I’ve been running this site since the end of October or so, and so far I’ve managed to get my Alexa under 100k, get some nice PR pages, a ton of backlinks and a very nice stream of daily organic traffic. Outside of 3 PhpBay commissions, I haven’t really made any money at all off the site. In fact, this is probably one of my lowest earning sites that I own.
I’m not really looking to make a fortune off this site. My initial goal was to develop an authority site, and so far I’m well on my way. Last week, just for kicks, I decided to add adsense on my post pages. I added a large square block at the beginning and end of the post. I’ve found that while this format does not look the best layout-wise, it is really effective and I have quite a few other sites using the same adsense format that make a LOT of money.
Anyway, after a week of testing and a huge amout of page impressions, I can now report that AdSense is completely ineffective on this site. I would have to go back and check, but I believe I have not received even a single actual click. I think I’ve made a total of less than 10 cents for the week, and that was all from CPM AdSense.
I didn’t have high expectations going into it, but I have to say I’m pretty dissapointed. The good thing is, now I can take the AdSense back off the site and it will look much nicer. Then I’ll never wonder what I’d been missing.
The bottom line – there are a lot better ways to monitize this kind of blog. If you’re running an internet marketing related blog, don’t expect AdSense to put your kids through college.
Popularity: 22% [?]
Tags: adsense
Sorry to hear the monetization hasn’t worked out too well yet, Sam, but I’m sure you’ll turn it around. Have you considered adding the “tip jar” approach?
When my sites get going and making me some $$, I’d be glad to contribute.
Glad AdSense is still doing well on your other sites though. Wish I could say the same for my sites using AdSense…I was once consistently earning $400 month on one site with Adsense alone, and now that revenue steadily declines and currently down 2/3 of that (while traffic is as high as ever on it). For me, AdSense is truly dead and I now focus on other monetization methods.
Another thought regarding our phpbay sites…
Today something was released called NicheSocializer which you may have heard about. While I’m not making enough $$ to buy into their package, it got me wondering if there might be a suite of free and/or low-cost plugins we could add to our site to simulate the modules in their package. I’ll see what I can find and let you know if I find anything over and above the standard plugins like “Socialize This”, etc.
Yeah I’m not big on donations. I’m not hurting for money or anything so I want to see other people do well more than I need a few bucks here and there. It was just a test, I wasn’t expecting much.
Niche Socializer doesn’t look that impressive. I never trust these kinds of systems. To me, there are people like me out there who are actually succeeding at making money online by doing a variety of things, then there is the Internet Marketing Guru crowd who sit there and put together these systems, then sell them back to themselves. Unless your ultimate goal is to create one of these “Systems” hype up a launch and throw up a squeeze page, I don’t really thin you’ll get much out of it.