The purpose of gathering your personal information online, at it’s most innocent level, is to pinpoint advertise. When your data isn’t being used to push some sort fake news brainwash, it’s being used to find products, and advertisements for those products, in which you might actually be interested.
Ever wondered how people actually make money on the internet when they aren’t directly selling something on their online store? Possibly the easiest and most instant way to generate an income on your site that isn’t a store is through Google Adsense. Google Adsense puts a purpose behind those annoying click bait and pop up ads that even show up on this website.
NinthandSuperior’s article Gathering Your Online Data. Even on a Simple Blog Site looks into how anyone can link Google Analytics to their website to look up data on users that view the site. Layering Google Adsense onto your website allows you to put advertisements on your site that target your users based on that gathered data. Just like Google Analytics, you just sign up for a free account and link that account to your website by copy and pasting your Adsense account code.
You can sign up for Google Adsense here. Once you sign in, you can control what ads are put on your site and where they are positioned. I use the easiest method for choosing ads, and I just enable the auto ad option. According to Adsense help, “Auto ads are a family of ad formats that offer a simple and innovative way for you to monetize your content. With Auto ads, you place the same piece of ad code once on each page. After you’ve added the code, Google automatically shows ads at optimal times when they’re likely to perform well for you and provide a good experience for your users.” Here is a excerpt of what my code looks like:
Auto ads chooses ads for you that target your audience and generate the most money. It will also place the ads automatically throughout your pages and posts. Most ads will get you about $0.25 – $1.00 per click, which can add up if you getting a lot of clicks.
Auto ads does give a lot of control to Adsense, however there are tools you can use to gain back autonomy when advertising on your site. First, regarding ad selection, you can look through and allow or block every single individual ad. You can also filter out any unwanted categories of ads. Here are some of the categories:
Second, you can control the placement of your ads by using a plugin for ad placement. The Plugin I use, Insert Post Ads, gives you the option of what pages will display ads and where the ads will be placed. I choose to not allow ads on the home page, other than in the side bar or header/footer. And, most of the time, I place ads after the second paragraph in a post.
Once you earn $100 or more you can withdraw your earnings. You can view your earning per day, month, and total account balance. Because this site still has zero readers, the going is slow. Here is the month to date earnings for this site:
However, there are success stories out there. Here’s a Forbes article about a couple who eventually made $1,000,000 with their websites by starting out with click ads, then working their way up to collecting membership fees and selling their websites.
