If anyone is interested, here is a chart of my cumulative Google AdSense earnings spanned over 5 years.
Austiner316: I was penalized by Google, you can say, for breaking their terms of use. I'd rather not say exactly what I was doing, I don't want other webmasters get the wrong idea, but it was a very simple tweak to ad positioning. My CTR increased to 15%. And with 1,000 daily views (It was just one page making most of the money) I was making about $20-$40 a day. It was the most effective trick to increase CTR I had ever experimented with, but I am no longer interested in doing it, because it was misleading and obviously you can get in trouble for it. I was able to get away with doing that for several months, and that's where most of the income came from. But then Google caught me. But let's make this clear—I did not know that it was against the Adsense Terms of Use at the time. I was relatively new to AdSense, and I thought it was an OK thing to do. sarpras2005: No, my websites are falloutsoftware.com, authenticsociety.com, chatcake.com (N/A, sold for $1,300), and websitehomework.com (recent one)
I had a period where my traffic went down 10% but earnings were averaging about 15% higher per month because of higher price per click Well done on earning so much. I think i've totalled about $2k in the last 2 years
One awesome thing I noticed is that it seems that with time, Google has optimized the ads on my pages by simply tracking what people click on the most, therefore increasing CTR with age of the site...
Just two. I'm not counting the one that I just created. I think 3 sites with decent value can pay off well. Heck, even 1 site if it's properly organized and targeted can be a huge success... look at StevePavlina.com, the guy is making at least 100,000 a year with his blog.
It's surprising to see that your revenue increased seeing that most users complained that earnings were going down as time passed. Congrats!
TheVccMatey... no actually my earnings did decrease recently but it wasn't because the economy was down, or "the earnings simply decreased for everyone" (I think that's just silly), but... it was because I haven't paid attention to my sites once I set them up, mostly because I was employed full time for 2 years. Note, that this is the chart for CUMULATIVE profit, that means it keeps adding up--it will always seem that it just keeps growing, but it doesn't it adds up. Like everyone elses... Those people's that you mention earnings were decreasing, because they were not taking care of their websites. Human focus is limited... and those people spend time focusing on PROFITS, instead of dividing their energy on producing work and generating great content. That's one of the important psychological roadblocks we must overcome first. We must understand what builds profit first (most people don't) and do only that, but it's hard to know exactly what it is: 1. Is it writing more content? 2. Is it writing content that is more original? 3. Do I need to have any teacher-like talents to write great content? (yes) 4. Do I need people to want to link to my content? (yes) 5. Should I track monthly statistics of my revenue and not just hope they will increase? (yes) 6. Should I do that so that I can pay attention to what I did that month and try to identify things that improve my pay? (yes) 7. And so forth.. These are the questions we should be asking, and not "why am I making this little money?". Well the answer to that is simply. Here is why... it's because you don't care about your website, it's a hobby, and a hopeful attempt at becoming "rich" (whatever that means, most people don't know how to manage money once they get a lot of it and get in trouble)... this is why its not going to work. Becoming successful at anything requires a psychological change and you must be willing to accept it. You must lose all your preconditioned logic about what you are doing and how it works in order to succeed. Good luck!
I absolutely agree with you! When my earnings started decreasing last year, I just added a ton of content and that increased my traffic around 4 times which increased my earnings exponentially. May 2009 - $20/day June - $15/day July - $35/day August - $20/day September - $10/day October - $50/day November - $xxx/day My earnings shot down during August and September because I had some busy project work to do. No matter how many times this question is asked, the answer still remains the same - How do I increase my earnings? Content!!