I mean, is there a return of investment?

How thin are you spread? Are you doing this solo or do you have a team generating content?

If you have a team it almost becomes a necessity to churn out as much more new content as possible however working alone, for me, takes a different mindset once a site has been created.

Working alone means working smarter and focussing on those parts of the site(s) that are evidently more popular or generating the most income or easier to work on to create more content. For instance my lowest CTR pages are a Coppermine gallery with thousands of widget images however I can sit watching the TV and add 100 new images in a couple of hours and know for certain the search engines will quickly pick them up and generate new earnings.

My highest CTR pages I can spend days researching and writing before posting but I definitely need to be focussed when doing those however their CTRs may be high but their page views are not massive since they are so specific.

Adsense ceiling has been discussed before

Nah, I'm 25% up in the past 3-4 months but how much this has to do with consumer confidence I cannot say.

@ explorador, not all websites and potential traffic is equal. I too lose revenue when I don't post as much new content. Google seems to like "fresh".

ROI? Yes, this is a real business consideration. My AdSense revenue plotted against traffic and time has dropped dramatically for the most part. I now think of fresh content as a method to keep my eCPM on par - not for growth. Quite honestly, every time I mess (tweak) with my ads I seem to lose revenue from AdSense –can’t seem to win with hard work.

For new revenue and worth while ROI, I have been introducing new products and services.

@ Huskypup,

Nah, I'm 25% up in the past 3-4 months but how much this has to do with consumer confidence I cannot say.

Your revenue will not go up forever… I have not hit a traffic ceiling, however regardless of what have done over the last ~ four-five years, I cannot increase my share of the AdSense pie in relation with my efforts (12 hour days – seven days a week).

This is my living BTW.

Your revenue will not go up forever

FWIW my earnings are nowhere near 2006, 2007 and 2008 saw a continuing slide downwards to the point where I seriously wondered whether AdSense would continue on my sites.

I feel that much of this was the recession and consumer lack of confidence but just how much I do not know but about a year ago I decided not to continually update existing sites with new stuff purely to see what happened.

Guess what? Nothing, not only did earnings not go down they became more stable then they had been for ages and at about that time iBill wrote a post something akin to "getting more out of your site than you do now" and I had a really, really big think about what I could possibly do with what I already had.

Consequently I made some very subtle alterations across my two main sites and these "improvements" have now turned into significant earners. My second site was more of a 10 year update/clean-up of code/etc however both these sites' earnings are up considerably on 2009 and in 2010 a +23.17% increase year-on-year so far with absolutely no extra pages having been added except for my Coppermine gallery and that is not where the big increase has come from.

I'm steadily going through some of my other sites tweaking and amending where necessary and these sites are also seeing significant increases.

Is it purely co-incidental and basically consumer confidence? I feel so since I am in a very expensive widget sector and it has been hit very hard however I feel the alterations I have made will generate further increases as economies in general pick-up and users search more for my widgets.

YMMV!

Your revenue will not go up forever…

In some cases it can. In others it might not. No two cases are the same.

I'm a one guy operation and running web sites is how I make my living.

I can tell you that the amount of effort I put in has no correlation to the AdSense earnings. And I can tell you that although at times it has felt like there was an "AdSense ceiling", I have found that to be untrue.

I do believe, however that in some niches you "hit the wall" with regards to the amount of traffic there is in that niche and it's near impossible to make any "real" money. I have a few smaller sites that just will never make the big bucks due to the topic. There just isn't enough people searching for that information to ever let the earnings continue to rise.

I do not believe in walls or ceilings.

As long as I can increase traffic, I can increase revenue. If I have to add content to increase traffic, then I do it. If I have to go to Facebook (see other item) or use email campaigns to increase awareness (and thus traffic), then I do that.

The only ceiling I would acknowledge would be maybe 5 billion people on my site at once. Once achieved, we'd have to aim for deep space, and I don't think we're quite there yet.

I can't think of a single niche that I couldn't figure out some way to expand, given time and money. I can think of some that might not be worth the effort, sure; but then you just move on to another one that is.

But geezopete, there's *always* somewhere to go!

HuskyPup: Working alone means working smarter and focussing on those parts of the site(s) that are evidently more popular

...

My highest CTR pages I can spend days researching and writing before posting but I definitely need to be focussed when doing those

Same here, that's part of the reason I'm so picky about this matter. I know there is a return of investment but "ceiling", that's the thing.

Edge: ROI? Yes, this is a real business consideration. My AdSense revenue plotted against traffic and time has dropped dramatically for the most part. I now think of fresh content as a method to keep my eCPM on par - not for growth.

That's what I've seen in my case and I wanted to have a point of comparison. Now I know I'm not the only one. I always had this idea after reading the efforts of others on Adsense terms.

HuskyPup: I feel that much of this was the recession and consumer lack of confidence

I see a direct effect of that on my Adsense history. Not everybody was hit, some more than others.

Swanny007: I can tell you that the amount of effort I put in has no correlation to the AdSense earnings. And I can tell you that although at times it has felt like there was an "AdSense ceiling", I have found that to be untrue.

I do believe, however that in some niches you "hit the wall" with regards to the amount of traffic there is in that niche and it's near impossible to make any "real" money. I have a few smaller sites that just will never make the big bucks due to the topic. There just isn't enough people searching for that information to ever let the earnings continue to rise.

Nice to hear that. Until this point I reached several ceilings, that sounds contradictory but is not. I reached a point where my efforts are getting more demanding.

Anyway about recession, I found that after working very hard on a new website to integrate on my network, it only served to keep my earnings instead of increasing it. Lucky me I never stopped building or I would be complaining of having less.

netmeg: As long as I can increase traffic, I can increase revenue. If I have to add content to increase traffic, then I do it. If I have to go to Facebook (see other item) or use email campaigns to increase awareness (and thus traffic), then I do that.

My traffic grows every year. Each year I get more visitors than the last one but my earnings don't go up in that same way. Every site is different, in this case it applies to all my sites on the Adsense Network so, "it applies to each one of them". I'm not saying is impossible to keep growing, is just that the numbers not always make sense.

But thanks, I'll keep reading this thread, I care about income (Adsense) but I care more about traffic. No matter what happens with Adsense, a website with good traffic will always have potential so I won't be working only for G.

Then again back to the OP I wanted to put to the test the old say of "more fresh content is the key". It's been mentioned so many times I wanted to know for how many of us that is trully working like everybody says. I guess seasons, promotion and link building are a big part of ROI. I'm afraid more content is not always enough.

Then again back to the OP I wanted to put to the test the old say of "more fresh content is the key".

My sites and my real world widgets are by their very nature evergreen therefore unless someone comes up with a completely new revolutionary widget processing system, a miracle cure for a centuries-old widget trade issue or a completely new source for my raw materials, then there realistically isn't much "new" to write about except how my widgets may have been used in some major or unique domestic projects.

I can tell you this, my widget trade magazines globally, as well as web sites, have this problem every month of trying to get companies/people to submit relevant articles even when we do it for free and when they do they don't think from a USP perspective, they just regurgitate sales brochure literature...extremely frustrating to say the very least and especially so with the very high value of my widgets.

Therefore for fresh content I can't do at the moment however this is one of the ideas prompted by netmeg I'm going to try with FaceBook, so long as I don't break FB again like last night:-)

Well, I think that the publisher/AdSense business model is an uphill – slippery slope endeavor at best.

First, All of us almost have unlimited competition. Any acne faced kid that can write on a blog, edit an html webpage can compete with you. In other words, entry as a publisher competitor is easy, which means lots of competitors.

Second, As far as earning click revenue with Google AdSense – again the competition is almost unlimited. Google will let anybody participate in AdSense with a website that has a white hat. So, lots of folks are competing for the same adwords advertising budgets. And, GG is taking first dubs on the clicks via their search in most cases.

Now, for anybody that doubts me just imagine that you sticky me with your highest paying keys words and webpage information. I guarantee you that by morning I will be a competitor (write and publish a webpage) and within two weeks I’ll show up in GG search results right next to you (or above) and start siphoning off your AdSense revenue. I’ll do this by dropping a link from my big bad PR8 home page with a millions visitors to the competing webpage.

The point I’m trying to make is that being a publishers is a tough business and revenue stream. No doubt we can get ahead with hard work; however with the level of competition each of us is facing I doubt anybody is going win the war – maybe a few battles …

Ultimately, unless your website goes viral, is a first stop for visitors, or GG gets a little more selective and restrictive on whom can compete for adwords money – we’re in a for tough ride and dropping revenue over the long haul.


Please don’t shoot the messenger…