$1 per week? What am I doing wrong?

[stevegalgas]

I signed up for Adsense about two weeks ago, and so far, it seems like I'll only be making $1 per week. I have a fairly small page- not a big portal or anything like that. It's an illustration portfolio site, but I get okay traffic for that. About 700 per week. I understand that's pretty meager, but should I only be getting that much out of Adsense right now?

Part of my concern is that my ads don't seem to be well targeted. My site is about comic book illustration, but I aim for more specific keywords because that's such a competitive market- so instead of comics, I use keywords like "robot sketches", "cartoon art", "small press comic books"... and all I get are engineering ads and robot parts.

Will the ads become more specified for my audience as the Google bots start to see what ads become successful on my site?

I saw a post where people were discussing their monthly profits from the service, and no one seemed to be making under $20. What am I doing wrong?

[fearlessrick]

Well, I'll give it a try. 700 page hits is not that much, but I think you may be overdoing it on your keywords.

Think along the lines of what somebody visiting your site would be interested in buying, because that's who your best advertisers are going to be.

Like, comic books, I think would be good. Comic art, illustrations, etc.

Also, you should know that Adsnse reads the page, not the meta tags, so your title, and content need to be relevant. The keywords should be in H1, 2 or 3, and Bold and Italic as well and with good density.

Hope that helps a little.

[hunderdown]

From what I've read over the past year here, sites that are built around images, as a portfolio site would be, are not a great match for AdSense. If you can build some real text into your pages, even if it's just a paragraph, you'll give AdSense more to chew on.

Could you develop, for example, a step-by-step guide to creating a comic book, spread over several pages, illustrated with your work, of course, but including some explanatory text? That might work well for AdSense, and it might also draw visitors to your site....

You could also try different ad placements, but I'd have to say the real limit is likely to be traffic. At your level of traffic, unless you somehow stumbled on some really valuable keywords, I think you'd be doing very well to earn over $10/week.

[crescenta]

hunderdown is right. If you had some sort of tutorial on comic book art--something that would appeal to comic book artist hopefuls, Adsense might target the ads better.

Edited to add: I was able to find your site. GREAT site, by the way -- but I think I see what the problem is. There isn't enough focused text on many of the pages for Google to figure out what sort of ad to put there.

I am even more convinced that you need either to have some sort of "techniques used" pages, or simply make some small tutorials about your type of art. If you use a certain type of software, talk about it. Mention your favorite type of art supplies. You may want to sign up as an Amazon.com affiliate (if you haven't already) and link to some of your favorite art and comic-related books. Any other artists who were a big influence on you when you were going to school? What about recommending some color theory books? List the books by name, explain why you like them, and link to them.

Do you have any advice to wannabe comic artists, like what things to do, what things to avoid? Write a page about that. There are all sorts of possibilities.

[stevegalgas]

Out of curiousity, does Adsense only take into account what's on the page or does it consider the other pages on a site as well for figuring out what a certain page is about?

>>>I was able to find your site. GREAT site, by the way -- but I think I see what the problem is. There isn't enough focused text on many of the pages for Google to figure out what sort of ad to put there.<<<

Thanks for the compliment! =) Hmm... perhaps I will have to work on that, then. I was hoping that the text that was on those pages would be enough. Perhaps not, then. That's unfortunate, though, because I like how clean my page is right now. I wanted to find a balance between text and image, but obviously the search engines (and therefore Adsense) like text-heavy pages.

>>>You may want to sign up as an Amazon.com affiliate (if you haven't already) and link to some of your favorite art and comic-related books. <<<

Is there any alternative to Amazon? I'm not crazy about Amazon, really, but I had considerered signing up for that. Do any of the other booksellers have a similar program?

Thanks for all the input!

[spaceylacie]

Ebay is a good affliate program. They were paying $20 for a new sign-up, but I think it might have gone back to $10. You can link to auctions that are related to your niche, that's what I like about it. Ebay also pays 10 cents when people bid on an auction from your site, but I haven't seen this area of the program add up much.

[PatrickDeese]

> Is there any alternative to Amazon?

Powells has an affiliate program too - a lot of indie sites prefer to sell thru them - however - Amazon has a lot more diverse inventory - it's always fun to recommend a $4.99 paperback and end up getting commissions for a $499 digital camera. :P

[sailorjwd]

Notice you have at least one XXX site linking to you - be careful.

When I first looked at your site I didn't even see the Ads. They are wiped out by all the graphics below them on the page I was looking at.

Might want to consider moving them closer to the text.