The $100/day AdSense Challenge

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Last week I had my first website break the $1/day mark in adsense revenue. If you’ve ever tried to make money online you know that this is no easy task. In fact, it took nearly 2 years for me to reach this point! After a lot of analysis I think I have some idea of what worked and what didn’t. So I’m setting myself a challenge–to push that website to the $100/day mark.

I’ll be documenting my progress on the blog in my sig and in this thread. The blog includes pics that I haven't attached here.


Benchmarking

To give you a better idea of the position I’m starting this challenge from here are a few statistics.


1. As of today the website ranks 60th worldwide on Google for its most-searched-for keyword according to Search Engine Genie.


2. Site usage statistics for the week of December 13-19 2010 during which the site made its record $1+/day average adsense revenue: 122 visits, 459 pageviews, 3.76 pages/visit, 42.62% bounce rate, 00:01:31 average time on site, 90% new visits.


3. Traffic sources were divided up as follows: 86% search engines, 9% referring sites, 4% direct traffic. Also of note is that 86% of the traffic came from Canada while 10% came from the US. This is one statistic in particular that I expect to change drastically as one of my goals is to add a large amount of US-specific content to the site.


Ground Rules for the Challenge

1. No paid traffic. This is partly because I don’t have the money to spend, but mostly because I don’t want to try to figure out arbitrage between PPC or PPV advertising and AdSense.


2. Part of the challenge is to force myself to add new content (at least 1 page) every day.


3. While the ultimate goal is to reach $100/day I’ll be keeping track of milestones along the way like: new peak revenue for one day/week/month, as well as new averages like $2/day, $5/day, $10/day etc.


4. I’ll also post updates on traffic statistics and search engine rankings.
#search engine optimization #$100 or day #adsense #challenge
  • Good luck on your challenge,

    I will be sure to post some of my own challenges and how I overcome some of them once i get up and running myself.

    Again,

    Good luck and best wishes with your site
  • Your story will inspire Adsense admirers including myself.
    • [1] reply
  • Good luck, I will be watching to see how you do!
  • Banned
    [DELETED]
  • Hey,

    Good luck on the challenge. This looks like a great project that you and us here on Warrior can learn alot from.

    A couple things I'd like to recommend if I could:

    1. A 6% click-through rate is good, but depending on the topic of the site, you can do much better. I dont do much adsense monetization anymore, but the sites I've got on adsense from the past hit between 10-30% CTR on average.

    Here's a clip:




    2. You said you're trying to post an article/day. Are you shooting for ranking for 1 or 2 main keywords or for a huge range of keywords in your niche?

    Good luck!
  • Good luck !

    I wish you all the best .
  • Best of luck Guy.
  • Good luck.
    I will be watcing your progres :-)
  • I’m kicking off the new year right with a summary of results for December 2010, an update on where I’m at with the $100/day AdSense Challenge, and a look ahead at my plans and goals going forward.

    December 2010 – the challenge begins
    If you’ll remember way back on December 22nd 2010 I decided to publicly challenge myself to turn my first site to earn $1/day from adsense into my first site to earn $100/day. I’m doing this without spending any money on advertising so other than hosting fees it should be pretty much pure profit. So how have I done so far?

    Rankings
    As of today my site has moved up from 60th to 30th in the world rankings on google for its most-searched keyword which accounted for 21% of all visits. And as a total during December the site was found through 291 keywords. The site ranks on page-one for many of these keywords although as of yet I haven’t found any where it’s in the top spot.

    Traffic
    A total of 623 visits for the month generated 1,225 pageviews for adsense. Traffic and earnings were low at the start of the month and reached new highs after I started this challenge and began adding new content.

    Content
    As part of the challenge I wanted to make sure I started adding to the site a minimum of 1 page of new content daily. In the 10 days since the challenge began I’ve managed to add 22 new pages so I’m pretty excited about that! Nearly all of these pages have been indexed according to webmaster tools and I’m seeing search engine traffic for many of the new keywords these pages are built around so I know that’s working.

    Click through rate
    Unfortunately I won’t be updating you on CTR since I found out it’s against adsense rules. However I will say that after changing the theme and placing 3 ad units more aggressively around my content, my CTR more than doubled from the 27th of the month and it has been holding at the new levels since. I’ve also set up custom channels for each ad unit so I’ll be able to track which position is performing best.

    Earnings
    The site enjoyed a new peak day and month. The highest earning day was $4.23. And December is the highest earning month in the history of this site at $31.09. Probably the most exciting part of this is that earnings grew so much with the new content and ad placements that it managed to push the daily average for the entire month passed the $1/day mark. As you can see from this chart:

    [see blog for pics]

    And here are the exact numbers including eCPM:

    [see blog for pics]

    Although these numbers are very early it at least gives me some idea of what I need to shoot for to achieve my ultimate goal. If they hold I’ll need roughly 4,000 impressions a day to reach my $100 a day goal. Seems a long way off right now so I’ll outline my shorter term goals below.

    Goals for January 2011
    1. Hit the payout threshold by the end of the month. That means I need to make a bit more than double what I made in December.

    2. Continue creating at least 1 new page of content daily.

    3. Begin expanding my content into US-specific keywords.

    4. Increase the total number of keywords used to find the site to 500 for an ever-broader traffic base.
    • [1] reply

    • You can do it if you stick with it, just dont give up
  • Good luck my friend, I'd like to do something like this myself to help with expenses and such. You seem to be making a small amount, but it looks like that small amount keeps getting bigger. I say stick with it man.
  • Banned
    Thanks for this mate, I enjoy reading it!
  • This is just a short post to share some exciting news about my $100/day AdSense Challenge. Just 2 weeks after starting the challenge with $1/day average earnings, my site has broken the $2/day average for the week of December 27th-January 2nd. This is thanks to a combination of two things:

    1. Traffic has grown by 107%

    2. Click through rate has doubled.

    Unfortunately CPC dropped a bit or earnings would have been even better.

    Here are the site usage statistics for the week:

    [see blog for pics]
    • [1] reply
    • adsense is not hard, i recommend adsense crusher and article marketing robot to toughen up your arsenal..
  • good luck!!!!
    • [1] reply
    • Another week of my adsense challenge is over and I have new record earnings and traffic to report! Perhaps the most exciting news is that earnings are staying well above the $2.16 daily average needed for my account to reach the payout threshold by the end of January. So that's another goal well on its way to successful completion. Now let's take a look at those new records.

      [see blog for pic]

      New 1-Day Earnings Record
      January 6 2011 marked a new record high since this challenge began with earnings of $4.94. The 8th also got close to the $5 mark with $4.81. I was really rooting for the site those 2 days hoping to break $5 but that will come in time.

      New Average Daily Earnings Record
      The week of January 3-9 2011 broke through the $3/day average very convincingly and earnings never dipped below $2 on any day this week.

      New 1-Week Earnings Record
      Total earnings for the week were $25.42 which isn't far off from the earnings for the entire month of December!

      New Traffic Peak
      Finally, traffic grew another 30% over last week with a new daily peak of 61 visitors. Pageviews broke the 1,000 mark as well.

      [see blog for pic]
      • [ 1 ] Thanks
  • keep updating
  • Banned
    I would love to earn just even £20.00 a month right now!
  • what do you use to get traffic?
    thanks for sharing this real case
    • [1] reply
    • You'll get there! Just keep creating content every day.

      Content.
      No backlinking, no tools, no article marketing, no video marketing, no social bookmarking. Just fresh content daily.
      • [2] replies
  • Its a great challenge. I wish you the best
  • This is an awesome case study you're doing, I'll be following it.

    Will you reveal your keyword/ site eventually?
  • I signed up here because I found this challenge, and I found it quite refreshing since it does not rely on any paid products or WSO.

    I am wondering if you can discuss how many articles you had when you started at the challenge. How many words are in your typical article? And do you have any estimates on how many articles it will take to reach $100/day?

    Thank you so much for this challenge, and I look forward to watching your progress throughout 2011.
  • Hi 33cents,

    I truly love your challenge, i am also currently on an adsense challenge. This thread is an inspiration to me. I do however have some questions.

    1. The site you are promoting. You do not say how old it was or PR etc.. before you began your challenge. Was it aged and established or was it a new domain?

    2. you say you do not do any backlinking apart from internal linking. Truly amazing to be getting the traffic you do without any backlinks. So the structure of your site must also play a major part for you. Do you simply just blog or have you setup categories and pages etc?
    • [2] replies
    • i don't think that anyone can make a 100 a day, not possible according to me, thanks for the tips though
      • [1] reply
    • Thank you for the encouraging words folks! Glad my tiny success so far has inspired some of you.

      I may reveal the general niche because it's a huge one. I already have so much competition that a couple more warriors wouldn't make any difference.

      I had about 35 pages of content when I started. I've built about 50 since then. So I'm currently averaging about 3.5 cents per page per day. That would mean I'll need 2500 pages to reach $100/day. As far as I'm concerned that is exactly what sites like EzineArticles does. Produce tons of pages and make a few cents off of each one. It adds up. Although when you're doing all the work yourself its slow!

      It's PR0 and 8 years old.

      I've tried to structure the blog in a way that makes sense for me so I can find things. Categories, posts and pages. The home page is a static linking out to all major categories and pages, which in turn link out to subpages, which link back to the major categories as well as to each other in some cases.

      Hope that made sense
      • [1] reply
  • Good luck with your project. I'll be following your thread.
  • good work Im thinking in starting a adsense websites all my sites are about product reviews.
  • WOW tough challenge. I have used adsense in the past and had my account banned. I also don't like their terms and conditions. I find it very hard to make money with them as they don't tell you how much you make per click plus they discount clicks etc.

    Good luck though I will follow your progress.
    • [1] reply
    • $100 per day through "accidental" long-tail traffic is very possible. If you have enough content, anything is possible.

      However, creating 2000+ pages of content in 30 days is crazy talk. That's 60+ pages of content per day. A better goal is a few pages per day over a couple of YEARS.

      A better plan is to actually promote your site with some backlinking. Even if you outsource it, it's not that expensive... In fact, you could probably get a lot of bang for your buck at less than $50 per month, which is about what you are earning now from the site. In other words, if you want to hit your goal faster, reinvest your earnings until you reach your goal.
  • I will keep an eye on your progress.
  • Pls contact me as soon as possible.
    • [1] reply
    • THank you for your reply 33cents,

      I see you had an aged domain, so trust must be in that somewhere for the traffic to come without any real backlinking.

      Do you have a genreal domain name or have you also got a boost from an EMD?
      • [1] reply
  • I am interested, please reply me as soon as possible.

    thank you so much.
  • Analytics/Adsense linking options only works as a subdomain (or subprofile) of the first domain you tried to link Adsense and Analytics. If you have a completely separate profile, it won't give you any Adsense options at all. In my setup xyz.com was the first Adsense domain I set up, and I put abc.com underneath it. You have to put in a second set of Analytics code for either xyz or abc (whichever domain you designated as not primary).
  • I don't see the option of linking any of my analytics website profiles or accounts to adsense and none of them have the adsense tab on the dashboard.
    • [1] reply
    • Your Adsense earnings page should have an option to "Go to your Google Analytics Account." If so, then I think you did the Adsense part already.

      Go to Analytics and look under the Content bar instead of the Dashboard for every single Analytics account you have. Only one account will have AdSense listed underneath the Content bar (other options common to all Analytics accounts include Site Search and Event Tracking). That is the Analytics account where you will have to add your other domains to. I think Google needs to fire their UI engineer for this one.
      • [3] replies
  • Banned
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  • Good luck and dont quit.

  • i sure hope you can reach the goal, it would be great to see you make it without backlinking
  • When I set out on this challenge I figured that I would do these updates whenever something interesting happened, maybe once a month, or some months a few times. But it's looking like there's going to be something worth mentioning every week and this week is no exception. I've got new earnings records, new traffic records and new ranking records! So let's take a look...

    [see blog for pic]

    New 1-Day Earnings Record
    January 14 2011 was a very exciting day for me as my site finally broke the $5 mark, but it didn't stop there, it soared to a new high of $6.59!

    New 1-Week Earnings Record
    Total earnings for the week of Jan 10-16 hit a new high of $26.71. So the daily average is creeping towards $4.

    New 1-Day Traffic Record
    January 16 2011 saw a new peak visitor count of 74.

    Rankings
    My site moved up to #23 worldwide for its main keyword. You'll remember from the first post about this challenge that the site started out at #60.
  • I like this thread...fun to watch! Best of luck to you on your personal challenge. Are you setting a time limit or do you have a set time in mind for various benchmarks? (10, 20, 50 per day, etc.?)
    • [1] reply
    • I just joined the forum so I can wish you well. Please keep posting and best of luck!
      • [1] reply
  • Your project is great to earn money with ads .Thanks for sharing I will try to get registration for this .
  • Realy great chalange i am sure you will get there just dont quit.

    I also starting something like this very soon

    cheers
  • You have goal and plan then you will sure success. I believe in goal and plan without having it you have a little chance to success.
  • I was encouraged by your posts and the updated good news. Congratulations! And I'm doing the same challenge with you together and would like to learn some tips from you. According to my Adsense channel reports, the ads on the top of blog do the best. How about yours?
  • Good luck in your quest I am sure you will manage this no problem you seem very capable.
  • I've got a similar goal: €100/day ($135), so I will follow this topic to see how you're doing Good luck!

    What kind of weblog is it that you have, product information?
    • [1] reply
    • Thank you for reminding me I forgot to give a report on the performance of the ad placements. Currently the leaderboard I have above the content/below the title, accounts for 53% of earnings.

      Oh man that's a ton of work! I have trouble putting an hour into content creation every day without getting bored LOL!

      The site is informational. There isn't much in the way of products for this niche.
  • great!
    So keep on working.
    And good luck for the challenge.
    What's the latest earning of your's?

    I would also have done similar challenge but Bad luck! I am banned by adsense!
  • Firstly, congrats on your continued upwards success. I'm doing a similar challenge myself.

    Anyway, since you're not doing much linkbuilding, it may be worth harnessing the power of your content by allowing others to share it. By this I mean adding 'Tweet' or Facebook buttons. If someone likes the content and thats what they're after, it will work in your favour. I've started to adopt Twitter quite a lot lately and can definitely see its benefits, especially when people 'ReTweet'.

    Also, being in SEO/Web design for over 10 years, 'send to a friend' scripts also work wonders. You can focus on quality content and others will make it viral for you....exactly what Google's ethos is behind 'natural' linking.

    All the best
  • By the way, how many words on average is your content?

    I think you've obviously got your keyword research process quite refined which shows in your results. Care to share how you do it?
    • [1] reply
    • I'll throw out my numbers too. We seem to be doing the same thing.

      40% of my revenue comes from the square below the right side of the title. My content wraps around the left. I'm thinking of putting the square below the left side of the title if I dump my sidebar ads (see below).

      Top link unit and bottom large rectangle just after the end of the content make up the rest of the revenue.

      My top left sidebar ads are contributing very little to CTR and revenue even thought the adsense heat maps says it should do well. I'm thinking about moving those ads to middle of the content just above the fold.
  • let the challenge start
  • wow, reading through all the starting point till now and see that you were soley focus on original content. Yeah, it is perfect but if you even further build links to it, you could even rank most of your sites really high and have much potential in google SE eye. BL wont make your sense immediately cuz it need times, i have spend 3 months to build BL with no hope of any ranking but what i get back now is all my page duplicate content got indexed and rank high for some special keywords which could get me site flooded of traffic 2000 to 2500 UV dailys and get huge of clicks but very Low CPC which earn me only $4 to $5 daily. Actaully, if CPC increase even 15 cents i would make 20$ easily without any hard.
  • Good luck with your great challenge. I enjoy reading it
  • very inspiring..
    i will keep following u
    stay tuned
  • I love this thread. What's the developement now? Are you using article spinner software or you manually write the articles?
    • [1] reply
    • Thank you to everyone, sorry if I miss any questions.

      That's the plan. $100/day from an adsense site. Then $100/day from an amazon site. Then $100/day from a clickbank site, etc. As for falling in the rankings, my site is going up and down in rankings daily for different keywords. But it ranks for so many now that it doesn't effect traffic. Even when the site dropped for awhile for it's primary keyword, traffic just continued to grow thanks to the continually growing list of long-tails that it ranks for.

      Thanks for the tip on tweet and like buttons. Content is between about 300 and 600 words. I think I mentioned briefly before that I'm just writing long-tails of my primary keyword and a couple of related secondary keywords.

      Everything is written manually.
  • keep on your work, And I suggest you to add infolinks also along with adsense in your site. That way you will reach $100 / day challenge sooner.
  • I love it! Would you be interested in starting an Adsense Challenge on our personal blogs, a'la Pat Flynn's Niche Site Duel? If so, I've got a backgrounds site with a traffic potential of about 300 hits / day that I could throw into the ring
  • New records abound to make for a thrilling 5th week of my adsense challenge! The week was fairly quiet for earnings until the last day when it set another 1-day record, 1-week record and pushed the week to a new daily average. Traffic continued to grow nicely as well with a new 1-day and 1-week record. The site also enjoyed a new peak ranking for its main keyword. Plus a little surprise, read to the end of this update to see

    [see blog for pic]

    Traffic
    Site traffic reached a new high on January 23 2011 with 79 unique visitors after reaching its previous high of 78 visitors on January 19 2011. The week as a whole saw traffic grow by 32% compared to 2 weeks ago when the site reached $3/day average earnings. Pageviews also soared passed 1,300.


    Earnings
    The site completely destroyed the previous 1-day record for earnings on January 23 2011 with a new peak of $13.37. This in turn helped it break the 1-week record with a new high of $32.65. And thanks to that the site has also set a new daily average well above $4.


    Rankings
    The site now ranks #22 for its main keyword worldwide. What's far more surprising though is that the keyword responsible for the 2nd most visitors is a keyword I'm not targeting at all. I have zero pages built for it. And the 3rd most used keyword only has 1 page built for it. I thought it was interesting how unexpected results can be. I'm starting to think the whole notion of 'targeting' certain keywords is a waste of time. Just keep on creating content for people and the SEs will take care of everything else for you automatically.


    Content
    The site has finally reached 100 indexed pages of content.


    Backlinks
    And here's the surprise I mentioned above. Although I've strictly maintained a policy of creating no backlinks myself, that hasn't stopped other people from linking to my content naturally. Since this challenge began the site has received 34 new 100% legitimate backlinks. Since I'm not even asking people to link to me I think getting roughly 1 new inbound link per day is pretty good especially considering that my site is still very small.
    • [ 1 ] Thanks
    • [2] replies
    • I know what you mean with that... I was going to post on Yahoo Answers to get a backlink and then I found out that someone out there already did that for me. It's much better to get others to build backlinks for me because of my good content. Pretty soon there will be no need for me to create backlinks at all.
    • Very good sign - this means your content is good.

      This is pretty much exactly how Google wants you to acquire links. Glad its working well
  • I am loving this, I went through a similar thing as you a couple months back but didn't catalog it. Should have though will all the support and suggestions. I have found that consistency and patience were the keys to my success.
  • If you can make one dollar a day....

    You can make $1,000 a day.

    Rinse, repeat, and move on.
  • This is a nice journey. Build backlinks, write more content and keep going!
  • Great thread! I'll be following along.
  • this is one of my goals too, just that I would be using more than one blog though.. 1 blog seems really hard to do so.. your work is inspiring (:
    • [2] replies
    • Thanks for posting your progress in this challenge. It's educational and fun to watch.

      Congrats on the $4/day record! Inspiring!
    • It's very inspring. I think he does the right job by focusing on 1 blog until it's big enough the visitors will increase automatically. Then when it's on "autopilot" you can focus on a new site, while still getting income from the first site.
  • Except I'm not 200 posts to start a challenge and a challenge for me is people not others. If others want to challenge themselves because of what all the fuss.
  • Really liked reading your thread. You made me start my own challenge on a blog. I also posted it on here, but my thread got removed no idea why though?
    • [1] reply
    • Because "watch my progress" threads usually get deleted by the mods as they rarely provide any value and just fizzle out. The OP scraped by with this one
  • I would just like to say thank you for all of your kind comments and support. I'm so glad you are finding this journey enjoyable and inspiring!
  • Hi 33centsaday,

    Have you looked into following any courses for your adsense challenge?

    I have been following along with the A100k Blueprint and i have to say that it is more than just an adsense course. They also will give you a better SEO understanding if you see their methods and tips they advise to enhance the sites and therefore income.

    I was skeptical at first about it. I thought i didn't need another course, i was even on a private webinar with them and still didn't buy into it... Then i read some great reviews here on WF and thought what the heck... Boy i'm glad i did. Dont get me wrong, i'm not a Newb but i definately understood their methods and teachings.

    If you decide to go for any adsense course then A100k is most definatlely MY recommendation. I did also read xfactor course and it's also good, but for me it has to be A100K.. Just my honest review :-)

    Chris
  • I believe one day you will reach that amount.I too learned a lot but did not get time to post on my blog.I can challenge if you do daily posts then its easier to reach.
  • Good luck il like to see your progress as i have about 10 adsense sites always looking to make a few more clicks .
  • Best of luck!

    I am at a 30$/day with adsense now. Just trying for a $100/day within next 6 months.
  • Great thread and all the best with your challenge. This is great motivation for a similar challenge that I am doing as well. Will definitely follow this thread.
  • Just want to warn you, this is a massive update, you might want to grab a coffee before proceeding

    January 2011 Goals Reviewed
    In the December 2010 Summary post I highlighted 4 goals that I wanted to reach in January:

    1. Reach the $100 payout threshold by the end of the month.
    Check! The site ended up earning more than double what it needed to reach this goal.

    2. Create at least 1 page of new content every day.
    Check! I lost track of the exact number but I wrote roughly 80 pages of content during January.

    3. Increase traffic from the US.
    Check! US-traffic accounted for 10% of overall site traffic in December, and 20% in January.

    4. Increase the total number of keywords used to find the site to 500.
    Check! The site received traffic through 857 different keywords.

    Traffic

    [see blog for site usage pic]

    With visitors to the site in January 2011 of 1,723 the site enjoyed a 276% increase in traffic over December 2010. This was directly proportional to the number of pages of content on the site. January 24-30 2011 set a new 1-week record at 484 visitors, up 10% from the previous week. January 24 2011 also set a new 1-day record at 84 visitors.

    Earnings

    [see blog for earnings chart]

    Total earnings for the month were $135.73. This was an increase of 435% over December. You'll notice that earnings growth FAR outpaced traffic growth. This was due to an increase in click through rate (CTR) which led to a higher eCPM. January 24-30 2011 set a new 1-week record of $42.66, pushing the daily average over $6, a jump of nearly 50% from the previous week.

    Rankings
    The site ended the month at #24 for its main keyword up from #60 when this challenge began. This keyword accounted for 15% of total traffic for the month. Most of the other 85% of traffic came through a total of 857 different keyword searches.

    Backlinks
    All of the new content I've created encouraged people to link to my site. Without any link-building strategy employed by me the site has earned 80 one-way backlinks since this challenge began.

    The Plan for February 2011
    As much as I would love to set earnings and traffic goals for the future, the fact is that I have no direct control over either. However I am setting a new goal over the one thing I do have control over: Content. In February I will have a little extra time available so my goal is to push myself and create 300 pages of fresh original content. It's a little scary publicly announcing that, but I think I can do it, as long as I stick to my daily plan of 10-12 pages and don't let myself fall behind.

    If I reach this goal and IF everything else about the site stays at current levels then I expect earnings to grow to a new peak of $40-$50/day with daily averages around $20. Let's see how close reality is to these predictions as the month progresses.

    What's Working for Me...Hope it Helps You
    I've received so much encouragement during the first 6 weeks of this challenge that I want to give back to the community all that I can in the hope that it will help you grow your online business. Much of what I'm about to share flies in the face of most of the suggestions, services and products promoted out there in the IM world. You might be surprised by this but I'm not. I've been involved in several offline and online businesses over the past 15 years and the one thing that has been consistent is that most of what I read didn't match my personal experience. At least I have the consolation that I'm not successful enough yet to step on any toes

    Niche
    Out of the 3 major niches (health, money and relationships) my site would fall under Money, although that's such a huge niche I'm currently targeting just one very small part of it. Still my main keyword is a pretty big niche on its own with 10 million competing pages and over 150k searches per month.

    Research
    If you are doing a ton of research to find worthwhile micro niches or whatever you're not going to like this. I did zero research whatsoever for my niche. The fact is I was already in a related offline business so I just went with what I knew.

    Keywords
    Likewise I do no research for new keywords either. There are virtually an unlimited number of long-tails to my main keyword so I just keep creating new pages for each of them. I don't care of the Google Keyword Tool shows search traffic or not. I would say that most of the keywords I build content around show no search traffic at all, and yet every page I create still generates traffic. Maybe it's not a lot but with low competition those pages usually end up on page 1 of the SERPs and bring in a steady flow of visitors.

    Wordpress Theme
    I'm using Barthelme which is a simple, free wordpress theme with a left-hand sidebar. The page is laid out like this: Title bar, page title, adsense ad, content, adsense ad. And the sidebar is like this: Email opt-in, adsense ad, links to pages. The homepage is static with links to all major categories, the categories in turn link to subpages/posts, which all link back to the homepage.

    Colors are basic white background, blue links, black text. Think craigslist and you'll have a good idea what my site looks like. It's not going to win any design awards but it's content rich, easy to navigate, and adsense ads are nice and prominent, and that's what matters.

    Plugins
    * Adsense Optimizer
    * All in One SEO Pack
    * Feedburner Email Widget
    * Google Analyticator
    * Google XML Sitemaps
    * TinyMCE Advanced
    * WP Super Cache

    Ad Layout
    As I mentioned under 'Wordpress Theme' above I have 3 adsense ad units on each page:

    1. 728x90 leaderboard above the content.
    This ad unit accounted for 47% of clicks and 46% of earnings.

    2. 728x90 leaderboard below the content.
    This ad unit accounted for 37% of clicks and 35% of earnings.

    3. 120x600 skyscraper in the left sidebar.
    This ad unit accounted for 14% of clicks and 13% of earnings.

    4. I also started using Adsense for Feeds this month and promoting email subscription to my feed so I can in effect send adsense to my email list.
    This google service accounted for 1% of clicks and 4% of earnings.
    • [ 3 ] Thanks
    • [1] reply
    • I really admire you attitude, getting on with it and not trying to get the holy grail of adsense publishing (if it actually exists) handed to you on a plate.

      I've been pretty sucesssful with adsense over the last year, but I hate backlinking etc, and I truly believe that your approach has some real merit.

      BTW, it took 3-4 months for my sites to see a jump in earnings, it seems the longer they sit there the more they earn.

      Good luck, and I'm sure you'll reach those $100 days in a few months time, it's a nice feeling, but not as nice as the single $200 day I had a couple of months back :-)
      • [1] reply
  • 33centsaday, did you ever think about adsense for search? I just got a few clicks from it. But sadly, my cpcs are very low, quite often 0.02$. Oh, it just came into my mind if adsense for search counts as one ad or not. Can we display 3 ads and a search on the same page?
    • [1] reply
    • Wow 33centsaday powerful and inspiring results you are acheiving with hard work and dedication. Keep up the the good work!

      Phil
  • Banned
    This is very encouraging but seems like a lot of work.
    I wish I had you spirit.
    However I agree that you should try some backlinking and outsourcing - reinvest in the business you'll get higher returns.

    Good luck though, will check on your progress.
    • [1] reply
    • Yeah I have been thinking about adding search especially as the site continues to grow in content. More importantly than the earnings it could directly contribute, is that it might help to keep visitors around longer, thus been exposed to more ads.

      You should be able to find the answer to your question in the resources section of your adsense account. I think you can have 3 ad units, 3 link units and 2 search units per page, but don't quote me.

      Does it really seem like a lot of work? I'm only spending a few hours a week at this. If I had been putting in 15 hour days and was only at $6/day after 6 weeks I would agree with you, but that's not the case.
  • Banned
    [DELETED]
    • [1] reply
    • I would love to be that smart... Care to enlighten us as to the methods you use to achieve these results?
      • [1] reply
  • Banned
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  • Thanks 33centsaday for creating this thread. It's very inspirational. I'll be following it!

    One thing I would like to check though.. You mentioned that your content pages are targeting long tails of your original keyword. I would think that your domain name should contain a partial / your short tail keyword minimally, yes?
  • Well done and keep it up! You're an inspiration to many of us, even those of us who have been in IM for a few years ;-)

    Quick question, the content that you create, how do you structure your titles? Are they catchy titles that include your keyword or JUST your keyword?

    Thanks
  • 33centsaday, you also mentioned that you are using Wordpress. In this case, are your posts 'posts' or are they actually static pages? Thanks again.
    • [1] reply
    • My domain has one word from my 3-word primary keyword. Keep in mind that I didn't register this domain with the intention of building a site anything like what I'm doing now. It was originally a corporate site for an offline business, I'm just reusing it now since it's old and somewhat related.

      Catchy titles that include the keyword.

      Mostly posts but there are quite a few pages as well.
  • After a very quiet 7th week with no records being broken, we're back in business this week with new highs for earnings and traffic. Unfortunately I've had to deal with some personal issues that set me back on content creation so I don't think I'm going to get close to my goal for February. Rankings also remained pretty steady for my major keywords. And traffic from the US is continuing to increase although not as fast as I thought it would. There's now more content for US-specific long-tails and yet Canadian traffic still makes up nearly 70% of total site traffic.

    As for the new records there are 2 to share:

    1-week Earnings Record
    Although pageviews and CTR were down, CPC was up significantly allowing for a new earnings high for February 7-13 2011 of $42.82.

    1-week Traffic Record
    This week also saw a new traffic high of 499 visitors and matched the 1-day high of 84.
    • [ 1 ] Thanks
    • [1] reply
    • Thanks for the update!

      good week for just a few new sites mate ...
  • Not much to report this week, earnings and traffic were slightly lower than last week. I seem to have hit a wall at about $6/day. The good news is that the site passed the $100 mark for the month yesterday so I’ll get paid two months in a row. The site did a enjoy one new record though, it moved up to position #22 for its main keyword worldwide. And one other exciting development is that its now getting crawled at least 3 times a day. I estimate it takes no more than 3 or 4 hours for new content to be indexed now.
    • [1] reply
    • Glad to hear that the site is still doing well. Are you still focusing on content only, no backlinking?

      How much content do you have now?

      I started a similar project with a brand new domain a few months ago. Sorry to say I'm not seeing any progress yet. Only 10-20 visits per day and no clicks whatsoever...

      I'm only up to about 75 pages though (all original and unique content). I've started backlinking again because it appears that building content alone is not going to get me any traffic any time soon. I wonder if it works for you because you had an aged domain and were already seeing some traffic and income.

      Us newer folks may have some trouble using this method.
      • [1] reply
  • Finally I have some new records to share! With all of the complaining going on about the fallout from Google's latest algorithm change which has reportedly devalued all kinds of backlinks and article marketing techniques. Am I ever glad I decided to build my own online property with my own unique content. Looks like the slow and steady publishing of your own content on your own site is still the way to go for building long-term success and warding off the inevitable 'google slap' or whatever when you use tricks to advance your rankings.

    [see blog for pic]

    New 1-week traffic record
    The week of February 21-27 2011 saw a 22% increase in traffic from the previous record 2 weeks ago, jumping to 613 visits. Even though average pages/visit has been trending down, this week still saw a new record just shy of 1800 pageviews.

    New 1-day traffic record
    February 26 2011 set a new 1-day high of 111 visits. The 27th also had over 100 visits so the site has finally, convincingly, broken through the barrier of 100 visits in a single day, I'm looking forward to that becoming the new average too!

    New 1-week earnings record
    The increase in traffic led to a new earnings peak for the week of $47.27. Still coming up a bit short of breaking through the $7/day average, but it will get there sooner or later.

    Rankings
    Just wanted to add a note on rankings. With this algo change from Google you should see how my rankings are bouncing all over the place for various keywords. The most extreme moves were one keyword that moved down 40 positions and another that moved up 100 positions (according to webmaster tools). However, thanks to all the content on my site ranking for so many keywords, the overall result has been positive.
  • My target upto now is 10/day. Next target 100/day
  • Nothing too major to report this time just one new record for weekly traffic which hit 623 visitors and 1,882 pageviews. Earnings were down a bit from last week but still holding above $6/day. The most interesting development was when I posted a new page and watched to see how long it would take to be indexed and where it would land in the SERPs. The answer to those questions was: 1.5 hours, and position #6! The positioning has danced up and down a bit between the top of page 2 and the middle of page 1 but it seems to have settled into page 1 at position #8.


    Admittedly this is a low competition keyword (less than 200,000 pages) but still I think that's pretty good considering I still do ZERO backlinking. One thing I have adopted is the practice of including at least 1 outbound link on every page to a relevant website. I don't know if that has a positive effect on my rankings but it helps my visitors so I figure it's a good thing even if it costs me a bit in adsense clicks.
  • Nice to reach the milestone, everyone starts small, the good thing with such challenges is the motivational aspects they all give
    • [1] reply
    • After several weeks of steadily growing traffic I can finally share a really exciting week! Earnings and traffic both soared to new highs!

      [see blog for pic]

      New Average Earnings
      The daily average finally broke through the $7/day barrier and soared to over $9/day for the week of March 21-27 2011.

      New 1-week Earnings Record
      Total earnings for the week hit a new high of $65.56.

      [see blog for pic]

      New 1-day Traffic Record
      March 21 2011 saw a new record for visitors at 125.

      New 1-week Traffic Record
      Traffic exploded to 797 visitors for the week, a 21% increase over the previous week. And pageviews jumped to over 2300.

      Rankings
      Unfortunately the site's ranking for its main keyword continues to slide now down to #39 (the high was #22 if I recall) so visits for that keyword now account for only 7% of all visits. However the site now ranks #1 for some long-tails and for one in particular it holds both the #1 and #2 positions for different pages. Altogether the site was found through 564 different search phrases during the week.
  • Good luck, I hope you will succeed because I am interested in adsense
    • [1] reply
    • Hi!

      I am a new warrior and this is my first post here. May I ask, how many pages have you built? Have you started getting backlinks (perhaps article marketing)?

      I have a travel site that is 2 years old, and has about 445 pages (not all of them are pure content pages. Let say, there are about 300 good pages). At the moment, I have about 500 visitors per day, earning betweeen 2$ and 6$ per day. I have realized that I do not have enough links.

      Do you think I could reach 20$ per day in 3 months, if I start link building campaign? I was thinking about spining and submiting articles to directories, and getting some forum-profile links and blog-posts (from Fieverr for example).

      Thanks.
      • [2] replies
  • Yes thats completely true guys.
    However, I attended a webinar on commission siphon and the software sounds very promising. I watched the entire video and this software automates the entire process...from keyword research, builds fantastic websites, and drives insane amount of traffic to all the sites.

    Am thinking of trying it myself..

    Has anyone tried it yet?
    • [2] replies
    • If it sounds too good to be true, it probably isn't true.

      If I had a system that did all that, I wouldn't be selling it, I'd be keeping VERY quiet
    • I am trying to respond the warrior who asked about Commission Siphon. I bought it two weeks ago and it has technical problems. I will wait couple more days for their terrible customer support and if it still doesn't work, I will get the refund. Too bad, it looked very promising! Am I the only one with problems?
  • Good luck.

    Yes, Adsense income can be a challenge--especially when they change their algorithms, which they did a few months ago.

    I'm finding that adding fresh new and unique content is helping, and bringing my income back to what it was each day. It dropped off right after Google implemented the new changes, but starting to climb back up again.
  • Banned
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  • Nice challenge. I bookmarked your blog!
  • March turned out to be a great month, enjoying a 50% increase in traffic and a 30% increase in earnings over February. I continued my policy of focusing on the creation of fresh content on a regular basis and allowing any backlinks to be created naturally by others.


    Backlinks
    Speaking of backlinks. As of today Webmaster Tools says that the site has over 4,000. I wonder how accurate that count is, do any of you have experience with independently verifying the numbers webmaster tools gives you?

    Traffic
    The lifeblood of any site. Here are a few of the stats for March:
    3,001 visits
    8,995 pageviews
    35 countries
    68% from Canada
    28% from the US

    Earnings
    March certainly didn’t disappoint for earnings. The site had a new 1-month high of $205.94, new 1-week high of $65.56 (March 21-27 2011) and a new daily average above $6.


    Interestingly, the site is making roughly $1 per month per page of content. So to reach my goal of $100/day I’ll need 3,000 pages…that’s a long way off! But at least the site is making enough now to pay a few small bills.

    Search and Rankings
    Although ranking for my main keyword continues on a downward trend, overall things are going well. The site was found through 1,862 different search terms during the month. 8% of total visits were for the main keyword.
  • nice keep it up!
  • Awesome job, keep up the good work and also thanks for sharing your results.
  • Just curious:

    Wondering if you do any sort of interlinking of your content on your site- ie internal link structure?

    I think you mentioned that you have pages and posts....so just wondering if you are linking posts to other posts or pages or not

    thanks- very interesting thread- will continue following along!
    • [1] reply
    • 33Cents..

      Just wanted to say congrats on the sustained progress and thanks for continuing to keep us posted. I've been following since you started the "challenge". I'm sort of a fan of the themed authority adsense model from xfactors latest.

      Your stats and numbers are very interesting and encouraging. I have a similar project going right now. My methods are a little different and my progress is much slower but it is picking up. I did some backlinking and finally got my main page on the first page of google for a keyword with 10k exact globals. My traffic went from about 30 visitors per day to about 150 per day so I'm pretty happy about that.

      I think with a bit of backlinking, you could push your main page to the first page of G for your main keyword and see a potentially huge jump in traffic and earnings. Might want to invest a 5spot or two on Fiverr and get some links if you dont have the time to do it yourself. Or you could use AMR like I do and submit some of your pages to over 1000 article directories with links back to your site. Just a couple easy ideas to get some links. Might be worth a shot. Seems to have worked for me so far.

      Unfortunately, my conversions are still horrible but I'm working on it. I got it to go from about .3% to over 1% by changing my ad layout and I'll be testing some more changes in the near future. I just had a $3 day yesterday. Usually my daily average is about 5 cents lol. Very encouraging for a newbie like me with a brand new site (my first attempt in IM).

      The site is still very young (4 months) and there are a ton of great keywords that I could rank for with some effort so hopefully the upward trend will continue. I have about 400 pages of content now. 100 are unique written by me (static pages) the rest is user generated blog posts. About 50% of those are unique and 50% are semi duplicate (submitted by other marketers in my niche via some article marketing networks.) I spend about 1 hour per day approving and editing new blog posts so it's pretty low maintenance at the moment.

      Keep us posted.
      • [1] reply
  • Must spirit ... good luck...
  • mmsearch, yes loads of internal linking. I described the structure somewhere but now I can't find the post LOL! Anyway, I have a static home page that links to all of the main categories (some are pages and some are posts) which in turn link to a few pages of related content. Those related pages also interlink between each other in many cases.

    April 2011 Review

    It's been a few quiet weeks with no new records but this week was a big one setting a new 1-day and 1-week earnings high, a new 1-day traffic high, and nicely closing out a new record month! All of this was done by the site you've been following throughout this challenge. I haven't had a chance to get to work on the new site I was talking about in my last update.

    [see blog for pic]

    Earnings
    New 1-day record
    April 25 2011 destroyed the previous record of $13.37 set all the way back in January with a new high of $20.88.


    New 1-week record
    Thanks in no small part to the new 1-day high the week finished off at a new high of $72.39. So after 19 weeks of effort I've finally reached the $10/day threshold or 10% of my ultimate earnings goal.


    New 1-month record
    April saw a 23% increase in earnings over March hitting a new high of $254.55.


    Traffic
    New 1-day record
    May 1 2011 enjoyed a new high of 130 visitors.
    Interestingly, the big jump in earnings for April was not matched by traffic, in fact total traffic for the month was down 10% over March.
    • [1] reply
    • Thanks for the update ...

      on a blog post it indicates you feel as if u may have reached capacity for this niche. So therefore a new niche and site is underway.

      Might we ask .. what is this current site ranked in the US SERPS in Google.

      Still not backlinking it eh?

      Still adding new contents? If so at what pace - posts / pages per day?

      19 weeks of blood sweat and tears bro ... $10 a day. And to be subject to the whims of the google serps ... leaves me scratching head wondering - DAMN ... how many "evergreen'ish" products could I have made in 19 weeks .... and whats the $$ per day from them.
  • awesome for me it seems nearly impossible hehe:p
  • Good challenge!
    It is kind of funny. I had a bunch of websites when I first started in IM world and some had Adsense on them. As I improved, I kind of abandoned many of these sites. Years later, I discovered I was making money with Adsense....but from where? I did some searching through my Google account and discovered it was all coming from one website. It was even a cookie cutter site! Turned out it was because of the domain name, exact match on a fairly highly searched keyword. The site had other revenue sources built in, but it was just adsense that was working. Unfortunately I let that domain expire....I really should re-register it.

    Exact match domains do make a big difference in this type of money maker.

    Cheers!
  • This thread has inspired me to make an authority site myself. Thank you
    • [1] reply
    • Wonderful thread....

      All the best for your challenge..

      Shaon
      • [1] reply
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    • [1] reply
    • @ 33cents...


      I am also quite curious about your keyword research. I typically shoot for anything with global monthly search count (exact) of between 1500-10k. I do this because I was also backlinking like mad for the competitive ones.

      I want to stop all this time consuming self backlinking for the most part and focus on content going forward. I would like to know what ranges you target with the "no backlinking" strategy. Your pages seem to be generating pretty good traffic so whatever you are doing seems to work pretty well.
  • Cantbedone!, July set a new earnings high for a single month at $261.22 and a new daily high of $22.47. August set a new daily traffic high of 175 uniques. This despite that fact that I've done practically nothing with this site in the last 3 months.

    I haven't done any keyword research in ages either. When I was still regularly adding content it was all just long tails for a main keyword or two. What I've ended up with is traffic that's very spread out. 322 pages generate 8-9,000 pageviews per month from about 1,600 keyword phrases. The #1 most used keyword only accounts for 3% of total traffic.
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    The $100/day AdSense Challenge

    Last week I had my first website break the $1/day mark in adsense revenue. If you’ve ever tried to make money online you know that this is no easy task. In fact, it took nearly 2 years for me to reach this point! After a lot of analysis I think I have some idea of what worked and what didn’t. So I’m setting myself a challenge–to push that website to the $100/day mark. I’ll be documenting my progress on the blog in my sig and in this thread. The blog includes pics that I haven't attached here.