I just received my first AdSense payment of $140.81, deposited via EDI into my bank account. A total of $38.47 of that was rolled over from June to October, which means I made $102.34 in November. If you do the math, I didn't make very much each month prior to November--the first month I made a conscientious decision to post well and post often.

Why am I telling you this? There are many new users here and many questions about whether anyone can really make money doing this thing. I am here to give you a resounding "Yes!"

You need to keep in mind a few things:

• Many of the more extreme earning Xombytes (those claiming thousands of dollars every month) should come with a disclaimer "results not typical". The methods used to make that kind of money most involve something other than writing original content.
• You can't expect to earn a steady anything if you don't submit regularly. I have over 150 Xombytes and probably 250 Xomblurbs submitted and you know what I've made from those. If you have less than 50 of either, you probably won't make much of anything unless one of your articles hits a bullseye in the search engine queue--something the user who made $680.00 in one day did. If you look at the total number of Xomba users here, you will know that it happens very rarely.
• You need to learn search engine optimization or SEO. Google has a keyword tool that shows which words and in what combination got the most hits through their search engine. Learn what words got hits for your article and change some of the wording accordingly to increase your odds.
• Quality is very important. As the saying goes, content is king. Think about the person who is actually going to read your article and hopefully click an AdSense link for you. Is the information accurate and factual? Does the article use proper spelling and sentence structure? Is there a compelling reason why someone should read your article and not someone else's? Remember, you are often competing with hundreds of other people for the attention of the reader, so you can't slap something together and expect to compete well.
• Take the long view of the year. What events are coming up in a couple of months? The Olympics will be in Beijing in August. The presidential election is in November and the party conventions will happen over the summer. The idea is to write several articles before something shows up on the radar of the reading public. This will enable you to better your odds for search engine placement, which should translate to more reads and (hopefully) more clicks.
• Along with timely articles for current events, you also want to consider making something evergreen. Evergreen simply means that the article is pertinent no matter what time of year it is. For instance, writing how to bake a chocolate cake or how to optimize your articles for the search engines will get more views over the course of the year than an article on your favorite movies for 2007.
• Lastly, you can always edit your articles later. If you find some more information on the topic or you find some typos, all you have to do is hit the "edit" button at the top of the page under your article's title, make your changes, and resubmit the article.

There are many more things to consider when writing articles, so you will definitely want to tune into the Workshop whenever it happens this month.

Until then, focus on writing as many quality articles as you can. My goal is to write five Xombytes/Xomblurbs every day this year. Since AdSense will pay you only once you reach $100.00 in your account, you want to focus on making $3.33 every day to make a monthly income. But, even if you consider the potential of making just $1.00 for every article you submit during the year at 5 articles per day (x366 days for 2008), you will make $1830.00 this year. Further, since the Internet will always have your articles, you will make money into perpetuity.

This is something that you CAN do, if you want. Just make sure your two guide words are Quality and Consistency.

Feel free to PM me with any questions you have about how I did it. Good luck to you!