AdSense can be a fantastic moneymaker. There are many people who make thousands of dollars per month through AdSense alone. Hearing this may get you excited, and you may already have dollar signs in your eyes. But don't get your hopes up just yet.

Although you've probably heard about people who bring in five or six figures per month with AdSense, you need to keep one very important thing in mind. In order to make that kind of money with AdSense, you need to have a ton of traffic.

In fact, most people who make more than $100 per month with AdSense either have a very large website with thousands of visitors per day, or they have dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of smaller websites.

For most people, AdSense may not be worth the effort to create sites only for promoting it. AdSense only pays a few cents for each click, depending on the keyword you target (some pay a lot more) and those few cents are a lot smaller than they were just a few years ago.

A few years ago, some people were getting several dollars per click for many keywords. These days, $1 clicks are relatively rare in most niches. Most clicks seem to be under $0.50 now, and smaller niches may experience clicks of only around $0.10 (or even less.)

In order to make $10 per day, at $0.10 per click you would need 100 clicks. If your click through ratio were 5%, you would need 2,000 visitors to your site every single day just to earn $10 per day.

For sites with very little traffic, you would have to have a really fantastic click through ratio in order to earn decent money with AdSense – or, choose highly competitive keywords that pay a lot, but are harder to rank high for in the search engines.

Some sites just naturally have traffic that doesn't buy much as far as paid information, but they like to click through links to access free information. Webmasters who have sites that target the freebie seeking demographic should test AdSense links to see which type performs best.

If you're running a site that has an extremely general audience, AdSense might also be a good alternative. AdSense is usually pretty good at delivering targeted ads. You can create thousands of content pages with AdSense links, place the code in your blogs, and watch your monthly earnings rise as you create more fodder for your readers.

If your only goal is to make money without becoming a product owner, then create a content-laden site that weaves affiliate links into the text and provides ample opportunities for clicks to AdSense links so that you can profit from the information you're delivering.

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"What Do You Do for a Living?"

When you make a living online, a lot of people won't understand what it is you do. Some of them will think you're nothing more than a spammer – just because you work on the Internet. You might even run into people who automatically assume you're into promoting porn, because they think that's all the Internet is used for!

You need to be prepared to deal with people like this. Some of them may even be close friends and family members who are simply ignorant about the various marketing uses for the World Wide Web.

The first thing you need to explain to people is that very few people who work on the Internet are spammers. Spammers actually make up a very, very small minority of those who make money online.

If you do any sort of email marketing, you should explain that every single person you send email to has signed up specifically to your newsletter, and clicked a link to confirm that they really want to be on your list.

Explain to them that subscribing to your newsletter is a lot like signing up for delivery of the newspaper, or a magazine subscription. People sign up to your newsletter, and then you send them valuable information, not just advertising.

If you sell eBooks online, you can explain to people that you're a bit like a book publisher, but all of the books you publish are in digital format. You can tell them that instead of paying a lot of extra money for the printing, binding, marketing, and shipping of a physical book, you eliminate those costs by selling all of your books as downloadable products.

If people still don't understand, you could even show them what an eBook is by letting them view one on your computer. If your main business is advertising affiliate products, you can tell people you're in advertising.

Explain to them that you run a website (or websites) and you place advertising on that website. Every time someone clicks an ad and purchases something, you receive a commission. If you make most of your money through AdSense or selling advertising on your sites, you can simply tell people that you place advertisements on your websites, and you charge advertisers for that ad space.

If you want to, you could show them some of your sites or blogs to illustrate the point. Some people feel more comfortable just telling people they design websites. If you're a decent website builder, this will probably really impress people, but be prepared to get requests from people asking if you'll make them a site, too.

If you don't want to deal with all of the questions about spamming and porn, just telling someone you design websites will usually be enough to throw them off your trail. If people are particularly persistent with their questions, you can start to point out some examples of people who have been very successful making money online.

Don't just use examples of famous Internet marketers like John Reese or Yanik Silver! Use some examples with verifiable "proof" in mainstream media. For example, the famous "make money" blogger John Chow has a number of stories out there about him.

There's also teenaged entrepreneur Ashley Squalls who has made mainstream news in a big way by making over $70,000 per month with advertising on her site that gives away MySpace layouts. And of course, the infamous Perez Hilton – a celebrity blogger who cashes in on the ad space his blog has.

You should try to realize that some people will just never understand what you do. Try to explain it the best way you can, and if it doesn't work, accept it. Some people just won't get it. If the in-laws or your spouse are nagging you because your money isn't yet streaming in, and you feel pressured, put together a simple presentation that answers all of their questions and puts their minds at ease.

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Every good marketer knows how important it is to increase the lifetime value of the customer. It's much cheaper to make a sale to a previous customer than it is to get a new one onboard. The cost of acquiring new customers can be high, but getting more money out of existing customers won't cost you a penny.

Building a backend to your business isn't hard but without one, you're limiting your financial potential. A backend is how you continue selling to an existing customer. Let's say you sell an eBook on how to make money blogging.

Your eBook could discuss what a blog is, how to set one up, and how to make money from it. Your backend sales could come from affiliate items (if you don't feel like taking the product creation route again) or a new eBook, membership site, or video/audio package you sell.

Whenever you first start selling online, always think of complementary topics you can tack on as a backend. For our example, your backend sales could be about social networking on other web 2.0 sites like Squidoo, MySpace, or bookmarking sites.

After they've begun seeing success, your backend sales could focus on more paid methods of marketing, such as AdWords. You progress your offers with your audience like stepping stones, moving from the first logical starting point to a more advanced stage.

Plop your offers right into your autoresponder system and it'll automatically cater to the needs of your subscribers the longer they stay on your list. Another common way to add a backend onto a product is to offer personal coaching.

Personal coaching can be expensive, sometimes costing thousands of dollars per month. A lot of marketers offer this as a backend strategy, giving them the potential to significantly increase the return on their investment (ROI) of acquiring the prospect.

If you take care to create backend offers that add value to their needs and which are of top quality, they'll continue buying from you. If you promote anything and everything just for the sake of cashing in, they'll lose trust in you.

Your backend sales strategy isn't all done just through your autoresponders. You can put links to backend products on your "thank you" pages. And don't forget that each product can act as a backend item for another one. So you might start with an eBook about MySpace and then use a blogging eBook as your backend item for the customer.

Just make sure you don't set yourself up for limited profits by using a single product without implementing a backend strategy that will work to increase your ROI over and over again. You're building a business, not dabbling in a few hit or miss sales.

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