Google AdSense Program

I was going to add this to my last post Million Dollar Business Ideas When Disabled! but the AdSense program deserves a page of it’s own.

When I got into the AdSense program I didn’t think it was worth much of my time, which was a mistake in hindsight! Signed for the AdSense program in February 2002, according to the “Choose date range” search facility when choosing “All Time” it was the 22nd of February I was accepted and the 27th of February when I got my first impressions.

On the first day received 110 impressions and made $0.08.

It took until Tuesday, 30 March 2004 for my first day of making more than $1 (made $2.10 that day ).

How To NOT Make Money From AdSense

I’d not taken the AdSense program seriously and had added the AdSense code to a handful of not very important pages, had few impressions and rarely made over $1 a day.

This confirmed what I thought I knew about the AdSense program, you can’t make money this way, that was until mid 2005.

By April 2005 I’d added AdSense code to a lot of my Classic Literature site pages, but because I didn’t consider AdSense important I only added one small rectangle ad right at the bottom of the menu (that was the only ad unit I tried) and didn’t ad AdSense to other important websites.

AdSense Heat Map

If you’ve done any research on AdSense you’ll have seen the click area heat map that I’ve copied to this post “AdSense Revenue” I made on another site of mine.

This heat map shows where website visitors tend to click the most, the hot areas are in red/orange and the cold in white.

The image you see to the right with the poorly drawn (MY AD scribble) is roughly where you’d find my only AdSense ad unit on sites that during March 2005 (1st to the 31st) were seeing ~14,000 impressions a day, but only made $7.68 a day from AdSense (that’s very low)!

Classic literature isn’t exactly a high money content niche, but I wasn’t on monetizing this traffic well. By believing AdSense wasn’t a good way to make money I’d shot myself in the foot, normally I do lots of research, but this one time I did NONE!

Screenshot below of AdSense revenue for the last half of March 2005

This could have gone on for another year of lost AdSense revenue, but I started building Amazon affiliate stores and as their only goal was to make money from Amazon I decided to cover them in AdSense ads (if 3 ad units per page is covered that is ).

Finally Making Money From AdSense

By luck I managed to add some of the ad units in red/orange areas and when my Amazon stores started pulling in thousands of visitors a day in their own right I got a very nice boost in AdSense revenue.

You can see from the screenshot above, impressions roughly tripled, but revenue increased by about 20 times! Yes some of this traffic was better money making, but most of it was from Amazon stores on my literature sites, so it wasn’t like we are comparing classic literature traffic to mortgage or insurance traffic, (those are money making AdSense words) closer to comparing it to general book store traffic (better, but not 20 times better!).

I’d stumbled on the fact that you can make some nice money from AdSense if you have a fair amount of traffic AND your ad units are placed in the right areas (see heat map).

Knowing this I optimised ad placement for all my sites and maximised AdSense revenue for the traffic I received. Unfortunately as mentioned in my last post the traffic from the Amazon affiliate stores wasn’t to last and a year later I was below $50 a day.

Still $50 a day while watching TV isn’t something to complain about, so quite happy with the income.

I took easy (working a few hours a day rather than the usual 10+) for about 9 months when I popped a disc in my back last year (see last post) and AdSense revenue dropped to under $40 a day. Didn’t help having a series of server disasters due low quality technical support at the places I rented servers from (see my dedicated server problems post for details).

Have got an excellent dedicated server now and am back to my normal 10+hrs of work a day which is seeing my AdSense income recover.

All in all it’s a nice way to make money with low maintenance in most cases, but by itself it’s never going to make me a millionaire. Even at $200 a day (which is possible) that’s only $73 a year.

What I do know is when I build anything online I add AdSense to it.

David Law