Earth to Adsense Newbies: Slow Down!

The Washington Post recently published an article featuring many ordinary people who’ve become financially successful due to displaying Google Adsense ads on their web site. These folks are pulling in $10,000 to $40,000 a month. They are definitely stars in the world of Adsense publishers.

Web publishing newbies read stories like this and start salivating over the possibility of pulling in big bucks. If those people can do it, why not me? Is their reasoning. And, there’s nothing wrong with that kind of thinking. Everyone’s looking for a way to make money from the Internet. These types of stories are great motivators.

But let’s look a little deeper into what it takes to make $10,000 a month or more this way.

Each one of the people featured in the article has a niche they are working in, and not just any niche, but a great niche that brings in lots of traffic. Andrew Leyden has a podcasting directory. David Miles Jr. and Kato Leonard give away MySpace design pages. Jock Friedly specializes in free public documents. Matther Daimler researches the best airline seats.

Funny. No MFA scraper sites were featured. Maybe because these people are all focused on long-term success, not short-term gains. Please resist clogging up the Internet with thousands of auto-generated sites with contextual ads thrown on a few pages to make a quick buck. Search engines are cracking down on these so you’ll find it hard to get rich this way.

The big earners found a niche that interested them and put a lot of long hours and work into making their sites user friendly and informative. Some may even have spent good money bringing in traffic as well. What you’re reading in the WAPO story is the end result of much dreaming, planning, and slaving over a computer for hours at a time.

Unless you have a gazillion dollars to spend on buying technical resources and hiring people to create content, there is no quick and easy way to make big bucks with your web site, especially if it’s brand new.

If your goal is to build an online empire, plan to spend at least two years doing research, writing, SEO, publicity, tweaking, and learning how to make the best web site possible. That’s right. Two years. It took all of those ordinary folks TIME to get their sites to the point where they created buzz and traffic, and yes, earning great money.

It will take you time too, just like the rest of us. If you want to make the big bucks faster, then work longer and harder. Now, that’s the real story behind those success stories. So, slow down and don’t get discouraged if you’re not an overnight sensation - nobody is. Remember that old saying:

Slow and Steady Wins the Race.