 articles and expand the site once I start making money.

The key to this step is make sure you get good quality unique articles.

Step 4: Building The Site Foundation

While my articles are being written I head over to Bluehost, where I host unlimited domains for the low monthly fee of $6.95 a month.

For my domain name, I always try to be creative and keep it as short as possible. My highest searched keyword will always be in the beginning of the domain.

Once I have a domain added onto my Bluehost account, I do the 1 click install of WordPress to get my site started.

With WordPress installed I now have the foundation to build my site. I find a nice quality WordPress theme with light colors and design a nice looking logo. If you don’t have graphic skills you can outsource logo design for $25. Try elance, or guru.com.

Step 5: Building The Site

Now that I have my sites foundation ready to go, when my articles begin arriving I start building my site via WordPress pages. Each page of the site is a keyword focused page.

I set my home page as a static page in the WordPress options. I build the home page on the highest paying keyword from my chosen long tail list. This is normally the same keyword that appears in my domain name.

For SEO I use the All In One SEO plugin and put the keyword early in the page title, H1, meta description of each page on the site. I also edit each permalink url to be keyword focused. I make sure my internal page links on my sidebar are keyword rich links.

In the page content I weave in AdSense ads using the Adsense Deluxe plugin. I also have some ad placements in the theme design.

Step 6: Links, Links and More Links

Once I have my site designed with lots keyword rich articles, I next focus on link building.

Versus finding link partners by sending e-mail after email to webmasters, I lookup whois records of other sites in my niche. I get the webmasters phone number and use OOMA my free voice over IP phone, to make unlimited free calls.

I get a lot of voicemails, but I always leave a nice message why I called. When I connect with a webmaster I tell them how great their site is and how I have a related site and would like to partner. I ask them to blog roll me and I will do the same.

I’ve had a ton of success with this method and it tremendously helps my search rankings. I normally have no problem getting a site in the top 10 of the search results for my chosen keywords.

One note, some people will get pissed you are calling them if so just move on to the next and forget about it.

I also focus on all the other ways there are to get links. Quality blog commenting, directory submission, article submission, squidoo, forums etc… There are tons of ways to get free one way links!

My most highly effective method for getting tons of links is by using
My Article Network which also gives me an added benefit in the next step. With My Article Network I can post one article and send 1000s of unique articles to blogs all over the web. Each article links back to both my home page and internal pages.

One last note, many of you might think reciprocal links don’t work anymore. But that is not true if you balance the reciprocal links with lots of incoming one way links. Having some reciprocal links with one way links looks more natural then all one way links or all reciprocal links. This is a big reason I use My Article Network for easy one way links.

Step 7: Free Content To Make Your Site Expand

One of the things the search engines love is updating content. I hate to keep buying articles for my site, so I use the blogging function of WordPress combined with My Article Network, to get unique updating content to my site.

With My Article Network you’ll be surprised of the quality of unique content you can deliver to your blog. Sure it might have an outgoing link or two but who cares. Each post expands my site giving me more SEO internal links for my AdSense money pages. Also I put AdSense ads on each blog post which drives more revenue.

I just create a few categories in WordPress and link them up with the appropriate category at My Article Network and I have free frequently updating content.

This is a super handy feature for my site and also drives additional traffic and AdSense revenue.

Step 8: Repeat, Repeat, Repeat

I’m a pretty busy guy but by working part-time I have my sites up and running with tons of links in 2 to 3 weeks. My target is to get each site to produce between $1000 to $1500 a month. I’ve invested a total of $300 to $500 to build each site so the return is excellent.

By producing 1 site a month you can see the earnings potential with Ad Sense is still alive!

Have fun and don’t rush things. All you need is one site a month, then at the end of a year you’ll have 12 sites. If you can achieve $1000 a month per site, that $12,000 per month or $144,000 per year!