What were your Adsense expectations?

Nicely done! You'll be shock how many people we get here everyday who keeps skipping the first part of your formula, and then wonder why they can't make any money.

 

I was doing some niche research about 4 months when I stumbled upon the "myspace layouts" keyword, so I decided I'd make a little phpbb forum on the subject. Within 2 weeks I had 5000+ visitors a day, and I was sucking up 35+ gig of bandwidth for the month. Looking for a way to pay for another server I then created an adsense account with low expectations but! I raked in $27 the first day! all the way up to $67 a day when it was hot, however now that everyone and their brother has a myspace layouts site, I'm seeing about $2-3 a day..

I did go ahead and ad adsense to all my sites, doing ok I guess.. considering it's free money..

Got a .97 click from good ol' DP yesterday

 

So I am pretty new to the web publishing business (or the 'game, as the kids and rappers call it). I began in the middle of March of this year, right around my birthday. I always had a vauge idea that I wanted in but I had no idea how to go about it. I had no web skills to speak of, except that I had taught myself Photoshop and spent countless hours in from of the computer. I always said that if I could figure out a way to get paid to sit in front of the computer, I would jump at it. (only now have I learned that you do not get paid by just 'sitting' in front of the PC. If you want to earn any money whatsoever, you have to WORK).

Anyways, so I have always flirted with owning a website. I have had countless Geocities pages when they were all the rage (I know, Geocities blows), posting up some great content like a Betty Page photo gallery and collections of my sub-par graphic design. Ahh, my graphic design master pieces. I would grace those on every single product that Cafepress sold and then create corresponding Geocities webpages with the free website builders and join webrings and then...nothing.

I sold a few pieces on Cafepress, original designs of which I was proud (as opposed to just using the latest SNL catchphrase). Everything sort of fizzled after that. I even bought a domain name once for a t-shirt company that a friend and I started, but that also fell flat after a few months. So I gave it up and concentrated on life (which at that time consisted primarily of chasing women while getting drunk).

Another of my favorite things to do at this time was to create free webpages entitled 'perpetual boredom' in the hopes that it would just magiclly become a hip and relevant underground 'zine. My real problem, in retrospect, was lack of content (aside from the chasing women and getting drunk all the time). I didn't feel like I had enough of a point of view to justify a blog, and I had no widgets to sell/market.

Then, not too long ago, I came up with the idea for my website. Or, to be more exact, I saw a website and decided that I could do better. So, I started a Blogger blog. Thats when I found out abouy adsense. I added content. I advertised on Adwords. And I finally believed in this idea and I saw potential, so I went and bought the domain and started from scratch. I was focused. Thru trial and error, I finally jury rigged up something that I am proud of. And, thanks to Google, I make a small amount of cash doing it. I have actually exceeded my expectations, but they were not unrealisticlly high.

I still have my day job, but my focus is this.

Anyway, thats how I got from there to here, and I am just getting started. There is so much more to learn out there.

 

I expect to earn at least $2500/mo. on adsense alone. Although I am personally no where near this goal, my boss hits the $2500 mark consistently every month with little to no maintenance. Mind you, his site has been online since the mid-90's and I have been up since June 2005. Even though $2500/mo. sounds intimidating, seeing the check every month with somebody else's name on it provides all the motivation I need to keep chuggin'. Keep ya heads up noobs... it ain't all smoke and mirrors.

 

I expect to earn this month less than $200 80% lower than my previous earning.

 

This is a fantastic thread!

I whacked my first website up in 2001 about backpacking around Europe because there weren't really any good ones at the time. Kept working on it periodically, growing other areas before main bits were finished and basically creating what has become a 1000 page monster with plenty of unfinished pages still to this day.

Went travelling for a year, moved to London and was computerless for about 2 years but always thinking there was a lot of untapped potential in my site - as long as I could get a computer and the time to get to work. Eventually bought a laptop and got building again with a focus on affiliate programs that were forking out a total of $10 a month at best.

Then I was contacted by a guy who runs a site about festivals who wanted to use one of my articles. Got chatting to the guy a bit and he put me onto Adsense in November 2004.

I stuck on a couple ads (uploading my site at work because I had no net connection at home) and was amazed to see that one click got me $0.80 on its own! Ended up putting ads on all my pages.

Then, as I am prone to do, I left all my stuff (computer included) in London and went off travelling again, always with my sites in the back of my mind, wishing I'd brought my laptop with me and regretting all the time I've wasted so far!

So now I'm FINALLY getting my first net connection since leaving Canada back in 2001, have bought a computer that isn't a pile of crap, and I'm ready to get serious about making money online.

So at first - no expectations. Now - I'm aiming for $10/day by the end of the summer and $500/month by the end of the year. Not sure if it's doable but I have some good ideas and for once in my life I'm going to put in the effort I should!

If I can hit $1000/month earnings you can bet my job will be packed in, my stuff sold, my backpack packed and I'll be off again! You can bet this time I'll be bringing my laptop along!

 

Hope you do it travoholic. If I didn't have kids AS makes me enough that I'd pack my bag and bugger off. With kids it's a different story.

 

I'm probably a very unique experience but it looks like I'm holding steady at $1600/mo after about 1.5 months after activating adSense.

In Sep 05 I decided to put a small list online to help me track some thing I was after in an online video game. I also gave the links to a few of my buddies who were after similar things. They thought it was cool and asked me to add stuff that they wanted, not just me. I kept adding, adding, and they sent it to a friend, who sent it to a friend, who in turn would ask me to put more and more stuff on, etc, etc, etc…

After spending about 10 hours a week on building the site by January I had a pretty comprehensive list of the vast majority of stuff in this game. I had around 100 unique visitors a day so I decided to link it in the official game forums. I went from 100 to 1000 visits in 3 days, 1000 to 5000 in 3 weeks, and to 20,000 in 3 months.

During this time I had to upgrade hosting plans 3 times, my little $9.99/mo plan was maxed out quick so I upgraded to a $50/mo one and then to a $90/mo one because of the ever increasing bandwidth. I thought it was a phase and that eventually it would wane.

I was wrong.

I updated the site 2-3 times a week, about 8-12 hours a week, and I tried to never ignore any e-mail that was sent my way; I always thanked anyone who pointed out something I missed or corrected me on something I had wrongly put up on the site to keep people coming back.

At the start of April I clocked 30000 unique visitors a day and was using 1.1TB of bandwidth out of my 1.8TB plan. The next level hosting platform was an unlimited 10Mmps connection but at $150/mo; at this point I was no longer able to justify shelling out the hosting for free and I decided to hook up google ads in hopes that I would make around $100/mo to justify the site.

Needless to say it has FAR exceeded my expectations.

Unfortunately I still do not know much about this world and I feel that I could take even greater advantage of this opportunity but not sure how. I'm going to take a look around here and see if anyone else has had experience on this level.

A couple of things about the site I noticed people have asked others about theirs:

--> The site is based on one video game which is a massive multiplayer online game. It requires its players (whom I am part of) a $15/mo subscription fee to play. Content is updated on a pretty regular basis and it is played by a huge number of gamers. I played this game a lot, and still actively play when I can (about 10-15 a week).

--> I am a professional web applications developer and designer. I mostly create business to business online applications and I have a pretty good graphic design background which allowed me to create a very professional looking site with the technical background to run it as efficiently as I know.

--> No one that I know of has created a page like the one I have. Although I know people who have focused on one area (or character class), there is no other site which lists close to as much as I do for every area in the game (this is where actually playing the game has given me the edge I believe)

--> I update constantly, but there aren't that many pages. All pages get date stamps, and there is almost always major weekly news to report on the homepage.

--> I have never advertised on any other sites. All the visits I get either come from word of mouth, of my own posts on the games official message board.


EDIT: Apparently must have missed that part about CRT and CPM in the ToS. Removed ASAP.

I hope this might shed some light on those who are curious and maybe those in the know can help shed some light with me

 

Dude, take down that screenshot. Do not reveal yoiur stats to anyone. If you must, black out the CTR and CPM etc. Do it now.

 

tortugapir8, you're violating the Adsense TOS by showing your stats. You should either get rid of it or black out parts of it. This is a banishable offense.

 

Heh, you beat me to it. By seconds, apparently!

 

Hey, JB I guess that was a photo finish, but I beat you by a hair

 

LOL, but you got me with the second reply

 

I think anveryone expects to make $1000 or more a day... maybe not today... but tomorrow...

 

Dude!

That is an amazing story, and at the end of the day it's guy like you that win at this game on the internet or at any game in life. You focus is your customers, and because that is your focus you have loads of them and that number keeps growing, and as that number grows so does you earnings. Congratulations mate, again that is a great story! Keep up the great work, please don't get dollar signs in the eyes because your success has been built on doing the exact opposite.

 

I want to earn 20$ per day or higher of course. I just think 20$ as my aim. Today i earn only 2.5$ per day i have much work to do

 

I expected to get $1 per day in around end of 2004. I thought that was enough to cover my hosting because I used an internet connection for free.
As I had expected I got my first check in four months, then I realized how difficult to deal check in my country, specially check less than $500. (My bank refused to clear check less than $500).
So I tried to learn from other publisher here in digitalpoint, I found that many publisher had earnt more than $100 a day. Woow that's a huge digit.
Based on what I read I tried to blend my Ads color and to rearrange my pages, did a little seo in the night, in the next month I got about $400. Now, my earning steadily hit $1500/month.
Thanks DP and all members

 

I see many people earning reasonable amounts of $$$ (i.e. at least $xxxx/mth for a decent income) but they also appear to be doing adsense for a longer period of time.

I have adsense on my sites a couple of years ago and forgot about them. It was earning next to nothing in the beginning but as the search engines got to them and traffic started coming in, so did the earnings. Still, the earnings were low, at $xx per month. I didn't really pay attention to it. What caught my attention eventually was that months later, it's still earning $xx per month consistently without much effort. As it happens, the updates to the sites grinds to a halt as I was busy with work but I was thinking to myself if a couple of sites could rake in $xx/mth, what is stopping me from multiplying that to a decent amount?

Incidentally, I came across DP and started learning, tweaking,...basically working my ass off on the sites. Now, I'm doing $xxx/mth with adsense and expect to be doing $xxxx/mth in a year's time. I actually got to $xx a month to $xxx/mth with a month's worth of work. The results are definitely encouraging.

They key here is FOCUS. Focus not just in doing but in learning as well and I can't say it enough times, DP is a great place for learning everything you need to know. I would also say that setting realistic goals work for me. If the goal is set, get it done. It's simple but it's hard work.

Good luck to achieving your goals!

 

projectw3, what style ad is that on the upper right-hand side of your site? I have never seen that before with the 'ads by google' so far above the actual ad. Sorry, if this is a newbie ?, I am just wondering.

 

I have no real expectations. I am trying to slowly learn as I go, building up to top out at $10 a day, I am hoping.