glad I built for my users and not adsense

[esllou]

I launched my site three years ago (third birthday on July 16th...I still have a tear in my eye on that day) and was just thinking reading through some of these threads on esp. the adsense board that I am glad I hadn't discovered forums like this when I was building and promoting the thing.

I built the site with my visitors in mind and never even thought about the idea of monetizing the thing. I didn't build for keywords, much less keyword density. I exchanged links with good sites, not good PR sites. And I made my site navigation so that it was user-friendly, not search engine friendly (not that they are mutually exclusive)

You get the idea. For a year or 18 months, my site was, if you like, virginal, pure, innocent and not tainted by "money". The result, as some of you are guessing, was a site which when I did come to monetize it, took off like a bat out of hell. I feel, BECAUSE it had been built without the motive for money.

If I had built the site with ideas of how best to monetize it in the back or even the front of my mind, I don't think it would have been half as successful. I would have made different decisions on so many aspects of the site. I think people who build sites now thinking first about adsense or other affiliate opportunities are very much putting the cart before the horse and poorer results will be seen down the line.

I know adsense has been a big boon especially for content sites that previously had little or no revenue incoming. So I am sure there are a lot of other webmasters on this forum with similar experiences to me.

I am now earning 3-5k monthly (third of that through G) and it makes all the months of earning less than a hundred bucks worthwhile.

Perseverance is key in this game. Many fall by the wayside because they simply don't have it.

[jason77]

pounds, euros or dollars ;-)

i agree....same here....only earning a lot less than you.

i only dont like other people who target
"my traffic", build cheap link farms, put google adsense on top of it and make more money with it and have less work with it than me with my website.

there are so many lazy website around that require no support at all, as they just show links and pseudo content but that make a lot of money.

i think google would help us all to check the content of adsense website better....and to cancel account of those websites.

[zulufox]

Dont worry about the spam sites... someday an update will come, they will plumet into serp oblivion but you will hold steady...

quality content always wins in the end.

[rubenski]

Isn't this about that old saying "Content is King"?. I had a similar experience. Started my website 3 years ago never even dreaming of making money with it. Traffic from other sites that link to my site has been steadily growing since and my site has even been published in some Dutch magazines! That was really cool. I don't mind optimizing my sites for search engines, but I always consider good content and usability as my primary objectives.

[oldskool79]

i think google would help us all to check the content of adsense website better....and to cancel account of those [spam] websites.

I wouldn't count on it. Lots of those websites are generating ad revenue for them and sending targetted traffic to their advertisers.

[europeforvisitors]

I wouldn't count on it. Lots of those websites are generating ad revenue for them and sending targetted traffic to their advertisers.

Yes, but they make life tougher for Google Search, which has been playing Whack-a-Mole wih e-commerce and affiliate spam for years. What the left hand giveth, the right hand taketh away.