Welcome Back, AdSense
by Antone Roundy | 3 Comments | Monetization
I haven't been running AdSense ads on my blogs for quite a while now, but today, I decided to bring them back into the mix. Two blog posts contributed to the decision.
First, I was checking out the websites of a few people who've posted comments here at White Hat Crew, and came across an article by Jeremy Young:
All I did was remove the Adsense ad from the sidebar and placed it just under the headline...
After making these few small changes my results improved immediately. I think it was the very same day that I re-arranged the ad postioning that I saw the income improve.
Then, there was an article by Daniel Scocco over at Daily Blog Tips:
AdSense certainly is not suitable for all types of sites, and there are other monetization strategies that can be more profitable in some situations (e.g., selling your own products). That being said, and as far as monetizing your site with ads goes, I think AdSense is the best advertising network on the Internet.
Except for one brief stint of a few months when one of my sites was ranking high for a bunch of different keywords (using techniques I won't discuss, because it was the most "gray hat" thing I've ever done, and got part of the site penalized), AdSense has never been a big money maker for me. And I don't expect it to make a fortune now either.
But the payouts used to come in handy from time to time when I needed a little more cash. So I figure it's worth checking out again.
What do you think -- is AdSense a big enough money maker to be worth using, or does it just send traffic away from your site for pennies a click?
March 29th, 2011 at 11:41 am
The only time I made money with Adsense was when I ran ads for a short time on a site selling a high priced niche item. Most of the ads were for competitors, so we had a conflict of interest. Do we want to sell products worth between $1000 and $4000, or do we want to send those potential customers to a competitor, and get 50 cents or $1.00 (or whatever) for the referral. It wasn't a hard decision.
March 29th, 2011 at 2:29 pm
Hi Antone, thanks for the mention, Since writing that post a lot of those smaller sites have gone by the wayside, But I still havn't given up on Adsense... Yet.
I am in the process of creating another site for Adsense and other Affiliate revenue, But an authority site, not just a couple of pagers. But the interesting thing I am noticing is with this site is the traffic numbers are virtually nil. The site is now a couple of months old with at least 50 articles, all original all well themed and all written by myself, so I can vouch for their quality, and the articles are actually getting indexed within minutes, so the G is aware of the site and indexing the pages very quickly.
I am not sure if it has something to do with Googles latest clean up or maybe the niche is just too big and competitive.
I am still yet to put the adsense on it as I have a goal of at least ten visitors a day from the SE before I put the ads on, I wonder if I put the ads on now, would it encourage G to send some traffic my way.
Any thoughts...
maybe I could post the link on NextGurus for a site review;-)
April 6th, 2011 at 3:58 am
I have been running adsense for a number of years now and although it does make around £150.00 per month for me I have found over the last year it has become quite unpredicatble as traffic on the main site is rising steadily, around 500 uniques per day, all from search engines. This site was first made live back in Oct 99 and has about 2500 pages now and is recognised as an authroity by the big G. But as long as it keep at around this level of earning I am happy because it pays for all the hosting and business bills, maybe once I have found tyhe time to get my head around the content factory we will see a rise in earnings.