Forum Moderators: martinibuster
New guy with a new guy question…
I’ve been lurking here for a few days, reading up on AdSense, trying to decode acronyms and such… The amount of knowledge and attention needed to do this well is clearly way beyond what I had anticipated...
But before I even start thinking about the art of AdSense, I have to decide if it’s worth the effort.
I have a blog. It’s about travel and travel writing (humor-bent).
I’ve had some good exposure in recent months and my numbers are rising rather rapidly (for a personal blog); at the moment I’m getting about 100 unique visitors a day and a little over 1,000 page views per day, when I post once a week. More on those rare occasions when I post more often. Obviously, these are mostly repeat visitors.
So, is it worth it for me to go through the whole process of setting up AdSense? It’s not just setting it up and figuring out ‘heat map’ stuff and CTR variables (whatever that is); I’m currently being hosted (for free) by a travel web site who have ads of their own on the blog. I’d have to essentially find new space, transfer all the content over - not to mention risk alienating the nice people at this travel web site who have been quite good to me over the years – and THEN get myself going on AdSense.
Judging from what I’ve read (assuming I understood it), even if my numbers continue to increase the way they are, it seems I’m still not looking at much of a payday here. Or am I?
I have a full time, wonderful, but atrocious paying job (travel writer), so we’re strictly talking booze money here. But even a little booze money would help me out a lot.
What do you think?
I discovered that my photo gallery site was getting huge amounts of traffic because of the links I'd put up to useful information as and when I stumbled upon them.
My visitors loved the links so much that word spread around - I guess the majority of new camera owners really have no idea what to do next after purchasing their new gizmo.
What I did next, after discovering webmasterworld and other similar forums, was to buy my own domain (less than $10) and shared hosting (less than $10 a month), create a new wordpress blog (free software) and started putting up my "more valuable" posts there.
I'd still update the old site now and then, but I put up a notice above the list of links to the effect that new information would be posted up at my new blog which has better search capabilities and categorization, blah blah blah, and mention the URL.
Guess what, it worked! The search engines crawled and indexed my new blog quickly, since it has a link from my old PR4 links site, and I didn't alienate my visitors, who now had one more (quality) choice available - they can continue to look around my old site, or decide that they'll now prefer to spend more time at my new blog.
You can also come up with a strategy, eg on your old site, you post snippets, short "hey, guess what I just found at this island ... " with a paragraph mentioning that you've got a more complete writeup and photos and jokes at your new blog.
In essence, you're using your old site as an easy, drop-off spot for quick and "lite" infobites, and your new blog for the more "meaty" stuff.
My old site continues to receive large number of visitors, because the search engines decided they preferred certain general keywords and phrases there, eg Canon vs Nikon, and they also like my new blog for the way it categorizes camera lenses more tightly.
You really get the best of both worlds with this approach, no need to create one and destroy the other.
PM me if you'd like more details and site examples.
Hope this helps.
