Bluehost

AdSense Stats for October 2008

November 5, 2008 Posted under: Making Money Online by Caroline Middlebrook

I haven’t done quite as much work on my niche sites as I did last month but I’m starting to see some trends in the stats. Here is the stats table at the end of October:

I’ve completed a third site now which is in niche B and what you can’t see from that table is that another couple are close to completion now.

Backlinks

Some time during last month I setup Google Webmaster tools to look at the inbound links for some of the sites and saw a much larger number than was being reported by Yahoo Site Explorer. However, although the numbers in the above table have increased from the month before, they are lower than when I first added the sites to Google. I have no idea what has happened there. I’m wondering if it could be something to do with changing my theme but I can’t see how that would be relevant. Perhaps somebody who knows more about how Google Webmaster tools reports its links could enlighten me.

Traffic

I should probably try and find a way of reporting average traffic levels neatly into that table. In niche A, both of the completed sites are now getting some traffic but site A1 which has the lower PR is getting a lot more traffic than A2. Neither site is ranking very well for the target keyword and 99% of the traffic is coming from long tail keywords. So what I can conclude from that is that so far, my efforts in building backlinks to these sites has not been enough to get them to rank for their chosen keyword meaning that the only factor determining traffic levels is the number of searches to the long tails.

Niche B is not doing well at all. Niche B is more competitive and has *significantly* higher AdSense CPC – we’re talking a 10 fold increase over those in niche A which is why I wanted a stab at it. But so far, those efforts are not paying off. I am finding niche B to be a very difficult topic to write about and although I have managed to find an angle that allows me to pump out the number of articles needed, there are no significant long tail phrases to speak of so those sites just aren’t ranking for anything that can bring me traffic.

Niche C is a funny one. I didn’t use keyword sniping for this site, there is no real target keyword and the AdSense CPC for any keywords relating to this topic are low – below $1.00. So why did I start it? Simply because it’s on a topic I’m interested in. I am treating this site more like a niche blog than a structured niche site. Every now and then I will just write something that comes to mind and leave it at that. But here’s what’s interesting – over the last few days that site suddenly started to get traffic! It’s only been a couple of days so it’s too early to tell but so far it’s getting almost as much as A1 and yet this site was only registered a few weeks ago and so far only has 5 articles on it and no backlink building has been done other than bookmarking the posts!

Maybe those people that say follow your passion are right… Niche C – easiest to write for, seems to be getting traffic more quickly. Niche A, moderately easy to write for, doing okay traffic wise. Niche B – very hard to write for, no traffic to speak of.

Income

Earlier in the month I reported that my click through rate was very low and I was concerned about that so I decided to change my theme on sites A1 and A2 and I have also removed AdSense from all other sites and they will remain like that until they start to consistently get traffic then I’ll put it back. After my initial error, I’m pleased to report that the change in theme has marked a huge improvement in CTR. I can’t give you actual percentages but the change was a 9-fold increase and income increased accordingly!

Site A1 brought in $3.80 this month which is quite an improvement over the $0.33 the month before. Of course these figures are still tiny but if I can improve CTR now while traffic is low, it means I’ll be as effective as possible when the traffic increases over time.

Site A2 looked like it was doing better as it has earned $0.88 in September but that was just a fluke and throughout October before the theme change it wasn’t getting any clicks at all. It is getting more now but not as many as A1 even though they are using the same theme.

None of the other sites have AdSense on them at the moment but if C1 continues to get traffic then I’ll add it in a week or so.


Want to Make Money Blogging? My free course, The Bloggers Bible contains everything you need to know about building a highly popular and profitable blog from scratch!

Just fill in your email below to get your first lesson immediately:


Post to Twitter Tweet This Post Post to StumbleUpon Stumble This Post


You might also like these similar posts:

The AdSense Project
Stats & Analysis for October ‘09 – $5,937 Earned
Stats & Analysis For October 2008 – $1,153 Earned
The Bum Marketing Project
The Power of the Cookie

30 Comments:

Colin
November 5, 2008

Caroline,

Those figures are truly pathetic. Do you think this whole idea might be a blind alley?

Not having a dig, just being realistic. Even a 1000% increase in revenue would be rubbish. Time to look for some other way to make money?

Colin

Colins last blog post..Melamine Scandal spreads to eggs

Well, what can I say. You must get them to rank in the first ten for the main keyword, otherwise you aren’t going to see the numbers you got in the research stage.

So, there’s the links, the aging of the domain, what else..? Sand box?

So the links are the only thing you can influence. Work on those links whatever it takes. Push the main keyword everywhere you can. Buy some links, see how this goes.

Cheers,
Alex

Alex at Net-Entrepreneur.coms last blog post..I like to cook, but this is too much…

John
November 5, 2008

I would think the Adsense earnings would be higher. (I’m newer to this than you are, so I say that not as an expert, just as an observation from someone also trying to start some Adsense sites).

Andy Bacon
November 5, 2008

Hello Caroline,
Thank you for sharing this project with us. I have already learned a lot about the thought process of trying to monetize a blog from watching what you do. I have been going through the Traffic Rush lessons and find the information very good. I have actually received some traffic from Stumble Upon but so far they are not very impressed with my site. I need to do more work. Is there a way to see how many thumbs of both direction a site has received? Also, what screen capture software do you use.
Thanks again for the help.
Andy Bacon

Andy Bacons last blog post..6 Proven Ways To Make Money Online

Mike Huang
November 6, 2008

Sooner or later, you would be able to gain money by just leaving these sites there :D

-Mike

Dennis Edell
November 6, 2008

After their boosted quite a bit, yes.

Dennis Edells last blog post..100 RSS Subscribers – It’s Happy Dance Time!

BusinessX
November 6, 2008

Keep at it, this is really inspiring. Two months and the numbers are coming in. A lot of bloggers put up their income reports first of the month and $40K/month just doesn’t speak to me. I desire to be at that level to be sure, but they don’t write about the struggle or the early days. Struggles getting traffic and numbers, nor the joy of the first dollars a site receives. I am still in MMO kindergarten and love the information you are giving us.

Nathan Hangen
November 6, 2008

I am really getting a lot of traffic from Ezine and my ctr on Adsense has been fantastic. I haven’t been as diligent on keyword research as I should be, but I am working that strategy now. It is funny how some sites seem to flourish while others can’t even get a jumpstart. You’ve got some good pagerank on your 1st niche, I bet the traffic and revenue will continue to increase.

Nathan Hangens last blog post..What Are You Waiting For?

Trevor
November 6, 2008

Thanks for sharing your results. One other thing that would be interesting to know is roughly how many content pages you have on each of the sites.

As for Google inbound links reporting, Google always stress that they only *show* a selected sample of links – others are counted even if not shown. Some people have guessed that they only show links from sites with a high enough PageRank so as PR fluctuates so can inbound links shown. But as always with Google it’s just guesswork.

Caroline Middlebrook
November 6, 2008

@Colin, every site starts with it’s first visitor, it’s first click. This blog started with 1 subscriber (me) and 0 traffic and 0 income but look at it now.

@Alex, sandbox yes. Even the earliest site is still just 3 months old so they are probably all still sandboxed. I’m not buying links for a site making $3 a month lol.

@Andy, you can see the thumbs up but you can only see the thumbs down of those who left a comment. I use Gadwin Printscreen to do my screen caps.

@Mike, that’s the idea, yes. The ones marked ‘complete’ are being left alone.

@Trevor, 10 content pages on each site.

make money
November 6, 2008

It is always a good idea to analyse your stats and keep on making sure that your site is converting. Sometimes it can be hard to work out why your site isn’t converting or why it is converting so well which is obviously great.

@Caroline,

Getting out of the sandbox is not merely a matter of time, isn’t it? They also check whether the site is being updated, and does it gain popularity/authority, which is links. So, buying a few quality* links (3pr-5pr) as an investment in the site might not be such a bad idea.

*from a site of related subject, with your main keyword as the anchor.

Cheers,
Alex

Alex at Net-Entrepreneur.coms last blog post..I like to cook, but this is too much…

Colin
November 6, 2008

Optimism and positivity are great qualities to have, but I think if you think these sites are going to generate anything other than pocket money you are being heroically positive.

If your revenue increased by 10% a month exponentially it would still take about 5 years to get to $1000 dollars a month.

You need to either get these sites growing at the rates of the top internet sites to be in with a chance of achieving even this very modest target. Wikipedia and the fish 4 sites are currently getting double digit monthly growth. Do you think you can match them in your niches? The other alternative is to create more sites, but you will need to be adding sites in the hundreds to get that kind of growth.

I think you would do better to look at the success of this blog and how you can make this profitable. I think you already have the data to prove that the niche site strategy isn’t working for you.

Colins last blog post..Melamine Scandal spreads to eggs

This is one of the things I hate about Adsense, the fact that you have to constantly test and tweak to get results.

WOW some of these commentors are NEGATIVE! Sheesh. I think you are doing great Caroline. Don’t listen to them I’ve seen Niche sites that are insanely popular. My friend started one where all he did was bash video games and their designs and yea he got 1000 readers a day within like a month. He was making a ton off of that plus he got to play video games all the time saying it was research BUT he didn’t make a dime off of AdSense.

AdSense is wack and it sucks at life. The only reason I put it on any of my sites is that it seems like it makes google index them faster. As soon as I get indexed I take them off normally.

TheSimpleStep
November 7, 2008

paid to review programs is better than adsense, at least it works for me …

cheers :)

Fat Loss School
November 7, 2008

good stuff caroline,

ignore some of the more bleak messages here, this is a learning experience for all of us and we’re all doing these little experiments. what would be lovely is if you let us know exactly what theme you changed to that helped your CTR.

cheers

kahthan

Caroline Middlebrook
November 7, 2008

@make money, yes I am implementing one change at a time and recording the results each time. With traffic levels still quite low I need to leave each change for a week or two to see the results so it’s quite slow going.

@Alex, yes it should be just a matter of time, 6 months max I hope. But the idea of this project is not to create blogs that require constant updating but static sites that can be just forgotten once a certain amount of groundwork has been done.

@Colin, I am not trying to compete with anybody else (well other than in the search engines of course!). The sites have very low traffic levels right now – in the region of around 15 visitors a day and that is why the income is low. If they rise in the rankings the traffic should increase several fold and so will the income. It’s all about the rankings in the serps. Time should have nothing to do with it other than this initial time in the sandbox.

Oh, and this is not my only source of revenue. If it was I’d be going back to my day job :-)

@JR, well really you need to do that with anything in business.

@Ryan, comes with the territory I’m afraid, but it is their negativity, not mine. AdSense doesn’t work for many sites but I cannot ignore the many stories of those sites on which is does work phenomenally. Some people are raking in literally thousands a month in AdSense alone. It doesn’t just suck :-)

@Fat Loss, it was the ProSense theme by DoshDosh. I’m fairly sure I linked it in the original post when I discussed the change.

small hosting
November 8, 2008

Hi Caroline, a few questions, how can you get many links (104 on A01), and do you write your own content? Thanks for the share

small hostings last blog post..Selling advertising on your blog

Paul
November 9, 2008

When you write about things you know about you automatically use all the long tail words people search on.

I have a site I wrote 10 years ago where 80% of the visits come from long tail keywords. I rank well for what I thought would be the key words too, but I could loose those and it wouldn’t make much difference.

Everyone under appreciates the value of time; as in years. Publish those niche sites and forget about them for a year or more. You will be amazed at what happens.

I think there are fundamental differences in how the game is played in static stable niches vs current events or trendy subjects.

At the end of the day what counts is how many pages of unique content you got published. Anything that reduces that number is probably not the best use of your time.

Hosting Review
November 10, 2008

I’ve never got luck with Adsense. It’s so hard to increase my earning level :-(

Hosting Reviews last blog post..HostDime.com

Caroline Middlebrook
November 10, 2008

@small hosting, I don’t know what you mean by 104 and A01 but I will be covering my link building methods in this project. Yes I do write all my own content at the moment but if I continued this kind of thing long term I would want to outsource it in some way.

@Paul, whilst leaving them alone is the ultimate aim, they still need to be ranking for something in the first place. A site that doesn’t rank for anything is still not going to get traffic a year later.

Phil
November 11, 2008

Strange, I find myself agreeing with just about everyone in some way or another….

Adsense sucks…. true

Adsense is great…. true

Niche sites work…. true

Niche sites don’t work…. true

Those figures are truly pathetic (quoting Colin)…. true

But to me the moral of all this is that different things work for different people!

Colin’s site obviously works due to his knowledge and passion about the subject, but that is hard to duplicate over a number of sites.

Personally I have around eighty niche sites, covering subjects in a large number of popular, and not so popular, niches.

As I am not an expert in all of these niches I rely on PLR articles, sometimes rewritten, sometimes used as they are. The duplicate content issue never comes up as the site design and order of articles will never be duplicated, unlike the many ‘cookie cutter’ niche sites that you can buy!

Adsense sucks as sometimes a site will earn only a few dollars a month!

Adsense is great as some of these sites are doing a few dollars a day!

Not huge money but it’s all in the numbers over time.

Frequently, as Ryan also says, I put Adsense on a site to help indexing. Why it helps I don’t know but it appears to in some cases.

But the strangest thing is that out of all my niche sites the ones that consistently perform well are all subjects that are close to my heart… could it to be to do with visitors noticing a little bit of passion in the content?

Time also helps as my two best performing sites are both over three years old, and even though they aren’t updated regularly they still earn from Adsense every single day – what would they do if I worked on them?

Keep testing Caroline, it makes interesting reading particularly your comment about not showing posting dates and times on sites that aren’t going to be updated regularly.

I have implemented this change (by manually editing the themes) on quite a few sites over the past two months and have noticed a definite change in the time visitors spend on the site, guess they now don’t get put off by seeing a post date that is months old!

Cheers

Phil

Caroline Middlebrook
November 12, 2008

@Phil,that’s right – it’s different for everybody but things also change over time. I never expected to pull in huge incomes from the start, that would be unrealistic but the fact remains that there are people who consistently make 4 and 5 figure incomes purely from AdSense each and every month. Everybody does it differently, there is no one single correct way to do it.

Colin
November 12, 2008

Some people may well pull in substantial incomes from adsense. I imagine it would be viable strategy for someone like Steve Pavlina who has the talent to write compelling and original content that makes you want to visit his site.

Paul MacCartney makes substantial sums of money from monetising his ability to write catchy melodies – that doesn’t mean we should all get our guitars out.

Adsense is a lovely way of generating a small income from an interest you have. But if you can’t generate really valuable content I don’t see any way you can turn it into anything other than pocket money. And if you can generate really valuable content the chances are Adsense isn’t the best way to generate an income from it.

Colins last blog post..Choosing a Hand Cream

FH2o
November 13, 2008

Adsense looks truly discouraging.
Looks like it’s going to be an uphill battle to monetize with Adsense! Thanks for sharing this so openly with us.

FH2os last blog post..4 Eared Cat

Great post. Thanks for the update. It seems that Google likes to play with us. They don’t always show all the links that they have in their database.

I have played with the niche blogging thingy for a little while and you’re right it is hard to write for niches that you have know interest in. I have to follow my formulas for writing articles or use a article researcher to help me produce good quick content.

Caroline Middlebrook
November 14, 2008

@FH2o, aww don’t be discouraged by the struggle of one person! Just because I’m still struggling with this doesn’t mean its hard or there wouldn’t be loads of other people making wads of cash with it! I just haven’t found the right mix of ingredients yet.

BloggerTests.com
November 18, 2008

One of my niche sites (about 200 pages in size) that I completed about a year ago and haven’t touched since then, is now generating $40-50/month from adsense. Over 90% of traffic is organic.
People tend to underestimate the value of time.

Good start Caroline!

dan

BloggerTests.coms last blog post..Ignite Landing Page Theme: Review

My Crazy Debt
November 20, 2008

I’m shocked by your figures. Just looking at this blog, I would think you were one of those niche gurus.

Hopefully things will pick up soon.

My Crazy Debts last blog post..Extra Money in December


Leave a comment

XHTML: You can use these tags: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <strike> <strong>

CommentLuv Enabled


Recommended Services
MyBlogLog Community
Top Commentators
Copyright © Caroline MiddlebrookTheme designed by Design Farmer

Twitter links powered by Tweet This v1.6.1, a WordPress plugin for Twitter.