All of a sudden I'm making money.

[edacsac]

... and I don't know what to do. I have a site that could see popularity given the free fall of the USD. I have 4 articles on this site, a few ads and contact information. Very little changes or gets added.

I'm working on an updated version of this site that includes a pretty cool, unique item shopping cart. One of the changes I made to the develop version was to add a smoky/marbled sort of background image to the page, which forced me to recolor my adsense ads. Since the ads are the same in dev and production, the ads in the production might stand out a bit more. But that happened quite awhile ago; making money is recent.

Now that I'm bringing in a few bucks, I'd like to push the new site out (especially since it has things to buy). Is that going to screw me? The ads won't stick out as much, since the background of the dev site matches the adsense colors.

I don't know what to do, nor do I know why all of a sudden I'm making 10x or more than I was before. I don't want to mess it up. I know it's only a few bucks a day, but hey. I barely made a dollar or so a month previously.

[netmeg]

Look at your traffic and your analytics to determine where it's coming from.

[edacsac]

I don't use analytics. I'm afraid to combine too much, or sign up for too much when it comes to google. Sounds like I should though.

[edacsac]

It looks like 40% of my traffic is coming through mainly two sites. One looks semi-directory like, with links to articles. No mention of my site anywhere, and the other one is blocked by mcafee as security rating of yellow. I'm at work, so I can't bypass mcafee to see what it is. It may be a false flag.

the other 60% looks like varied, good, related links, and lot's of them.

I have two more articles in need of final edit, but I could have them up soon. Plus, I can get the new site going, but I'm affraid it may mess things up. Links won't change, but shopping and login functionality will be added.

[Swanny007]

You should have server-side stats, no? I know cPanel has stuff like awstats built-in. If you don't want to use Google for analytics you don't have to ;-)

[edacsac]

That's good. I'm using my built in stats. They don't tell me anything different than when I wasn't making money though. Maybe the ads are getting better and people are more inclined to click them.

[wyweb]

Or maybe you're just getting a spike. I've had them before. On multiple occasions.

From digg. From a UK site that sent me 20,000 unique a day for 3 days (on average).

They didn't spend any money though. They chewed up my bandwidth and took off, which was their right.

You Brits don't like to spend money. You don't even like to click on ads.

[Jon_King]

What are the Adsense Page RPM before the increase and now? Or maybe I should say, there must be an increase in the Page RPM or Page views, which is it?

[JCKline]

If things drop because your ads don't "stick out", then make them clash and see if things pick up.

[edacsac]

What is and where do I find RPM?

[Jon_King]

In Adsense choose:

Quick reports> Overview last month

Then look at the columns Pageviews and Page RPM to find a clue for your good fortune.

[leadegroot]

RPM is in the new format, not the old one.

I say go for it - make sure you keep a full copy of the old site so you can roll it back if its a real failure :)

[edacsac]

That was weird. Now that I've just passed my first payment threshold I'm now back to making nothing. I didn't roll out any major changes. The only thing I did do was take the top performing ad units and apply them to most pages. And what I mean by this is that I have many identical ad units, only difference being the name I gave them and Just a slight difference in colors. So I swapped non-performing ones with performing ones, hoping to compound the good fortune. I also added a new article. Now I'm worse off than I was before I started making some money. There is a good chance that my slight windfall was due to people researching a topic, and now that the world is blowing up, people aren't as interested at the moment.