How to Make Money with Google AdSense: A Beginner's Guide

My Google AdSense account is at $143 so far today, and in today's video, I want to show you how I did it. I'll show you how you can start completely from scratch and get to at least $3,000 a month with Google AdSense. You can do this from any country in the world, and you can do this even if you are completely new to any type of online marketing.

Understanding How Google AdSense Works

So first, let's talk about how Google AdSense works. Imagine that someone is researching basketball drills at home, and generally what they'll do is scroll the top 10 results in Google. They'll click on one or more of these results. If you open these results, for example, this result here, you will see that this is a helpful article that contains information about basketball drills at home.

How Websites Earn with Google AdSense Ads

This article also has these ads that are automatically shown on the content, and these ads are Google AdSense ads. Basically, whenever visitors of this website take a look at the information on the website and click on any of these ads, the person who owns this website will make a percentage of profits that Google themselves make.

Anyone who owns a website can sign up for Google AdSense. If you own this website, for example, there will be ads that get shown from interested advertisers on your website, and you will get paid a percentage share. In fact, it's 68% of the total revenue that Google themselves get will be paid out to you.

Setting Up Your AdSense Account

Once you've joined the AdSense program, Google will start automatically displaying ads like this on your website, and you will get paid 68% of the total revenue that Google collects from advertisers. All you need to do is just keep producing content like this, get automated traffic from Google search, and collect the revenue.

Choosing the Right Niche for Your Website

The first step in the process is to find a niche for your niche website. You can succeed with Google AdSense in a variety of different niches. One of the websites that I own is Travel Croc, a large travel website.

Using Google Keyword Planner to Identify Profitable Niches

A great tool to use is Google Keyword Planner; it's 100% free. Just type in Google Keyword Planner into Google. Go ahead and sign up for Google Keyword Planner if you have never used it before. You'll be prompted to set up a campaign. Do that, and as soon as the campaign is set up, stop it. This way, you will keep access to Google Keyword Planner without spending anything.

Why the Right Niche Matters

Let me show you why having the right niche is important. I'm inside the Keyword Planner tool, and if you click on "Discover new keywords," I recommend removing your default location. This way, you'll be doing analysis for the whole world rather than your specific default location.

Comparing Niche Profitability

Google Keyword Planner will allow you to see roughly how much money you can make from a particular niche. Let's first check credit cards. If you have a website in the finance niche and you publish content about credit cards, let's check the results.

We get various keywords that advertisers use to advertise their ads related to credit cards on people's websites. Two critical pieces of information here are the top-of-page bid high range and low range.

Finding the Right Keywords

This roughly gives you an idea of how much advertisers are paying per click to advertise on people's websites in this particular niche. If you have a piece of content about balance transfer credit cards, you can expect that advertisers might pay somewhere between $7 to $41 for every single click.

Choosing a Domain Name and Hosting Service

Next, we need to register our domain and get a hosting service. In case you're not sure what a domain is, it's this thing that you type into your browser to access the website. For example, the domain name of my travel website is travelog.com.

You'll also need to choose a hosting company, which makes all your website files available to the whole of the internet 24/7.

Recommended Hosting Services

A great hosting company that I highly recommend is Hostinger.com. Their pricing is already great, but they've given me a coupon for a further 10% discount. So if you click the link in the description below or just go to hostinger.com added blogger, you can use my coupon "Cafe added blogger" to get a further 10% off on top of the rates that you currently see on their website.

Setting Up Your Website

Once you click the link in the description, you'll get to a page like this to get the business plan. Choose the length of your initial purchase; the best value is going to be 48 months. Fill out your information and complete your payment.

Claiming Your Free Domain

Once you've completed the checkout, you'll get your login details, and after you log in, you'll get into the control panel. You should see a notification that says "Claim your free domain anytime."

Building Your Website with WordPress

Next, you'll also need to finish the pending setup of your business web hosting account. You can choose WordPress as the platform to build your website. It's the standard for bloggers everywhere in the world, and I highly recommend you learn WordPress.

Creating a Blog and Driving Traffic

After setting up your website, the next steps involve creating quality content for your niche and implementing strategies to drive traffic to your blog. With consistent effort, you can grow your audience and maximize your earnings through Google AdSense

Getting Started with Your Website

Before you can see how easy this was, of course, your website does not look like much right now, but don't worry, we're going to fix that. To log into the back end of your website, go into this option here called admin panel, and that will log you into the WordPress admin dashboard inside your website.

Changing the Theme of Your Website

Let’s change the theme of your website. Go into the appearance on the left-hand side, then click themes, and then click add new theme. One of the themes that I highly recommend and it is free to use is NE. Search for it in the search box, and once you've got that, you can click install. That will install the theme, then click activate.

Customizing Your Website’s Settings

After that, I recommend you go into settings, go to permalinks, and enable the option that says post name. That will make your URLs nicer looking. You can use the AI feature of Canva to create a blog logo like this. You can then use this customize option within your WordPress admin dashboard, then go into header and the change logo option and then upload your logo over here. And there we go, we've now got a logo. You can adjust its size to make it a little bit larger if you'd like to.

Publishing Content to Build Your Website

Now, let’s click publish. As you can see, our website is starting to take shape. Now there's a lot more customization that we can do with this website, but that would take quite a long time, and in this video, I just want to focus on how to make money with Google AdSense.

Learning How to Customize Your Website

But if you do want to learn how to customize your website, then make sure to check the links in the description below. I’m going to drop a link to my tutorial that will take you through all the steps on how to customize your website and make it look awesome.

Setting Up Basic Content on Your Website

Now we’ve got the shell of our basic website set up, and you can see that we've already got some posts that were prepopulated by the artificial intelligence engine during the Hostinger installation process. These are basically just some initial content so that your website does not look empty. You can delete all of these posts and progressively replace them with your own.

Using Keyword Research to Rank on Google

Okay, well our aim is to eventually make our website more like this website over here, so we need to start publishing content so that we can start ranking in Google search, getting traffic, and making revenue. For this, we need to start talking about keyword research. What are the actual topics and what’s the content that you need to publish on your website so that you can start ranking in Google search?

Tools for Finding Keywords

The easiest way to find good keywords and good topics for you to write about is to use tools such as SEMrush. SEMrush is one of my favorite keyword research tools. I’m going to show you how to use it in just a second. If you click the link in the description below, you can actually get a 14-day free trial of SEMrush. Now, this is cool and exclusive to me. You can see that there is a special page that says Cafe Blogger and SEMrush special offer 14-day Pro trial.

How to Use SEMrush for Keyword Research

If you go and sign up directly on the SEMrush website, you can see that the trial period is just 7 days. But if you do it from the link in the description below, it’s a much better deal. What I always say about tools is if you are on a budget, you can go and do this for 14 days. At least you've given SEMrush a try. Now it’s an amazing tool if you're able to continue paying the subscription once the free trial expires. Then that’s good because you’ll be able to work much quicker. But worst case scenario, if for some reason you can’t continue after the trial, you can cancel within these 14 days, and at least you’ve been able to dig through and get some awesome keywords.

Exploring the SEMrush Keyword Magic Tool

Within SEMrush, I’m going to focus on the Keyword Magic tool. Here you can enter some starting keywords. For us, since it’s basketball, we can type in basketball and look for keywords within the whole basketball niche, or I can just say basketball drills to make it a little bit more niche down. Now let’s click search, and SEMrush is going to pull up all the keywords that have basketball and drills in them.

Sorting Keywords Based on Difficulty

The cool thing is that they also give you a keyword difficulty metric over here, and you can sort by keyword difficulty. You can then target keywords that are the easiest for you to rank for. You can see keywords such as dribbling drills basketball, basketball shooting drills, animated basketball, basketball dribbling games, and there are 11,000 keywords. Basically, each one of them can be a separate page on your new website that you're building.

Filtering Easy Keywords in SEMrush

If you want to pull up just the easy ones, you can use these filters at the top. By clicking into KD percentage, we can say that we want everything that is easy. By doing this, we’ve got 299, or we can even give it a custom range, something like from 0 to 29%, which will give us both easy and very easy. This way, we've got 467 keywords. Now 467 keywords are potentially enough for you to publish dozens, probably even hundreds, of articles on your website, and they’re all going to be targeting these easy terms.

Alternative Keyword Research with Google Keyword Planner

If for some reason you don’t want to use SEMrush, that’s cool too, because you can use Google Keyword Planner. With Google Keyword Planner, you can also find keywords. Let’s just do the same thing: basketball drills, and let's see what comes up.

Assessing Keyword Difficulty for Free

Now let’s say you follow the steps that we’ve just gone through and you’ve decided to use SEMrush and chosen one of these keywords, such as basketball passing drills. How do you actually go about creating the content for it? First, log back into the WP admin area of your WordPress site, go into posts, and under all posts, you’ll see an option that says add new. Click that, and here you'll be prompted to create your post title.

Creating and Writing Your Blog Post

Get some ideas from other blog posts. If you type in basketball passing drills, you can take a look at what titles other blog posts have used. For example, "21 Basketball Passing Drills for Coaches," "Five Basketball Passing Drills for Great Ball Movement," and so on. You can get some inspiration from that.

Using ChatGPT for Content Creation

You can also use ChatGPT. It’s still free to use, so you can go to chat.openai.com and ask it to create a blog post outline or a blog post draft for you. You can literally tell it to write a blog post about "Seven Best Basketball Drills," and then you can take this blog post that ChatGPT has written for you and rewrite it in your own words.

Finalizing and Publishing Your Post

I recommend never, ever copying and pasting the exact post that ChatGPT has written for you. Rewrite the content significantly to make it your own. Once done, you can go ahead and publish your post.

Repeating the Process for Success

So what do you do next? Well, you continue repeating the process: publish 15 to 20 articles. After you’ve published 15 to 20 articles, if you do everything correctly, you should start seeing traffic after about 3 to 4 weeks. Keep publishing, and you need to get to a stage where you’ve got about 100 visitors per day. That will allow you to actually apply for Google AdSense.

Setting Up Google AdSense

Once you’re ready to apply for Google AdSense, just type in Google AdSense into Google, go to their homepage, click the button that says "Get Started," and complete your sign-up process. From here, go to sites and then click "Add New Site" to add your new website.

Verifying Your Website with Google AdSense

Once you enter the URL of your new website, you will need to verify it. To verify, you can use the first option, "AdSense Code Snippet." You’ll need to take this code, copy it, and place it between the head tags on your website.

Configuring Google AdSense on Your Website

Go back into the WP admin area of your website, go into plugins, click "Add New," and in the search bar, enter "Insert Header Footer." Install and activate it. Then go to "Code Snippets" and click "Add Snippet." Paste your custom code here and choose to insert it sitewide in the header.

Requesting Google AdSense Review

Once you’ve done this, make sure to activate the snippet and click update. Go back to your AdSense panel, tick the box that says "I’ve placed the code," and click verify. Google will verify your website, and you may get something like "Request Review." Click on that to allow AdSense to manually review your website.

Setting Up AdSense Ads

Once AdSense has reviewed and accepted your website, go into the ads section and set up the ad settings. Enable Auto Ads and overlay formats to maximize your earnings.

Final Steps to Growing Your Website

From here, your job is to publish more articles,find more keywords, and continue growing the website. The passive income from Google search traffic will continue to grow, and as your site gathers authority, you