I posted this YouTube video just before leaving town to go on a trip with my family. The video is about how I earned $3.5 Million in revenue from Google AdSense which I intended to use for an upcoming blog post when I got home.
While out of town with my family I talked to a friend of mine and he told me about all the activity surrounding the video. I had asked some friends and employees to go check out the video before I left and some of them had bookmarked it. This apparently started an avalanche. It’s gotten an amazing number of video plays, more than 10 YouTube honors so far, made the top of its category, lot’s of people started talking about it online and then people began linking to it.
Although still on vacation (I’m in my hotel room at the Grand Canyon in AZ right now), I decided to fire up my laptop and check out what was happening. There seemed to be two different groups of comments. The first group of people liked the video, and went to my site and signed up for my newsletter. Many of them have sent me nice comments and acknowledgements. I’ve received a ton of traffic, sign-ups and people sending me questions in the last 48 hours (I’ll eventually get to answer them all).
The second group of people are shocked by the amount of money my AdSense 1099 tax form shows and are skeptical. And without all the background data I had planned to put in the upcoming blog post I guess it makes sense. $3.5 million is a lot of money.
However, that document is 100% authentic and unaltered. I really did make $3.5 million last year in revenue from AdSense.
Here is my attempt to answer some of the questions and comments surrounding the video:
I’m not promoting some get rich quick scheme. In fact, I don’t even have anything for sale on my site. I’ve had the domain name billmcintosh.com for a while and I decided recently to start a site where I’ll give away free coaching, tips, advice, wordpress plugins and scripts. Does that mean I’ll never sell an internet marketing product ever? I can’t promise that, but I definitely don’t have plans to release any kind of get rich quick scheme through this site anytime in the future.
I have so many websites I can’t even count them. they’re spread across 15+ dedicated servers plus more virtual private servers and shared hosting accounts. I buy some sites, I build some, but my staff creates most of them. My AdSense income came from a variety of places: Organic SEO, membership sites where I displayed AdSense to members while they are visiting the paid content section, sites that I drive traffic to with PPC, and on pages where I send people who I feel will not convert into customers for my own products, but might be a good match for someone else’s.
During 2007 I drove a TON of traffic. Some days I had 150,000 visitors on just one of my sites.
And although you can see that I’ve made a lot of money using AdSense, I do not recommend someone relying upon 100% AdSense earnings for a business. AdSense is volatile and Google is not an easy company to partner with. I know of several horror stories where someone started making a nice income from AdSense, then overnight…SLAP! Google pulls the rug out from under them and bans their account for a silly reason. And just like that they have no business. So AdSense is a good start, but definitely not the only way you should earn income.I’m not claiming I made $3.5 million bucks in pure profit from AdSense. Nor is AdSense my only income source. I have more than 20 full-time employees and probably 20 more outside contractors working for my various companies. That along with marketing and promotion eats up a chunk of my revenue.When I get home (or maybe earlier if I have time while away) I’ll make another video and post giving you guys more details. I’ll also provide some more proof for the skeptics out there. So if you feel you can learn something from me, go check out my video and sign up to my site. If not, that’s fine too. Either way I wish you luck with your adventures in the world of Internet marketing.
