Earn Money Online Blog

Early May Adsense Earnings Update

As you probably know, one of the things that I do with my websites is earn money online with Adsense. I’ve spent the last six months or so putting into place some ideas and techniques that I have learned on my own, about three months ago I came across someone who essentially has done the same thing for a couple years and is earning quite well via adsense (with a few additional twists.) Very few people are very upfront about how much they earn with adsense and what their main earning niches are. I’ve somewhat struggled with this myself. Do I tell everything about what and how I do as well as how much I make and where it comes from? Or do, I become mum on the main technique that has made this earn money blog possible? I may explore that dilemma in a post a bit later on, but I thought I’d bring you up to date on where I am vis-a-vis my adsense earnings.

No, I will not tell which sites make the most money. I WILL say that currently this site is not one of them, but I am working my way up in search rankings for some good terms on this site, so who knows if I can keep working at it, this could be one of my big earning sites. I am building links to sites through traditional article, directory and several other methods. Everything is above board. (i.e. no automation of comment spam/etc.)

My real push to start developing traffic at several of my sites started probably around September of last year (2008). I had been making the threshold for an adsense payment every 2-3 months (although at the depths of low traffic it had been maybe 4 months between payments and everything had been in the 100-120 range, but I had some time in September and October to put in some serious work on my pages and on developing inbound links and from then until March my adsense earnings grew every month.

September earnings 55.32
October earnings 94.05
November earnings 161.65
December earnings 216.64
January earnings 308.20
February earnings 335.59
March earnings 423..85
April earnings 306.66 First drop in monthly earnings since at least September.

March earnings surpassed my all time record of around 383 from January of 2006 (just before the big daddy update to Google’s search algorithm which left me scratching my head over what happened for months.)

So, why was April lower? I have a couple ideas. First, the last few days of March (starting around the 28th) I noticed a drop in traffic and earnings. I read some people talk about search upheavals around that time. I also notice there was a public (toolbar) PR export around that time. In looking at the keywords I’m concerned about I didn’t see great changes there, but I did notice a bit less international traffic. Some in the forums claimed that they were seeing less international traffic…. i.e. if the site was a .uk site it was getting fewer US based visitors,etc. It may be that Google has changed weighting somewhat so that more local sites will show up for their search locales. It’s also possible that I had a drop in social traffic around that time. The last round of promotion to social sites my sites saw was early March, so… by late March we’re falling of the first few pages and into obscurity and so I should be seeing lower traffic.

It’s interesting to note that while my traffic in April was about 40% of what it had been in May, my earnings were around 75% of where they were. That means I’m earning more per thousand visitors and in general that means my traffic is better quality. This would back up the “less international traffic” as well as the “less social traffic” theories as those two types of traffic do not convert as well and are more likely to cause smartpricing penalties.

So, while I’m a bit bummed at a decline in earnings for April, I’m convinced that all in all things are in good shape, I’ve weathered the first large google algorithm tweak of this attempt to earn money online with google adsense and I just need to scale up what I’ve started to move from an okay amount to a really good monthly income.

The last theory I have on April traffic is basically seasonality. I suspect web traffic in spring and summer months is less than in October-March, so there may be a seasonal component involved with the drop as well. (That wouldn’t accompany a rise in CPM though, so if it’s a factor I doubt it’s the ONLY factor.)

So, right now I’m in the midst of trying to buckle down and get to work on a handful of sites that I’ve got some big plans for. (Including this one.) One of the things that I have noticed is that by and large the sites that have done best have over 100 posts and the sites that haven’t done as well have fewer than 100 posts. I suspect one of the reasons for that is inlinking improving the search placement. I mean if I have a site that has “red, wooly widgets” linking to the main page from each of 500 post pages I would think that may affect the results for the search “red wooly widgets”. Offsite links typically carry more weight, but links within your own site will likely make a bit of a difference too and when it get’s to a certain “critical mass” you’re going to see some results just from the insite linking.

Anyway, my hopes are to at least maintain in the 300-500 range for the next several months and hopefully push forward for more growth. Unfortunately my other work has been fairly busy and I haven’t had many opportunities to pour time into my sites since probably February. So, if all goes well I’ll be blocking off bits of time to invest on my sites and be able to report continued growth in the adsense earnings from here going forward.

All of this has convinced me that at least for the short term, google adsense is by far the easiest and most straightforward to implement ways to earn money online from a blog or with any other kind of site. This makes two (separate) times that I’ve managed to start sites and work my way up to $300+ of earnings per month with adsense. The first time I had no clue what was going on, how it was working and I poured 14 hour days directly into it at the peak. This time around I’m spending less time, but I think I have a handle on exactly why I’m getting traffic and where I should be looking for more and better sources of traffic.

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