Jerry Alonzy figured he’d be working into his 70s at least.
As an independent handyman at the mercy of weather patterns near Hartford, he’d always made a decent income that rarely grew.
Then he found Google, and his life changed. Alonzy, 57, now makes $120,000 a year from the ads Google places on his Natural Handyman Web site, and he couldn’t be more thrilled.
“I put in two, maybe three hours a day on the site, and the checks pour in,” he says. “What’s not to like?”
In return for placing its ads on Web sites and blogs, Google pays Web publishers every time one of its ads are clicked. Those clicks help keep Alonzy and his wife living comfortably and talking about moving to Hawaii. “All I need is a laptop and a high-speed Internet connection, and I can live anywhere.”
The Internet may be a young person’s medium, but the retired and those nearing retirement such as Alonzy have found that they can work the Web just as well. Sometimes, such “Gray Googlers” can live a richer, more financially rewarding life than when they were supposedly working.
“Google isn’t just for kids anymore,” says Google executive Kim Scott, who runs the company’s Ad Sense program, the ad platform that provides the income for Web publishers such as Alonzy and others.
Take Jerrold Foutz. The former Boeing engineer, 75, started a Web site a few years ago devoted to one of his passions — switching mode power supplies, which help drive, for instance, the inside of video cameras.
He put Google ads on his smpstech.com site four years ago. After just one month, the first Google check was for $800. The second check totaled $2,000.
“I thought, ‘Wow,’ “ he said. “This was the most amazing thing that ever happened to me. Something I thought would make $50 a year now equals my Boeing retirement check.”
That comes out to around $25,000 yearly.
Foutz’s experience is not an anomaly.
After Hope Pryor’s four kids left home, she grew intrigued with the Internet and learned how to design a Web page. She didn’t want it to focus on just her, so she posted some of her favorite recipes on the site.
Now, her Cooks Recipes site is bringing in nearly $90,000 yearly, mostly from Google ads. The holidays are the biggest-producing months of the year.
“Last December alone, I netted $30,000 from Google,” she says. “There’s not too many people I know who can walk into a car dealership and buy two vehicles at one time. I did just that recently.”
Patience Needed
While the upside of working with AdSense sounds exhilarating, it’s not that way for everybody.
Scott says she posted an unsold novel on Google and earns about $5 a month from the AdSense ads on the site. Al Needham, 74, who runs a site about the care of bees (bees-online.com) from his home near Boston, reaps about $250 a month.
“Forget about getting rich overnight,” says Alonzy. “It takes time to learn.”
Jennifer Slegg, a consultant whose JenSense blog is devoted to tips for using so-called “contextual” advertising, says the easy part is getting AdSense up and running. Google provides computer code that must be copied and pasted onto a Web site. Figuring out how to do that “is very easy for new publishers.”
Foutz says even if you’ve never cut and pasted code before (hint: On Windows PCs, highlight the text, press Control C to copy, then Control V to paste it), “Just follow what Google says. They have very easy to understand instructions.”