Google Adsense can be a good revenue stream for your website. There are many other monetization methods: ad sales, affiliate marketing, own product sale, cpa programs, but they work only when your blog reach a higher number of visitors. Until your website is well established, google adsense may be your only hope of generating some revenue. There are other competitors that will let you add ads even if you have 10 visitors a day, but their revenues are at least 4 times lower than google adsese.

Google Adsense can be also a way to test your website potential. The payout of Adsense differ so much depending on the topic your website is about, the origin of your visitors, etc, testing your website even if you have 50-100 visitors a day is a good way to predict it’s future, but it is not that accurate. Why ? Because Google Adsense revenue is not scaling. Let me tell you why is happening this. Google take many factors into consideration when deciding how much you will be paid for every click on your website. First, they will pay you a part of the amount that the advertiser is bidding for every keyword. After you send them few hundreds of clicks, they will start to give your website a quality score based on how many users click on adsense ads and then hit back on their browsers, the average time spent on the target website, the number of actions generated on the target website, the actions and conversions generated. With every click that you send to them this score is more precisely calculated.

When you have a small website with 50-100 visitors, even if you place the ads all over your website, there will not be a high amount of clicks to determine that your website send unworthy visitors.  More visitors you send, the lower score you will get until you will not be satisfied about the money you earn for every click.

How to test this ? Wait until your website reach at least 500 visitors, and then place google adsense on it. Place ads everywhere. In the first month you will get a lot of money, but in 3 months you will get half of what you earned in first month. In 6 months you will earn 3 times less. This is also known as smartpricing.

How to avoid this ? If you want to avoid the smartpricing, then you have to keep the ads to a minimum, so that you can send only those targeted visitors to google advertisers. But in this way, you will earn 1/3 of the income anyway, so what’s the point ? The poing is that you will maximize the revenue you get from adsense for every banner. You will not stuff your website with ads so you can also generate some revenue from affiliate links inside your content, and you can have space to place other banners, private sale ads, and other opportunities.

When your website is small, you can get some bucks to be happy and continue with your website, but if your website grows up, then you need to digg for alternatives that opens to you when you reach a certain level. Always research your topic to find new products to advertise based on comission and other opportunities that may arrive. Try to reduce the number of google adsense ads in time. You can make the same revenue with 2 small ads or with 5 huge ads if you get smartpriced.