My blog is simply personal & purely for fun so monetization, if it happened, was just a bonus. So earning virtually nothing from it for over a year didn't bother me too much. But December '05 it picked up and January is quadruple that so far, but I have yet the time to see how or why? So yeah, it's gone from small change to a fistful of bills but not enough to retire on.. yet A quality, well targeted & promoted blog would probably see a rise on that though
Yes, content is important. Bear in mind that each blog posting can be picked up by search engine individually. So if you write about Jessica Simpson today then write about bluetooth on the next posting, people search for each content will be directed accordingly, provided the blog has a good PR. Anyway, do avoid too personalised blogs like what you did today or yesterday, or what you ate. Honestly, not many people will be searching for that. Perhaps the best way is to blog about technology stuff?
I have a blog that earns an average of $3-5 a day. Now I have two. Still trying to get traffic to the 2nd blog.
you need content + traffic as other said . Also you need the ads properly placed . Wrong placement of ads in blogs can make your profits decrease by 50 %
And also consider joining other affiliate programs together with Adsense like Amazon Associates, Chitika, etc.
This week is my first week that my blogs paid more than minimum wage for the time invested. Considering I've only run my oldest blog for 2 months is a testimony to the fact that AdSense does work. I don't do any real significant marketing above and beyond my usual forum posting and e-mailing.
I have one blog purely designed for Adsense, but with original content that I add about once a week. Sometimes once every two weeks. Started it about 3 months ago. It's currently doing about $5/day on about 50 uniques a day. Then Google added some of the blog's images to its image directory in December, now I'm getting about 100 uniques/day and doing around $10/day. Imagine how much I could make if I paid more attention to it. But I don't. Because I don't really care about the topic, and it's a major chore. It's purely for Adsense money. I should probably hire someone to keep adding content...
That seems like a great clickthrough rate you have there Jack for the amount of hits. I'll be starting my own Cleveland Browns blog soon, and maybe my own webmaster-related blog. Anyway, blog or no blog, allowing your articles to be known by others is the key. Traffic delivered to specific blogs usually mean the user has a genuine interest in your topic, and if your Google Ads are related, it may create a lead.
CTR isn't that great. I get an average of 10/15 hits/day (many coming from a leaderboard at the top), but that still equates to a big chunk of change. One hit is anywhere from $.50 to $1.50, but never lower than $.50, and oftentimes over $1.00 per average.
My Wife’s Blog receives over 2000 hits a day. This is because she cares about the content, interacts with the readers and doesn't care about the money or clicks.
You can care about the content and still make your site make money for you. It's not a case of either/or.