To get back into the swing of things here, I’m going to be answering some reader questions over the next couple weeks. Some have been left as blog comments and some have been sent in. Feel free to use the contact mail link in the header or if you’re on the mailing list, you can just hit reply to an email to send a question.
To start things off, a recent commenter asked…
How can you make money with Google Adsense if you don’t have any money to get started?
As I’ve mentioned before, I make a big chunk of my income from Adsense, so I’m always game to answer questions about the program. If you’re serious about starting a web site (or two or three or ten), I recommend buying a domain name and getting your own web hosting, an investment of less than $20 up front with an ongoing $5-$8 a month for hosting fees.
However, if you’re broke (which I was in the beginning, so I can sympathize!), you can indeed make money with Adsense without spending a dime out of your pocket.
The easiest way is to set up a Blogger account and build one or more blogs there. Since Blogger is owned by Google these days, they make it easy to apply for the Adsense program and serve ads right on your blog (when I got started, you actually had to have your own domain name in order to apply, hmmph!).
It’s actually not a bad idea to cut your teeth on freebie blogs. You can start several on Blogger and see which niches end up keeping your interest, drawing a decent amount of traffic, and making you noticeable money with Adsense.
Remember, content that is closely associated with products and services tends to do best for pay-for-click publishers.