Thursday, March 25, 2010

How Often Do You Check Your Adsense Earnings?

Are you committing the sin of checking your adsense earnings every now and then hoping that by some miraculous chance, your earnings will go up?

Many people spend way too much time checking on their adsense earnings every now and then. In fact, I am guilty of this bad habit too.

There have been times in my life when I have checked my adsense earnings for literally 5 to 10 times a day. That is almost everytime that I get a chance to use the internet!

Here is one thing that I realised. Checking your adsense earnings can be a total waste of time!

So what if you know how much you have earned today. It will not change anything. You can better use your time to do the following things:

1. Craft more posts.
2. Comment on other people's blog.
3. Do a dead link hunt.
4. Do some search engine optimisation.
5. Do some keyword research.

So there you have it. Some useful things you can do instead of spending time checking on your adsense earnings. I have decided to stop checking my adsense earnings for the rest of this month. I hope I succeed.

Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Why Adsense Earnings Can Only Go Up

As bloggers or online journalists (what I would term as the new breed of journalists), we can expect our online advertising revenue to go up with Google's recent announcement.

Google has recently announced that it will now serve multiple ads even from other networks. What this means is that there will be greater competition from within the adwords program itself (which is how we get our earnings).

Hopefully, with competing ads from other networks, the higher paying ads will feature on your sites and this in turn should translate to higher payouts per click and higher ad revenue for all of us.

With this announcement, it shows that it is always good to stick to a market leader like Google when it comes to finding advertisers for our sites.

Sunday, March 21, 2010

How To Earn $10 A Day From Adsense

A long time ago, I set myself the goal of earning $1 per day from adsense. I have already achieved a certain level of success as my average earnings per month range from $30 to $60 per month. This is quite a formidable feat for me considering that I am only using adsense on my blogs.

What seemed like a long and tedious journey slowly bore fruit as I saw my page impressions increase. So did the number of unique visitors visiting my site. And of course, there was this sheer joy of seeing the pagerank of my sites increase.

With the hurdle of the $1 per day finally cleared, I decided to set the goal of earning $10 per day (or even $100 per day) for this year.

Here are my thoughts on how one might go about earning $10 per day from Adsense:

1. Increase blogging frequency
2. Increase the number of blogs
3. Comment on other people's blogs
4. Link Exchange
5. Search Engine Optimisation & Keyword research

I believe that if I can carry out this 5 steps faithfully, it will be possible to earn $10 a day just from Adsense alone. Maintaining the earnings will however be a different matter altogether as the number of blogs that I have to create will be quite a lot. I estimate that a good 20 to 30 blogs of a certain quality will be necessary. On the otherhand, I could put all my eggs in one basket and hope that one of my blogs will have a much higher number of readers, page impressions and clicks. This is of course a more sustainable strategy but which will also require more effort on my part.

Adwords Adsense Arbitrage

I have read elsewhere in the internet that it is possible to profit from having an adwords campaign working side by side with your adsense ads.

It simply works by paying less for your adwords such that you drive sufficient traffic to your site to increase your adsense earnings dramatically.

How reliable is this method? I did my own calculations here:

Money spent on Adwords

E.g. per click =$0.01
100 clicks = $1.00

So you spent $1.00 to drive 100 visitors to your site.

Money earned from Adsense

Assuming the common click-through rate of 1.5%, out of 100 visitors, you can expect 1.5 clicks. Now, you will have to be hoping that each click on an ad unit at your site will earn around $1 just for you to break even. That is highly unlikely as most of the times, ads only pay like $0.10 to $0.50 per click. Out of the clicks you get, not all will be on the high paying ads too.

Adword Adsense Arbitrage - Myth Debunked

I hope I have debunked the adword and adsense abritrage myth for you.

Thursday, March 18, 2010

Why Adsense Earnings Drop?

Very often, we might find that our adsense earnings suddenly take a plunge during certain days. Why does this happen?

For me, the most common explanation that I can find is that the latest post or article that I have published tends to attract low paying ads. This is very obvious especially when you start to see ads that have little relevance to your site popping up at your homepage or whereever your latest posting is at.

With low paying ads, the same number of clicks translates to a lower ad revenue. The trick then is to make sure that you publish another post or article that will attract high paying ads. Keywords in your blog posts and articles are especially important if you want high paying ads to display on your site.

Example:

You are running a personal finance site and your latest article happens to be about travelling. Well, that will of course attract lots of travel ads which might not be very high paying. The simple option then would be to make sure that you post another article that deals with personal finance so as to draw back the high paying ads. Afterall, readers are more likely to visit your most recent posting.

Adsense Now Serving Multiple Ad Networks

I received this email from Adsense today:


Hi,

We have launched a new capability in AdSense allowing Google-certified ad networks compete directly within AdSense, which means that advertisers from these third-party networks will be able to compete with AdWords advertisers to show on the Google Content Network.

These new capabilities will automatically be enabled for your account, and you'll see a new section in your Ad Review Center where you can allow or block specific ad networks or all networks except AdWords. Please note that we'll gradually be adding new ad networks to AdSense accounts over the next few months, so you won't see any immediate impact on your ads or your earnings.

To ensure the quality of the ads that appear on AdSense publisher websites, Google will certify all participating ad networks for adherence to our standards for user privacy, ad quality, and speed. Some participating ad networks use targeting methods similar to Google's interest-based advertising to show more relevant ads to users on the sites they visit. These ad networks won't be permitted to collect data from your site for the purpose of subsequent interest-based advertising, but we'll allow networks that comply with user privacy guidelines to show ads using these tools. Publishers can opt out of user interest targeting from these ad networks, and Google has changed our requirements for third-party ad serving to reflect this.

We are currently only accepting ads from Google-certified ad networks in North America and Europe, but we will make this feature available to ad networks in additional parts of the world in the future.

To learn more and manage the ad networks appearing on your pages, visit the AdSense Help Center at https://www.google.com/adsense/support/bin/topic.py?hl=en&topic=13522 and visit our blog post at http://adsense.blogspot.com/2010/03/google-certified-ad-networks-now.html.

Sincerely,
The Google AdSense Team

Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Why I Started This Site


I started this site back in 2008 when I was exploring the use of Adsense in my blogs. The purpose of this site was to record down my adsense earnings and hopefully generate earnings from this site too.


It was pretty silly because I did not realise back then that Google actually allows me to track all my adsense earnings daily. When I realised my folly, I decided to stop recording my adsense earnings on this site as it was plain silly. Besides, who will be interested in reading a blog that just talks about my daily adsense earnings every single day?

In 2009, I decided to take this blog to the next level by putting in more content heavy articles so as to contribute to the existing pool of knowledge on what works and doesn't work for Adsense. These various tips are incorporated into this site and should provide a foundational building block to all readers or bloggers or webmasters who are keen on using Adsense to monetise their sites.


I believe that I give a very honest view on my own experiences and hopefully, the reader will be able to discover some of the mistakes that I have made. Hopefully, they will also learn some simple tips that will help increase their adsense earnings.

In 2010, I want to bring this blog to an even higher level. I hope to achieve the 300 posts for this blog by end of the year and also hope that this will increase the pagerank to 2.

I hope that you will find the tips in this site useful. Do leave feedback and comments if you have any.

Thanks!

Beware the Fake Adsense Screenshot

A lot of people or internet marketers out there have been touting that they have been earning ridiculously high amounts of money from adsense. Many of them even give you a screenshot of their adsense earnings page to PROVE to you that they are the real deal.

DON'T BELIEVE THEM!

These adsense screenshots are easily faked and could be done in a matter of 5 minutes. Whenever you see a screenshot that shows you the amount a person has been earning from adsense, it is most probably faked. The reason is that most people who are earning good money from adsense will know that it is against Google's Term of Service (TOS in short) to display the statistics of their earnings.

Furthermore, for those of us who know how to calculate the various variables in the adsense earnings page, the figures just do not make sense and do not add up. Of course there are those who are still able to compute these figures correctly and put up an adsense earning page that looks "correct".

Fake adsense screenshots are too common and it is good that people are aware of such scams that go around.

There is no magic or tricks to learn from improving your adsense earnings. Nothing really fantastic other than pure hard work. There are of course wonderful tips to help you but this should never cost you an arm and a leg.

In fact, the tips on this site should suffice to help you improve your adsense earnings.

What is Click Through Rate?

In Google adsense lingo or jargon, the click through rate means the number of clicks you get divided by the number of page impressions.

CTR = No. of clicks / No. of page impressions. (Cool formula eh?)

So the CTR (or click through rate) is dependent on two variables. The number of clicks that you get on a particular site and the no. page impressions. The number of page impressions are simply the no. of pages that have been viewed by visitors.

It is widely agreed amongst various expert bloggers that the CTR for most sites should be around 1.5% though this figure can vary on certain days. But in the long run, you can expect a click through rate of 1.5%.

What this means is that out of every 100 page impressions, you can expect 1.5 clicks. (Of course, there is no such thing as 0.5 or half a click)

If you detect that your CTR is very low (i.e. lower than 1.5%), it means that you might need to remedy certain things in terms of ad placement, color or even size of the ads. Changing these might help to improve your CTR.

On the other hand, if you have a very high CTR, do not be happy too soon. What it means is that people are actually leaving your site before they have read all your marvelous content. Do you really want that to happen?

The desired click through rate for most sites should be at 1.5% . Any lower and you should do carry out some modifications to your ads. Any higher, be happy but also monitor it closely to ensure that no click fraud is taking place.

5 Things to Do to Get Blogging Ideas

So you have a blog up and running.... then all of a sudden, you run totally dry of ideas. You no longer have anything interesting to write about. What do you do?

Well here are a few simple things that I do whenever I run out of ideas on what to write:

1. I read the newspapers or online news to find anything interesting that might be related to my niche area that I am blogging about.

2. Look through my last 10 postings. Under each posting, find some topic that is related to the posting which you could expand upon into a single post. Brainstorm and list down any topic that comes into mind which you feel that you have not properly discussed in your previous posting.

3. Read what other people are blogging about in your niche area. After reading their posts, try to see whether you agree with them or not. From there, you will be able to build up another post.

4. Type one of your targeted keywords into Google's all-powerful search engine and see what autocomplete phrases automatically form.

5. Try out Google Trends to see the latest things people are searching for.

Tuesday, March 16, 2010

How To Earn $1 A Day From Adsense

I have been earning $1 per day from Adsense (and sometimes even more) quite consistently over the past few months. How did I do it?

Firstly, I started updating my sites alot more regularly and frequently.

Secondly, I tried to include quality content over just mere quantity.

Thirdly, I increased the number of sites that I own.

This 3 simple steps were what it took to get me from $0 adsense earnings to a steady $1 per day in adsense earnings. It definitely was not an easy process.

Some experts view that each of their posting is worth in terms of thousands of dollars. For me, I think each of my posting is worth tens of dollars. It is like building up a huge database of articles so that when the time comes for my blog to receive the huge amount of traffic that Google will direct to me, the blog will be able to convert many of these visitors into regular readers.

SHARING MY EXPERIENCE ABOUT ONE BLOG

I have a blog about financial freedom here (http://sgfinancialfreedom.blogspot.com)

When I first started this blog, it had only 5 to 10 visitors a week. Sometimes, maybe only 5 to 10 unique visitors in a month. Did I give up? No!

I continued to add content even though no one was reading it. I continued to improve upon the site and slowly, the readers started to pour in. I now see the benefits of my previous postings as readers are bound to read more than 1 posts per visit (well, at least most readers).

So with 1 reader, I can get around 2 to 3 page impressions. As you will most probably know by now, increased page impressions leads to a greater likelihood that someone clicks on the ads that you have.

The thing about earning money from adsense is to never give up. Even when it seems like nothing is working. Keep trying and one day the money will come.

Monday, March 15, 2010

Another $29 till next adsense payout

At 15 Mar 10, I am at $71 in terms of adsense earnings.

That means that I need another $29 for my 4th adsense payout in 2 years. In the past, making $29 in one or two months would seem like an impossibilty. Today, this has become the norm for my adsense earnings.

In fact, I hope to hit the $29 shortfall by middle of next month. That is roughly $1 per day in terms of adsense earnings and is easily achievable even if I do not update my blogs.

My various blogs draw a high number of viewers each day and somehow, the quantity of postings also keep viewers coming back for more. So even if I do not update the blogs, readers have something to read from the archives that they might not have read before. So each new posting I have is like adding on to my previous work. My blog keeps growing and the adsense earnings also keep rising.

I can only rub my hands in glee as I wait patiently for my fourth Google Adsense Paycheck.

Sunday, March 14, 2010

Pagerank is Dead

Whoever says that pagerank is dead does not know what he is talking about.

Google's pagerank algorithm is still very much alive. However, Google is facing all kinds of problems ranking pages with the onslaught of the number of blogs that arise up in the internet. The thing is this : Google needs to ensure that it remains profitable by showing adverts of advertisers to the best publishers.

The internet order has however been turned upside down with the proliferation of countless of blogs. This range from the good to the bad. The problem then is how does Google rank these blogs when compared to more established publishers like newspapers and stuff.

So the rise of this new form of web journalism had some people signalling the end of Pagerank and the entry of a new or better way of indexing pages in Google's search engine. Perhaps, blogs should be left out of Google's index some say.

But that does not solve the problem. At the end of the day, more and more people are turning to blogs for their information, entertainment and lots more. The sprouting up of blogs all over the internet has also been sparked by the craze that people have of making money online. Google itself had provided the means by which people could easily upload information in the form of Blogger.

Pagerank is still not dead. With the rise of the blogs, Google will just have to tweak its Pagerank algorithm to suit the new internet environment that is sprouting out. At the end of the day, people will only link to sites that they find useful. (that is of course excluding people who sell backlinks on their sites).

The new world order of blogs has arrived and the old world of journalism has learnt that they need to embrace it instead of fight against it. They have started to hire popular artists or even stars to write articles for their own blogs. These star studded blogs hopefully will attract more eyeballs than the normal Joe out there who spends his life in anonymity behind some blog.

Thursday, March 11, 2010

How To Boost Adsense Earnings

Here are a list of things you can do to boost your adsense earnings:

1. Placement of ads
2. Color of ads
3. Use Adsense for Search
4. Use Adsense for Feeds
5. Write better quality content
6. Write greater quantity of articles
7. Comment on other people's sites / blogs
8. Use social bookmarking services
9. Get more people to your site
10. Write keyword specific topics

Any other suggestions?

Monday, March 8, 2010

How Often To Blog?

New bloggers always face this dilemma on deciding how frequently to put up new posts in their blogs.

Frequency versus Regularity

Before discussing how frequently to put up new new posts in your blog, I think that we should clarify the difference between frequency and regularity.

Frequency is the number of times a new post is put up in a week or day.

Regularity is how often the blog is updated.

While it might seem that these two are the same, they are essentially different. A blogger could be putting up new posts very frequently but not regularly. This could be the serial blogger who has what I called "a posting spurt" where he posts 10 to 20 posts in a single day only to leave the blog alone for a few months before posting again.

On the otherhand, another blogger might post very infrequently but still does it on a regular basis. This kind of blogs are usually personal blogs where the bloggers update it once a week or month. Though the postings are not so frequent, they are nevertheless regular and a reader who is visiting the blog knows that when they visit the blog in a month's time, it will be different.

How Often To Blog?

How often to blog depends on the kind of readers you are expecting. If you post too frequently, you might chase them away as it is usually impossible to keep up with the quality of posts. Many experts agree that the posting frequency should be around one posting a day. New blogs should strive to put up at least 2-3 posts a day.

The issue however is not about frequency but about regular postings. If people are left to guess when to visit your blog, they will give up after sometime especially if they noticed that your blog is not updated regularly. Who wants to read stale news afterall?

How often you should blog also depends on the purpose of your blog and its audience. Once you determine who your audience are, you can safely decide how often you should put up new postings on the blog.

Blogging Does not Equal to Earning Money

Some people think that by blogging frequently, they can earn lots of money through affiliate programs or adsense. This is certainly not true.

I have a few blogs and I realised that certain blogs which I have not updated for weeks or months are still earning me a tidy sum of money each month. Talk about passive income!

On the other hand, certain blogs which I update very regularly and frequently are drawing a much smaller online income. So from this, I can vaguely conclude that though there is a correlation between frequency of posting and adsense earnings, there is certainly no simple cause and effect that can be derived.

Monday, March 1, 2010

Adsense Earnings for Feb 2010

After a stellar performance in January 2010, my adsense earnings have declined slightly to end off at $48.97 for the month of February.

It is amazing how unsatisfied I am with this earnings when people are still struggling to even get their first paycheck from adsense.

But the truth is that I have made some goals to hit an average of $10 per day in adsense earnings for this year and if this continues, my goals will not be met. Afterall, isn't earning $300 per month a reasonable amount to ask for considering the amount of time that I spend on my blogs?

Third Cheque from Adsense

I received my third cheque thus far since joining Google's Adsense program in 2008.

The third payment that I received totals to an amount of $180.75.

I have been making very good progress on my earnings in adsense.

Over the past 2-3 months, my page impressions have increased and led to higher adsense earnings. I can consistently earning $1 a day now using adsense. There is of course a lot of hardwork involved.

Click-through rate remains relatively the same regardless of site so it seems that the only way to increase my adsense earnings is thru the following means:

1. Increase page views/ visitors
2. Increase no. of sites

I hope to get my 4th payout by April or May 2010.

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