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A Beginner’s Guide to Residual Income From a Beginner

There are two ways to learn things: from a master in the field, and, from another beginner. I have always been a fan of the second approach (such as with Learning Starcraft 2 website) because I feel that masters lose touch with the struggles of the beginner. Other beginners, however, know exactly what you will go through trying to learn and a relationship of mutual learning can take place.

I am a beginner to Adsense revenue share, I dabbled last year but my first genuine foray into revenue share was January 2012. So far my efforts are earning me ‘beer money’ but they are increasing rapidly and my Adsense income could become one of my biggest earners over the next 12 months – if I stick with it (which I plan to). The great thing about Adsense revenue is that it continues earning after you start working. A few years after I stop writing I will still be making money from my content.

If building a passive income stream that keeps earning when you stop working interests you then read on.

What is Adsense Revenue Share?

Adsense revenue share is a system where content producers share the income from advertising with site owners. There are many websites that offer revenue share in different ways but the most basic of these is time-based sharing. In time-based revenue share ad display time is split up between showing the content producer’s ads and the website owner’s ads. For example, if the revenue share is 75% then 75% of the time that someone visits a page the content producer’s Adsense ad will display and the other 25% of the time the website owner’s ads will display. There are no guarantees that either ad will earn money but the higher the Adsense share time the more chance one of your ads will be clicked.

Why Use Adsense Revenue Share Sites?

You may be thinking that on your own website you can get 100% revenue share and you are right. The loss in Adsense revenue share is the drawback of writing on a revenue sharing site. But there are advantages that make up for it.

You can start writing from day one. There is no need to set up your own website, most revenue sharing sites simply have you make an account, insert your Adsense code and  you can start writing (and earning). When I started I got my first dollar within a week. This also helped to keep me motivated and let me know that I was on the right track.

Site design, coding and ad placement optimization are all done for you. The good revenue sharing sites are run by people who really know what they are doing when it comes to bringing in traffic and getting it to convert into revenue. If you are a beginner to Adsense publishing then your first year will probably be spent learning all of this for yourself (meanwhile your earnings are terrible). 100% of 100 visitors worth of revenue is worse than 75% of 10,000 visitors worth of revenue.

All of the site maintenance is done for you. Getting a theme here? All of the hassles of running are website are outsourced and you can just focus on learning SEO, keyword research and writing. All of these things make revenue sharing sites the best option for a beginner to Internet marketing.

Is Writing for Adsense Income Right For You?

Only you can decide if it is right for you and the only sure way to know is to give it a try for a month and see what you think. There are a few things you must be able to check off if Adsense writing is going to work for you:

At least 1-2 hours free a day. You need to do this consistently if it is going to work and you have to a way to work uninterrupted. Another writer I know who is raising children while trying to write ended up buying a laptop so she could escape to her room when she was trying to write. She is doing quite well.

Patience. This is probably the most important requirement. It takes a long time to build up a decent, consistent income stream and you must be able to continue writing even in the face of zero earnings. It could even take a month for you to see your first dollar. Some people see this dollar as a sign of things to come, others give up in frustration. There is no instant gratification in writing for Adsense.

A love for learning, or, at least a willingness to learn. I really enjoy learning about almost anything. This makes it a lot easier to learn through the tons of search engine optimization, writing techniques and even researching article topics. The best way to think of new ideas for what to write is to think about what you would like to learn. If you already love to learn then coming up with article ideas is going to be a lot easier for you.

How to Get Started

The first thing you need to do is decide on a revenue sharing site. Take a look at a few options and evaluate which is right for you. Things to look out for are:

An active, positive and friendly community – Check out the forums if they exist. Is the overall sentiment positive? Are people accepting and willing to help new writers? If the forum is full of bitter people complaining about the site then it is not a good choice (unless you are a masochist).

A clear and easy-to-understand revenue sharing program – Some sites state upfront exactly what your revenue share is and whether there is a chance of it increasing. Others may have a more complex program (like Squidoo’s lense program, for example) which may be more difficult difficult to understand. Generally the simpler and clearer the revenue sharing scheme the better, though it’s up to you to find one that sounds appealing to you.

Quality control systems – Peer reviews, admin approval processes and reader rating systems are all examples of quality control systems. The tighter the site’s control on the quality of articles it allows to be published the better and the longer the site is likely to last. It may be harder to write for a site with strict quality regulations but this is a good thing, you should be trying to write great content if you want to be successful in the long run.

Easy to use publishing software – This can be hard to find out without actually using the site but you may be able to get an idea of how user-friendly the software is based on what people say in the forums. Otherwise you can always sign up for a site and play around with it’s publishing software for a while and see if you like it. Good software will: make it easy to import content from an external wordprocessor, make it easy to insert images and video into your article and will have lots of options for customization and formatting.

Accessible and active Admin – Are the admin and/or creators of the site easy to reach? Do they participate in community discussion and actively try to improve the site? Working for a faceless organization isn’t the most beginner-friendly way to get started. You want to be able to get help if you have a problem and to be able to make suggestions for improvements easily.

A large portion of your time in your first year writing will be spent towards learning all about search engine optimization, keyword research and many other aspects of Internet marketing. In fact your first few months worth of articles are likely to be poor earners because you will lack this knowledge in the beginning. They wont be wasted effort though because once you have learned you will be able to go back and tweak all of your original articles to earn better. It is very much a ‘learn on the job’ deal.

The things which you will need to learn in order to be successful writing for Adsense revenue share are:

Keyword Research – This is probably the first thing you should learn as it is crucial to both sides of the Adsense program: bringing in traffic and monetizing that traffic. Keyword research involves finding out what people are searching for online, discovering what words they use to search and evaluating the potential profitability of writing about that topic.

On-page SEO – Search engine optimization comes in two forms, on and off-page. On-page SEO is the most important in the beginning as it has the biggest impact. It governs a number of writing and article design techniques that will help bring in traffic to the page and will produce relevant Adsense ads to the topic. A good starting point is Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI) as it is likely to be the prominent SEO technique of this decade. Check out that link for a beginner’s guide I wrote on InfoBarrel about LSI which you may find helpful.

Off-Page SEO – Less important than it’s on-page counterpart but still important to the success of your articles. Off-page SEO primarily deals with building links back to your articles on other websites (and promoting others to do the same for you). Google puts a fair bit of weight in what other people say about your articles and the more people that link to you the better you are likely to rank (and the more you will earn). Things to research are: Backlinking and Interlinking. 

Affiliate Marketing – If you want to compliment  your Adsense earnings with commissions on sales you create for other sites (like Amazon) then you should learn about affiliate marketing and how to incorporate affiliate links into your articles. Affiliate sales make up a large portion of my earnings over on InfoBarrel.

Writing Skills – Probably doesn’t need to be said but you will need to learn to write high-quality articles that are over 500 words long. The best way to do this is to simply read a lot of other peoples articles. I spend a bit of time each day reading the articles of other InfoBarrel writer’s articles, especially ones from the very successful writers.

Final Tip

Get started as soon as possible. Adsense article writing is something that you really just need to jump in to. It can seem pretty overwhelming at first but the sooner you get started the easier it gets to start connecting the puzzle pieces in your head. If you start today by finding a site to write for and then write your first article tomorrow you will already have done the hardest part. Most people never make it beyond dreaming.

If you have any questions about writing for Adsense revenue share I’d be more than happy to answer them in the comments below. Thanks for reading!