Making a Business for AdSense

How do you make a business for AdSense?  Ah, that is the question, isn't it? The fact is, you don't make a business FOR AdSense. Or even a business whose sole purpose is to use with Adsense.  Trying to create a business just so you can use AdSense is the wrong way to build a business.

After all, when you consider what a business really is, AdSense shouldn't come into it at all.  Most viable businesses (that means a business that has existed for a while already, and is already making income by itself) already have a revenue stream ... the one that the business generates. If your business is like mine was, then it should be earning money without having advertisements on it's website.


Either that or the ads on it's website should be from paying advertisers that aren't coming through ad agencies like AdSense.
As a photographer, when I built my business I didn't do it using advertising on my website. My business earned it's money doing what I do (or did, since I'm retired now) ... taking photos. I provided both a service to my clients, and a finished product (the photos) and that's what I got paid for. My business supported itself, it didn't need ads from anywhere to earn money (and I never had ads on my website ... kind of tacky to have ads on a photographer's website like that).

So how do you build a viable business like that, and be able to get approved for AdSense? With a lot of hard work, and over time. You can't do it in a day, or a week, or even a month.
Here's a company that did it right.

Just over a year ago the city I lived in lost our only daily newspaper. A large conglomerate took them over and closed them down. The paper had been published for 100+ years, and now we had nothing. Our city was pretty devastated by a lack of local news. After a large number of townspeople started complaining about the lack of local news and information,  couple of the reporters that worked at the paper got together with a couple of the journalists, and started up a small website producing local news. These guys didn't sit behind desks all day. They went out and got the local news.

The first couple of issues (updated every day) got immediate notice by locals, because the news was about our city, and we recognized the reporters names from our old paper.  Less than a week into publishing they had paid subscribers (I was one of them) and paid sponsorship by other local business. By the second week, local businesses had contacted them and purchased ads on the paper. Certainly what they earned wasn't enough to feed their families, or pay their bills, but it was local money, earned by reporting real news that people wanted. The advertising purchased by the local area businesses grew, because the newspaper was getting a lot of notice.

Why?

That part was easy for them. They produced news about our town, and nobody else was doing it. And our city (I still call it a town) devoured that news. We had been used to having a printed newspaper for 100 years, and without news about what was happening in town, nobody knew what events were going on, or what council was doing, or what changes the city was planning. These reporters and journalists stepped in and filled a role that nobody else had.

Six months after the online version of the newspaper began, two separate ad companies approached them about advertising on the site.

And at that point, they were already earning enough money by selling ads to local business that they were making a living. Not a lot, but enough to pay the bills.

Nine months after they began the business, AdSense was added. By then, they didn't need to rely on Adsense or any other online advertising agency. The business had developed it's own revenue stream before they added AdSense.

And that's how you build a business that can safely use AdSense.

And no, I don't mean start your own newspaper.

I mean whatever business you start in whatever industry, you build and develop a paying client base long before you even think about AdSense as a way to add revenue.

AdSense should be the last stop on the revenue stream.

posted by J.Gracey Stinson