The Big Adsventure

Now that the summer holidays are over traffic is picking up again. During the holidays a lot of people go on vacation and spend more time outside, working on their garden or house. I can really see this in my sites page views and AdSense™ income. Still my income is growing and this month has been good for almost $25.
So, why is the income growing while there is a drop in page views? One thing I’ve been trying out is different ad colors, so the ads blend in better with the site. I’ve also been busy submitting my sites to web directories, which I think has resulted in more targeted visitors to my sites. A highly targeted visitor is one that is interested in your sites subject and is more likely to click on an ad for a related subject. I also noticed more relevant ads showing on my sites (instead of those public service ads that don’t earn you anything when clicked) This is probably because more of my pages have been indexed by Google…

You’ve probably seen sites that ad pictures next to their AdSense ads (like on Letsworkonline.com) Those ads seem to get more clicks then just the plain text ads. Google has now noticed this as well and is using the same strategy on the AdSense ads. Have a look at these two I noticed at Digital Point:
the usual ads:

and the new one with picture added by google:

If you check out AdSense Help Centre on a regular basis you probably know already, if not you should check it out, the Optimization Tips page has been greatly improved, giving you tips on how to select the best color palette, ad placement and ad formats to use for optimal AdSense performance and maximum profit on your website.

Not every AdSense ad makes the same amount of money, it seems that the first ads displayed on your site make the most money per click, with my current sitedesigns these are the first ads displayed on the page. So what if the bottom ads on your site get more clicks? You want the highest paying ads to be in the location of your site where the most clicks occur. By using CSS to design your site you can do this, with CSS you can put the bottom ads in the top of your website source which will cause Google to display the high paying ads in the bottom of your website. I’ve started redesigning my sites with CSS, it is a lot of work and people wont see the difference when visiting my site, I however hope to see some difference in my AdSense income after the redesign.

The lack of traffic lately is not only because I have not done much promoting these last couple of months. Talking to fellow webmasters it seems that their traffic has gone down as well. Quite logical if you think about it: the weather has been too good to sit at home browsing the web. Schools are done for this year and people are going away to enjoy their much earned vacation. Time for me to sit in the sun with a notepad and a couple of beers, thinking up new ways to get those clicks in!

It’s been a while since I’ve added an entry to this blog, the reason for this is that I’ve been without an internet connection for a while. Anyways I’m back online again and want to keep you updated om my AdSense adventure.
The past few months my AdSense revenue has been rather poor, the lack of promoting my sites has become noticable in my AdSense revenue faster then expected. It’s time to add some new content to all of my sites, there must be some content for most of them in the 50,000 articles I’ve purchased…
Being without an internet connection for some months has also filled my mailboxes up, appart from the usual spam I also found a lot more new articles in my maibox. Adding an article submission form to one of my article sites seems to have paid off, now all I have to do is read thru them (all 1,800 of them!) to see which ones I can use…

I’ve already told you a few things about getting content from article websites, getting content this way is as easy as copy/paste. Now if you want to put a lot of content on your website this way it can take quite some time. So after some searching on the ‘net I’ve managed to close some great deals on complete article databases. With now over 50,000 articles in over 100 categories in my possession I have more content than I can handle! The search is on for some good domain names to fill with all this content.

I told you about web hosting a while ago, one thing I didn’t talk about back then is speed. I just witnessed first hand how important the speed of your website is. A few of weeks ago I acquired a domain name and an existing website. Since the website was looking quite nice and working perfectly I didn’t spend any time on improving it. The site came with hosting payed for another couple of months so I was in no hurry to move it to my regular webhosting service at Moduhost.
While checking on the traffic logs a few days ago I decided to move the site over because it is a little bit easier to check the logs of the sites hosted on my reseller account: logging on as the reseller enables me to check all the site stats without the need to log on to each websites account.
I had noticed that the other host was quite a bit slower than I was used to with all my other sites, but I didn’t think much of it. If I had known what I know now I had moved the site over the day that I acquired it. After the move I’ve seen quite an increase in my traffic statistics, visitors stay longer and view more pages. I guess they used to just leave the site because it was too slow. The increase I see in my traffic can also be seen in the adsense income for the site! So if your looking into getting your website hosted somewhere, be sure to check the speed of the host: ask for some sites that are hosted on the same server and see if they load in a reasonable time!

p.s. a little update on the submitted article (the search engine count on it)
about 2 weeks have passed since submitting the article, the search for a phrase from my article gets the following number of hits:
Google: 23
MSN: 23
Yahoo: 1
Google-bot has now found the same number of copies of my article as the MSN-spider, I have no idea whats taking Yahoo so long…
Theres still quite some article sites on Publish-Your-Article.com that I didn’t submit my article to, I might visit some of these sites soon to get my article published to some more sites.

I told you earlier that I made $25 with AdSense last year. After adding AdSense ads to one of my sites that was getting some traffic already and starting two new ones, my AdSense income for the first month of this year was $15.48 which comes down to $0.50 a day with only just over 800 pageviews a day. The income from these sites would add up to about $180 a year which is not much, but would very comfortably cover the yearly domain registration and hosting costs.
In February I started some more sites and changed the placement of ads a little on the existing sites, while the number of pageviews dropped down to about 500 a day the AdSense income went up to an average of $0.82 a day.
I have put a lot of time into the creation of websites lately and while the cash is not exactly comming in big time, things are certainly moving in the right direction!