How I Made ₦16 Million Blogging: My Google AdSense Success Story

I looked at the figure mentioned in the title and it looks pretty huge though but it didn’t come easy as many of you are anticipating to read about. Now, I started blogging in 2015 but received my first payment on the 21st of August 2021, that’s six good years of blogging. It took me complete four years to get approved on the Google AdSense publisher program.

In case you’re wondering what Google AdSense program is, it is Google’s traffic monetization platform that allows publishers (blog owners like me) to sell traffic to advertizer.

When your blog is approved for monetization by the AdSense, Google then places Ads from the advertizer on both the blogs home page and individual posts. when a visitor visits the blog he or she will see the Ads as they appear in-between paragraphs of the post (that’s impression).

The Beginning of My Blogging Journey

It all started back in 2015, I created my first blog and was writing passionately about music production because that’s what I knew best. This is the niche I chose because I was a music producer with six years of experience at the time I started the blog “producertek”. I wasn’t consistent in posting articles, so sometimes I posted just one article pay month or even one article in three or four months.

When I sequenced a beat that I liked I would then write down the entire process I used in achieving such instrumental, then I would later develop an article with it. So it took me four years to get Google AdSense approval.

Understanding What Google AdSense Is

What is AdSense?

AdSense is a traffic monetization platform owned by Google. Google requires publishers to apply for the monetization of the traffic on their blogs, digital tools, apps and vlogs and if they meet the criteria, Google will approve after the review period which last up to 14 days (two weeks).

Once approved, Google team demand that you code a special code to put in the HTML code of your website (for bloggers), the code is normally inserted in the header section of the HTML.

Why is AdSense necessary for publishers?

AdSense is necessary though but not mandatory. The best way to earn money from your blog is to monetize the traffic coming in daily. Others normally monetize with other Ads Network but for me I chose AdSense because it worked well for me and I was satisfied with how much I was earning. Although as to how much you can earn on AdSense is not guaranteed but it also depends heavily on both the niche of the blog and the traffic sources. To me I treat my website just the same way other businesses such as exportation can be treated.

AdSense is necessary for publishers because according testimonials from other bloggers it’s the best Ads program to use on your blog. Though others use affiliate programs but for me I was okay earning from Google adsense.

Why I Switched from Entertainment to Finance and Investment

After I got approved as a publisher on the adsense platform in 2019, for a whole month I earned nothing. In fact it took another one and half year to get $10, and when I made the $10 adsense notified me that I needed to update my payment details. I thought they were going to send my earnings directly to my account but the threshold to receive my the payment wasn’t met yet.

Because I had a close friend who worked with Zenith Bank, getting a domiciliary account was not actually a problem. I opened a domiciliary account with Zenith Bank and updated it as it was demanded. Adsense demanded my account number, Account name, Bank name, Bank Address, Swift Code and Sort Code. All of these I asked my account officer ( the marketer who opened my account) and he gladly provided them for me.

So, back to while I switched the niche, AdSense was given the CPC (cost per click) on my blog so little that even a hundred of it could amount to nothing. So I did my research on this YouTube channel 👉👉 https://youtu.be/pQ-R3Ofi0nQ?si=thfnQM066hUN1519 (for reference purpose only) and discovered three things: that my niche wasn’t among those with high CPC, my traffic was coming from countries with low traffic value (Nigeria) and my click through Rate (CTR) wasn’t too reasonable.

After i did the research, I found out that my niche was also among those with the lowest CPC value, so I had to switch my niche if I really wanted to earn huge from Blogging. I switched the niche from entertainment to Finance and Investment and also changed my domain to “Newsway” then I noticed a significant earning within two months and finally my first pay sent to my Bank Account was $217.

In essence, what I’m trying to say is that all niche are not the same, they vary even in the earnings too. And I also confirmed that Finance and Investment niche is just one of the few niche with the highest CPC.

The Turning Point and My First Big Payout

‎I didn’t just make ₦16 Million overnight, and I didn’t make it in a month either. It is the amount I made cumulatively in one year between September 2022 and September 2023. My turning point actually came after I switched from the entertainment niche to Finance and Investment niche.

‎As I narrated earlier, when I did the change I noticed a huge surge in my earning from $60 to $217 in just the first month after the switch. Thereafter, I started earning above $1000 steadily month after month and some months like June 2023 I made $3366.71 and that translates to ₦5,723,407 when converted to naira at an exchange rate of N1,700 at the time it was paid.

And I had made $2164.82 in (may) the month preceding June and equally earned $1357.21 a month after June (July) because my hosting could no longer handle the huge traffic to my site, so the hosting company shut the site down and asked me to upgrade to a higher plan but instead I bought a VPS (Viral Private Server) and migrated out of the shared hosting plan.

‎When I summed all the money Google paid to my account I discovered i made over ₦16 Million from my blog within one year after switching from entertainment to Finance and Investment niche. This is not a guarantee but in my case that is what I made overall in one year. See proof in the picture below 👇

Challenges I Faced as a New Blogger

Just as I have highlighted earlier in this article, the journey to giving me this huge pay didn’t come easy but I remained consistent and this however rewarded my hard work. Earning huge in a year wasn’t all that smooth actually, because I Faced a lot of challenges especially as a newbie in blogging. Some of my challenges were:

• Traffic: To get the reasonable amount of traffic that gave me upto ₦16 Million in a year which I will be showing proof wasn’t easy especially during my early days in the blogging business. I remembered I could post something on Facebook and have no engagement at all, but I didn’t give up. Another thing here was that I was posting links and having little or no visibility for it at all. Facebook will show your post to just fewer people if the post contains a link to another website.
• Monetization: Again it took me four years to get the Google adsense approval to monetize my little traffic. This was because as a novice I didn’t do much research before starting a blog and that’s the reason I’m writing this article, to help someone else to avoid making the mistakes I made when I was starting newly. Presently, I can get a blog monetize within a month or two at most because of the experience I had in the past.
• Consistency: I wasn’t consistent in posting articles on my blog and that alone impacted negatively on my traffic. To earn more on the adsense platform as a publisher, you must be consistent with posting articles. More unique content brings more traffic to your blog.
• ‎Choosing the right niche: Many people teaching how to start earning online through blogging will tell you that you should choose a niche that you know very well, but I have a different opinion and and that is; Choose a niche you can earn more with higher CPC, because you can also do your research using the Internet and with that you can write very unique and impactful articles that can bring reasonable revenue to your account.

Understanding the Finance and Investment Niche

‎The Finance and Investment niche is very broad actually but you can choose to narrate it just within what you feel you should be writing about in the Nigerian Finance sector.

‎But basically, this particular niche covers personal finance, Investment education and opportunities, financial news, cryptocurrencies, insurance, business and stocks.

‎I choose this niche because there are billions of topics to write about which I knew I can exhaust and I also have pre-requisite knowledge about trade and even personal finance because I did Entrepreneurship Skills as a course during my university days.

Why Finance Has a High CPC Value

‎Im quite sure that when I said I switched the niche I was writing about from entertainment to Finance and Investment, many of you reading were wondering why I said finance and Investment is the highest paying niche in terms of CPC. This is because advertisers in the financial sector spend more on ads than any other niche.

There are certain that the money will come back with just few people who may click and take action. So also are crypto projects with pre-sale or IDO (Initial Coin Offering) they budget huge money for advertisement because they have minted the tokens themselves would decide what value to sell them to raise money for the development of the projects ecosystem.

‎Another reason why the finance niche has a high CPC is that there are fewer publishers who are writing unique and quality articles in the niche.

‎Importance of trust and Credibility in Financial Blogging.

‎One of the key factors to keep in mind as you are blogging about finance is that facts and proofs gives your articles credibility. So I adopted this strategy as my key tool of success because whenever I write about a particular topic I backed it up with proofs and I show clear process of how those data were gotten.

I provided links to other sites where I got the information I wrote about and both Google, Bing and my readers trusted my posts and that’s why almost all my articles appeared and ranked high on Google news discover. This earned me other proposals from other monetization platforms and sponsored and guest posts from individuals who wanted their projects to go viral especially by appearing and ranking high on Google news and search engines like bing and google.

Is this a guarantee for people writing in finance niche?

Absolutely not, this is not a guarantee but my own strategy works for me this days. There are a lot of factors that influences how much a blogger can earn and whichever strategy you have adopted still I can’t guarantee you will earn like I did.

Google takes into account factors such as the traffic sources, niche type, how long a user stays while reading on your blog, how many pages the reader visited when he or she landed on your blog and finally which country your account was created in.

Bloggers in the United States, Canada and some key countries in Europe can earn more with the same traffic another is also getting from Africa. AdSense has a calculator to those desiring to monetize their blogs with AdSense. When tried the calculator I found out that if a blog in Africa about finance is getting 50,000 page views the blog will generate $2500 while the same traffic in Americas that’s the Caribbean Americas will generate $2000 and this same traffic in Asia and Pacific Europe will generate $3100. The same traffic showed different earnings when I checked in other niche such as entertainment showed a very small amount. Please check proof in the screenshot below.

So what influences how much your blog will earn depends on where the traffic is coming from and the niche you’re writing about.

Common Mistakes New Bloggers Make

Bloggers often make mistakes and some are not even aware that they’ve been making mistakes all the while. Mistakes such as:

• Not focusing on a particular niche: there a lot of novice bloggers trying to increase traffic on their blogs, they have rather resulted in writing contents randomly across all niche. They will write about finance in the morning, write about health in the afternoon, write about lifestyle in the evening and then still continue to write about other niche the next day. This act will confuse the algorithm.
• Inconsistent: the algorithm rewards only the consistent bloggers. Writing regularly and unique and quality content will not only drive in new readers but also keep the old ones. The strategy is quite simple, write unique, original and impactful content and the algorithm will always favour your blog.
• Not optimizing pages for SEO: the time when few people knew about blogging has long ago past. Now, there is a lot of competition so using SEO tools such as Yoast and Rank Math will help optimize your pages to rank high on the search engines.

My Advice to Upcoming Bloggers

If my person story and experience has inspired you to start a blogger then I will encourage you to do so. While doing so please write consistently and focus more on writing impactful content. Do this passionately and always use only verifiable data to write about and the algorithm will surely reward you.

As you are starting, do not tried to manipulate the process because you might just get a life ban. Choose a niche that you can always have a topic to write about.

I didn’t make my money overnight but when I started earning I became very consistent, writing more than ten articles in a week. I confused soly on my niche and because my posts were so impactful the algorithm was always flavouring me. I implore you to do the same and you will see the things turning around naturally.

Disclaimer: This article is based on my personal experiences and should not be considered as a financial advise. All the data provided here including the screenshots are mine and I urge you all not to consider my experience as a guarantee to earn the way I earned.