Forum Moderators: martinibuster
But even though I enjoyed it, I sometimes wondered what, if any, the real value was of all the time and effort I put into it, beyond my personal enjoyment.
I did get emails from readers saying they enjoyed the site, and that went a long way towards motivating me.
Until I put Adsense on the site 16 months ago there was no advertizing on the site, and no income from the site.
After installing Adsense I did enroll in and put up some affiliate links. Compared to Adsense, the affiliate thing was, shall we say, disappointing. The affiliates stuff didn't last long. I have no affiliate stuff on the site now.
That doesn't mean I wouldn't use affiliate programs. I just haven't figured out how to make them work for me. I also haven't seen many that I would place on the site, for various reasons, even if I could make them work.
Meanwhile I keep working on the site.
But Adsense has changed the way I see the site. It hasn't changed what I post on the site though.
Reader input has changed what I post on the site.
This thing started out as mostly a big photo gallery. Then I'd get emails asking questions about one thing or another, so I started adding a bit of info on each page. Of course that meant I had to redesign the whole site to accomodate the info.
As time has gone on, the bits of info I post have led to more questions and comments from readers.
Some of those questions and comments have motivated me to add more sections and different types of info to the site.
Adsense has allowed me to develop some of the resources needed to meet the needs of my readers. It's also allowed me to expand the scope of what I post, or plan to post.
It's also allowed me to travel farther, literally, to get conent for the site.
Right now I've got plans to convert part of the site from static pages to more dynamically generated content. I'm not the brightest bulb on the block, and that means paying someone to create the dynamic system for me.
Without Adsense, I don't know that I'd have undertaken that project.
Adsense has allowed me to consider site related projects that I would not have otherwise considered as being viable for me.
In the end, it hasn't changed the nature of what I do as much as it has changed the scope of what I see as possible.
How about you?
[In the name of giving credit where credit is due, had I not found this place (WW) I probably wouldn't have gotten the site to the point where Adsense would work as well as it does for me.]
One affect adsense has had on the content I put into the site is that it is a more commercial now. I tend to think in terms of attracting "shoppers" rather than attracting "readers" much moreso now than I ever did before.
For better or worse, this has had a big impact on the earnings I've been enjoying.
The Adsense came along, and I realized that the site didn't need to be deadwood. More, I didn't have to keep it focused on content I don't care about any more, because sheer number of eyeballs is no longer how I measure my site's success. I no longer feel like I'm running the site as a (tiresome) public service. Ironically, by making my site into a little business, it's turned back into a hobby.
The practical repercussions are that while the old content is staying up, it's being streamlined and moved into secondary sections of the site. The main focus of the site is going to be my current (and conveniently Adsense-friendly) hobby. I'm also putting up several minisites that I've dreamed about for a while, but lacked the motivation to make. In short, Adsense has brought my site back to life.
A few additional points:
* I organize stuff differently thanks to adsense, but it's the same basic theme.
* I've prioritized my backlog based on adsense, but I'm still writing about my core topics.
* I take deductions for expenses I incur now that there's income from the site. I make sure I don't get carried away with that (I still show profit) but it's changed some of my budget decisions.
I think it was EFV that used the term "evergreen" to refer to content that had a long shelf life. I try to stay evergreen in the main, but will do commentary pieces now and then that help keep repeat visitors interested. But if I walk away from my site for indefinite time, it mainly keeps ticking without me.
My main hobby site has been on the net for eight years. Most of the content was written in the previous century, visitor numbers naturally increased and I received many "thank you" e-mails for the content. Many visitors also replied with comments, additions etc. I was happy with the fact that people liked my content and that was it.
Over time the attitude of visitors changed. Thank you e-mails were replaced by "I want you to answer my silly question" e-mails because people began to think that asking me a question by e-mail was easier than reading the information on my site. I started to get disappointed in the internet community, and stopped adding information to the site.
But then Adsense came along. I decided to add it to the site to cover the hosting costs and was surprised by the results. A year of hosting was covered after a few weeks and the site started to generate income on its own.
Adsense motivated me to streamline the design, replace all the <font> crap with decent CSS, cut large pages about multiple subjects into smaller pieces and add new quality content on a regular base. One page of content often costs me a week of research, writing and drawing the necessary images and motivation to do this has been absent for years. But since Adsense I have the motivation again to update the site, add content which I think is interesting for the visitors.
I track the earnings of each new page with a channel to keep motivated to add new content. The motivation I was getting from the "thank you" e-mails is now replaced by the motivation of looking at the Adsense earnings.
I still see this site as a hobby site, not a commercial one. Adsense did change my motivation, it did also change the layout of the site, but it had no influence on the content. Since Adsense I have refound my old hobby.
