Google Adsense
Google Adsense has been a primary way for me to monetize my sites and many site owners have relied on this program for income. I have known of people making a few cents a day and I’ve known of people making as much as a thousand dollars a day. There is no quick ticket to making tons of money it will depend on a couple of important factors.
Traffic. It’s the most important recipe for online success in anything.
Content. Google Adsense targets ads based on the text on your page. It’s possible to narrow the focus of the ads so it only uses a segment of the page, but the bottom line is that you need content for the targeting of ads to happen. One catch though is that the ad prices will vary based on the content. Some content areas get more expensive clicks, some content areas get very cheap clicks.
Placement and Colors. Yes, this is probably as important as the other components. It seems that some niches and sites perform better with one strategy for colors of the ad than others. It depends on the site and the theme of the site. You should create channels to track ad views and click throughs to monitor your success. Many will say that blending the ads is the best approach and from what I’ve seen it seems to be the case for most of my sites. Some sites though I’ve had more success with a mix of color schemes. (It’s possible to rotate ad themes through the google ad setup panel.)
My all time adsense earnings as of today have been $2144.95, with a largest part of that coming between November 2005 and February of 2006 (about 60%) and the other large part maybe 30% coming in the last 8 months. So, why has it been inconsistent?
When I started with adsense I had one site. It was a computer technology oriented site and I had installed wordpress on there to make posting easier and get a nice new look for it. I saw ads as a chance to pay my hosting costs and put a few through the site. The power of the blogging software for doing pings when I posted impressed me. In some cases I would see visitors in my traffic logs just a few moments after a post. In addition to that, google liked my domain and they seemed to LOVE wordpress. I started getting some pretty good long tail search visits from google. At that time I decided to farm out another site that had lived in a subdirectory at that domain and though the easiest thing to do for visitors was an auto-refresh on the old page to the new so people would be able to find it. This second site was geared towards people that may not be as technically savvy, so… I thought that was a good helpful idea.
So, for a period both sites were doing pretty well in search rankings until early December of 2005. The second site vanished. There were no results for that site in google even by doing the old site:domain.name search. I read their terms and conditions in vain and finally realized where I had offended the “google gods”…. that auto-refresh was seen as a spammy technique. I removed it and pleaded with Google to reinstate the second site and fortunately the primary site kept churning. In fact it started doing REALLY well.
The day after Christmas I made $27 just from one site. The NEXT day I made about $59 dollars. It was fantastic! The potential was great, I was spending hours updating the site and feeling pretty good about it. After that peak thinks settled down and I saw an average of around $11 a day for January and the first few days of February. Something had been fluctuating a bit though. I had got busy with work and wasn’t spending quite as much time, but suddenly the bottom fell out and I was quickly down under a dollar a day.
When I got a chance to try and figure out what had happened I found that search terms I used to rank for, the site was nowhere to be found. It was as if I had been penalized. Maybe I had, maybe it was that auto-refresh redirect. However, I found a better explanation. Big Daddy. Google updates their search algorithm quite frequently, but this was a MAJOR update. It put a big emphasis on backlinks or inbound links to your site.
In reviewing whether or not I had many backlinks it looked as though many of the sites that had linked to me had changed to nofollow or cut out their trackback links entirely. I saw a few sites, but not much. Apparently not enough for google. Many of my pages were in the supplemental results.
I became quite down. I had by this time four sites with adsense. I earned maybe a dollar a day for this stretch on average. My minimum average was around 80 cents a day. I didn’t feel the motivation to work on my sites because it seemed pointless. More posts just didn’t seem to make the traffic come back. I needed to look better to google.
After a while of brooding and moping and dealing with my regular job, I started to take a different attitude. It was possible to climb back up. If I had a single site that had averaged $11 a day once, I could do it again. I just needed to figure out how to get the search engines to see me as relevant again.
So, that’s what started me on my journey of learning about the importance of backlinks, the different ways to gain backlinks and after almost two years of brooding, learning and assimilating what I’ve learned I’ve got a comprehensive strategy that I started putting into place in the last 8 months or so.
I thought there could have been a lasting penalty associated with the two domains that I had previously had doing fairly well and so I decided to take the third domain I started and throw my work into that one. It yielded almost immediate results. It’s a domain in a niche that originally was getting 10-20 visits a day when I started it. I quickly got up towards 100 visits a day and now it’s looking closer to 250-300 a day. Each time I reach a certain level I keep thinking that this is the most traffic I’ll probably see on this site, each time I seem to be proven wrong and it pushes higher. Right now it’s been a good anchor for earnings with $2-$3 a day and lots of work yet to do.
In the last month I’ve also seen the resuscitation of the original two sites and they have started to perform a lot better in the search results as I’ve applied my link building ideas to those domains. I’ve also seen good movement from some of my other sites. At this point I have around 10 websites most of which have adsense. I’ve got loads of work to do on each and everyone to add content in so that they will be providing some really useful information to the visitors.
Here are some resources I’ve found related to adsense you might be interested in:
Digital point question about changing the adsense font (quick answer – no – transform your text on your site to match adsense if you really want a close match.)
How to find adsense font and size
Another forum thread asking about adsense font and size.
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