Adsense Journal - Documenting My Personal Journey

[Althaf Ahmed]

Hello,

I am not really new here, in that I mean, I was once a member of this forum around 7 years back. It was about Internet Marketing only. I left Internet Marketing in 2004 and moved on to other ventures.

I want to utilize this thread to document my personal journey to Adsense success.

The Adsense project is not really new. I started off on January 19th 2009. I invested in a premium domain worth $1000 and started pumping in content constantly.

In the last 1 year, I haven't really achieved much as I took the whole project casually. Last month, something trajic happened; I lost my freelance contract with a company I was working with for past 14 months.

I now literally have nowhere to go in terms of work. I believe this is my moment of, both crisis and opportunity. I have to make this moment work for me, and not againsst for me.

Enough of history.

A little bit on the project. My primary blog I started in 2009 now has over 1300 articles. Very little SEO has been done till now. It gets about 12,000 visitors in a month and not much income.

I have since then launched 3 more blogs, tightly focused on 3 different niches, with a potential of making $300/each/month.

What I will document is what I will do in terms of SEO to the blogs, the growth in, both traffic and income and general observation.

Kindly do not misunderstand me. I do not plan to release any book based on this project. This isn't a pre-sale thread. All I am loking for is motivation, guidance from the pros here, and of course...success.

Do join me in my ride to financial success.

Thank you

[Althaf Ahmed]

What I plan to utilize for my project -

1. Regular updating of blogs.
2. Article Marketing for backlinks and direct visitors.
3. In-content links from relevant blogs.
4. Possible Social Media Campaigns (frontpage in digg, reddit, etc)

I have done all of the above in the past with good success. So, they won't be much of an issue.

[Althaf Ahmed]

I understand it doesn't work for everyone. You have to have that sync to take it anywhere. By the way, I don't plan to restrict at adsense. I also plan to integrate other models like infolinks, contextual affiliate products, etc.

[wolfmmiii]

Originally Posted by Next6

I also plan to integrate other models like infolinks, contextual affiliate products, etc.

Good luck! I'll be following. I would, however, suggest not integrating affiliate links on the same pages where your AdSense exists. If you are focused on AdSense, then stay with AdSense. You might want to do split testing on the same page to see which converts better and then go with the better performing model for that particular keyword.

[Althaf Ahmed]

I thought I will add this. Every Sunday, I will update this thread with traffic and income. Income will be from 2 sources;Adsense and Infolinks.

Thanks

[Althaf Ahmed]

Agreed. I plan to do affiliate thing much later. I am not particularly fond of it. I love adsense, and now I am slowly liking infolinks.

Originally Posted by wolfmmiii

Good luck! I'll be following. I would, however, suggest not integrating affiliate links on the same pages where your AdSense exists. If you are focused on AdSense, then stay with AdSense. You might want to do split testing on the same page to see which converts better and then go with the better performing model for that particular keyword.

[ron.the.bull]

I'm curious. 12k visitors in a month is good traffic. Why not much income? What is the general niche, if you don't mind saying?

[paulgl]

Let's don't and say we did.

How about starting your own blog and updating that?

Why use WF for yet another one of these self promoting threads
started under the guise of helping people?

Just do what you want to do, come back in 6 months and brag.

Paul

[claycath]

Personally, I like the idea that Next6 is doing the updates on here. I do a similar thing in a private forum & it's great to get feedback from others and keeps me motivated. I'll want to slack off sometimes & think, no, I have to be able to tell my forum pals what I did this week. I don't want to look like I did nothing. It also motivates me to see the growth I have had over the months AND I'm told by other readers that it motivates them too.

Go for it Next6, don't listen to any Naysayers on here. If they don't want to read it, they don't have to! Some of us would like to keep track of what you are doing.

Cathy

[claycath]

Oh, I forgot to ask?12,000 visitors no money? Do you have any idea why?



Cathy

[Althaf Ahmed]

It has multiple topics, and sadly the majority of traffic comes from cooking articles that pay very little for adsense clicks.

Originally Posted by ron.the.bull

I'm curious. 12k visitors in a month is good traffic. Why not much income? What is the general niche, if you don't mind saying?

[ron.the.bull]

Without making any assumptions on your multiple topics, let me mention my multiple topic site. Of all the my sites, one in particular just does not get clicks from Adsense. Its a site with three related niches, rolled into one. There is no real focus, just kind of general, broad article base. Great content, steady traffic, but I just can't get Adsense to work on it. The click rate is so bad that I took Adsense off of it, worrying that its hurting my credibility with Google. My laser focused sites convert. I'll never go broad topic again, personally.

[Althaf Ahmed]

In my case, it isn't like that. I got 163 clicks this month and 372 clicks last month. The issue is about low paying topics bringing in the clicks. When I started in Jan 2009, I had not researched the topic well. It was many months later, I started adding high paying topics, but I am yet to do much SEO on them.

I hope you see my dilemma now.

[Althaf Ahmed]

Just ran an adsense report. From Jan 1st to March 31st, the blog registered 972 clicks and earned only $190. That is less than 20 cents per click.

[Althaf Ahmed]

Stats for the past week -

Adsense made a total of $99.30 from 3 niche sites and 1 general site.
The sites received a combined traffic of 5422 visitors.

Do you think these earnings are meagre?

[claycath]

I think those earnings for just 3 sites are great! Can I ask how old are these sites and how are you getting traffic to them?



Cathy

[Althaf Ahmed]

1 niche site is almost 2 years old and makes the most. The other 2 niche sites are between 8-10 months. The general site is 15 months old.

[wizlor]

I just wonder the articles in your website are unique or they are taken from other places?

[Althaf Ahmed]

They are original content. Why do you think otherwise?

[Alexander CPA]

If your website has "very little seo done" that would be the first thing I'd do, you've already got some traffic coming in, if you were to optimize your SEO now, you'd be able to greatly increase your traffic rather quickly.

[Althaf Ahmed]

Alex, you are right, in that, I just started doing link building 2-3 weeks back only. I am primarily building links from Article Directories (by manually spinning the content) and then some from one of the blog networks out there.

I admit these are low to medium value links, but then at this point, I can't afford on anything rich.

I am also planning 3-4 social media campaigns targeting digg and reddit. My goal is to garner some domain authority from the exposure.

Do you have anything to add on SEO front?

[Althaf Ahmed]

I did not update this thread last Sunday and yesterday, because I had relatives at home (my in-laws). Sorry about that. So here goes -

From 25th April to 8th of May, Adsense made $162.71. Traffic from the 3 blogs combined to 11951 visitors.

Infolinks for the same period made $9.05.

That's about it.

[misterkailo]

Get the XFactor AdSense guide. After following his method, I now make a lot more than I did before. Your earning is extremely low for 11951 visitors. With that same amount of visitors I would get about 750.

[DrGUID]

YieldBuild is good, and ad placement helps a lot.

Folk - a general point. Big numbers of visitors does not equal big revenue! I have enormous amounts of traffic for some of my IT "how to" articles. But Adsense CTR is a paltry 0.15%. I think the key with these types of pages is to market affiliate stuff to them - I do quite well selling my own software off the back of these pages.

Finally remember the 80/20 rule - 20% of your pages will be making 80% of your income. I've not seen a site yet where this isn't true.

[Althaf Ahmed]

Well, I did want to update it, and had no plans to quit. But then, the I dont want to build a thread that will get deleted. No point at all.

[Althaf Ahmed]

Funny, the thread is still alive. I really shouldn't have listened to naysayers, coz the journey was indeed very interesting.

However, here is an update.

I did develop the blogs, 2 of them. Combined, they were earning a little over $450. Last September, I sold both the blogs. The combined transaction got me $20,400 USD before Paypal fees.

It was a very satisfying experience, because the project took my understanding of SEO and Keyword research to a completely new level, plus the compensation was handsome.

Anyways, this is my last update for this thread.

[pearsonbrown]

I have no objections to "experiential" threads ;-).

Frankly, I have got so much else to do in this forum that this thread is the least of my worries ;-)

Pearson

[Althaf Ahmed]

I agree with you Old man.