It's Over.

Sixty-seven days has come and gone. It's the New Year, and time to wrap up this little experiment. The holiday season ate up a lot of my time over the last few weeks. Little has changed over the holidays as far as income produced. I generated almost $11.00 in adsense income. Not the get rich quick as many report. I have had to become a student of adwords, and adsense as well as some of the other pay per click search engines. I have spent countless hours, reading and rereading ebooks, and articles on how to optimize web pages and blogs. I have also spent many hours typing out articles from that research to provide top shelf content.

It has been great fun, and I admit there was a larger learning curve than I expected, and was lead to believe there are many people who claim to have made their fortunes doing adword arbitrage. I could learn how to make that much money if I just drop "the buy it now or the price will only go up tomorrow" cash.

I know some of my mistakes have been critical to the lack of success of my experiment.

Time. I didn't devote enough time to the blog, or to the behind the scenes experiments. When I was launching the keyword campaigns, I didn't spend enough time scouring for the lower cost keywords that would convert into the higher paying keywords that would generate the higher income. Instead of making dollars a click, I was generating pennies. The trick is to multiply the sites to multiply the pennies. Working full-time at a job, then coming home to bang on the keyboard didn't allow me to duplicate the work on a bigger scale. Sometimes just being too tired to attempt to be articulate in any sense of the word.

Money. The old adage, it takes money to make money, even holds true on the Internet. I was very fearful in setting up budgets for my pay per clicks that were more than $5.00 a day. I know that my budget levels needed to be higher than that, if not 10 times higher or more. It can be cost prohibitive, if your borrowing money, and watching it disappear so quickly, and not seeing a significant end result. As past campaigns have proven, the pay per click search engines do provide traffic, it just a matter of ensuring that the keywords are laser target to the sales page. Tricking the visitor, I have learned is by no means cost effective. Offer truth in your ads, and the higher conversion rates should follow. We have all seen those ads that offer more, the ads that are so tempting but disappoint the second they are clicked.

Consistency. Focus. When I originally intended to do this blog, I made a promise to myself that I would try to write an article every day. I would try to read other blogs,make comments, and be an active participant. What ever excuses I can manage to muster up, all ad up to the fact that I didn't produce the kind of results that I wanted to. This is not a set it and forget it experiment, or recipe. This is hands on, and full time, without a doubt.

So, I am going to take what I learned, and try to be more hands on, more active, and see if it is possible to try to make income online.

Day 38

The Adsense formula

C+T+C = Adsense Cash

Let’s break that formula down a bit more. Or what do we know we need to succeed with adsense.

Content – We all know that we need to build pages with great content, but there is a key to this, well actually its “keywords” If we build our content around high paying topics topics we have the opportunity to increase our effective CPM. What is your effective CPM? Effective CPM is a measure of your average earnings, per thousand clicks. You can find this number when you log into your adsense account in the reports section.You can increase your Effective CPM by selecting topics that attract high bids from Adsense advertisers, and building pages and whole websites on higher paying topics.

Although Google doesn't release information on Adsense bids, there are ways around it. You can get a reasonable idea of the top paying topics by looking at information on Adwords bids, or, for that matter, bids on pay-per-click search engines. There are a number of keyword research tools available, both free and paid, that can help you find high paying topics.


Traffic – Why is traffic so important? Well besides the obvious answer, with no traffic, you won’t earn any money, but we also need to know how many impressions our site/blog is receiving. Impressions are the number of times your pages with Adsense ads have been viewed. You can increase the impressions by increasing traffic (preferably targeted traffic) to your web pages. How can we increase the impressions on our blog? We can submit our site to more search engines. We can create more links, primarily links from other sites/blogs. We can buy those links, trade those links with others, or solicit links from other sites. I make sure I read many blogs a day, and leave my url in the comments in hopes of generating extra links to my blog. I can’t forget a very popular option when it comes to linking. You can create relevant articles complimenting the topic of your site or blog and submit them to article sites. Make sure that at the end of the article you include your name, and website. With everyone looking for keyword rich content, your articles will be placed on many sites. Of course with no cost to you. There is another method of increasing impressions. You can buy traffic with pay per click search engines. There is one caveat though. Make sure that you spend less on your keyword advertising than what you could possibly earn. It sound silly to mention that point, but keyword bidding can be a very expensive if not done properly.


Clickthroughs – The most important aspect, because clickthroughs mean cash.
Clickthroughs are the percentage of viewers who click on your Adsense ads. You can increase Clickthroughs by increasing the relevance of Adsense ads on your site, and by tweaking the format and placing of your ads. See the previous article concerning adsense placement.

Although you can't dictate which Adsense ads show on your site, you can
influence the relevance of the ads by maintaining a tightly focused blog. If every page on your site focuses tightly on a few select topics, it’s more likely that the Adsense ads will too. For example, if every page of your site is about affiliate marketing, and the words 'affiliate marketing' appears several times on every page, it’s likely that the ads will relate to affiliate marketing.

The best way to tweak your ad format and placement is view the previous blog entry. Many articles have been written and conclude that the best format is the large rectangle, with background and border the same color as the page behind it, so that the ad blends into the page. The best placement is towards the center or top left of the first screen of the page. Try these suggestions first, and then track and test, to be sure of what works best for your pages.

Adsense isn’t a get rich scheme, but done right, paying close attention to the adsense formula, you can easily build a network of pages that can make you money. A little bit of luck helps too. Just rermember lucky always favours the well prepared.

Day 21

It's been a very few busy days. Starting a new job....yet again, and trying to keep on top of home life, without it imploding on me. I am spending most of my time in front of my laptop, reading article upon article about adsense. I have been stopping in on blogs and seeing what other people are up to. I've noticed that traffic has picked up some on the site, thank you to all that have stopped by and offered some advice. Every little bit helps. My www.67days.com site is up and running, now the debate is this. Do you register your website with the search engines or do you let them spider their way to your site and hope it doesn't take months to get there? I have read that if the search engines spider on their own, you may get better rankings as opposed to submitting the url to the search engines. Time being of the essence I have chosen to register my site with a bunch of little known search engines, and left google to stumble upon it. I'm not sure how it works exactly, but I thought that dividing it this way may give me a better idea on what to do the next time. Anyone else have any suggestions. I would think, but this is pure speculation, that google would find the pages more easily since it is serving ads to the page? Is this far fetched? I guess time will tell on this one.

Adsense and understanding the fine details is still at the bane of my existence at this point. I am reading all the books from the so called guru's, but it's very time consuming. I think I will spend the rest of this week on this one, then try to move on to some affiliate marketing and adwords campaign. I'm gonna start small again just to test the results. I will need a few days to find some good products to promote and see what happens. I'll post the results as soon as they are in. I'm hoping by Sunday of this week to have it up and running. I have some housekeeping to get done on my blog, and a few of my sites. More later.