True Story: How I earned $550,000+ from Google AdSense and decided to join Medium

This is my honest story how Google AdSense has changed my life.

It is the second part of my personal story about trying to make money online. The first part can be found here:

There will be NO affiliate links in this story, no tricky ways in convincing you to buy something and so on.

Because I want this blog to be about HONESTY that is so rare in this “making money online” niche.

Maybe it is a naïve attempt, but I am really putting my heart into these lines and I want to gain as much subscribers as possible on Medium. So if you like the story, please subscribe. It would really motivate me to move further. Thanks! 🙏

As I mentioned in Part 1, up until finding Google AdSense I have tried a lot of ways of earning money online (and offline):

• “Get Paid to Surf” programs;
• selling free stuff to other people;
• starting my own hosting company;
• working as a web developer;
• starting my own web development company.

Quite a lot, huh? 🤔

But then I have found Google AdSense. And it changed my life forever.

Brief intro

So roughly ~10 years ago, in 2013, I have established web development company in Lithuania (a small country in Europe, that I was born in).

The business idea was pretty basic — create websites and CRMs for local businesses and in that way earn some money.

The start was really harsh, but I have managed to earn stable income using this method. It was not a super big amount of money (something like ~1500 Euros per month), but at that time it was quite good money for me.

At the same time, I wanted to learn new things and get better at web development so I’ve challenged myself and created few projects as a side-hustle. Nothing very special, like various calculators, forums, dictionaries, blogs and so on. All in my native Lithuanian language.

Some of those websites began to receive traffic from search engines. It was not a huge amount of traffic — something like ~2000 unique visitors per day.

Finding ways to monetize the traffic

At first, I have tried to put some affiliate network links programs on my websites. But they paid me very little and it was quite hard to convert my visitors. It was not zero, but something like ~150 euros per month.

And then I have discovered Google AdSense.

For those, who are not familiar with Google AdSense, the idea of earning money there is pretty simple — you just have to put ads on your website and if a visitor click on these ads — you earn the money.

Ads looks like this:

But don’t even think to cheat the system (like telling your family/friends to click on the ads intentionally), because in the long run Google will discover this activity and ban you. And if you are banned from Google AdSense, you are banned for life and you won’t be able to join this miracle again.

So I have switched my affiliate link ads to Google AdSense and the results were instant.

On the first month I have made something around ~700 euros (~4.5 times more than using affiliate links).

My Google AdSense method that really worked

So after earning my first money on Google AdSense, I began to think how to optimize the things and how to earn more.

During my journey, I came up with with these steps, which describes my method. Those steps were created purely from my experience and I want to share them with you.

What is worth to mention, that this was not the only method that I have tried, but it was the most profitable one.

Ready? Let’s go! 🚀

Method overview:

• Step 1. Focus on rich (Tier 1) countries.
• Step 2. Focus on SEO, find a niche and build a big big website (at least 100k+ pages)
• Step 3. Find a domain name
• Step 4. Optimize website to the fullest
• Step 5. Translate your website
• Step 6. Experiment with ad formats and placement

Step 1. Focus on rich (Tier 1) countries.

As I mentioned before, my first websites were focused on Lithuania market. And Lithuania is Tier-3 country and it is relatively poor. Or at least it was poor 10 years ago.

Now things are improving but it is still nothing compared to USA, Canada, Australia or UK.

Here you can find a brief list of countries and they Tier level: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/tier-1-countries

So the first thing that I have learned — primary focus on getting traffic from rich (Tier-1) countries.

Step 2. Focus on SEO, find a niche and build a big big website (at least 100k+ pages)

The second step is quite obvious — how to get traffic from those rich countries?

I spent countless hours on researching and thinking how to do it.

In general, there are 2 free and organic traffic sources for new websites — social networks and SEO.

I have focused on SEO, because I wanted to create more or less evergreen content, that does not become obsolete after some time. And with search engines it is possible to get a lot of traffic on that type of content.

Now the next question is also obvious — what should the website be about? What niche it should be focusing on?

So I came up with the main idea — create a big website (that has at least 100k pages) with something related to the specific country or region. It could be anything: baby names, domain names, phone numbers, titles of popular locations, surnames, etc.

Each of those records have to have a separate page on the website, because on SEO we will be targeting very specific, low-competition keywords.

Maybe it sounds a bit complicated, so I will give you my own example.

In my case, the best performing niche was business directories. Because various companies exists everywhere in the world — from Ruanda or Mongolia to United States and Canada.

So the idea was to build a big database of companies for each country/region/jurisdiction.

For this method the business niche was perfect because sometimes it was possible to build a separate database even to specific region, not a country.

For example for the United States, I was able to build a separate database of companies for every state.

So in general:

More countries/regions = more databases = more websites = more traffic = more ad clicks = more money.

From SEO perspective, I was focusing on low-competition keywords: mainly on the company title and the company code.

First, I have tried to rank for generic keywords like “free business directory in [COUNTRY]” , but sometimes those keywords had very high competition. And even if I managed to rank on those, they did not bring as much traffic as specific company title/code keywords.

So in other words, instead of focusing on 10 popular high-competition keywords, I focused on 100k+ low-competition keywords. 😎

After finding a niche, I had to do a research and find data sources. In other words, where to get the data from: find websites / platforms / APIs. I have always read the terms and conditions of a specific source and only included those that permit data re-usage.

In this business niche, many official company registrars provided data for free, because it was public data.

I have set a goal or a limit — the database should include at least 100k records. But more records is always better. The biggest database had over 15 million records!

After finding a data source all I had to do was to extract each company’s data into a database. For that purpose I have used MySQL.

It is possible to hire someone on Fiverr or Upwork for doing that, or nowadays ask ChatGPT to do it. 🦾

But at that time I did it myself.

Step 3. Find a domain name

So the next step was to find a good domain name.

I have focused on .com / .net domain names, because from my experience they ranked better.

I have always checked the history of a domain before registering and avoided domains that had a bad history.

For domain history check, I have used archive.org. If domain was previously registered, I have checked the backlinks profile at ahrefs.com, linkody.com and other tools.

So to sum up, it should be a brand new domain name or a domain name that did not have any negative history in the past.

Step 4. Optimize website to the fullest

Because database had so many records and I wanted Google and Bing to crawl my websites as fast as possible, I had to create a custom PHP script which had to be incredibly fast.

You see — WordPress, Joomla or Drupal won’t do the job here, because those systems are generic, pretty slow and not optimized for such a big datasets. They are good for blogs or smaller sites, but was not suitable for my method.

So I have coded my own custom PHP script and did A LOT of optimizations to make it blazing fast.

I am really glad that I took this path, because I have learned a lot of new things.

I did optimizations on both sides: on server side and code itself.

I will not mention all the details here because it could get really boring, but those micro-optimizations were really extreme.

For example, instead of using PHP function array_key_exists(‘key’, $array) I have used isset($array[‘key’]) because it is much faster.

I have optimized everything like that crazy, because every millisecond mattered.

So after the optimization, I was able to host my script on VPS for 20 USD/month and host multiple websites there with millions of pages.

Step 5. Translate your website

So the next thing that I found really beneficial was translating websites into other languages.

Google AdSense supports 50 languages. So why not translate the websites to them?

I have noticed that there are many people on one country searching for companies in another.

For example, people from France were searching companies from Germany. So if my German site had a French human-translated version, it is a win-win situation for everyone: French user gets better user experience, Google AdSense will show more relevant ads and I will earn more money.

Finding a good translator was quite an easy task to do, because I have used platforms like Freelancer.com, Fiverr and Upwork.

Step 6. Experiment with ad formats and placement

Once my websites began to receive traffic, I did some A/B testing with ads.

The goal here was to find the best ads combination which gave the best financial results while keeping good user experience.

Important thing was not to stuff too many ads and I think I have succeeded.

And it worked! The results of my journey :)

So it took about month and a half to launch my first 20 websites.

Googlebot crawled them like crazy. At that time, it was 10 request per site limit, so my poor server received approx. 200 request per second or whooping 17 million hits per day.

Thanks to the optimizations that I have done, my server did not go offline and stood still like a rock. 🗿😂

It took about 10 days to get sites indexed and they began to receive traffic. Some of those sites received as much as 5000 unique visitors per day!

At that moment the only thought in my head was — is that really possible? Is it possible to earn significant passive income online?

And this is one of the reasons I am writing this article — to show people that it is really possible to earn money on Google AdSense.

So it was a moment of truth and the first Google AdSense payment arrived:

It was a WOW moment for me and I instantly understood that I have found a gold mine.

I spent $20 on server, ~$150 on domains (~$170 in total) and earned more than $2,500. Amazing! 🥳

So during the years I have scaled/modified those websites a lot, launched more than 200 websites in total using this method.

I have also tried different ad networks like Media.net, MGID, Infolinks, Solvemedia, even Disqus. The results were not as good as with Google AdSense, but I was also able to earn some decent money with other ad networks as well.

In total, up until today, I have earned 553k from AdSense alone. And I am still earning using this method.

Using this method, on my biggest month, I have earned 14k, so I was able to buy a flat without any mortgages, save some money, make investments and travel a lot.

To live a dream life basically.

But… But last year something happened…

Why the method is not working as it used to?

But in the end of 2022, the music almost stopped.

I have tried everything that came to my mind to improve the situation, but Google algorithm has changed dramatically.

The main problem from my point of view is that Googlebot does not crawl the websites like it used before.

As I mentioned previously, back in the days it was possible to get 10 requests per second easily even for a completely new website.

And now it is nothing compared to that. I have some sites that receives only 200 Googlebot requests PER DAY. So very few pages gets indexed.

I have tried a lot of techniques but I have not succeeded to increase the crawl budget.

If you have any ideas how to fix the problem — your comment is more than welcome. 😂

So I came to these conclusions:

• SEO is very risky and it is almost dead or at least dying. Google algorithm is constantly changing and all your rankings and SEO traffic can be lost in a blink of an eye. Also, in my opinion, website speed is not that important anymore. What is more, there is a growing trend of zero-click searches. And many many other things that are not in my favor. So to sum up — the best times for SEO, in my opinion, are gone forever.
• Competition. The level of competition is also rising almost everyday and there are more and more websites that you have to compete with.
• Rise of AI. With the latest AI developments, it is quite clear that zero-click trend will continue rising even more, and eventually it can kill the whole SEO industry in the long run.
• Ad blockers. The trend of ad blockers is also rising at a record pace and it is not a good thing if you want to make money with Google AdSense :D

Final thoughts

So why am I sharing this experience with you?

Well… for many reasons.

First, I want to show people through my personal experience that it is really possible to earn significant money online. And it is not incredibly hard once you have a working method. But finding one can be really really hard.

I would like to share one quote from the book that I have read recently:

When you are learning to write, at the beginning writing a single letter “e” is harder than after one year to write the whole word “elephant”.

So in other words earning first dollar online is always the hardest thing to do. Going from $0 to $1 can be incredibly hard, but once you find a working method scaling up from $1 to $10,000 can be easy.

Also it is quite clear that this Google AdSense stage in my life is almost over and I need to find something new.

That is why I am starting my journey on Medium.

I really want to get out of this “bubble” that I’ve lived in and want to meet new people and ideas. And I think Medium is the perfect place for that.

So my journey continues…

After 10 years or so, I am searching for a new gold mine again.

I hope I will find it and if I will, more honest stories like this will appear on my Medium blog.

That’s the whole point of this blog. Honest stories about my journey making money online….

See you soon! 🙂