Forum Moderators: martinibuster
My site averaged 356 visits per day last month, and 473 this month. Growth is steady, but it's still a pretty obscure site.
Sadly, Adsense won't make me rich. My first month (which ends tomorrow) has netted me nealry $15. I'm hoping to hit that magic $15 mark by the end of the month, so I can buy a book about Crete. :)
<snip>
Here's a peek at my growth. I may have an obscure site, but I love looking at the growth patterns. I just need to figure out how to make it pay! (note to admin. Picture does not have site url or other identifying info).
My problem is that a humor site like mine has topics of every description, and not much by way of high-dollar keywords. The ads I get rarely have relevance for my viewers, so I am doing well when I get 7 clicks in a day.
My site costs me less than $4 per month to run, so I'm ahead of the game on covering my expenses.
I'm shooting for a short-term goal of $100 per month, which is the cost of a wet-slip at the marina. By the time I get to the top of the waiting list for wet-slips, my website will hopefully pick up the tab, and I'll be sailing on Google's nickel.
I won't be sailing to Crete in my humble little boat, but I'll be in the water!
I'm not posting this to get advice, but if you do have tips on getting people to click those ads, who am I to stop you from posting?
[edited by: Jenstar at 2:57 am (utc) on Jan. 31, 2005]
[edit reason] Sorry, no links to non-authority sites [/edit]
The way to generate income is to provide content that people want to read. If you build it, they will come.
BTW: the statistics are my site's traffic statistics, nothing to do with Adsense.
Oh puh-leeze. Don't be so uptight. If no one talked about their Adsense take/stats on this board, there would be no posting in this forum at all.
And jefuchs, cheer up. When I started Adsense about 4/5 months ago I never thought I'd care about Adsense, seeing as how it was barely making me a buck or two a day. Now I'm up to double digits a day. It CAN happen with time and more traffic. Like everything else, it just takes time.
$15 is quite measley really, perhaps your ad placement needs to be looked at? You could quite easily be making that much per day with better placed ads, and the higher paying ads for your 'genre'.
Good luck!
W.
'A Mortgage broker walks into a bar...'
*True eCPM is based number of page views, not ad impressions. 'Net' means payable to you.
I agree about the measly take, but it's hard to get those ads to change. If you saw my earlier post, I'm having a problem getting rid of ads for whale watching. I had one post that mentioned a whale, and I've been plagued by whale ads ever since... even after deleting the post. I add three to five new posts a day, and the whale stuff should have been forgotten by Google long since.
I'm not sure how the whale label stuck so well, but I can't shake it, and nobody's clicking it.
As I said, I don't make a living at this, and at least I'm covering expenses, but it'd be great to reach my potential, since the site is gaining popularity.
Once Google pulls the plug on you, that's all she wrote.
Of course if you're making $15, I guess it doesn't matter much.
If you want to make more, you're going to have to do some work. If it's just a hobby, be happy with whatever you get. There are some sites and subjects which will simply never do well because they aren't a good fit to the adsense model and will never attract high paying ads or generate high CTR or CPM.
'A Mortgage broker walks into a bar...'
"A mortgage broker walks into a bar, checks his Rolex, then sits down next to an insurance salesman offering hair-loss medication at a discount, with special deals for people taking cruises and booking flights...."
(Sorry, couldn't resist.)
[edited by: darkmage at 4:43 am (utc) on Jan. 31, 2005]
Relax. Take a chill pill. If engaging in conversation about Adsense gets you all afluttered and hiding under your bed for fear The Great God Google will crush you, I suggest avoiding the Adsense forum entirely. For some reason -- and I really don't know why -- people tend to talk about Adsense on the GOOGLE ADSENSE FORUM. Go figure. /shrug
I won't be sailing to Crete in my humble little boat, but I'll be in the water!
Dignity by Deacon Blue ...
There's a man i meet walks up our street
He's a worker for the council
Has been twenty years
And he takes no lip off nobody
And litter off the gutter
Puts it in a bag
And never seems to mutter
And he packs his lunch in a "sunblest" bag
The children call him "bogie"
He never lets on
But i know 'cause he once told me
He let me know a secret about the money in his kitty
He's gonna buy a dinghy
Gonna call her Dignity
"And I'll sail her up the west coast
Through villages and towns
I'll be on my holidays
They'll be doing their rounds
They'll ask me how I got her I'll say "I saved my money"
They'll say isn't she pretty that ship called dignity"
And I'm telling this story
In a faraway scene
Sipping down raki (NOTE: They drink raki in Crete)
And reading Maynard Keynes
And i'm thinking about home and all that means
And a place in the winter for Dignity
And I'll sail her up the west coast
Through villages and towns
I'll be on my holidays
They'll be doing their rounds
They'll ask me how I got her I'll say "I saved my money"
They'll say isn't she pretty that ship called Dignity
And I'm thinking about home
And I'm thinking about faith
And I'm thinking about work
And I'm thinking about how good it would be
To be here some day
On a ship called Dignity
A ship called Dignity
That ship.
So don't give up :)
So adsense click values will be very low (probably lowest you'll find ...)
Sames goes for subjects like weather, weather forecasting. All free, though you see high volumes of searches.
might i suggest you write some humor about higher paying topics like web hosting, automobiles, casinos....
there once was a web host from nantucket,
who's bandwidth was in the bit bucket...
(this one could run and run :o)
I have been more then happy with this... its constantly increasing as the content on my site increases...
A Big shout to all at google!
I mean, you're averaging $0.50 a day on about 500 visitors a day.
If the click-through and payment rate stays the same, and let's say you want to make $50 a day, you'd need to bring in 50,000 visitors a day to reach that. Right?
No amount of re-writing the content is going to change that.
That's very true, and as I said, I don't expect this site to make me rich, but I have two things:
1. A site that pays its own bills
2. A growing built-in audience, who visit daily.
The second one is important. While my humor site may not make a lot of money, it can be a good venue to promote my future websites. I can put my own ad for these sites in front of thousands of eyes per month -- free.
I know a lot of you are used to thinking big, but I am an upstart, and this is a beginning.
My brother had a popular sports website that brought him notoriety, and he was sought out to write the Forward for a book, based on his expertise. Despite this, the site is now defunct. I never saw any revenue-generating elements on his site, which is probably why he had to give it up. If it had at least paid its own expenses, he might still have it.
I'm trying to plan ahead, keep the site paid for, and ust it as a jumping-off spot for future ideas.
If I'm wrong about this, let me know.
If its what you like, its what you like. A site can be its own reward.
It's just that if you're looking to make a living off it, then you'll need to ramp up the traffic seriously, or switch gears and put your energies to a more efficient use of your time. You never know, if you create something "viral" that gets spread around, you could hit some peaks of traffic at the 50k a day level.
Just make sure you can still afford the bandwidth if that happens.
Bill is right, though - you'd make more money selling a funny t-shirt or two... if you sold 3 a month at a $5 profit, you're doubling your income.
The problem you'll always have with adsense is that (no matter how much it may look like it when I check my stats) - it doesn't have a sense of humour. You could stuff all the keywords you want into a page but they still won't end up appropriate.
In terms of adsense you might be much better off finding a more general topic for the whole site and somehow making the bot ignore the content on each individual page.
My problem is that a humor site like mine has topics of every description, and not much by way of high-dollar keywords.
Even if you're determined to use a low-paying topic area for your AdSense efforts, there's a lot you can do to focus your efforts where the relative rewards are the greatest, IMO.
In the last few days, my click-though rate has skyrocketed, thanks to advice I have found here.
Two pieces of advice in particular have helped: First, I'm writing more carefully to include better keywords,
Second, I changed the Adsesnse code to make the ads more conspicuous. Someone mentioned that making ads look like other site links (blending them in with content), is a bad idea, and that they should stand out like a sore thumb. This seems to be true, at least for my site.
At my new click-through rate, I'll make fivefold of January's income.
With my current growth of traffic, it could well be tenfold.
