Forum Moderators: martinibuster
After dumping most of my adsense pages last year after dismal returns VS time spent, I decided to give it another go. I've put borderless ads color matched to my site on twelve pages according to the heat map and have been eliminating trash ads. To date these 12 pages are averaging a grand total of 17 cents per day, so based on that if traffic remains the same I would have to develop over 1000 pages to break $20.00 per day.
Now I know some people here have done this, but how does one manage to develop 1000's of pages of content and still find time to eat drink and be merry? I'm lucky if I can put out two or three decent articles a week, at which rate would take over 6 years to crack a thousand ;~)
If anyone has any suggestions I'm all ears.
I was waiting for your post update ;)
Good luck on the $5 a day!
-Sometime next week maybe?
And by the way, keep on posting...!
keep on posting
Hey Lovejoy,
Actually I would hold back on the daily journal, I know it is exciting, but can become a killjoy after few days to people looking for other stuff, just a personal view, no offense and all the best wishes, let us know when it multiplies many times, and don't forget to include tricks and tips for new members when things start rolling fast.
Good Luck
Hobbs
There are ton's of threads of people making $100.00 plus a day here at webmaster world, but very few about getting over the first humps that discourage us "cents per day" people, hense my posts to this thread.
What I'm posting now is what a adsense newbie goes through trying to break through the initial hurdles that make many of us give up prematurely.
If people can see what I'm going through, giving it my best shot, maybe they will be encouraged to stay the course as well. Plus I'm sure if the mods think I'm sucking up bandwidth they will let me know ;~). Right now I'm getting email from other "cents per day" people asking me to continue. I'm sure much of what I may post is old news for the $100.00+ people, maybe even trade secrets ;~), but it should great encouragement to those of us making less than $5.00 a day ;~)
From my perspective these updates you add every day or so are interesting and well worth reading. Thanks for taking time from your day to add them to this thread. Like you say, there's plenty of treads here about the folks making a living doing this.
Your perspective and this thread add value to the forum.
Keep on plugging away it and you'll hopefully reach your goals sooner rather than later.
Keep it up Lovejoy! Most interesting thread these days for me too!
I just figured out maybe why my blog's clicks are so poor compared to my other domain. On my old domain there are basically three ways to get off the page, click on another article, click on a ad or click back. The blog has more options on the menu. Maybe ugly pages with larger fonts and crappy navigation rule ;~)
There are now 45 pages on the blog, I'll try and pop another five up tomorrow. Only three have been picked up by Google, but then that's pretty quick considering it's only been two weeks.
Today looks like it might be another two dollar day on the old domain site, if I can find time I'll start moving articles from the blog over to the old domain, but I'll keep the blog running until more pages get picked up.
Yesterday almost broke $2.00 again ($1.84), today I migrated over 10 pages from the blog site to the old domain with the crappy navigtion ;~)
The blog is now listed on Google under its main keyword phrase (results 1-10 of 852,000) on page one and page two (Results 11 - 20 of about 2,650,000). Still not much action on the blog as far as clicks go, but that should change as google adds individual pages to the index. One blog page is already number one for its main keyword phrase.
I've yet to check what's happening with the blog on msm or yahoo, I will check that later today.
P.S. Thanks everyone for their encouragement and support.
Quick update, Yahoo has the blog at the number 6 position for the main keyword phrase and at number two with the link from the old domain to the blog.
Took the week end off for a change went to the beach and cleared the "little grey cells" with fresh air and surf ;~).
From my weekend stats with 50 pages now up I noticed the 80/20 therory in action, some pages convert very well, other get very little traffic at all. Seems my small niche has an untapped sub-niche that has a group of very interested viewers for green, blue and purple widgets, so I put up a few more pages on Sunday related to different types of green, blue and purple widgets. From what I've seen so far I could possibly spin off this interest in the G,B&P widgets as a separate site, or even an e-book. Before I do that I will upload more of the G,B&P relate pages to the old domain and see if there is a saturation point for this topic.
More of the blog sites pages have been pick up by the search engines, but the clicks are still abysmal ;~0
You working on anything else besides adding content, like link exchanges, keeping a mailing list, etc.?
My old site's been up since 1997 and already has pretty good linkage with related websites. I've seo'd its way to first page rankings on the major engines over the last four years, but how blogs hook up I'm a total newbie ;~). Everything I've done since 97 has been through organic listings using free software,scripts etc...I've got to be the cheapest guy online.
I did set up my own affiliate program using a very low cost program and the roi on that is pretty good with no middle man taking a chunk ;~). I did toy with a newsletter early on, but as a one man army I was already marching to too many drummers ;~)
Right now with 50 pages the adsense take ranges from $1.00- $2.00
per day, using the channels the 80/20 split is becoming very clear. To me this indicates that niche markets should be tweaked/expanded and keyword search phrase numbers searched for the poor performing pages to bring their numbers up.
In the past when developing any new information product I've always done a check on search words to check the volume, anything with over 3,000 searches a month seems to generate reasonable sales for the effort involved in developement, but I've not yet done that with the subject content of most of the new pages I'm uploading. That's next on the list and I will keep posting the results of tweaks.
As with anything time is always an issue and I find I have to set definite time schedules to get all this done. This involves all the usual midnight oil, but also plenty of brainstorming while biking and working out. Seems I've got all my best ideas while near the water front or at the beach, but WiFi is just arriving in my area and I have to jot it all down and take it back to the office ;~0
Perhaps you can encourage members to submit stories to you somehow ;)
Offer a small incentive and people fall for it every time :)
Interesting system, though wouldn't it take quite a bit of time keeping track of points, editing content and checking for plagarism? My main concern is accuracy in an article, my niche requires a high level of expertise.
I do something similar, but it's not automated. For submitting a story or article, people will get a link back to their site and small ad, or will get a prize when they enter our contest.
Of course I read through them all or have someone else before they are posted, since a lot of the time it's not stuff worth publishing.
How did you set up your automatic forums? Purchase a script, or did you do the programming?
Things have been pretty busy, but I though I'd spare a minute to bring you up to date. For the month of July with minimal adsense set up and little though to ad placement on about 6 pages I made $3.34. During August when I optimized ad placement with the heat map and added 50 pages of new content the take was $34.54. This is quite an improvement and will buy my daily coffee, the donut will have to wait for the steady $2.00 a day level ;~)
On the content front the old 20/80 formula is certainly in motion with about 20% of the pages providing about 80% of the income. In the coming months I'm going to monitor that and add more pages of content that appears to generate the most interest ( and income). I will also use this information to develop more information products on these subjects to sell from my site.
The blog site so far has been a dismal failure on the click front, even when it was directly linked to my main page. I've put affiliate links on the blog, but to date they haven't converted to sales yet either.
Lovejoy
Just my 2 cents of un-asked-for advice.
This is a great thread, good to know that there are others out there just starting out and going through the same things i am.
My site has very little traffic at this time and have been concentrating on building traffic for the last 3 months. Thanks to the good advice in these forums i have increased my traffic, from 107 visitors with 459 page views in June, to ending August with 397 visitors and 909 page views.
Adsense earnings increased from $17 in june to about $35 in aug. Over this time my CTR and ECPM have remained about the same. around 5.5% CTR and around $40 ECPM. Do these sound like good numbers? should I be putting more time into trying to optimize the ad placements to increase clickthrough or just concentrate on building traffic, and worry about optimizing the ads once i have more traffic?
Lovejoy, in your opinon has just adding content helped you to increase your earnings or have you also been looking at optimizing ad placement?
" During August when I optimized ad placement with the heat map and added 50 pages of new content the take was $34.54."
of the 50 pages you added how much of that increase occured on the new pages, vs. the old "optimized" pages?
[webmasterworld.com...]
It is Blogger.com-specific, but still I think there may some points there of interest. As always, looking forward to the next update, and good luck.
[edited by: Etonian at 2:21 pm (utc) on Sep. 2, 2006]
My traffic has just about pegged as it is for my main keywords. According to the main keyword searches my main niche pulls in less than 10,000 a month, of which most appears to be already hitting my site with a CTR of 10.62% for August.
There is a broader related search term I'm aiming the articles at now that generates over 350,000 searches a month on overture, so your advice will be taken regarding traffic and the blogs ;~)
Lovejoy
That's difficult to say, once the 20/80 thing kicked in I started adding pages that converted well, so the majority of the new pages I've put up were based on the success of the old pages that were already converting the best.
At this point it's like making pancakes and experimenting as to how much apple sauce you can add to the mix before the pancakes fall apart when you scoop them out of the frying pan ;~) As it is now all pages have the ad placement on the upper left column.
P.S. I increased the margin and font size size yesterday on all pages after reading about demographics/Boomers/ bifocals etc. Too early to tell yet what this may do, but clicks were up about 10% for the day ;~)
Lovejoy
The blog is finally starting top get some action from Tags & Pings as articles get propagated about the net. I added five more article using similar subject matter to my best converting pages and the take is now hovering around $2.00 a day. A three dollar day will make me think I'm on the right track ;~)
[edited by: Etonian at 9:25 pm (utc) on Sep. 7, 2006]
Get yourself a content writer ;)
Yep. Is there a college/university near you? Hungry/thirsty college students can crank out articles for you for $5/$10 a page. Less $ for "common" stuff, more $$ for exotic subjects.
Most of them dont think about making money yet - just where their next beer will come from.
Sorry for the delay in getting back to you, my one man army is in great need of a vacation ;~). In answer to your question my niche is quite specialized. In the past, information I've purchased was so full of inacuracies I ended up doing some heavy editing before I could even use it. I'm in the swing of things now and can pop out about five articles on my own a day, but uploading them involves the working in the wee hours to avoid the distractions of a home office with children ;~).
Earning are pretty steady, but I've yet to crack three dollar barrier. I've got ten more articles that are of similar subject matter to my best performing pages I'll up load tonight and see if I can crack that barrier in the next few days.
