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.

The more I have been doing SEO the more I have learned this fact: Google loves content, aka words.

That FACT cannot be emphasized enough.

I will say it again.

The search engine, known as Google, loves text.  It is what they pride themselves on and they have the best system at reading, analyzing, and properly indexing it.

Flash, pictures, animation, and videos are great.  There is nothing wrong with those things (besides Flash, avoid that at all costs for SEO purposes) but they all must be accompanied by text.

My standard is at least 300 words of text on the home page and at least 150 words of text on any sub page I make.

I am on the internet at least ten hours a day.  Its how I make a living so I have to be.  And it surprises me that people still have not gotten this by now.  I see the most beautiful websites designed but they have little to no text.  And the owners of them, who spend thousands getting them made, cannot understand why it is not ranking for any of its terms.

Here are two suggestions I can give you when it comes to content that will help you immensely if you apply them

Home Page and Sub pages Must Have Enough Key Word Rich Content (On Page SEO)

When we get a new client we check two things before anything else.  First, we check to see if the coding is up to W3C standards (which it is usually not) and second item we inspect is the content.

When it comes to content we look for three important items in which the web designers most likely did not think about.

• 300 words of text on the home page

• all sub pages have some kind of text

• keywords are in the text enough for relevance but not overly so to where it looks like spam (this is actually an art as most people do this part wrong)

• check for duplicate content on Copyscape (big “no no” though Google lets local searches get away with it many times)

We still add videos, images, and all the other things to dress up a website but for search engine optimization purposes we make sure rich content either proceeds or follows all of those items.

Google Loves Articles (Off Page SEO)

Google has always and will always love articles.  I use article writing extensively when it comes to achieving first page ranking for my personal websites and my company’s clients.  I have gotten many websites to page one by writing 2-3 well written articles for them.

Ezine, GoArticles, Hubpages, and Tumblr are some of the best.  But more importantly is the type of article you write.

I do not know how Google bots can tell a good article from one that is not but, believe me, they can.  I have written 100s of articles on every topic imaginable and I have noticed that the ones I put a lot of work into and made them long, and I mean 600-800 words long, have done the best.

There are some Ezine articles I wrote back in February that are a PR3 right now.  That is seen as an authoritative article to Google.  I invested 20 minutes of research into a topic, one hour writing the article, and now three months later its a PR3.  Amazing!  Better than any reciprocal or forum link could have done.

Again, Google loves content.

Keep in mind that they make hundreds of millions off articles so you can understand why they are partial to them.

Every article directory has Adsense on their website now.  Look at all of them and you will see it.  Its everywhere.

Even the top notch ones like EHow, About.com, and Helium all use adsense ads to monetize their websites.  And Google gives anyone who feeds those directories with quality content higher rankings.

It is one of the tools I have used extensively to a steady stream of income of Google adsense revenue.

So, do ya’ like writing?

I hope so.  If you do not then SEO is going to be very difficult for you.  Usually people who do not like to write but still want to rank high in the SERPS resort to “black hat” because they are lazy.  Those techniques require very little work and anyone who does search engine optimization, and is good at it, can tell you its hours of work.

Hours of writing.  Hours of making content for your website and others.  But once you reach your goal its worth it.

Content is still king with Google. Remember its how they were able to beat Yahoo and MSN in the early 2000s.  People were noticing that when they did a search on Google they got more informational results while the others were producing crap. Tons of images but very little useful data.

The more useful content you create the better you will do.  Unless you want to mass comment spam other websites then it is something you will have to get used to.  Google loves words and the more you feed the “big G” what it loves the more it will in turn reward you.

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!

So what is Latent Semantic Indexing?

Basically, Latent Semantic Indexing is a fairly new technology which Google and other search engines are including as a part of their algorithm in order to improve search engine results. Latent Semantic Indexing looks to determine if your webpage is relevant by looking for natural patterns in words that are related to the topic of your webpage.

For instance, if you have a webpage related to the theme of computers, the LSI algorithm would scan your site for words actually associated with the term computers. Those words may include mentions of hard drives, Dell, servers, laptops, and software because these words would naturally be associated with content on the topic of computers.

It is very important you understand this concept.  The reason being is that now search engines are not only looking at your main keyword to determine if a webpage is relevant, they are also looking at the whole page and if the naturally related words to your main keyword are being used in the content.

Furthermore you should not just use Latent Semantic Indexing in your web content.  You should also consider using the concept when you get offsite links to your site.  The anchor text of the links and words around the links should include naturally related words.

If you want to stay in the top of the search results well into the future the bottom-line is that you should consider Latent Semantic Indexing as a key part of your SEO strategy.  Use lots of synonyms and related words in your content and links. Get close to your niche and learn the lingo so the related words flow naturally in your content.

Since most sites are not including Latent Semantic Indexing as a key part of their SEO strategy you have the potential to sky above them in the search results!