Forum Moderators: phranque
(I need some encouragement, so now’s not the time to brag how you made $100K the first year from your website!)
How long did it take you to get a decent amount of traffic through Google?
How many hours did you put in to it?
And was web designing/computer software your background in school or work?
I usually don’t post messages like this, but I'm becoming very impatient and upset with the earnings in general especially last months earning. I need some success stories that took hard work and some time... Got any good examples?
With my first commercial website project it took me around a year to get a decent amount of traffic/day from mainly google (around 5000 uniques a day) After I published the website - I didn't do anything with it, only few links to get it indexed by spiders and then I just left it with adsense on, and forgot about it - until the day arrived with a let's call it a nice first payday check from adsense. Then I looked back and into the statistics and noticed I had gone from 100 visitors to 5000 visitors a day. - This kept rolling for about 1½ year. It was fun getting paid for doing nothing. Then I killed the website, and began creating new and more interesting articles - expanding and redesigning and so on.... and then I went non-commercial. Didn't like the idea of google profiting on my content since they never did anything cool for me anyways.
"How many hours did you put in to it?"
Around 400 hours of hardcore back to the basics content creation. This does not include previous research or reading or information gathering.. which would be an estimate of several years.
"Was web designing/computer software your background in school or work?"
No, just - learned by doing - how to work with tables and templates in dreamweaver. Never gone for any hype about the bliss of php or asp or anything like that.
Sincerely, and have fun,
How long?...8 or 9 months.
How many hours?... I dunno, maybe 200 hrs..a lot.
Background?... Just kept picking away at it, probably more lucky than good.
Do everything you can as best as you can. Ifs it not a winner cut your losses
and move on to something else. Hope this helps!...KF
I'm not really a "success story" compared to the many names on here, but hopefully I can offer at least some encouragement because I too have been very, very frustrated at this whole AdSense game at times. I don't make much money through AdSense but I will. I'm still in the building phase and only recently starting to take it seriously.
My first site to generate income took several months to get any traffic, because I honestly didn't know how to market it without any money, or really, any experience. I've since learned some ways that I can generate traffic in my target market.
While this site took several months of figuring out how to get the traffic, it eventually did and now some months gets over 30k unique visitors. It will make $175-225 on a good month (roughly half of that for most of the year though because it's seasonal) using AdSense on just a few select pages. I have a redesign planned which will make much better use of ad placement on all pages; advertising on it was an afterthought which came months after it should have (it wasn't a goal to make money, just provide a resource, but now that we see the potential ... ;)
The good news is experience in the above market gave me ideas to build on, and I recently launched a site which targets those same users in a very unique way. The site has been up since just the start of August and is currently making a couple of dollars a day, and in the first page or two of Google results for some relevant terms. It's not a lot, but for just over a month I'm pleased with the results. I don't even have a page rank yet but yesterday I made a whopping $2.36 with 539 banner impressions and 9 clicks (haha).
Also for what it's worth, I have really focused on creating a good product using SEO as best I know how, and used tactics like a sitemap and some "pound-the-pavement" manual marketing to get people talking about it in blogs, newsletters, forums, etc.
My approach has been targeting this same market for all of my projects. It's not a huge money market, but I enjoy it, I understand it, and if I continue to produce for them I'll eventually make a good stream of income.
SOME of the guys here have been doing this for many years and that fact has played a major part in their large AdSense incomes. To be honest, I haven't even visited my original site or done but a few minutes of work on it in maybe a year--I'm making roughly $1000-1500 a year doing nothing at all. How's that for encouragement. AdSense revenue in many cases is a front-loaded industry. Do the work up front and work your butt off for the $0/hr, but then a year later you'll be glad you did. =)
Encouraging thought of the day: My hosting account is on auto-pay, my domain names are on auto-renew, and my website traffic increases every month and has consistently for almost 2 years with zero advertising. I make a heck of a lot more than I pay out, so as I see it, it's basically free money. It doesn't get better than that. ;)
Hope that offers at least something for you.
All the best!
