Forum Moderators: martinibuster
- AdSense earnings are less, but not in proportion with the lost traffic: (lost 1/3 my traffic, earnings dropped by only 10 to 15%)
- My eCPM is much higher with home brewed loyal predictable visitors, search engine traffic was diluting my eCPM.
Self worth is too underrated, with or without search engine traffic, a good site can fly on its own, I could have never known that without the BigDaddy nudge out of the nest.
Work on building your self worth and confidence through the quality of your site and gaining happy loyal visitors, it's too easy to psychologically depend on your daily earnings meter for self worth, your mental well being cannot survive the seesaw of earnings fluctuations for too long, find other personal justifications for your existence like serving visitors and giving them a good experience, personal relations, charity, hobbies .. and seriously wean yourself off AdSense earnings reports dependency, it can affect the quality time spent on building your sites, and might even lower your earnings!
Oh, and remind me when I forget:
It's about visitors, money is only a byproduct
Specially full time AdSensers can appreciate this, with your earnings source being literally online, being more secretive becomes second nature, and most that do this full time are alone with little or no physical interaction with the outside world, your sense of reality gradually goes cyber (distorted), and more with time, your earnings start to gradually replace other satisfaction sources.
One suggestion to keep it real:
Translate adsense earnings into what they can buy in terms of real world dreams, collage fund, a Harley Davidson bike, a sport car, your dream house, retirement fund, another web site .. and make sure to treat yourself once in a while when you are doing good.
AdSense earnings are less, but not in proportion with the lost traffic: (lost 1/3 my traffic, earnings dropped by only 10 to 15%)
I had something similar happen just under a year ago. I lost 70-90% of my Google referrals for two months (probably due to a www-vs.-non-www duplication error that I later fixed), but income didn't drop nearly as much as Google referrals did.
Even now, with Google referrals at record levels, I generate far more traffic with internal referrals than with search referrals, and some of my most profitable pages get most of their traffic from internal links.
To me, this just goes to show that having a good depth and breadth of quality content is a form of insurance: It makes you far less vulnerable than you'd be if you depended entirely for search referrals for traffic and had nothing to keep attract repeat visitors or "sticky" traffic.
But that period definitely changed the way I viewed Adsense -- and how fickle everything can be. Whereas I would log in 5-10 times a day before, when my earnings plummetted, I think I logged in only twice a week. It was really disheartening. After getting good earnings, all of a sudden I had to change things and scale down my plans. Got back my traffic when I stopped accepting reciprocal links.
I feel your pain ...
evolution of S.E. tends to consider good pages what a user would consider a good page
europeforvisitors:
having a good depth and breadth of quality content is a form of insurance
You both hit the nail on the head there, algorithms change, come and go, but they all try to emulate what a human eye sees as valuable content worth bookmarking. I historically averaged around 1,200 bookmarks daily for years, that's got to be worth something in the ebb & flow of the searchengines tide, but so as not to sound ungrateful, what kick started my site over 3 years ago was Google traffic and Google traffic alone.
Welcome to WW Trajano!
my biggest site has been on the web for 10 years now, it's a monster in it's niche, but i'd still be in trouble without google search traffic.
It's about visitors, money is only a byproduct
Visitors are important only because they bring revenue.
:-)
Visitors are important only because they bring revenue
The point I was trying to make is that all those (money) are symptoms and byproducts of success, and in the rat race we sometimes forget why we are making money in the first place and get trapped inside the process of producing it (AdSense) hence my post about putting things in perspective.
As for the importance of visitors being only for money, I see where you are going with this but differ from personal experience, there are things that money can't buy for me, one of them is the satisfaction of making a difference in some of my visitor's lives, it is actually that which drove me to create my site in the first place, and it is exactly what I hope some of my visitors come out with after visiting my site, money can't buy that, and money only came at a later stage with AdSense, actually it is money and AdSense that affected the time spent in developing my content, I am not complaining for wanting "things" is normal, and the flesh is weak when it comes to bragging rights too!
All I was trying to say is that in finding a balance between both "things" and good service lies happiness, too much idealism will lead to something like the ODP, too much "things" leads to a MFA, I am trying and hoping to position myself as somewhere in the middle, and it's up to you to find your own happy spot too.
if you're in it for the long haul, there's no such thing as enthusiasm, commitment and dedication to your sites' subject. it has paid off already and i believe it'll do so again in the future. money is a strong motivator, but what if earnings are behind expectations at times? if you only look at the money, you will not be substantially satisfied with your job (remember that is what we all do most of the time) and you can't bear backstrokes as good. i'm struggling with that, too. but my worst problem is that i forget to live actually because i have too little time. i'm working on that ;)
in these few years, i've seen competitors come and go, partly because of a bad concept, party because of lack of endurance and devotion for the subject and for what people really want. i don't give a f*ck about people who only see the money. look at their websites and you know what i mean.
Is essence - the average value of a visitor to a business from Google is less than that from MSN or Yahoo, which were (in proportion) buying much generating much more revenue.
That caused me to look closely at AdWords, and eventually slash spends there!
