While thousands of dollars a month might be a goal a bit too lofty to shoot for, a well-trafficked, nicely-maintained, reader-friendly, interesting site with nonintrusive ad options can make some serious money over its lifetime. And when it comes to ads, where’s the first place everybody turns to? Google AdSense!

Unfortunately, however, Google isn’t exactly as accepting as they once were. And why should they be? Back when AdSense was a relatively new concept, Google didn’t care very much about how their ads were spread out and about. They were making the lion’s share of the money from advertisers; but now that they’re the single biggest name in the net, they’re a bit more selective about to whom they’ll allow into their club.

So if you have been denied by Google, or even if you choose not to submit to Google’s ironfisted rule over your domain, we will discuss some legitimate AdSense alternatives.

What makes this article different from other articles you’ll read online? For starters, I work for quite a few popular websites out there, including CarInsuranceList.com and DatingSites.org, so I’m not some Johnny-come-lately whose idea of “information” is plucking the first few AdSense competitors from a search engine and telling you that they’re viable alternatives.

These alternatives are ones I have personally used, and I can personally attest to their effectiveness.

Are they as good as Google? Honestly, nothing is as good as Google. Google has the best servers, the best advertisers, the most options, and they offer the biggest earning potential. But they’re also the most stubborn. Some people need alternatives – like me. Not all of my domains have been approved, so I’ve had to use alternate ad servers.

Great AdSense Alternatives

AdBrite

Although their website isn’t very colorful, AdBrite is a legitimate ad server that offers you a ton of cool options, including customizable ad campaigns and even in-video ads via an AdBrite dedicated web player (which actually loads, unlike that Google/YouTube Flash nightmare).

Publishers have the option of getting really involved in a hands-on way, setting ad rates and receiving 75% of all revenue. The service only pays out via check, but the best ones usually do.

Their servers are also reliable. It may take about a full day for the ads to show up, but once up, you’ll rarely catch one of those annoying “page cannot be displayed” messages from their ads. Overall, AdBrite is a really solid service.

Chitika

Chitika catches some flak in the industry because their ads aren’t exactly as cool as some of the other guys. Their ads are mostly text-based. Chitika plays well with other ad servers. If you have an AdBrite account and some extra space, throwing a Chitika button on your website is a smart play. They pay out through click and per a thousand impressions, meaning that you will get paid if you have visitors.

Chitika also pays through PayPal, which is great for site owners who want to get their money right away. And on the plus side, if you do pick up a lot of traffic, you will be considered a “Premium” site and get some great, well-paying ad scripts.

Kontera

Another service paying through PayPal, Kontera is a serious ad service that pays out well if you get a lot of site traffic. The best part about Kontera, and what makes them a great AdSense alternative, is that you do not even need space on your site to use them. As long as you have text, you simply add a short script into the body of your html, and Kontera will target keywords in your text and create those floating ads when someone hovers over them.

Kontera is probably the easiest to set up and has high CPC and CTRs. Kontera is essentially a plug-and-play service.

All in all, Google is the Stealth Bomber of the sky’s fighting jets, but that doesn’t mean you can’t find some other jets out there cruise around in. These three AdSense alternatives are legitimate and will help turn your site or blog into a true money-maker.

About the Author

Peter Reynolds is a web developer and writer, owning multiple websites and working for CarInsuranceList.com and DatingSites.org. Peter’s five years of web experience makes him an authority on SEO and 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 eight 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
SEO Linkvine. With SEO Linkvine I can get 1000 unique links from blogs all over the web. Each blog post 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 SEO Linkvine 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 and SEO Linkvine , to get unique updating content to my site.

With My Article Network and SEO Linkvine 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/SEO Linkvine 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!

One of the individuals highlighted in the article was a retired guy who was 57 year old and was making as much as $120,000 a year by placing AdSense on his handyman website.  Several others grey googlers were making $30,000 to $50,000 a year off AdSense.  The article even referenced AdSense guru Joel Comm.

I guess AdSense has finally hit the mainstream.  First, it was the dotcom bubble in early 2000’s, and then it was the real estate bubble of the mid 2000s, so are we heading for the AdSense bubble of 2010?

You can only figure that if AdSense hits the mainstream that its effectiveness as an income source will start to deteriorate.  People will start to get AdSense blindness and skip right over those ads.  

At the time of this wrtiting I do not use AdSense on this blog, but I thought the examples in the article did a good job of showing how if you really stay focused on building an authority website or blog, the potential Adsense income can be quite good. 

Then Google changed the algorithm to kill spam in its engine and suddenly things got more difficult.  The newbie could no longer throw up spam sites and make $1000s per month.  This led many of the guru’s to say making money with Adsense was dead, but I highly disagree.    If you were on the web during the early days you were probably making tons on good income with Adsense.  But most of the methods that worked then do not work today.  That is why I have created this post to discuss two methods that anyone can use today to make $1000s each month with Google Adsense. 

Here they are:

1. Method 1 is very simple.  You simply create a very small review website or blog of maybe 5 or 8 pages.  You can even use private label rights (PLR) articles for creating the site to make it super fast.  Don’t worry about duplicate content because in this method you are not worried about making your site rank in Google or any of the search engines.  What you are worried about is using PLR articles to create many sites super fast and then driving traffic to these sites.

To drive traffic to the site you use a very simple method.  Simply focus on driving traffic to your site via authority hubs that allow you to place your own content on their site.   Some of the common authority hubs you should use are article directories like ezinearticles.com, Squidoo, Newsvine and other web 2.0 sites.  To be successful with this strategy you are banking on Google ranking your posted content in the top 10 that is placed on the authority hubs.  So you place an article on ezinearticles.com that ranks in the top 10 of Google and then it leads to your Adsense site via a link in the content.

The key to this method is using the ranking power of the authority hubs.  These authority hubs are already authority sites so it is easy to get low competition keywords in the top 10 position of Google.   Note it is critical you focus on long tail low competition keywords when posting your content on the authority hubs.  Do not focus on the most competitive keywords. 

For a rule of thumb do not focus on keywords with more than 30,000 phrase matched results.  When I say phrase matched I mean search the keyword in quotes.  So you would do a Google search such as “Nebraska Teeth Whitening”.  If the results are less than 30,000, you are almost guaranteed to rank in the top 10 with ezinearticles.com, Squidoo or web 2.0 posted content.

With this method consistency pays off.  If you can create 1 site a week and write 10 articles a week and submit them there is no reason you can not have a site producing $5 – $15 a day.   I have many Adsense sites that use this exact method that generate $15 a day and I only submitted 10 articles to different authority hubs.  If you do 1 site a week submitting the 10 articles at the year end you will have 52 sites.  If each site averaged $3 a day per site you could have a nice little income of $4745 a month.

After that you could totally quit and have a great little monthly income on autopilot.  How much time did you waste last year?

2. Method 2 involves building 1 big authority site via a blog.  To be successful with this method it is better if you are passionate about your topic.  This will allow you to produce tons of content about your topic that offers real value.  The key to building an authority site or blog is that you have to offer lots of unique value.  If you do not offer value and just repeat what others are saying you will likely have a tough time making the site an authority. 

Here are some good examples of authority site with lots of value to offer:

www.seobook.com
www.shoemoney.com  (check out his adsense earnings on the site)
www.askdavetaylor.com
www.problogger.net

So in a nutshell making good money with Google Adsense or Yahoo Ads does still exist and is not dead.  However, you will have to work a little harder than you did in the past.  Hey it is still better than a day job!