Hi I'm Miles. I've been with Adsense for some years. I was with them before but I got banned. A few years later I got my account reinstated and this time I promised myself to abide by Adsense rules. So a fresh new start eh? Well it was very tough when I rejoined Adsense in the month of August 2006. As soon as I got accepted again I put adsense straight onto my site. NO optimisation at all on my side and with the 500 uniques I was getting a day I turned in a measely $19 for that month New month dawning In Setember or so, I started becoming more active on webmaster forums, DigitalPoint in particular. I then found a fantastic trick that was great at the time. Images next to ads. This trick helped me greatly and I was amused at how my luck was changing. I thought to myself. 'Dam I am really going to make money out of this damned thing'. October ended, and combined with last months earnings I had $121. I was very pleased with myself. October was a dismal month for me because my damned host went on holiday and neglected many of my emails saying my site was down. For almost the whole of October my site was down but someone I managed to make the payout, JUST, with $100 and a few cents. In November a member of this forum, Wissam, introduced me to Swicki. At first I was very confused as to how it could benefit me and my site but then I started to realised. Swicki is your own personal search engine which you can have a cloud and portal display search results relating to your site. I put the search on my site and the Swicki became more popular with 500 searches a day, the Swicki script estimated my Swicki was worth $200. In that month I made a fantastic $170 In December I optimised my site's ass off. I made a VERY appealing image (hehe I really got it of Wissam's site) related to my sites niche and stuck it by the ads. (Speaking of ads, I recommend using 250x300 because it is a very nice shape and many people click it as it can be easilyt made to look like content. I really detest 468x60 web banner ads, people are ad blind to them.) Anyway I made quite alot of money with my site combined with my swicki. My Swicki was getting 4000 searches a day and was worth $100k, surprisingly it earned me more money that my site. But in a way it balances its self out because my Swicki is available on my site. At the end of the month I was looking for to the cheque for $300 that would be sent out/ In January Adsense made a very controversial change to the system. They stopped permitting publishers from display images next to the ads. They said it unnecessarily brought attention to the ad. I thought that this was the end of my adsense career because a majority of my clicks relied of drawing users attention. I began to stress myself thinking of ways to generate more traffic therefore getting more clicks. SEO, the answer to my dreams. I started optimizing my site heavily for Search Engines. I got a tool called IBP 8(Google it, bloody awesome). It generated me fantastic keywords relating to my site and in a way I learnt off the program. It also helped me submit my site to many directories. I thought the month would end on a high but halfway through my host had errors with my site and my site went down. I just made the adsense payout with $100 and a few cents. February started to look up for me. With all my Ad optimization, SEO and traffic I was easily on $10 day. Nothing dramatic happened in this month but I kept on promoting my site in whatever ways I could. I end this month with a new adsense record of $396. So far this month has outplayed my predictions and has already got me past the $450 mark. I hope to get $480+ by the end of this month. Right now my Swicki is worth $500k o-o and my site gets 3k uniques daily. I know I am not a big player in the Adsense world nor did I come here to brag my story but I thought it would help some new and old comers to Adsense and give them an idea of which directions to take.I am a UK Publisher btw. Feedback is appreciated and I will try to respond to all questions or queries in this topic, apart from url asking ones XD. Cheers, Miles
I like this personal storries. They are so better than stupid adsense books for MFA sites. Good job man,, I learn so much from DP, from 0 - 9$ a day from 8-Fev. until today
Congratulations MilesB. Would you mind telling the PR of your site and the total number of articles you have? I hope you reach the $1000/month milestone next month
So the lesson of the day, kids, is TRAFFIC = MORE MONEY. Got that? Now go and do your SEO instead of spending every hour checking your stats and wondering how if you've been click bombed, why you didn't get paid for those last 5 clicks, why your clicks are only worth .01 cent, or some other inane, pointless Adsense-theme paranoia. TRAFFIC = MORE MONEY
Great inspiring story MilesB! Thanks for sharing and for the info about Swicki. I plan on checking it out.
Yes everyone should check out Swicki. gooner4ever, haven't used IPB 9 but I suspect it should be even better than 8
Maybe you should think about changing your host , if it causes trouble with low traffic it will cause more problems in the future.
I think its always a fgood idea to have good host with an excellent support. Extremley cheap hosts are not cheap for a reason. They can let you down in a big way as soon as there is a problem.