I've realized that my blog which talks about everything from politics to media to people, hasn't made squat with Adsense. The advertisements are usually totally mistargeted, with some of them advertising for something that I'm torching in my blog just because I have keywords in the copy. Anyways, I'm trying to figure out if I need to focus more on 1 or 2 areas or if I just need to keep doing what I'm doing and have patience. Can a Mixed Bag blog really make money and what is the best way to monetize it?
I think its still doable to cover a few things but say if they all can fall under one category and not be so thinly spread and random, say technology and gadgets with the various subcats you could have under those. Or fashion, again with the various subcats, or food and talk about dishes and fabulous foods from around the world. Your targetting something more specific but still with the freedom to explore related topics. By trying to talk about everything your almost certainly tagetting nothing.
I can speak from experience on this, I used to write a "humor/commentary" blog that was all over the place. When I started looking into monetizing it I quickly came across the realization that I didn't really have a target audience. I to wrote about everything from politics, news, entertainment, etc. My regular readers enjoyed my content, but Adsense was (and still is) earning a paltry $15-$20/mo. Text-Link-Ads also chips in with about $25-45/mo. All my other methods of monetization basically failed. My suggestion for being able to make money with a blog that's not targeted for a specific niche or audience is to try and get as large a readership as possible through quality content before you think about making money. That way you can just sell direct advertising links because webmasters want links on popular blogs with large readerships. Otherwise, I'm thinking you'd have to start being much more targeted with your posts. Either that or split your blog into 3+ blogs that each cover politics, news, and people respectively, each with their own targeted domain.
Personally, I have a mix garbage blog which I love to talk crap in it. My total income alone from the blog around $500 monthly. Please dont stick to adsense as blog is not the best to use with adsense. Use many other method other than adsense. Blogs visitors loves to see the leaderboard banner, sidebar banner which nice graphics and flash movie
My first blog was a blog which I spoke about whatever the hell went through my head at that time. I make about $300 a month but that is from blog reviews.