My Adsense Earnings Are RIDICULOUS!

I've noticed a little bit of a kick in the pants with my pay per click payouts over the last couple of days as well. Don't know exactly what I've stepped into but I'm liking the smell of it.

hi i am jessica i want you to learn me about channels on adsense setup what should i do?
do you have any information about seo and article marketing i need help

I recently switched to graphic only ads and that's when the ppc went WAY up

I don't get but a tiny fraction of your traffic, an infinitesimal fraction at that...
and I'm earning $4 a day to date.

Last month it was $4 a week, so I'm gaining...

BTW, my blogs are NOT specifically for adsense, my addiction blogs are about topics close to my heart, and the advertisers aren't paying much for ads placed on those blogs.

well, I 'think' the payout is also based on conversions... my blogs may or may not actually make conversions for the companies currently putting ads on my site.

example: addiction blog often attracts rehab sites.
a rehab place may charge tens of thousands for it's fee.

my readers (my blog's demographics) aren't necessarily going to shell out that kind of cash...

I'm writing to those who are still using drugs:
recoveryworks on Technorati

As I mentioned before, I don't want to quote the exact traffic number. The setup is a simple two column site with the adsense below the title.

Anyone who purchased Xfactor's Adsense video would recognize it immediately.

I know that I need to be patient, it's just that the numbers are really, really low.

Gotcha. Let's say around five hundred visits this week (seven days).

The site is not the one in my sig. It's in the travel industry, which should pay well (particularly on airline info).

Thanks,

Coz

Simple but brilliant advice. I am going to implement in my own sites because my revenues have been falling recently I do not understand why.

I read the post, thanks for the tip! I think there are two other points in which I have failed:

1. Choosing keywords that are too competitive. I search for keywords that have less than five thousand competitors (in quotes), write a page about it on my site, then rewrite it for Ezines. I know that Xfactor (the most knowledgeable Adsense guy I know of) writesfor phrases with less than 300 competitors, but I honestly can't find them. Guess I should consider paying for wordtracker...

2. On page optimization. Though each article is keyword optimized, I failed to include meta keywords and descriptions.

Perhaps these two are contributing to poor performance.

I suppose SEO. There's so much competition that I can't find a phrase that has less than a thousand competitors in quotes. If anyone uses the paid version of Wordtracker, I'd love to hear their results.

Still, this site is only two weeks old (the articles went live last week)...

Keywords are definitely at a huge part of this business model; over the past few days I've focused on keywords that pay better, and have now seen my earnings rise. Here is my game plan for the next week or two:

submit 25 more articles to EA
submit 25 new pages of original content to my website
write one 1500+ word article on an authority site with a backlink

I am now making just over a dollar a day, with a goal of five dollars a day in two months.

I'll keep everyone posted as to my progress.

Did you start from scratch or placed adsense on an existing website? Thats impossible to launch a website from day one and earn that much.

Actually, the website was built in one day. It was sending out the link to my list that got me all the traffic. Now the trick is to figure out how to keep them coming back

Now THAT'S inspirational! It seems that nearly everyone I've talked to who is heavy into adsense swears by wordtracker. SEO Tool is great, but I can't seem to find the really low hanging fruit.

I agree my efforts on keyword research may have been, well, overly optimistic (i.e. choosing more competitive terms), though it should benefit me in the long run if I focus on low competition phrases now using wordtracker.

It's almost like I built the roof, but haven't completed the foundation yet to hold it up!

Thanks for the explanation. I'm sure a lot of people (myself included) didn't realize the number/quality of bidders could affect earnings so much.

Wow! I read this last night and just changed some of the adsense units on a blog that I purchased a few days ago. The site gets decent traffic yet earned me only $.47 on one day of the first three days I had it.

I changed only half of the ads to show with a red title and the other half I left alone. I have a block with blue titles next toa block with red titles. My earnings on this blog jumped to $1.72 so far today!

I will let it run over the weekend to see if this seems to stay consistent at all or if this just happens to be a coincidence. I'll report back in a few days.

Thanks for posting. I read this before, but your post happened to be here at the right time.

I changed mine to red a few weeks back and CTR fell through the floor - I always thought that red was a colour to avoid on line as it's hard to read. Interesintg how you experienced the opposite effect.

Solid job Barry, congratulations.

Total for me yesterday: $0.

Well, everyday can't be a winner, particularly with the low amount of traffic I'm getting. I did submit five more articles to EA, though, which should help a bit.

I agree. I just bought a book called "Get To The Top On Google" by David Viney, which is packed with solid SEO advice.

He suggested submitting the site to the top free directories:

dmoz.org
lii.org
jayde.com
webworldindex.com

as well as several paid ones, though with such little revenue I don't feel comfortable going in the red to pay for a listing.

All in time, I suppose.

guess my copywriting skills currently exceed my adsense skills.

Great job Barry, my goal is five dollars a day by mid January. Keep me posted with your results.

I guess it depends on your traffic, where the ads are placed, etc. Assuming you get at least ten impressions a day and the ads are at the top where people will see them, you should get at least a few clicks...

I don't use search, just text and image ads.

There could be a number of factors here, but first of, if you are only getting a trickle of visitors to your site then it is difficult to see how well your adsense is performing.

1. Where have you got your adsense blocks on your site?
2. What niche are you targetting?
3. How good is your on and off site SEO?
4. How competitive are your target keywords in the search engines?
5. Is your content good?

Nicely done... Ten bucks a day sounds pretty good to me, especially since I haven't hit an average of $5/day yet.

Still, to start a website that cost exactly ten dollars a year and is already profiting over $1 day within one month makes pretty good business sense to me.

How many sites do you have?

I used this tool for awhile:

Seo Book Keyword Suggestion Tool

which is responsible for very little traffic.

Here was my big mistake: I used a Bum Marketing approach for an adsense business model, where I searched for keywords with less than 5,000 competing sites (in quotes). While EzineArticles may wind up on the first page for some of these, the real money comes from getting cozy with the search engines themselves. Even with a decent click through from my articles, I'm not getting enough visitors.

At this point, I signed up for the free 7 day trial of wordtracker, and immediately found keywords with less than 300 competing websites.

For a brand new site, this is much more manageable...

Currently, about 73 pages are indexed, and all of them have stiff competition (these are the keywords chosen from SEO Tools.

There are roughly 100 pages that aren't indexed, most of which have very little competition (chosen from Wordtracker).

Therefore, I imagine once those pages begin to get indexed, I will see a significant rise in earnings (or so I hope) as the search engines pick them up.

For anyone who is attempting to monetize a site with Adsense, here's the key lessons I've learned from month 1:

1. Commit to a number of articles a week. I must submit at least 25 articles a week, either to my site or article directories. While the real pros laugh at this amount (many writing over ten a day) I'm still working full time for another month before quitting. Then the number will jump to 50 per week.

2. Create original content. I've seen too many people lose their accounts lately to even consider posting anything that isn't mine.

3. Use the paid version of Wordtracker, even if it's only the 7 day free trial. If you want to find low hanging fruit, this is the only tool I've found that will get you there.

4. Ensure they are phrases that pay. When you find keywords with less than 300 competing sites, enter the phrase in google and see how many paid ads there are. I made the mistake of writing info pieces that no one is bidding on.

5. Work your ass off. Treat the site like a business. Put in twenty hours a week writing, and learning about SEO. So many people are infatuated with the "4 Hour Work Week" mentality of making passive income in a matter of days. Guess what? The author of that book worked himself stupid to build up his company before setting it on autopilot, and the title was a direct result of split testing 12 titles to determine which would sell more copies (Tim Ferriss has even gone on record saying he hates the title).

6. Decide if this is the right business for you. If you like to write, and are interested in a topic, this may be way to go. If you don't see yourself writing over 7,000 words a week, try something else.

These are lessons from an adsense newbie. I hope others will post hard hitting points that others can benefit from.

Back to work

Yep, that's the one I use on all the article pages. It's below the headline and sub head...

Will appreciate tips on how to convert to image/text
Thanks,

I just sent you a PM with my reply...

However, to answer here for everyone:

The first 120 pages I submitted were highly competitive. Most are indexed, and receive little to no traffic from search engines.

The next 75 pages I submitted were not nearly as competitive. Sadly, those pages have not yet been indexed, so I can't compare the two.

My focus in the past two days has been on link building. I have submitted my site to 50 directories, and wrote ten more EZine articles, with two backlinks to two different pages on my site (the less competitive terms).

I really hope that directories pay off! Does anyone here submit to directories as well?

Earnings still hover around a dollar a day...

Sorry, I don't understand your question...

It's hard to tell. The payments are all over the place (probably due to the variety of topics).

I've tried using Spyfu, but to be honest, it doesn't help me much. Almost every keyword I type in shows no results.

What I do now is type the keyword in google and see how many ads pop up.

Is there anyone here who is having success with Spyfu? I'd love to hear your feedback.

You may be correct, though I'm already earning $30 per month with this site (admittedly not much, but hey, it's something) with a tragically small amount of traffic. I'm considering sprinkling affiliate links in there, but this is intended to be an adsense based revenue stream.

If anything, this is an education in SEO.

I keep hearing from others about how they get to the top of Google for these huge phrases in a matter of days...

must be nice

I don't have those results, but am going for the long term, stable route.

Best regards,

Coz

By the way, does anyone know of a tool where you type in a keyword, and it shows you what position your website is in? It'd save a bunch of time!

Hi Debbie,

The additional earnings are a result of the lower hanging fruit getting noticed in the search engines. The more competitive keywords are still not receiving any traffic.

To a lesser extent, several more articles just got published, and the ctr has risen a bit as well.

However, the low hanging fruit is making the difference right now.

It will interesting to see what effect the link from the authority site will have on my positions in google.

By the way, I just incorporated analytics with adsense, and couldn't be happier. Now I can see traffic, impressions, earnings, ctr, and eCPM for each and every page. An invaluable (and free) tool!

Hi Debbie,

Generally, the low hanging fruit is three to five words long, and contain the higher paying keyword within. I try to sprinkle variations (including synonyms) throughout the article, and only use the keyword as the title, sub head, intro and conclusion (sometimes even less).

It seems to work: when I search for terms in quotes I'm usually at the top.

This is how I determined that more backlinks were needed. Obviously, on-page optimization was spot on...

I'm very happy with earnings per click. Definitely no "WTF!" moments.

Seems like we got on the boat at the same time.

I just use the keyword in the meta tag. I'm not really sure if it matters.

I figure that advertisers for debt consolidation would still appear on my site. Even if they bid on "debt consolidation" in quotes, my page is optimized for it.

When I research a keyword, I'll often search for it in quotes (to confirm competition) and notice how many advertisers there are. Then, I'll search for the phrase without quotes, and note the change of advertisers. This lets me know if people are bidding on at least part of my phrase, which helps.

However, when it takes 20-30 to write an article, I generally just write the damn thing anyway and forget about it!

Please keep in mind this is just my opinion and others may have different advice:

As for ad color, it depends. Some sites get me to click on the ad because it blends so well. I get people to click on my ads because they contrast... the only way to know for certain is to set up different channels and test the outcome.

Back clicking is when a user clicks on an Adsense ad, then returns to your site and clicks another adsense ad. Google seems to be fine with this, as it makes sense: why type in a URL when you can just click the link? Of course, if people are back clicking dozens of times on the same ads, they'll probably be deemed invalid and you won't get paid.

I'm all for owning the domain, even if it costs ten bucks (plus cheap hosting). Any website following this business model is for the long term, and I want to own it outright.

I don't know anything about web design, but recently married a web designer, which helps! Having said that, nvu.com is a free web authoring tool, or you could try using XSitePro, which a lot technophobes seem to use. Your call.

Hope this helps.

Back to work,

Coz

Welcome to the forum. The only advice I can provide is to ask yourself whether or not income from adsense is the main goal for your blog. If so, you should make sure each page revolves one specific keyphrase (in order to serve up relevant adsense ads).

My earnings have now risen to around $3.35 per day, and that's with less than one tenth of your page views. The key, I believe, is creating each page with one keyword/ topic in mind.

Best of luck to you!

Coz

That doesn't sound right to me unless your traffic is coming from junk sources. if it's coming from search engines or articles your earnings should be much better than that, no matter how untargeted your pages are.

Today I've had only 30 page views on a site I've done nothing for in weeks other than write a single article and I've made 4.50 so far and it's only 9 am. What is your page layout looking like?

The only time I've ever seen such low returns out that kind of traffic is when the traffic source is poor quality.

My Adsense earnings used to vary from 2 cents to $2 per click. I eventually got rid of the really cheap clicks by only displaying one ad/page. Although my CTR took a bit of a dip, I started earning more per click. That was 4 months ago and it has remained steady.

As an added bonus, my blog now looks less cluttered and more appealing.