Money with Google….What?? How do People Make Money with Google?

Did you know there are many many people that make money with Google? Most of us use it all the time to search for this and that, its a great search engine, the most widely used world wide receiving several hundred million search requests a day (Wikipedia Google search). With a user base that HUGE you can bet people are making money, not just Google. There are a number of ways this is being done;

• Increasing traffic to ones own website, through SEO or Adwords,
• Selling ad space to Google on your own website(s) (Google Adsense),
• Promoting affiliate sites/services/products via Adwords,
  • Through the search engine front page,
  • Through the content network on other sites with Google adsense active,
• Selling Google advertising management/optimization to businesses.

Of these different methods, one of the best know and popular (historically) is Google Adsense. Folks create/develop (or purchase) information/content websites and include adsense spaces within their sites. Whenever a visitor clicks one of the ads Google puts on your site, they pay you. Chances are you have seen this in your own surfing. on many sites you’ll see at the bottom of an advertisement “ads by Google”. This type of ‘money with Google’ is still making some sites a lot of money, a well known example of this is the popular dating site, PlentyofFish, this site is funded primarily through Google Adsense. But beware the ’snake oil’ sales page that claims you buy their Adsense Website and plug it in for fat fast cash. While there may have been a time where this worked, but, for the most part, It just isn’t usually the case, Google is pretty smart and it knows when a site is a “feeder site”. A feeder site is a content site that a bunch of people purchase and launch, quickly creating duplicate information sites all over the web. Google ’sees’ this and buries these sites at the bottom of search results. I wouldn’t personally recommend chasing this type of ‘money with Google.  The challenge with these sites is you need a lot of content (many many pages) and a lot of frequent visitors. I found this great article on About.com that discusses the challenges with Adsense. If your website is unique and has lots of content and visitors, then Adsense may be worth looking into. Otherwise, there are other ways to make money with Google.

If you already have a brick and mortar business or an e commerce website, then implementing the Google Pay Per Click (PPC or Adwords) network is a fast and easy way to get visitors to your website(s). In fact, PPC is the fastest way to drive massive traffic within the same day a Adwords campaign is set up. This of course costs money. Google charges users every time one of their ads are ‘clicked’ (hence Pay Per Click). The cost can vary from $0.10 per click to more than a dollar per click based on the maximum bid(s). So if a keyword is ‘hot’ it will cost you. The benefit comes back to the website owner if their product/service is presented in such a way that users will wish to make a purchase or otherwise initiate business with you. Once your confident your site is ready for traffic you can set up an account free with Google Adwords and have fun watching the ‘clicks’ and your site vititor count climb.

For advance training in Google Adwords and PPC marketing, Commision Blueprint 2.0 is well trusted. As of this writing, they were open. However, they generally fill up each time they enroll new students, so if the site says they are closed to new students, be sure to sign up to be notified when they open again.

I have also written a couple of other posts on the basics of PPC. They are;

Google Adwords 101

PPC Marketing Home Study Courses

Training with Google Adwords and Marketing Online

A increasingly popular way to use make money with Google is affiliate marketing. This is promoting someone elses product or service through the Google Adwords (PPC) network. This can be done even without a website of your own (called direct linking) A prospective affiliate marketer can make money every time visitors (traffic) they bring to the merchants website converts into paying customers. Some affiliate marketers have made literally millions (and continue to) using Google Adwords and the affiliate networks. What is cool about this type of “Google Money” is that the marketer doesn’t have to have a product to sell/ship or handle nor do they have to worry about much of the typical overhead that most other business models carry. It takes a fair bit of knowledge and research to successfully implement this business model. But the basics are, conduct market research to determine what is “hot” (what you’ll promote), establish affiliate relationships with your prospective merchants(and get your links), conduct in depth keyword research, build/develop your landing pages (unless your doing a Direct Linking campaign), research and develop ad copy and develop and monitor your Adwords campaigns. The experienced affiliate can go through this process relatively painlessly, creating campaigns, making them profitable, then find another.

If you are (or become) a PPC/Adwords expert, you can make money by providing the service to other businesses. There are many creative ways to add considerable benefit to an existing business/website through skilled implementation of Google Adwords and many business owners don’t want to learn or simply don’t understand the potential value to their business. This differs from an affiliate relationship because you are payed for a service. The obvious downside here is you can only charge so much for this type of service and you can only service so many clients at a time (without hiring employees). However, the upside is a more predicable and stable income (once established) than the affiliate marketer. If you are a PPC guru, there are only a handful of really good companies offering this service, so there is a lot of potential for this type of business.

Google is not the only PPC network. While it represents the majority of searches, there are some other big player worthy of your time. It is best to start by learning Google Adwords first. Once you have done that, start learning about Yahoo and MSN’s PPC networks. Both of these are very profitable networks to work with. Do note that these networks do not function in exactly the same way as Google Adwords, so make sure to do some studying before jumping in.

If you don’t already have a Google Adwords account (or if you wish to open a new one) you can get Google(Adwords) Credit through most web hosting services. Web hosting is a required tool for a successful PPC marketer. If you already have hosting, check and see if they include any Adwords Credit. If you don’t already have web hosting, check to see if it is included before you purchase hosting. Hostgator (my host) does include Google Adwords Credit as well as credit for other networks.

Googles Free Adwords Editor Software, is a must have for Adwords advertisers. It makes the process of managing your campaigns much easier and will save a lot of time. And as with all Google tools and software, it is free.

Googles free Keyword tool is a site you should have bookmarked as you’ll use it a lot.

Many people are making money with Google. It is a very real and legitimate business, nothing fishy about it. But it does take considerable work to learn, research and impliment/tweek profitable campaigns. An investment in time to learn the ropes and ‘do it right’ will put you miles ahead and closer to your slice of Google Money. Commission Blueprint 2.0 is one of the best training programs around and has helped a lot of newbie marketers make money with Google.