Happy holidays!
December 26, 2007
Happy holidays to everyone. I have been working on a post to recap the year but haven’t finished it yet. I have spent the last couple of days with my family. I haven’t been doing much work the past week or so, but will probably get back into this year and also work on a post setting my goals for the year.
It is interesting to note though that this year Christmas Day wasn’t my worst Adsense day for the year.
Adsense on the increase
October 4, 2007
Lately, I have noticed an increase in my Adsense earnings. I am not exactly sure why, a little extra traffic is helping but the trend does seem to be moving up.
I have no idea, but perhaps Google is paying advertisers more. I no longer read webmaster forums so it is difficult to know if other adsensers are experiencing the same. There are definitely more advertising programs competing with Adsense for space on websites, than when Google first launched adsense.
Adsense is dead podcast
September 27, 2006
If you have a life outside of internet marketing, you probably haven’t been paying attention to the whole is Adsense alive or dead argument.
I just finished listening to a podcast with John Jonas.
I enjoyed listening to what he said even if I felt a little depressed by trying to make to make some nice, pretty sites with Adsense to try and make a little cash.
Technorati Tags: Adsense dead
My site in Joel Comms Ebook
September 9, 2006
It is interesting sometimes to just search on your domain name in google without the the .com to see if there are references to your sites.
Today I found that my Japanese Diet was mentioned in an ebook by Joel Comm.
Joel Comm is famous for his books on adsense. It the last case study in his free ebook, Adsense Case Studies.
July 2006 adsense
August 1, 2006
The last couple of weeks earnings have been on the up and up with Google Adsense. I have no explanation as to why other than perhaps we are moving into the travel season. I came in at $683 for the month.
For the past couple of months I have been hovering around $500-$600. It is good for me as I temporarily stopped focusing on Adsense and more on affiliate programs and of course ebooks.
August was great last year so I could be in for a bumper month.
Adsense secret ebooks
June 27, 2006
There seem to be a lot of Adsense “secret” books around. I have a secret for you - there are no secrets!
In general people get higher click throughs when they blend their ads in the surrounding text, using colours of the main site.
Some gurus also suggest placing the ads next to pictures. This again may lead to higher click throughs, but does it increase your overall income?
Google has a unique conversion and tracking system, where they can track an ads success as to whether a click through actually generates a sale or some other conversion, like an email sign up.
So, I doubt that over the long term, making ads too much like navigation will result in higher income.
If you are looking for ideas on good ad placement, take a look at Steve Pavlina’s blog.
What does result in higher income, is higher traffic to your site. More visitors, more people buying. I would suggest to people to spend time (and money if necessary) thinking how to increase traffic, by either providing useful content or a unique web service, rather than worrying about whether the ads should be on the left or the right hand side of a page.
Beijing Olympic site update
May 23, 2006
I have installed a new template for my Beijing Olympic site.
I have also tried to optimize the ads in the site in a way that everyone is recommending these days.
Everyone on forums tend to agree on:
- Using the Google heatmap
- Blending ads
- Put ads in the main text of the site
The site is now indexed by Google which took a few months and is starting to rank on some keywords.
How long will Adsense last
April 24, 2006
There is an interesting discussion going on at Webmasterworld on this topic.
One person had this to say:
Currently, online marketing only accounts for around 10% of all advertsing expenditure. Within the next 10 years, that figure will be around 50% if not more. The future is rosy. The people who are looking to make a living online now will benefit more than those who make a start in years to come.
I have been working on the internet for more than a year now, and I have been able to grow my income slowly overtime. Adsense is up and down, but I have been able to diversify into other programs.
If was to take it more seriously and run it as a business, I cannot see any reason, why I couldn’t do this full-time.
I thought that maybe I was late to get in, but I think that maybe there has been no better time to start.
Mini Site Update
April 18, 2006
Someone left a comment asking how my mini-sites are doing. The short answer is: pretty average. Although, someone just yesterday bought a wine opener from my site.
I have done nothing to promote the site, it took a couple of hours to set up and I have made a couple of bucks from it. Is it worth it? Well, if you are looking for short term profits there are probably better ways to make money.
In the long term, who knows? There are so many things that could happen with the site.
One other problem, is that if you plan to make a bunch of mini-sites to profit from Adsense, there is fairly good emerging evidence that it is better to have one or a couple of big, high traffic sites with a lot of content on a fairly specific topic. For example mobile phones or a travel destinations.
Broad topic sites, untargetted users, humour sites are all going to perform bad in Adsense terms.
My other new sites are taking time to develop any traffic. Although, people are finding them. I started a site about the book and movie: Shantaram. I am currently on the first page of Google results for Shantaram Movie.
If I was able to maintain the position, I could expect some good results when the movie starring Johnny Depp is released.
So to conclude, nothing startling but I am an optimist!
Reducing the number of ads
April 6, 2006
The tempting thing when you sign up for Adsense is put the maximum number of ad blocks on your site. I was earning reasonable amount of income, so I didn’t really mind if I was doing things the right or wrong way - it was working well enough for me.
For some reason, as I have done more work on my site and added more sites and more content, my earnings are going down from my original site. I have read a great deal about “smart pricing” on Webmasterworld, but I won’t even go down this path.
I have read on the forums that reducing the number of ads on a page, can actually increase your income.
I am also waiting for a new site to get some traffic and user interaction before I add Adsense to it.
