My Google AdSense Payout - The First $100 in my First Year!

I have been trying to earn an online income for almost a year now. I had already achieved some success with Squidoo, but like how everyone believes – I couldn’t just put all my eggs in one single basket. Apart from that, I also wanted to use Google AdSense because I have heard many success stories from people who have used the program. If they can do it, you can too right? Right – provided you do as much hard work as them!

This page is not to show my expertise but to show you that it’s possible to earn some money online even if you are an amateur. There are many AdSense tutorials out there which will give you awesome SEO tips and techniques, and you might as well refer those. What I’m going to share here is different from others – MY story! I will even openly talk about the mistakes I made initially so that you can learn from them too if you are a newbie. I’m no expert in the field, but when I see many people out there struggling to get their first AdSense payout, I can’t help but feel relieved that I’m doing okay so far. Remember this is NOT a rags to riches story. I'm not rich yet and I'm not earning 35k dollars a month or anything! This page is solely to make you understand - if you have given up - that it is possible to earn income online by working at home and increase it over a period of time.

 I will be creating pages like this one hopefully each year – with your support and acknowledgement – to keep a tab on my performance. More like a yearly review of sorts. Hope you find this first page of the series interesting, motivational (yes, all of us needs to be motivated now and then, don’t we?) and useful!

I came into the online money making scene pretty late. It goes without saying that I knew next to nothing about legit programs, strategies and techniques. I just wanted to make ‘quick’ money online like the rest of them. This is where I went wrong! Why?

• You can never earn ‘quick & easy’ money. You’ll always have to work for it! – I went around looking for programs that offered me quick money. I did come across some programs like mturk which offered quick money, but the money paid was a pittance. Not exactly what I was looking for.
• All the hard work for less revenue? NOT worth it! – The problem with using ‘quick money’ programs like mturk is that you end up doing loads of hard work throughout the day. If it’s worth it in the long run, I would recommend doing all the hard work. But the problem is – you have to keep repeating the same steps over and over again in order to make the same amount of money. When you stop working, the money stops coming in too. This got to me after few days and I felt saturated with all the mechanical work.

If you are serious about making money online, you would want to opt for a method that will earn you money even while you’re relaxing after doing all the hard work.

Mistake no. 2 was to create useless, short pages and expecting traffic to come my way. Yes, guilty as charged -- I was one of those lazy marketers who created short, "lazy" pages on both Squidoo and Hubpages in the hope of getting some "quick" traffic. This doesn't work well, mind you! I see good traffic only coming for pages/articles that have more than 400 words.

Another mistake I made is to start something which I wasn’t particular good at – designing T-shirts. I came across this online store – Printfection and thought ‘Hey! This seems easy!’ and just put in random, abstract designs on T-shirts thinking it would attract customers. Yes, laugh at me – but I did that! The designs were amateurish and I didn’t really have any ‘unique’ witty one-liners to imprint on them. I didn’t make any sales (duh!) but the Printfection forums introduced me to one of the best passive income sites on the Internet today – Squidoo.

I discovered Squidoo by mistake. It’s not like I knew the site already existed, and I wanted to try it out or anything. Not really! Some Printfection users were discussing the best ways to promote their designs outside of the site and they mentioned Squidoo. I thought I would be able to sell off some of my rubbish designs this way. Fat chance huh? Anyway, I always believed to give anything and everything a try before declaring it as a failure – so off I went and registered at Squidoo.

Squidoo was a blessing in disguise for me. True, it doesn’t come as part of the ‘make quick and easy money’ package, but I was addicted nonetheless. I read many inspirational lenses and posts at Squidoo which inspired me to work harder. I’m now a Giant Squid (a person who has published more than 50 pages at the site) and I continue to publish pages now and then. Recently, I got a tax info request email from Squidoo, which means that I’m getting closer to my target of earning a significant online income. If I can do it, so can you!

If you want to make legit money online, then I would totally recommend Squidoo! You’ll have to work hard for it though and have to wait for few months before you actually start seeing results. What I like about the site is the various Amazon modules which help you out in making sales. I didn’t make any sales using them initially, but slowly and surely the purchases are increasing. Right now while I'm writing this hub, I see another Amazon purchase made from one of my lenses (NOT kidding!).

Squidoo is similar to Hubpages except that you get money based on your lens (page) rankings. They pay you via PayPal. Nowadays I use the PayPal money to invest more into my online venture (more on that in my next yearly report – whether it was a success or a failure! ;)) or to buy marketing e-books.

After spending considerable time at Squidoo, I decided to check out Hubpages. Many Squidoo lensmasters seemed to have hubs too and some of them preferred Hubpages. I decided to check it out myself.

I’m slowly leaning towards creating more content for Hubpages as compared to Squidoo. My hubs tend to get indexed faster on Google.

I had tried creating blogs and sites with AdSense before, but they never really took off. Due to this very reason, my AdSense earnings were far from satisfactory. I never really thought Hubpages would work for me – but I’m glad it did! Hubpages solely is responsible for increasing my AdSense earnings in the last one year or so. If you have an approved AdSense account, then I would recommend you to try out Hubpages! It’s totally worth the effort. But like Squidoo, you have to take time out in creating unique and great quality content in order to see the cash coming. Like I said before, if I can do it, so can you! :)

I received my first AdSense payout of $100 recently from Google. I collected my earnings from Western Union Quick Cash. The good thing about using Western Union as cash payment method is that you get paid the next day itself after payment has been issued.

P.S - You will have to take some documents like a valid ID and your unique MTCN (Money Transfer Control) number in order to get payment from Western Union.

This is what I see in forums whenever someone mentions their first payout – ‘your next payment will come faster’. And I feel so too! I can already see the difference as compared to previous year’s statistics and hopefully it will just get better!

By the end of it all, you might have realized that I’m just another person like you who is looking to earn an income online. It need not be a daunting task as long as you’re willing to work for it. To your success!