I was just doing some arithmetic in my head while trying to go to sleep last night and made a cool little realization about my Adsense income. Backstory: I was running my first website for 9 months without earning my first check. In October, I finally earned enough for a check and more. My october goal had been $2.00 per day consistantly. Then in december, my goal became $5.00 a day consistantly. I'm above that now. This is Adsense only, mind you... not counting affiliate sales, YPN, Chitika My little victory realization is that if you average out my total adsense income since that first check, and then annualize the income, in amounts to roughly a three percent raise on my salary as a Software Quality Assurance engineer. I know that it is a minor victory, especially since I still need the day-gig, but let me tell you, that first 9 months when I'd go days without a cent... All I had to go on was faith, and the fact that my faith in myself (and the DP community) paid off means more to me than y'all know. Let's all have a rewarding new year! Thanks to everybody,
Way to go, if you are motivated you can achieve your goals. Seems everyone I talk to wants to make the "easy" money on adsense they've heard about, but they aren't willing to do the work. Good for you!
Well done. Did you get a letter of commendation from yourself when you realised you got a raise? I'm working hard so that "Google" will give me a raise as well. The letter should come in the post when I do get the raise. And, hopefully the letter has "$100" on it.
Congrats on your goals. I also have acheived much more than I had planned for. I'm earning ~$5/day right now on AdSense on top of my affiliate links which I earn about $3/day with. I've earned more through AdSense in the past 3 months than I have in the whole prior year to that. What it comes down to is how much traffic you have. Keywords are important, but if you have the traffic, you can monetize it well enough and market it well enough to make any kind of traffic profitable. We run nearly 15,000 impressions per day and only a fraction click on ads or buy things through affiliate links. Once we setup our redesign with even more affiliate links, I expect to be making quite a bit more on top of the adsense ads. AdSense, in the near future, may even make its way off my site depending on how well affiliate links generate sales for me. I have past experience working for an affiliate sales company like LinkShare or CJ (I'm not disclosing which company I worked for), and there is a lot of money in the business just WAITING to be grabbed by webmasters like us. Companies offer thousands and thousands of referral fees, we just need to monetize, sell, market, and benefit from it.
fsmedia: You know, that's an interesting perspective. I have (relatively) high and low traffic sites, and the low ones get awesome CTR on .80-1.00 keywords. The high traffic site I spent most (er, ALL) of last year toiling over I have not managed to adequately monetize. I've tried so many different things on that one site, that my readers must think I'm a complete schizophrenic! With the low traffic site with high CTR, I wouldn't want to boost my uniques unless I could guarantee that the additional visitors were HYPER targeted, because if the CTR goes down, I'm afraid smart pricing will wash out what I've built up currently. I already have one site where that happened. I was getting 1.00-1.20 per click, but my impressions shot up, my CTR accordingly went down, and now I'm getting, like .20 per click on that site.
18 months is the average magic number it seems. Here's the AdSense calendar: Month 1: $0.05/day, The only income you make is from your own clicks. Month 2: $0.07/day, You think your ads aren't seen so you make them bright green. Month 3: $0.31/day, You start to clog forums with bad replies in hopes that people come to your site. Month 4: $0.60/day, You tell all your friends and family, but no one comes Month 5: $0.99/day, Most people quit -- you pay for some AdSense ebook with bad advice Month 6: $2.30/day, You find DP forums, you ask the same questions everyone else does, and your threads get ignored Month 7: $3.40/day, You blend your ads, work on better ad placement, and start making really good content based on DP advice Month 9: $4.99/day, You hear about more people lying that they're getting $1000 per day, you're thinking about quitting Month 12: $9.00/day, You continue to update your site with content but things are getting slower. Conversely, CPC and eCPM is going up. Month 14: $14.00/day, You've been updating even less but you are working on better content. Month 16: $18.00/day, You're almost not focusing on content at all on a daily basis, but the weekly updates you do are the most successful Month 18: $20.00/day, You're there! Month 19: $0.05/day, Your subject is outdated, no one is interested anymore.
It's scary how close to accurate that is (so far)... That's why I've got so many sites going, Month 19 insurance
Nice, dadasays. I'm in the month 6 range, and it's good to know all my efforts will be lost a year from now
Hmmm. I'm sensing some mocking going on. I realise my posting won't help my AdSense. But it while away the time while I work on my new site.
gen: No mocking going on, just a little guide for everyone to go by. Print it up and cross it off so you know exactly what to do month by month techlh: Either worthless, or covered by every scraper and spam site, heh. Of course I'm joking, slightly, but it is closer to the truth than you'd believe!
Congrats on the victory Mister Tut. According to dadasays' list I'm somewhere between month 7 and 9, even though I started with Adsense at the very tail end of October. Then again I put it on some sites that have been on line for several years now. Wish I had done it sooner.
The only thing that should be more entertaining than dadasays comment would be a look at his site. Lol, no hard feelings dada